Chapter 1. The Stable Yard
_ CHAPTER I. THE STABLE YARD
It was one of those exquisite days that come in every winter, in which it seems no longer the dead body, but the lovely ghost of summer. Such a day bears to its sister of the happier time something of the relation the marble statue bears to the living form； the sense it awakes of beauty is more abstract, more ethereal； it lifts the soul into a higher region than will summer day of lordliest splendour. It is like the love that loss has purified.
Such, however, were not the thoughts that at the moment occupied the mind of Malcolm Colonsay. Indeed, the loveliness of the morning was but partially visible from the spot where he stood--the stable yard of Lossie House, ancient and roughly paved. It was a hundred years since the stones had been last relaid and levelled: none of the horses of the late Marquis minded it but one--her whom the young man in Highland dress was now grooming--and she would have fidgeted had it been an o

......
全部内容，请购买此书。