They talked, but they did not talk much.  What they said was trite enough.  Underneath was the potent language, wave meeting wave with shock and thrill and exultation.  These would not come, here and now, to outer utterance.  But sooner or later they would come.  Each knew that—­though not always does one acknowledge what is known.

When they spoke it was chiefly of weather and of country people....

The lightning blazed less frequently, thunder subdued itself.  For a time the rain fell thick and leaden, but after an hour it thinned and grew silver.  Presently it wholly stopped.

“This storm is over,” said Ian.

Elspeth rose from the ledge of stone.  He drew aside the dripping curtain of leaf and stem, and she stepped forth from the cave, and he followed.  The clouds were breaking, the birds were singing.  The day of creation could not have seen the glen more lucent and fragrant.  When, soon, they came to its lower reaches, with White Farm before them, they saw overhead a rainbow.

* * * * *

The day of the storm and the cave was over, but with no outward word their inner selves had covenanted to meet again.  They met in the leafy glen.  It was easy for her to find an errand to Mother Binning’s, or, even, in the long summer afternoons, to wander forth from White Farm unquestioned.  As for him, he came over the moor, avoided the cot at the glen head, and plunged down the steep hillside below.  Once they met Jock Binning in the glen.  After that they chose for their trysting-place that green hidden arm that once she and the laird of Glenfernie had entered.

Elspeth did not think in those days; she loved.  She moved as one who is moved; she was drawn as by the cords of the sun.  The Ancient One, the Sphinx, had her fast.  The reflection of a greater thing claimed her and taught her, held her like a bayadere in a temple court.

As for Ian, he also held that he loved.  He was the Arab bound for the well for which he thirsted, single-minded as to that, and without much present consciousness of tarnish or sin....  But what might arise in his mind when his thirst was quenched?  Ian did not care, in these blissful days, to think of that.

He had come on the day of the storm, the cave, and the rainbow to a fatal place in his very long life.  He was upon very still, deep water, glasslike, with only vague threads and tremors to show what might issue in resistless currents.  He had been in such a place, in his planetary life, over and over and over again.  This concatenation had formed it, or that concatenation; the surrounding phenomena varied, but essentially it was always the same, like a dream place.  The question was, would he turn his boat, or raft, or whatever was beneath him, or his own stroke as swimmer, and escape from this glassy place whose currents were yet but tendrils?  He could do it; it was the Valley of Decision....  But so often,