“In some part you say truth.  But my load of inconsistency does not lighten yours of guilt.”

“Perhaps not.  We were friends.  Five-sixths of me made a fair enough friend and comrade.  We interlocked.  You had gifts and possessions I had not.  I liked the oak-feeling of you—­the great ship in sail!  In turn, I had the key, perhaps, to a few lands of bloom and flavor that you lacked.  We interchanged and thought that we were each the richer.  Five-sixths....  Say, then, that the other sixth might be defined as no-friend, or as false friend!  Say that it was wilful, impatient of superiorities, proud, vain, willing to hurt, betray, and play the demon generally!  Say that once it gave itself swing it darkened some of the other sixths....  Well, it is done!  Yet there was gold.  Perhaps, laird of Glenfernie, there is still gold in the mine!”

“You are mistaken in your proportions.  Gold!  You are to me the specter of the Kelpie’s Pool!”

Silence held for a minute or two.  The clouds, passing between earth and sun, made against the mountain slopes impalpable, dark, fantastic shapes.  An eagle wheeled above its nest at the mountain-top.  Ian spoke again.  His tone had altered.

“If I do not decline remorse, I at least decline the leaden cope of it you would have me wear!  There is such a thing as fair play to oneself!  Two years ago come August Elspeth Barrow and I agreed to part—­”

“Oh, ’agreed’—­”

“Have it so!  I said that we must part.  She acquiesced—­and that without the appeals that the stage and literature show us.  Oh, doubtless I might have seen a pierced spirit, and did not, and was brute beast there!  But one thing you have got to believe, and that is that neither of us knew what was to happen.  Even with that, she was aware of how a letter might be sent, with good hope of reaching me.  She was not a weak, ignorant girl....  I went away, and within a fortnight was deep in that long attempt that ends here.  I became actively an agent for the Prince and his father.  A hundred names and their fates were in my hands.  You can fill in the multitude of activities, each seeming small in itself, but the whole preoccupying every field....  If Elspeth Barrow wrote I never received her letter.  When my thought turned in that direction, it saw her well and not necessarily unhappy.  Time passed.  For reasons, I ceased to write home, and again for reasons I obliterated paths by which I might be reached.  For months I heard nothing, as I said nothing.  I was on the very eve of quitting Paris, under careful disguise, to go into Scotland.  Came suddenly your challenge—­and still, though I knew that to you at least our relations must have been discovered, I knew no more than that!  I did not know that she was dead....  I could not stay to fight you then.  I left you to brand me as you pleased in your mind.”

“I had already branded you.”