“Yes.  They tried to tell inner things.”

“I came here to say that I wronged folk from whom a man within me cannot part.  One is dead, and I have to seek her along another road.  But you are living, breathing there!  I made myself your foe, and now I wish that I could unmake what I made....  I was and am a sinful soul....  It is for you to say if it is anything to you, what I confess.”  He rose from the fire and moved once or twice the length of the place.  At last he came and stood before the other.  “It is no wonder if it be not given,” he said.  “But I ask your forgiveness, Alexander!”

“Well, I give it to you,” said Alexander.  His face worked.  He got to his feet and went to Ian.  He put his hands upon the other’s shoulders. “Old Saracen!” he said.

Ian shook.  With the dropping of Alexander’s hands he went back a step; he sat down and hid his head in his arms.

Said Alexander:  “You did thus and thus, obeying inner weakness, calling it all the time strength.  And do I not know that I, too, made myself a shadow going after shadows?  My own make of selfishness, arrogance, and hatred....  Let us do better, you and I!” He mended the fire.  “By understanding the past may be altered.  Already it is altered with you and me....  I was here the other day.  I stayed a long time.  There seemed two boys in the cave and there seemed a girl beside them.  The three felt with and understood and were one another.”  He came and knelt beside Ian.  “Let us forge a stronger friendship!”

Ian, face to the rock, was weeping, weeping.  Alexander knelt beside him, lay beside him, arm over heaving shoulders.  Old Steadfast—­Old Saracen—­and Elspeth Barrow, also, and around and through, pulsing, cohering, interpenetrating, healing, a sense of something greater....

It passed—­the torrent force, long pent, aching against its barriers.  Ian lay still, at last sat up.

“Come outside,” said Alexander, “into the cold and the air.”

They left the cave for the moonlight night.  They leaned against the rock, and about them hung the sleeping trees.  The crag was silvered, the stream ran with a deep under-sound.  The air struck pure and cold.  The large stars shone down through all the flooding radiance of the moon.  The familiar place, the strange place, the old-new place....  At last Ian spoke, “Have you been to the Kelpie’s Pool?”

“Yes.  The day I came home I lay for hours beside it.”

“I was there to-night.  I came here from there.”

“It is with us.  But far beside it is also with us!”

“The carnival at Rome.  When I left Rome I went to the Lake of Como.  I want to tell you of a night there—­and of nights and days later, elsewhere—­”

“Come within, as we used to do, and talk the heart out.”

They went back to the fire.  It played and sang.  The minutes, poignant, full, went by.

“So at last prison and scaffold risks ceased to count.  I took what disguise I could and came.”