But as Colin lay helpless, stunned by this unlooked-for downfall, there came before his eyes, as vividly as if he saw them in actual presence, the sick people of his native district--the young men and the young women who now and then paid, even on the sweet shores of the Holy Loch, the terrible toll which consumption takes of all the nations of the north. One of them, a young man about his own age, who like himself had been in training for the Scotch Church, whom Colin had pitied with all his kind heart--with the deepest half-remorseful sense of his own superior happiness--came before him with intense distinctness as he lay struck silent by the cold shadow of fate. He could almost have thought that he saw the spectral attenuated form, with its hectic cheeks, its thin, long, wasted hands, its preternatural length of limb, seated in the old, high-backed easy-chair in the farmhouse parlour. All the invalid’s life appeared to him in a sudden flash of recollection; the kindly neighbours’ visits; the books and papers which were lent him; the soup and jellies which the minister’s wife and the other ladies of the parish, few in number as they were, kept him provided with. Colin could even remember his own periodical visits; his efforts to think what would interest the sick man; his pity, and wonder, and almost contempt, for the patience which could endure, and even take a pleasure in, the poor comforts of the fading life. God help him! was this what he himself was coming to? was this all he had to anticipate? Colin’s heart gave a strange leap in his breast at the thought. A sudden wild throb, a sense of something intolerable, a cry against the fate which was too hard, which could not be borne, rose within him, and produced a momentary sickness which took the light out of his eyes, and made everything swim round him in a kind of dizzy gloom. Had he been standing he would have fallen down, and the bystanders would have said he had fainted. But he had not fainted; he was bitterly, painfully conscious of everything. It was only his heart that fluttered in his breast like a wounded bird; it was only his mind that had been struck, and reeled. So much absorbed was he that he did not hear the voice of the nurse, who brought him some invalid nourishment, and who became frightened when she got no answer, and shook him violently by the arm. “Lord bless us, he’s gone,” exclaimed the woman; and she was but little reassured when her patient turned upon her with dry lips and a glittering eye. “I am not gone yet,” said Colin; “there is no such luck for me;” and then he began once more to picture out to himself the sick man at the Holy Loch, with the little tray on the table beside him, and his little basin of soup. God help him! was this how he was to be for all the rest of his life?