His friend must rest with that.  He did so, and put that matter aside.  At any rate, things stood there better than he had feared.  “I shall be gone a month or two.  But you’ll still be here when I come home?”

“As far as I know I’ll be here through the summer.  I have no plans....  If the leaf remains dry and dead, what should you say to taking ship at Leith in September for Holland?  Amsterdam—­then Antwerp—­then the Rhine.  We might see the great Frederick—­push farther and look at the Queen of Hungary.”

“No, I may not.  I look to be a home-staying laird.”

They sat with the table between them, and the light from the four sides of the room rippled and crossed over them.  Books were on the table, folios and volumes in less.

“The home-staying laird—­the full scholar—­at last the writer—­the master ... it is a good fortune!”

As Ian spoke he stretched his arms, he leaned back in his chair and regarded the room, the fireplace, the little furnace, and the shelves ranged with the quaint, makeshift apparatuses of boyhood.  He looked at the green boughs without the loophole windows and at the crossing lights and shadows, and the brown books upon the brown table, and at last, under somewhat lowered lids, at Alexander.  What moved in the bottom of his mind it would be hard to say.  He thought that he loved the man sitting over against him, and so, surely, to some great amount he did.  But somewhere, in the thousand valleys behind them, he had stayed in an inn of malice and had carried hence poison in a vial as small as a single cell.  What suddenly made that past to burn and set it in the present it were hard to say.  A spark perhaps of envy or of jealousy, or a movement of contempt for Alexander’s “fortune.”  But he looked at his friend with half-closed eyes, and under the sea of consciousness crawled, half-blind, half-asleep, a willingness for Glenfernie to find some thorn in life.  The wish did not come to consciousness.  It was far down.  He thought of himself as steel true to Alexander.  And in a moment the old love drew again.  He put out his hands across the board.  “When are we going to see Mother Binning and to light the fire in the cave?...  There are not many like you, Alexander!  I’m glad to get back.”

“I’m glad to have you back, old sworn-fellow, old Saracen!”

They clasped hands.  Gray eyes and brown eyes with gold flecks met in a gaze that was as steady with the one as with the other.  It was Alexander who first loosened handclasp.

They talked of affairs, particular and general, of Ian’s late proceedings and the lairdship of Alexander, of men and places that they knew away from this countryside.  Ian watched the other as they talked.  Whatever there was that had moved, down there in the abyss, was asleep again.

“Old Steadfast, you are ruddy and joyous!  How long since I was here, in the winter?  Four months?  Well, you’ve changed.  What is it?...  Is it love?  Are you in love?”