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"How far is Prince's Gate from here?" he asked. "A mile and a half, I should say." "And it is now twenty minutes to two," said he, rising. "It will be a nice smart walk." "Thank you," said Mr. Ogilvie; "if it is all the same to you, we will perform the journey in a hansom. I am not in training just at present for your tramps to Ben-an-Sloich." "Ah!
All this lonely world of olive greens and browns had grown strangely dark. Even the hum of flies the only sound audible in these high solitudes away from the sea seemed stilled; and a cold wind began to blow over from Ben-an-Sloich.
Was it for a pale rose-leaf to brave that fell wind that tore the waves into spindrift, and howled through the lonely chasms of Ben-an-Sloich?
Then those wan gleams of yellow light on the sea? he went to the other window, and behold! the heavy bands of cloud that lay across the unseen peaks of Ben-an-Sloich had parted, and there was a blaze of clear, metallic, green sky; and the clouds bordering on that gleam of light were touched with a smoky and stormy saffron-hue that flashed and changed amidst the seething and twisting shapes of the fog and the mist.
He was still intently watching the new-comers who straggled in, singly or in pairs, to the stalls. When a slight motion of the white curtains showed that some one was entering one of the boxes, the corner of the box was regarded with as earnest a gaze as ever followed the movements of a herd of red deer in the misty chasms of Ben-an-Sloich.
And where was the loneliness of his life when always, wherever he went by sea or shore, he had these old friends around him the red-beaked sea-pyots whirring along the rocks; and the startled curlews, whistling their warning note across the sea; and the shy duck swimming far out on the smooth lochs; to say nothing of the black game that would scarcely move from their perch on the larch-trees as he approached, and the deer that were more distinctly visible on the far heights of Ben-an-Sloich when a slight sprinkling of snow had fallen?
But he now saw that that fine morning would not last. Behind the house clouds of a suffused yellow began to blot out the sparkling peaks of Ben-an-Sloich. The colors of the plain of the sea were troubled with gusts of wind until they disappeared altogether. The sky in the north grew an ominous black, until the farther shores of Loch Tua were dazzling white against that bank of angry cloud.
"Ah," said he to the splendid red deer, which was walking about the paddock with his velvety horns held proudly in the air, "what part of the Highlands have you come from? And wouldn't you like now a canter down the dry bed of a stream on the side of Ben-an-Sloich?"
But there is still another vision; and perhaps this solitary dreamer, who has no eyes for the great slopes of Ben-an-Sloich that stretch into the clouds, and no ears for the soft calling of the sea-birds as they wheel over his head, tries hardest to fix this one in his memory.
There is no sickness and sentiment on the side of Ben-an-Sloich. And so I was glad to come to Castle Dare, and to see the old mother, and Janet, and Hamish; and the sound of the pipes, Ogilvie when I heard them away in the steamer, that brought tears to my eyes; and I said to myself, 'Now you are at home again, and there will be no more nonsense of idle thinking. And what has it come to?
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