“Perhaps even—?”

The other gave a shriveled response to the smile.  “No.  I certainly did not mean that.”  He took his head in his hands and sighed.  “What a world it is!  As I go down the hill I wish sometimes that I had Alison’s eyes....  Well, tell me about yourself.”

“The one thing that I want to tell you just now, Black Hill, is that I am not any longer bloodhound at the heels of Ian.  What was done is done.  Let us go on to better things.  So at last will be unknit what was done.”

Black Hill both seemed and did not seem to pay attention.  The man who sat before him was big and straight and gave forth warmth and light.  He needed warmth and light; he needed a big tree to lean against.  He vaguely hoped that Glenfernie was home to stay.  He rubbed his hands and drank more wine.

“No one has known for a long time where you were....  Goodworth has an agent in Paris who says that Ian tried once to find out that.”

“To find out where I was?”

“Yes.”

Alexander gazed out of window, beyond the terrace and the old trees to the long hill, purple with heath, sunny and clear atop.

A servant came to the door.  “Mrs. Alison has returned, sir.”

Glenfernie rose.  “I will go find her then.—­I will ride over often if I may.”

“I wish you would!” said Black Hill.  “I was sorry about that quarrel with your father.”

The old laird’s son walked down the matted corridor.  The drawing-room door stood open; he saw one panel of the tall screen covered with pagodas, palms, and macaws.  Further on was the room, clean and fragrant, known as Mrs. Alison’s room.  This door, too, was wide.  He stood by his old friend.  They put hands into hands; eyes met, eyes held in a long look.

She said, “O God, I praise Thee!”

They sat within the garden door, on one side the clear, still room, on the other the green and growing things, the great tree loved by birds.  The place was like a cloister.  He stayed with her an hour, and in all that time there was not a great deal said with the outer tongue.  But each grew more happy, deeper and stronger.

He talked to her of the Roman Campagna, of the East and the desert....

As the hour closed he spoke directly of Ian.  “That is myself now, as Elspeth is myself now.  I falter, I fail, but I go on to profounder Oneness.”

“Christ is born, then he grows up.”

“May I see Ian’s last letters?”

She put them in his hands.  “They are very short.  They speak almost always of external things.”

He read, then sat musing, his eyes upon the tree.  “This last one—­You answered that it was not known where I was?”

“Yes.  But he says here at the last, ’I feel it somewhere that he is on his way to Scotland.’”

“I’ll have to think it out.”

“Every letter is objective like this.  But for all that, I divine, in the dark, a ferment....  As you see, we have not heard for months.”