“None.  None for a long while.  I had it conveyed to my kindred and to an old friend that I had disappeared from Paris—­gone eastward, Heaven knew where—­probably Crim Tartary!  So my own world at least, as far as I am concerned, will be off the scent.  That was in the winter.  I have really heard nothing for months....  When the dawn comes up and we are all rich and famed and gay, my-lorded from John o’ Groat’s House to Land’s End—­then, Warburton, then—­”

“Then?”

“Then we’ll be good!” Ian laughed.  “Don’t you want, sometimes, to be good, Warburton?  Wise—­and simple.  Doesn’t it rise before you in the night with a most unearthly beauty?”

“Oh, I think I am so-so good!” answered the other.  “So-so bad, so-so good.  What puts you in this strain?”

“Tell me and I will tell you!  And now I’m going to Scotland, into the Highlands, to paint a prince who, when he’s king, will, no manner of doubt, wear the tartan and make every thane of Glamis thane of Cawdor likewise!...  One half the creature’s body is an old, childish loyalty, and the other half’s ambition.  The creature’s myself.  There are also bars and circles and splashes of various colors, dark and bright.  Sometimes it dreams of wings—­wings of an archangel, no less, Warburton!  The next moment there seems to be an impotency to produce even beetle wings!...  What a weathercock and variorum I am, thou art, he is!”

“We’re no worse than other men,” said Warburton, comfortably.  “We’re all pretty ignorant, I take it!”

They came to a building, old and not without some lingering of strength and grace.  It stood in the angle of two streets and received sunshine and light as well as cross-tides of sound.  The Scot and the Englishman both lodged here, above a harness-maker and a worker in fine woods.  They passed into the court and to a stair that once had known a constant, worldly-rich traffic up and down.  Now it was still and twilight, after the streets.  Both men had affairs to put in order, business on hand.  They moved now abstractedly, and when Warburton reached, upon the first landing, the door of his rooms, he turned aside from Ian with only a negligent, “We’ll sup together and say last things then.”

The Scot went on alone to the next landing and his own room.  These were not his usual lodgings in Paris.  Agent now of high Jacobite interests, shuttle sent from conspirers in France to chiefs in Scotland, on the eve of a departure in disguise, he had broken old nest and old relations, and was now as a stranger in a city that he knew well, and where by not a few he was known.  The room that he turned into had little sign of old, well-liked occupancy; the servant who at his call entered from a smaller chamber was not the man to whom he was used, but a Highlander sent him by a Gordon then in Paris.

“I am back, Donal!” said Ian, and threw himself into a chair by the table.  “Come, give an account of your errands!”