The work was finished; Ogilvy was dressed--his body in all the colours of the arc of hope--his mind in the dark midnight weeds of a concealed misery, concealed even from himself. He sought the chamber of his mother, and, taking her hand, kissed it fervently; but could not trust himself to even a broken syllable of speech, and his silence was sympathetic. She looked into the face of her son, and then threw her eye solemnly over the array of his dress. The tear stood apparent, yet her face seemed to have borrowed his composedness, as if she felt that the old doom still followed the house of Ogilvy, and was inevitable, when the evil genius of the Bowers was in the ascendant. There was no reproof now, save that which lies in the dumb expression of sorrow--even that reproof which, melting the obstruction of man's egotism, finds its way to the heart, when even scorn would be only a hardening coruscation. Yet even this he could bear for the sake of that conventionality which is a tyrant. Turning away his head, he again kissed the soft hand, and hurried away. As he issued from the gate and mounted his steed, now refreshed from the rough stress of the previous evening, the sun shone high and flaring, and the face of the country, with its rising hills and heather-bloom, and patches of waving corn, responded--as became it surely on a bridal morning--to the clang of the bell in Bell's Tower,--so like in all but the workings of the heart to the Sabbath morning when the union is to be between the spirit of man and the Lamb without guile. Yet art, self-confident and pragmatic, was not to be cajoled by the solicitations of, to it, a lying nature, however beautiful; and Ogilvy found it convenient, if not manly and heroic, to knit his eyebrows against the sun. So does the Indian hurl his wooden spear against the lightning, because he is a greater being than the Author of the thunder. So he rode on to where the bells rung--for was not he specially called?--the gloom on his countenance, with which his forced determination kept pace, increasing as he proceeded. Nor had he ever ridden thus before. Even his steed might have known, as he opened his nostrils, that there was something more than common in the wind's eye, accustomed as he was to the speed of enthusiasm, or the walk of exhaustion. He was now a solemn stalking-horse, bearing a rigid, buckram-mailed showman, whose only sound or movement resided in the plates of his armour, or his lath sword or gilded spontoon.