Days and weeks went by.  Autumn came and stepped in russet toward winter.  Yet it was not cold and the mists and winds delayed.  The homecoming of the laird of Glenfernie slipped into received fact—­a fact rather large, acceptable, bringing into the neighborhood situation of things in general a perceptible amount of expansion and depth, but settling now, for the general run, into comfortable every-day.  They were used—­until these late years—­to seeing a laird of Glenfernie about.  When he was not there it was a missed part of the landscape.  When he was in presence Nature showed herself correctly filled out.  This laird was like and not like the old lairds.  Big like the one before him in outward frame and seeming, there were certainly inner differences.  Dale and village pondered these differences.  It came at last to a judgment that this Glenfernie was larger and kinder.  The neighborhood considered that he would make a good home body, and if he was a scholar, sitting late in the old keep over great books, that harmed no one, redounded, indeed, to the dale’s credit.  His very wanderings might so redound now that they were over.  “That’s the laird of Glenfernie,” the dale might say to strangers.

It was dim, gray, late November weather.  There poured rain, shrieked a wind.  Then the sky cleared and the air stilled.  There came three wonderful days, one after the other, and between them wonderful nights with a waxing moon.  Alexander, riding home from Littlefarm, found waiting for him in the court Peter Lindsay, of Black Hill.  This was a trusted man.

“I hae a bit letter frae Mistress Alison, laird.”  Giving it to him, Peter came close, his eye upon the approaching stable-boy.  “Dinna look at it here, but when ye’re alone.  I’ll bide and tak the answer.”

Alexander nodded, turned, and crossed to the keep.  Within its ancient, deep entrance he broke seal and opened the paper superscribed by Mrs. Alison.  Within was not her handwriting.  There ran but two lines, in a hand with which he was well acquainted: 

“Will you meet one that you know in the cave to-night four hours after moonrise?”

He went back to the messenger.  “The answer is, ‘Yes.’  Say just that, Peter Lindsay.”

The day went by.  He worked with Strickland.  The latter thought him a little absent, but the accounts were checked and decisions made.  At the supper-table he was more quiet than usual.

“Full moon to-night,” said Alice.  “What does it look like, Alexander, when it shines in Rome and when it comes up right out of the desert?”

“It lights the ruins and it is pale day in the desert.  What makes you think to-night of Rome and the desert?”

“I do not know.  I see the rim now out of window.”

The moon climbed.  It shone with an intense silver behind leafless boughs and behind the dark-clad boughs of firs.  It came above the trees.  The night hung windless and deeply clear.  A fire burned upon the hearth of the room in the keep.  Alexander sat before it and he sat very still, and vast pictures came to the inner eye, and to the inner ear meanings of old words....