When his friends had departed, Lord Cairnforth sat silent and melancholy. His cousin good-naturedly tried to rouse him into the usual contest at chess with which they had begun to while away the long winter evenings, and which just suited Lord Cairnforth's acute, accurate, and introspective brain, accustomed to plan and to order, so that he delighted in the game, and was soon as good a player as his teacher. But now his mind was disturbed and restless; he sat by the fireside, listening to the fierce wind that went howling round and round the Castle, as the wind can howl along the sometimes placid shores of Loch Beg. "I hope they have reached the Manse in safety. Let me know, Malcolm, when the carriage returns. I will go to bed then. I wish they would have remained here; but the minister never will stay; he dislikes sleeping a single night from under his own roof. Is he not a good man, cousin--one of a thousand?" "I have not the slightest doubt of it." "And his daughter--have you in any way modified your opinion of her, which at first was not very favorable?" "Not as to her beauty, certainly," was the careless reply. "She's 'no bonnie,' as you say in these parts--terribly Scotch; but she is very good. Only don't you think good people are just a little wearisome sometimes?" The earl smiled. He was accustomed to, and often rather amused by his cousin's honest worldliness and outspoken skepticisms--that candid confession of badness which always inclines a kindly heart to believe the very best of the penitent. "Nevertheless, though Miss Cardross may be 'no bonnie,' and too good to please your taste, I hope you will go often to the Manse in my absence, and write me word how they are, otherwise I shall hear little--the minister's letters are too voluminous to be frequent--and Miss Cardross is not given to much correspondence." Captain Bruce promised, and again the two young men sat silent, listening to the eerie howling of the wind. It inclined both of them to graver talk than was their habit when together. "I wonder," said the earl, "whether this blast, according to popular superstition, is come to carry many souls away with it 'on the wings of the wind!' Where will they fly to the instant they leave the body? How free and happy they must feel!" "What an odd fancy! And not a particularly pleasant one," replied the captain, with a shiver. "Not unpleasant, to my mind. I like to think of these things. If I were out of the body, I should, if I could fly back to Cairnforth." "Pray don't imagine such dreadful things. May you live a hundred years!"