With slow-pacing shadows, the hot hours crept athwart the heath, and the house, and the dead, and carried the living with them in their invisible current. There is no tide in time; it is a steady current, not returning. Happy they whom it bears inward to the center of things! Alas¹, for those whom it carries outward to “the flaming walls of creation!” The poor old laird who, with all his refinement², all his education, all his interest in philology³, prosody⁴, history, and reliquial humanity, had become the slave of a goblet⁵, had left it behind him, had faced the empty universe empty-handed, and vanished with a shadow-goblet in his heart; the eyes that gloated over the gems⁷ had gone to help the grass to grow. But the will of the dead remained to trouble for a time the living, for it put his daughter in a painful predicament: until Crawford's property was removed from the house, it would give him constant opportunity of prosecuting⁸ the suit which Aleza had reason to think he intended to resume, and the thought of which had become to her insupportable.

 

Great was her astonishment⁹ when she learned to what the door in the study led, and what a multitude of curious and valuable things were there of whose presence in the house she had never dreamed. She would gladly have had them for herself; and it pained her to the heart to think of the disappointment of the poor ghost when he saw, if he could see, his treasured hoard¹⁰ emptied out of its hidden and safe abode¹¹. For, even if George should magnanimously protest that he did not care for the things enough to claim them, and beg that they might remain where they were, she could not grant his request, for it would be to accept them from him. Had her father left them to her, she would have kept them as carefully as even he could desire—with this difference only, that she would not have shut them up from giving pleasure to others.

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