An indescribable suggestion of an invisible yet luminous cloud hovered about his forehead and eyes--which latter, if not fixed on very vacancy, seemed to have got somewhere near it.

At the fourth or fifth turn he opened the door by which he had entered, continuing a remark he had begun to Donal--of which, although he heard every word and seemed on the point of understanding something, he had not caught the sense when his lordship disappeared, still talking.

Donal thought it therefore his part to follow him, and found himself in his lordship's bedroom.

But out of this his lordship had already gone, through an opposite door, and Donal still following entered an old picture-gallery, of which he had heard Davie speak, but which the earl kept private for his exercise indoors.

It was a long, narrow place, hardly more than a wide corridor, and appeared nowhere to afford distance enough for seeing a picture.