Excerpt from The Marquis of Lossie, Vol. 1 of 3 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The woman's body lay upstairs wrapped in pale linen of death. Her life had been shrouded in mystery.

Reproduction of the original.