But Donal could ill judge, for the sole light in the place came from the fires and candles in the rooms whose doors they had left open behind them, with just a faint glimmer from the vapour-buried moon, sufficing to show the outline of window after window, and revealing something of the great length of the gallery.
By the time Donal overtook the earl, he was some distance down, holding straight on into the long dusk, and still talking.
"This is my favourite promenade," he said, as if brought to himself by the sound of Donal's overtaking steps.

"After dinner always, Mr.Grant, wet weather or dry, still or stormy, I walk here.

What do I care for the weather! It will be time when I am old to consult the barometer!" Donal wondered a little: there seemed no great hardihood in the worst of weather to go pacing a picture-gallery, where the fiercest storm that ever blew could send in only little threads of air through the chinks of windows and doors! "Yes," his lordship went on, "I taught myself hardship in my boyhood, and I reap the fruits of it in my prime!--Come up here: I will show you a prospect unequalled." He stopped in front of a large picture, and began to talk as if expatiating on the points of a landscape outspread before him.

His remarks belonged to something magnificent; but whether they were applicable to the picture Donal could not tell; there was light enough only to give a faint gleam to its gilded frame.
"Reach beyond reach!" said his lordship; "endless! infinite! How would not poor Maldon, with his ever fresh ambition after the unattainable, have gloated on such a scene! In Nature alone you front success! She does what she means! She alone does what she means!" "If," said Donal, more for the sake of confirming the earl's impression that he had a listener, than from any idea that he would listen--"if you mean the object of Nature is to present us with perfection, I cannot allow she does what she intends: you rarely see her produce anything she would herself call perfect.

But if her object be to make us behold perfection with the inner eye, this object she certainly does gain, and that just by stopping short of--" He did not finish the sentence.