It was spring, and the air was full of that invigorating hopefulness, which was none the worse to Cosmo for coming on a somewhat chilly breeze. The glory of the broad, blue Firth, with its islands and its bays, and the world of bright, keen, sunny air in which its few sails shone with a dazzling indescribable whiteness, like nothing but themselves--the round white clouds ranging themselves in lines and fantastic groups over the whole low varied line of the opposite coast--and the intoxication of that free, unbroken breeze, coming fresh over miles of country and leagues of sea, lifted Cosmo out of his former thoughts, only to rouse in him a vague heroical excitement--a longing after something, he knew not what, which any tangible shaping would but have vulgarized. The boy spread out his arms with an involuntary enthusiasm, drinking in that wine of youth. What would he do?--he stood upon the height of the hill like a young Mercury, ready to fly over all the world on the errands of the gods--but even the voice of Jupiter, speaking out of the clouds, would only have been prose and bathos to the unconscious, unexplainable poetic elevation of the lad, who neither knew himself nor the world. A word of any kind, even the sublimest, would have brought him to his feet and to a vague sense of shame and self-ridicule in a moment--which consummation happened to him before he was aware. The word was a name--a name which he had only heard once before--and the voice that spoke it was at some distance, for the sound came ringing to him, faint yet clear, brightened into a cry of pleasure by the breath of the hills on which it came. “Desirée!” The boy started, blushed at himself in the awaking of his dream, and pausing only a moment, rushed down the slope of Arthur’s Seat toward Duddingstone, where, on the first practicable road which he approached, he perceived a solemn procession of young ladies, two-and-two, duly officered and governed, and behaving themselves irreproachably. Cosmo did not make a rush down through their seemly and proper ranks, to find out Desirée or Joanna; instead, the lad watched them for a moment, and then turned round laughing, and went back to his lodging--laughing the shamefaced rosy laugh of his years, when one can feel one has been a little ridiculous without feeling one’s self much the worse for it, and when it strikes rather comically than painfully to find how different one’s high-flown fancies are, to all the sober arrangements of the every-day world. CHAPTER XXXIII.