“Ah!” said Mother Binning.  “There’s a braw wrong-doer for you, sitting drinking Spanish wine!”

“Say his name.”

“It’s he that once, when you were a lad, you brought alive from the Kelpie’s Pool.”

“Thank you, Mother!  That’s what I wanted. Scrying! Who gives to whom—­who gives back to whom?  The underneath great I, I suppose.  Left hand giving to right—­and no brand-new news!  All the same, other drifts concurring, I think that he fled by the Lisbon ship!”

Mother Binning pushed aside the pan of water and rubbed her hand across her eyes.  She took up her bundle of herbs.  “Hoot, Glenfernie! do ye think that’s your soul’s desire?”

Jock came limping around the house.  Alexander could not now abide the sight of this cripple who had spied, and had not shot some fashion of arrow!  He said good-by and loosed Black Alan from the ash-tree and rode away.  He would not tread the glen.  His memory recoiled from it as from some Eastern glen of serpents.  He and Black Alan went over the moors.  And still it was early and he had his body strength back.  He rode to Littlefarm.

Robin Greenlaw was in the field, coat off in the gay, warm weather.  He came to Glenfernie’s side, and the latter dismounted and sat with him under a tree.  Greenlaw brought a stone jug and tankard and poured ale.

The laird drank.  “That’s good, Robin!” He put down the tankard.  “Are you still a poet?”

“If I was so once upon a time, I hope I am so still.  At any rate, I still make verses.  And I see poems that I can never write.”

“’Never’—­how long a word that is!”

Greenlaw gazed at the workers in the field.  “I met Mr. Strickland the other day.  He says that you will travel again.”

“’Travel’—­yes.”

“The Jardine Arms gets it from the Edinburgh road that Ian Rullock made a daring escape.”

“He had always ingenuity and a certain sort of physical bravery.”

“So has Lucifer, Milton says.  But he’s not Lucifer.”

“No.  He is weak and small.”

“Well, look Glenfernie!  I would not waste my soul chasing him!”

“How dead are you all!  You, too, Greenlaw!”

Robin flushed.  “No!  I hate all that he did that is vile!  If all his escaping leads him to violent death, I shall not find it in me to grieve!  But all the same, I would not see you narrowed to the wolf-hunter that will never make the wolf less than the wolf!  I don’t know.  I’ve always thought of you as one who would serve Wisdom and show us her beauty—­”

“To me this is now wisdom—­this is now beauty.  Poets may stay and make poetry, but I go after Ian Rullock!”

“Oh, there’s poetry in that, too,” said Greenlaw, “because there’s nothing in which there isn’t poetry!  But you’re choosing the kind you’re not best in, or so it seems to me.”

Glenfernie rode from Littlefarm homeward.  But the next day he and Black Alan went to Black Hill.  Here he saw Mr. Touris alone.  That gentleman sat with a shrunken and shriveled look.