Seated or lying upon the brown earth by the splintered crag, alone save for the wheeling birds and the sound of wind and water and the sailing clouds, he had time at last for the rise into mind, definitely shaped and visible, of much that had been slowly brewing and forming.  He was conscious of a beginning of a readjustment of ideas.  For a long time now he had been pledged to personal daring, to thought forced to become supple and concentrated, to hard, practical planning, physical hardship and danger.  In the midst of this had begun to grow up a criticism of all the enterprises upon which he was engaged.  Scope—­in many respects the Jacobite character, generally taken, was amiable and brave, but its prime exhibit was not scope!  Somewhat narrow, somewhat obsolete; Ian’s mind now saw Jacobitism in that light.  As he sat without his rock fortress, in the shadow of birch-trees, with lower hills and glens at his feet, he had a pale vision of Europe, of the world.  Countries and times showed themselves contiguous.  “Causes,” dynastic wars, political life, life in other molds and hues, appeared in chords and sequences and strokes of the eye, rather than in the old way of innumerable, vivid, but faintly connected points.  “I begin to see,” thought Ian, “how things travel together, like with like!” His body was rested, recovered, his mind invigorated.  He had had with him for long days the very elixir of solitude.  Relations and associations that before had been banked in ignorance came forth and looked at him.  “You surely have known us before, though you had forgotten that you knew us!” He found that he was taking delight in these expansions of meaning.  He thought, “If I can get abroad out of this danger, out of old circles, I’ll roam and study and go to school to wider plans!” He suddenly thought, “This kind of thing is what Old Steadfast meant when he used to say that I did not see widely enough.”  He moved sharply.  A hot and bitter flood seemed to well up within him.  “He himself is seeing narrowly now—­Alexander Jardine!”

He left the crag and went for a scrambling and somewhat dangerous walk along the mountain-side.  There was peril in leaving that one rock-curtained place.  Two days before he had seen what he thought to be signs of red-coated soldiers in the glen far below.  But he must walk—­he must exercise his body, note old things, not give too much time to new perceptions!  He breathed the keen, sweet mountain air; with a knife that he had he fell to making a staff from a young oak; he watched the pass below and the shadows of the clouds; he climbed fairly to the mountain-top and had a great view; he sang an old song, not aloud, but under his breath; and at last he must come back with solitude to his fastness.  And here was brooding thought again!

Two more days passed.  The man from the hut below in the pass came at dusk with food carefully sent from the chieftain’s hall.  Redcoats had gone indeed through the glen, but they could never find the path to this place!  They might return or they might not; they were like the devil who rose by your side when you were most peaceful!  Angus went down the mountain-side.  The sound of his footstep died away.  Ian had again Solitude herself.