Had Malcolm followed his inclination, he would have fled from it, but he mastered himself still, and walked quietly out. The marquis was pacing, with downbent head and hasty strides, up the garden: Malcolm turned the other way. The shower was over, and the sun was drawing out millions of mimic suns from the drops that hung, for a moment ere they fell, from flower and bush and great tree. But Malcolm saw nothing. Perplexed with himself and more perplexed yet with the behaviour of his master, he went back to his grandfather’s cottage, and, as soon as he came in, recounted to him the whole occurrence. “He had a feeshon,” said the bard, with wide eyes. “He comes of a race that sees.” “What cud the veesion hae been, daddy?” “Tat she knows not, for ta feeshon tid not come to her,” said the piper solemnly. Had the marquis had his vision in London, he would have gone straight to his _study_, as he called it, not without a sense of the absurdity involved, opened a certain cabinet, and drawn out a certain hidden drawer; being at Lossie, he walked up the glen of the burn to the bare hill, overlooking the House, the royal burgh, the great sea, and his own lands lying far and wide around him. But all the time he saw nothing of these--he saw but the low white forehead of his vision, a mouth of sweetness, and hazel eyes that looked into his very soul. Malcolm walked back to the House, clomb the narrow duct of an ancient stone stair that went screwing like a great auger through the pile from top to bottom, sought the wide lonely garret, flung himself upon his bed, and from his pillow gazed through the little dormer-window on the pale blue skies flecked with cold white clouds, while in his mind’s eye he saw the foliage beneath burning in the flames of slow decay, diverse as if each of the seven in the prismatic chord had chosen and seared its own: the first nor’-easter that drove the flocks of Neptune on the sands, would sweep its ashes away. Life, he said to himself, was but a poor gray kind of thing after all. The peacock summer had folded its gorgeous train, and the soul within him had lost its purple and green, its gold and blue. He never thought of asking how much of the sadness was owing to bodily conditions with which he was little acquainted, and to compelled idleness in one accustomed to an active life. But if he had, the sorrowful probabilities of life would have seemed just the same. And indeed he might have argued that, to be subject to any evil from a cause inadequate, only involves an absurdity that embitters the pain by its mockery. He had yet to learn what faith can do, in the revelation of the Moodless, for the subjugation of mood to will.