“I wish that he would think to returning,” said Strickland.  He had been leaning against the doorpost.  Now he straightened himself.  “I will go on as far as the pool.”

Mother Binning loosed her hands.  “Did ye have that thought when ye left hame?”

“No, I believe not.”

“Gae on, then!  The day’s bonny, and the Lord’s gude has a wide ring!”

Strickland walking on, left the stream and the glen head.  Now he was upon the moor.  It dipped and rose like a Titan wave of a Titan sea.  Its long, long unbroken crest, clean line against clean space, brought a sense of quiet, distance, might.  Here solitude was at home.  Now Strickland moved, and now he stood and watched the quiet.  Turning at last a shoulder of the moor, he saw at some distance below him the pool, like a small mirror.  He descended toward it, without noise over the springy earth.

A horse appeared between him and the water.  Strickland felt a most involuntary startling and thrill—­then half laughed to think that he had feared that he saw the water-steed, the kelpie.  The horse was fastened to a stake that once had been the bole of an ancient willow.  It grazed around—­somewhere would be a master....  Presently Strickland’s eye found the latter—­a man lying upon the moorside, just above the water.  Again with a shock and thrill—­though not like the first—­it came to him who it was.

The laird of Glenfernie lay very still, his eyes upon the Kelpie’s Pool.  His old tutor, long his friend, quiet and stanch, gazed unseen.  When he had moved a few feet an outcropping of rock hid his form, but his eyes could still dwell upon the pool and the man its visitor.  He turned to go away, then he stood still.

“What if he means a closer going yet?” Strickland settled back against the rock.  “He would loose his horse first—­he would not leave it fastened here.  If he does that then I will go down to him.”

Glenfernie lay still.  There was no wind to-day.  The reeds stood straight, the willow leaves slept, the water stayed like dusky glass.  The air, pure and light, hung at rest in the ether.  Minutes went by, an hour.  He might, Strickland thought, have lain there a long time.  At last he sat up, rose, began to walk around the pool.  He went around it thrice.  Then again he sat down, his arms upon his knees, watching the dusk water.  He did not go nor sit like one overwrought or frenzied or despairing.  His great frame, his bearing, the air of him, had quietude, but not listlessness; there seemed at once calm and intensity as of a still center that had flung off the storm.  Time flowed.  Thought Strickland: 

“He is as far as I am from death in that water.  I’ll cease to spy.”

He moved away, moss and ling muffling step, gained and dipped behind the shoulder of the moor.  The horse grazed on.  The laird sat still, his arms upon his knees, his head a little lifted, his eyes crossing the Kelpie’s Pool to the wave-line against the sky.