Ian stayed another hour or two ere he rode back to Black Hill.  With Glenfernie he went over Glenfernie House, the known, familiar rooms.  They went to the school-room together and out through the breach in the old castle wall, and sat among the pine roots, and looked down through leafy tree-tops to the glint of water.  When, in the sun-washed house and narrow garden and grassy court, they came upon men and women they stopped and spoke, and all was friendly and merry as it should be in a land of good folk.  Ian had his crack with Davie, with Eppie and Phemie and old Lauchlinson and others.  They sat for a few minutes with Mrs. Grizel where, in a most housewifely corner, she measured currants and bargained with pickers of cherries.  Strickland they came upon in the book-room.  With the Jardines and this gentleman the sense of employed and employee had long ago passed into a larger inclusion.  He and the young laird talked and worked together as members of one family.  Now there was some converse among the three, and then the two left Strickland in the cool, dusky room.  Outside the house June flamed again.  For a while they paced up and down under the trees in the narrow garden atop the craggy height.  Then Ian mounted Fatima, who all these years was kept for him at Black Hill.

“You’ll come over to-morrow?”

“Yes.”

Glenfernie watched him down the steep-descending, winding road, and thought of many roads that, good company, he and Ian had traveled together.

This was the middle of the day.  In the afternoon he walked to White Farm....  It was sunset when he turned his face homeward.  He looked back and saw Elspeth at the stepping-stones, in a clear flame of golden sky and golden water.  She had seemed kind; he walked on air, his hand in Hope’s.  Hope had well-nigh the look of Assurance.  He was going away because it was promised and arranged for and he must go.  But he was coming again—­he was coming again.

A golden moon rose through the clear east.  He was in no hurry to reach Glenfernie House.  The aching, panting bliss that he felt, the energy compressed, held back, straining at the leash, wanted night and isolation.  So it could better dream of day and the clasp of that other that with him would make one.  Now he walked and now stood, his eyes upon the mounting orb or the greater stars that it could not dim, and now he stretched himself in the summer heath.  At last, not far from midnight, he came to that face of Glenfernie Hill below the old wall, to the home stream and the bit of thick wood where once, in boyhood, he had lain with covered face under the trees and little by little had put from his mind “The Cranes of Ibycus.”  The moonlight was all broken here.  Shafts of black and white lay inextricably crossed and mingled.  Alexander passed through the little wood and climbed, with the secure step of old habit, the steep, rough path to the pine without the wall, there stooped and came through the broken wall to the moon-silvered court, and so to the door left open for him.