All that day Keith Macleod was in despair. As for himself, he would have had sufficient joy in the mere consciousness of the presence of this beautiful creature. His eyes followed her with a constant delight; whether she took up a book, or examined the cunning spring of a sixteenth-century dagger, or turned to the dripping panes. He would have been content even to sit and listen to Mr. White sententiously lecturing Lady Macleod about the Renaissance, knowing that from time to time those beautiful, tender eyes would meet his. But what would she think of it? Would she consider this the normal condition of life in the Highlands--this being boxed up in an old-fashioned room, with doors and windows firmly closed against the wind and the wet, with a number of people trying to keep up some sort of social intercourse, and not very well succeeding? She had looked at the portraits in the dining-hall--looming darkly from their black backgrounds, though two or three were in resplendent uniforms; she had examined all the trophies of the chase--skins, horns, and what not--in the outer corridor; she had opened the piano, and almost started back from the discords produced by the feebly jangling old keys. "You do not cultivate music much," she had said to Janet Macleod, with a smile. "No," answered Janet, seriously. "We have little use for music here--except to sing to a child now and again, and you know you do not want a piano for that." And then the return to the cold window, with the constant rain and the beating of the white surge on the black rocks. The imprisonment became torture--became maddening. What if he were suddenly to murder this old man and stop forever his insufferable prosing about Bernada Siena and Andrea Mantegna? It seemed so strange to hear him talk of the unearthly calm of Raphael's "St. Michael"--of the beautiful, still landscape of it, and the mysterious joy on the face of the angel--and to listen at the same moment to the wild roar of the Atlantic around the rocks of Mull. If Macleod had been alone with the talker, he might have gone to sleep. It was like the tolling of a bell. "The artist passes away, but he leaves his soul behind.... We can judge by his work of the joy he must have experienced in creation, of the splendid dreams that have visited him, of the triumph of completion.... Life without an object--a pursuit demanding the sacrifice of our constant care--what is it? The existence of a pig is nobler--a pig is of some use.... We are independent of weather in a great city; we do not need to care for the seasons; you take a hansom and drive to the National Gallery, and there all at once you find yourself in the soft Italian climate, with the most beautiful women and great heroes of chivalry all around you, and with those quaint and loving presentations of sacred stories that tell of a time when art was proud to be the meek handmaid of religion. Oh, my dear Lady Macleod, there is a 'Holy Family' of Giotto's--"