day's journey, the same who had parted from him in such displeasure. He presented his letter.
Mr. Carmichael gave him a keen glance, but uttered no word until he had read it.
"Well, young man," he said, looking up at him with concentrated severity, "what would you have me do?"
"Tell me of any situation you may happen to know or hear of, sir," said Donal. "That is all I could expect."
"All!" repeated the clergyman, with something very like a sneer; "—but what if I think that all a very great deal? What if I imagine myself set in charge over young minds and hearts? What if I know you better than the good man whose friendship for your parents gives him a kind interest in you? You little thought how you were undermining your prospects last Friday! My old friend would scarcely have me welcome to my parish one he may be glad to see out of his own! You can go to the kitchen and have your dinner—I have no desire to render evil for evil—but I will not bid you God-speed. And the sooner you take yourself out of this, young man, the better!"
"Good morning, sir!" said Donal, and left the room.
On the doorstep he met a youth he had known by sight at the university: it was the minister's son—the worst-behaved of all the students. Was this a case of the sins of the father being visited on the child? Does God never visit the virtues of the father on the child?
A little ruffled, and not a little disappointed, Donal walked away. Almost unconsciously he took the road to the castle, and coming to the gate, leaned on the top bar, and stood thinking.
Suddenly, down through the trees came Davie bounding, pushed his hand through between the bars, and shook hands with him.
"I have been looking for you all day," he said.
"Why?" asked Donal.
"Forgue sent you a letter."
"I have had no letter."
"Eppy took it this morning."
"Ah, that explains! I have not been home since breakfast."
"It was to say my father would like to see you."
"I will go and get it: then I shall know what to do."
"Why do you live there? The cobbler is a dirty little man! Your clothes will smell of leather!"
"He is not dirty," said Donal. "His hands do get dirty—very dirty with his work—and his face too; and I daresay soap and water can't get them quite clean. But he will have a nice earth-bath one day, and that will take all the dirt off. And if you could see his soul—that is as clean as clean can be—so clean it is quite shining!"
"Have you seen it?" said the boy, looking up at Donal, unsure whether he was making game of him, or meaning something very serious.
"I have had a glimpse or two of it. I never saw a cleaner.—You know, my dear boy, there's a cleanness much deeper than the skin!"
"I know!" said Davie, but stared as if he wondered he would speak of such things.
Donal returned his gaze. Out of the fullness of his heart his eyes shone. Davie was reassured.
"Can you ride?" he asked.
"Yes, a little."
"Who taught you?"
"An old mare I was fond of."
"Ah, you are making game of me! I do not like to be made game of," said Davie, and turned away.
"No indeed," replied Donal. "I never make game of anybody.—But now I will go and find the letter."
"I would go with you," said the boy, "but my father will not let me beyond the grounds. I don't know why."
Donal hastened home, and found himself eagerly expected, for the letter young Eppy had brought was from the earl. It informed Donal that it would give his lordship pleasure to see him, if he would favour him with a call.
In a few minutes he was again on the road to the castle.
CHAPTER XI.
THE EARL
He met no one on his way from the gate up through the wood. He ascended the hill with its dark ascending firs, to its crown of silvery birches, above which, as often as the slowly circling road brought him to the other side, he saw rise like a helmet the gray mass of the fortress. Turret and tower, pinnacle and battlement, appeared and disappeared as he climbed. Not until at last he stood almost on the top, and from an open space beheld nearly the whole front, could he tell what it was like. It was a grand pile, but looked a gloomy one to live in.
He stood on a broad grassy platform, from which rose a gravelled terrace, and from the terrace the castle. He ran his eye along the front seeking a door but saw none. Ascending the terrace by a broad flight of steps, he approached a deep recess in the front, where two portions of the house of differing date nearly met. Inside this recess he found a rather small door, flush with the wall, thickly studded and plated with iron, surmounted by the Morven horses carved in gray stone, and surrounded with several mouldings. Looking for some means of announcing his presence, he saw a handle at the end of a rod of iron, and pulled, but heard nothing: the sound of the bell was smothered in a wilderness of stone walls. By and by, however, appeared an old servant, bowed and slow, with plentiful hair white as wool, and a mingled look of childishness and caution in his wrinkled countenance.
"The earl wants to see me," said Donal.
"What name?" said the man.
"Donal Grant; but his lordship will be nothing the wiser, I suspect; I don't think he knows my name. Tell him—the young man he sent for to Andrew Comin's."
The man left him, and Donal began to look about him. The place where he stood was a mere entry, a cell in huge walls, with a second, a low, round-headed door, like the entrance to a prison, by which the butler had disappeared. There was nothing but bare stone around him, with again the Morven arms cut deep into it on one side. The ceiling was neither vaulted nor groined nor flat, but seemed determined by the accidental concurrence of ends of stone stairs and corners of floors on different levels. It was full ten minutes before the man returned and requested him to follow him.
Immediately Donal found himself in a larger and less irregular stone-case, adorned with heads and horns and skins of animals. Crossing this, the man opened a door covered with red cloth, which looked strange in the midst of the cold hard stone, and Donal entered an octagonal space, its doors of dark shining oak, with carved stone lintels and doorposts, and its walls adorned with arms and armour almost to the domed ceiling. Into it, as if it descended suddenly out of some far height, but dropping at last like a gently alighting bird, came the end of a turnpike-stair, of slow sweep and enormous diameter—such a stair as in wildest gothic tale he had never imagined. Like the revolving centre of a huge shell, it went up out of sight, with plain promise of endless convolutions beyond. It was of ancient stone, but not worn as would have been a narrow stair. A great rope of silk, a modern addition, ran up along the wall for a hand-rail; and with slow-moving withered hand upon it, up the glorious ascent climbed the serving man, suggesting to Donal's eye the crawling of an insect, to his heart the redemption of the sons of God.
With the stair yet ascending above them as if it would never stop, the man paused upon a step no broader than the rest, and opening a door in the round of the well, said, "Mr. Grant, my lord," and stood aside for Donal to enter.
He
