From the moor Glenfernie rode through the village.  Folk spoke to him, looked after him; children about the doors called to others, “It’s tha laird on Black Alan!” Old and young women, distaff or pan or pot or pitcher in hand, turned head, gazed, spoke to themselves or to one another.  The Jardine Arms looked out of doors.  “He’s unco like tha auld laird!” Auld Willy, that was over a hundred, raised a piping voice, “Did ye young things remember Gawin Elliot that was his great-grandfather ye’d be saying, ’Ye might think it was Gawin Elliot that was hangit!’” Mrs. Macmurdo came to her shop door.  “Eh, the laird, wi’ all the straw of all that’s past alight in his heart!”

Alexander answered the “good days,” but he did not draw rein.  He rode slowly up the steep village street and over the bare waste bit of hill until here was the manse, with the kirk beyond it.  Coming out of the manse gate was the minister.  Glenfernie checked his mare.  All around spread a bare and lonely hilltop.  The manse and the kirk and the minister’s figure buttressed each the others with a grim strength.  The wind swept around them and around Glenfernie.

Mr. M’Nab, standing beside the laird, spoke earnestly.  “We rejoice, Glenfernie, that you are about once more!  There is the making in you of a grand man, like your father.  It would have been down-spiriting if that son of Belial had again triumphed in mischief.  The weak would have found it so.”

“What is triumph?”

“Ye may well ask that!  And yet,” said M’Nab, “I know.  It is the warm-feeling cloak that Good when it hath been naked wraps around it, seeing the spoiler spoiled and the wicked fallen into the pit that he digged!”

“Aye, the naked Good.”

The minister looked afar, a dark glow and energy in his thin face.  “They are in prison, and the scaffolds groan—­they who would out with the Kirk and a Protestant king and in with the French and popery!”

“Your general wrong,” said Glenfernie, “barbed and feathered also for a Scots minister’s own inmost nerve!  And is not my wrong general likewise?  Who hates and punishes falsity, though it were found in his own self, acts for the common good!”

“Aye!” said the minister.  “But there must be assurance that God calls you and that you hate the sin and not the sinner!”

“Who assures the assurances?  Still it is I!”

Glenfernie rode on.  Mr. M’Nab looked after him with a darkling brow.  “That was heathenish—!”

Alexander passed kirk and kirkyard.  He went home and sat in the room in the keep, under his hand paper upon which he made figures, diagrams, words, and sentences.  When the next day came he did not ride, but walked.  He walked over the hills, with the kirk spire before him lifting toward a vast, blue serenity.  Presently he came in sight of the kirkyard, its gravestones and yew-trees.  He had met few persons upon the road, and here on the hilltop held to-day a balmy silence and solitude.  As he approached the gate, to which there mounted five ancient, rounded steps of stone, he saw sitting on one of these a woman with a basket of flowers.  Nearer still, he found that it was Gilian Barrow.