through the trees, round and round the hill. He followed it a
little way. An aromatic air now blew and now paused as he went.
The trees seemed climbing up to attack the fortress above, which he
could not see. When he had gone a few yards out of sight of the
gate, he threw himself down among them, and fell into a reverie.
The ancient time arose before him, when, without a tree to cover
the approach of an enemy, the castle rose defiant and bare in its
strength, like an athlete stripped for the fight, and the little
town huddled close under its protection. What wars had there
blustered, what rumours blown, what fears whispered, what sorrows
moaned! But were there not now just as many evils as then? Let the
world improve as it may, the deeper ill only breaks out afresh in
new forms. Time itself, the staring, vacant, unlovely time, is to
many the one dread foe. Others have a house empty and garnished, in
which neither Love nor Hope dwells. A self, with no God to protect
from it, a self unrulable, insatiable, makes of existence to some
the hell called madness. Godless man is a horror of the
unfinished--a hopeless necessity for the unattainable! The most
discontented are those who have all the truthless heart desires.

Thoughts like these were coming and going in Donal's brain, when he
heard a slight sound somewhere near him--the lightest of sounds
indeed--the turning of the leaf of a book. He raised his head and
looked, but could see no one. At last, up through the tree-boles on
the slope of the hill, he caught the shine of something white: it
was the hand that held an open book. He took it for the hand of a
lady. The trunk of a large tree hid the reclining form. He would
go back! There was the lovely cloth-striped meadow to lie in!

He rose quietly, but not quietly enough to steal away. From behind