As from a compartment above sifted down a dry light with great power of lighting.  It came into Alexander’s mind, into that, too, of Ian....  How absurd was the human animal!  All this saying the opposite left the truth intact.  They were not strangers, each was quite securely seated in the other.  Self-annihilation—­self-oblivion!...  All these farcical high horses!...  Men went to see comedies and did not see their own comedy.

The laird of Glenfernie and Ian Rullock each very slightly and coldly acknowledged the other’s presence.  No words passed.  But the slow amenity of life bent by a fraction the head of each, just parted the lips of each.  Then Alexander turned with an abrupt movement of his great body and with his companions was swallowed by the crowd.

On his bed that night, lying straight with his hands upon his breast, he had for the space of one deep breath an overmastering sense of the suaveness of reality.  Crudity, angularity, harshness, seemed to vanish, to dissolve.  He knew dry beds of ancient torrents that were a long and somewhat wide wilderness of mere broken rock, stone piece by stone piece, and only the more jagged edges lost and only the surface worn by the action, through ages, of water.  It was as though such a bed grew beneath his eyes meadow smooth—­smoother than that—­smooth as air, air that lost nothing by yielding—­smooth as ether that, yielding all, yielded nothing....  The moment went, but left its memory.  As the moment was large so was its memory.

He fought against it with tribes of memories, lower and dwarfish, but myriads strong.  The bells from some convent rang, the December stars blazed beyond his window, he put out his arms to the December cold.

Ian, despite that moment in the playhouse, looked for the arrival of a second challenge from Glenfernie.  For an instant it might be that they had seen that things couldn’t be so separate, after all!  That there was, as it were, some universal cement.  But instants passed, and, indubitably, the world was a broken field!  Enmity still existed, full-veined.  It would be like this Alexander, who had overshot another Alexander, to send challenge after challenge, never to rest satisfied with one crossing of weapons, with blood drawn once!  Or if there was no challenge, no formal duel, still there would be duel.  He would pursue—­he would cry, “Turn!”—­there would be perpetuity of encounter.  To the world’s end there was to be the face of menace, of old reproach—­the arrows dropped of pain of many sorts.  “In short, vengeance,” said Ian.  “Vengeance deep as China!  When he used to deny himself revenge in small things it was all piling up for this!...  What I did slipped the leash for him!  Well, aren’t we evened?”

What he looked for came, brought by Deschamps.  The two met in a field outside Paris, with seconds, with all the conventionally correct paraphernalia.  The setting differed from that of their lonely fight on a Highland mountain-side.  But again Ian, still the better swordsman, wounded Alexander.  This time he gave—­willed perhaps to give—­a slight hurt.