“If I am—­” Glenfernie rose and paced the room.  Coming to one of the narrow windows, he stood and looked out and down upon bank and brae and wood and field and moor.  He returned to the table.  “I’ll tell you about it.”

He told.  Ian sat and listened.  The light played about him, shook gold dots and lines over his green coat, over his hands, his faintly smiling face, his head held straight and high.  He was so well to look at, so “magnificent”!  Alexander spoke with the eloquence of a possessing passion, and Ian listened and felt himself to be the sympathizing friend.  Even the profound, unreasonable, unhumorous idealism of old Steadfast had its quaint, Utopian appeal.  He was going to marry the farmer’s granddaughter, though he might, undoubtedly, marry better....  Ian listened, questioned, summed up: 

“I have always been the worldly-wise one!  Is there any use in my talking now of worldly wisdom?”

“No use at all.”

“Then I won’t!...  Old Alexander the Great, are you happy?”

“If she gives me her love.”

Ian dismissed that with a wave of his hand.  “Oh, I think she’ll give it, dear simpleton!” He looked at Glenfernie now with genial affection.  “Well, on the whole, and balancing one thing against another, I think that I want you to be happy!”

Alexander laughed at that minification.  “And my happiness is big enough—­or if I get it it will be big enough—­not in the least to disturb our friendship country, Ian!”

“I’ll believe that, too.  Our relations are old and rooted.”

“Old and rooted.”

“So I wish you joy....  And I remember when you thought you would not marry!”

“Oh—­memories!  I’m sweeping them away!  I’m beginning again!...  I hold fast the memory of friendship.  I hold fast the memory that somehow, in this form or that, I must have loved her from the beginning of things!” He rose and moved about the room.  Going to the fireplace, he leaned his forehead against the stone and looked down at the laid, not kindled, wood.  He turned and came back to Ian.  “The world seems to me all good.”

Ian laughed at him, half in raillery, but half in a flood of kindness.  If what had stirred had been ancient betrayal, alive and vital one knew not when, now again it was dead, dead.  He rose, he put his arm again about Alexander’s shoulder.  “Glenfernie!  Glenfernie! you’re in deep!  Well, I hope the world will stay heaven, e’en for your sake!”

They left the old room with its hauntings of a boy’s search for gold, with, back of that, who might know what hauntings of ancient times and fortress doings, violences and agonies, subduings, revivings, cark and care and light struggling through, dark nights and waited-for dawns!  They went down the stair and out of the keep.  Late June flamed around them.