“It’s heigho! for Jamie, isn’t it?” asked Alexander.  “Winter makes us look old.  Wait till springtime!”

That evening she waylaid Strickland.  “What is the matter with Alexander?”

“I don’t know.”

“He looks five years older.  He looks as though he had been through wars.”

“Perhaps he has.  I don’t know what it is,” said Strickland, soberly.

“Do you think,” said Alice—­“do you think he could have had—­oh, somewhere out in the world!—­a love-affair, and it ended badly?  She died, or there was a rival, or something like that, and he has just heard of it?”

“You have been reading novels,” said Strickland.  “And yet—!”

That night, seeing from his own window the light in the keep, he turned to his bed with the thought of the havoc of love.  Lying there with open eyes he saw in procession Unhappy Love.  He lay long awake, but at last he turned and addressed himself to sleep.  “He’s a strong climber!  Whatever it is, maybe he’ll climb out of it.”

But in the keep, Alexander, sitting by the fire with lowered head and hanging hands, saw not the time when he would climb out of it....

He went no more to White Farm.  He went, though not every Sunday, to kirk and sat with his aunt and with Strickland in the laird’s boxlike, curtained pew.  Mr. M’Nab preached of original sin and ineffable condemnation, and of the few, the very, very few, saved as by fire.  He saw Jarvis Barrow sitting motionless, sternly agreeing, and beyond him Jenny Barrow and then Elspeth and Gilian.  Out of kirk, in the kirkyard, he gave them good day.  He studied to keep strangeness out of his manner; an onlooker would note only a somewhat silent, preoccupied laird.  He might be pondering the sermon.  Mr. M’Nab’s sermons were calculated to arouse alarm and concern—­or, in the case of the justified, stern triumph—­in the human breast.  White Farm made no quarrel with the laird for that quietude and withdrawing.  In the autumn he had told Jarvis Barrow of that hour with Elspeth in the stubble-field.  The old man listened, then, “They are strange warks, women!” he said, and almost immediately went on to speak of other things.  There seemed no sympathy and no regret for the earthly happening.  But he liked to debate with the laird election and the perseverance of the saints.

Jenny Barrow, only, could not be held from exclamation over Glenfernie’s defection.  “Why does he na come as he used to?  Wha’s done aught to him or said a word to gie offense?” She talked to Menie and Merran since Elspeth and Gilian gave her notice that they were wearied of the subject.  Perhaps Jenny’s concern with it kept her from the perception that not Glenfernie only was changing or had changed.  Elspeth—!  But Elspeth had been always a dreamer, rather silent, a listener rather than a speaker.  Jenny did not look around corners; the overt sufficed for a bustling, good-natured life.  Gilian’s arrival, moreover, made for a diversion of attention.  By the time novelty subsided again into every day an altered Elspeth had so fitted into the frame of life that Jenny was unaware of alteration.