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Donal Grant by George MacDonald
Book, page 191 / 547


wore when he came to his chamber. A moment, and he rose and began to
pace the room. An indescribable suggestion of an invisible yet
luminous cloud hovered about his forehead and eyes--which latter, if
not fixed on very vacancy, seemed to have got somewhere near it. At
the fourth or fifth turn he opened the door by which he had entered,
continuing a remark he had begun to Donal--of which, although he
heard every word and seemed on the point of understanding something,
he had not caught the sense when his lordship disappeared, still
talking. Donal thought it therefore his part to follow him, and
found himself in his lordship's bedroom. But out of this his
lordship had already gone, through an opposite door, and Donal still
following entered an old picture-gallery, of which he had heard
Davie speak, but which the earl kept private for his exercise
indoors. It was a long, narrow place, hardly more than a wide
corridor, and appeared nowhere to afford distance enough for seeing
a picture. But Donal could ill judge, for the sole light in the
place came from the fires and candles in the rooms whose doors they
had left open behind them, with just a faint glimmer from the
vapour-buried moon, sufficing to show the outline of window after
window, and revealing something of the great length of the gallery.

By the time Donal overtook the earl, he was some distance down,
holding straight on into the long dusk, and still talking.

"This is my favourite promenade," he said, as if brought to himself
by the sound of Donal's overtaking steps. "After dinner always, Mr.
Grant, wet weather or dry, still or stormy, I walk here. What do I
care for the weather! It will be time when I am old to consult the
barometer!"

Donal wondered a little: there seemed no great hardihood in the
worst of weather to go pacing a picture-gallery, where the fiercest
storm that ever blew could send in only little threads of air
through the chinks of windows and doors!

"Yes," his lordship went on, "I taught myself hardship in my
boyhood, and I reap the fruits of it in my prime!--Come up here: I
will show you a prospect unequalled."

He stopped in front of a large picture, and began to talk as if

 
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