His father was to him a downy nest inside a stone-castle.
They all sat together round the kitchen fire.

The laird fell into a gentle monologue, in which, to Joan's thinking, he talked even more strangely than Cosmo.

Things born in the fire and the smoke, like the song of the three holy children, issued from the furnace clothed in softest moonlight.

Joan said to herself it was plain where the boy got his oddity; but what she called oddity was but sense from a deeper source than she knew the existence of.

He read them also passages of the book then occupying him so much: Joan wondered what attraction such a jumble of good words and no sense could have for a man so capable in ordinary affairs.