“I have not seen you for years.”

“I mind the last time.  Your mother lay ill.  One evening at sunset Mr. Ian Rullock and you came to White Farm.”

“It must have been after sunset.  It must have been dark.”

“Back of that you and he came from Edinburgh one time.  We were down by the wishing-green, Robin Greenlaw and Gilian and I and three or four other lads and lassies.  Do you remember?  Mr. Rullock would have us dance, and we all took hands—­you, too—­and went around the ash-tree as though it were a May-pole.  We changed hands, one with another, and danced upon the green.  Then you and he got upon your horses and rode away.  He was riding the white mare Fatima.  But oh,” said Elspeth, “then came grandfather, who had seen us from the reaped field, and he blamed us sair and put no to our playing!  He gave word to the minister, and Sunday the sermon dealt with the ill women of Scripture.  Back of that—­”

“Back of that—­”

“There was the day the two of you would go to the Kelpie’s Pool.”  Elspeth’s eyes enlarged and darkened.  “The next morn we heard—­Jock Binning told us—­that Mr. Ian had nearly drowned.”

“Almost ten years ago.  Once—­twice—­thrice in ten years.  How idly were they spent, those years!”

“Oh,” cried Elspeth, “they say that you have been to world’s end and have gotten great learning!”

“One comes home from all that to find world’s end and great learning.”

Elspeth leaned from him, back against the thorn-tree.  She looked somewhat disquietedly, somewhat questioningly, at this new laird.  Glenfernie, in his turn, laid upon himself both hands of control.  He thought: 

“Do not peril all—­do not peril all—­with haste and frightening!”

He sat upon the green hillock and talked of country news.  She met him with this and that ...  White Farm affairs, Littlefarm.

“Robin,” said Alexander, “manages so well that he’ll grow wealthy!”

“Oh no!  He manages well, but he’ll never grow wealthy outside!  But inside he has great riches.”

"Does she love him, then?" It poured fear into his heart.  A magician with a sword—­with a great, evil, written-upon creese like that hanging at Black Hill—­was here before the palace.

“Do you love him?” asked Alexander, and asked it with so straight a simplicity that Elspeth Barrow took no offense.

She looked at him, and those strange smiles played about her lips.  “Robin is a fairy man,” she said.  “He has ower little of struggle save with his rhymes,” and left him to make what he could of that.

“She is heart-free,” he thought, but still he feared and boded.

Elspeth rose from the grass, stepped from beneath the blooming tree.  “I must be going.  It wears toward noon.”

Together they left the flower-set cape.  The laird of Glenfernie looked back upon it.

“Heaven sent a sample down. You come here when you wish?  You walk about with the spring and summer days?”