The cartel bore date the 1st of January—­later by a month than the Black Hill letter.  It dropped from Ian’s hand; he sat with blankness of mind in the sunlight.  Presently he shivered slightly.  He leaned his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands and sat still.  Alexander!  He felt no hot straining toward meeting, toward fighting, Alexander.  Perversely enough, after a year of impatient, contemptuous thought in that direction, he had lately felt liking and an ancient strong respect returning like a tide that was due.  And he could not meet Alexander in April—­that was impossible!  No private affair could be attended to now.

...  Elspeth, of whom the letter carried no word, Elspeth from whom he had not heard since in August he left that countryside, Elspeth who had agreed with him that love of man and woman was nobody’s business but their own, Elspeth who, when he would go, had let him go with a fine pale refusal to deal in women’s tears and talk of injury, who had said, indeed, that she did not repent, much bliss being worth some bale—­Elspeth whom he could not be sure that he would see again, but whom at times before his eyes at night he saw....  Immediately upon his leaving Black Hill she had broken with Glenfernie.  She was clear of him—­the laird could reproach her with nothing!

What had happened?  He had told her how, at need, a letter might be sent.  But one had never come.  He himself had never written.  Writing was set in a prickly ring of difficulties and dangers.  What had happened?  Strong, secret inclination toward finding least painful things for himself brought his conclusion.  Sitting there in the sunshine, his will deceiving him, he determined that it was simply that Elspeth had at last told Glenfernie that she could not love him because she loved another.  Probably—­persistence being markedly a trait of Old Steadfast’s—­he had been after her once and again, and she had turned upon him and said much more than in prudence she should have said!  So Alexander would have made his discovery and might, if he pleased, image other trysts than his own in the glen!  Certainly he had done this, and then sat down and penned his challenge!

Elspeth!  He was unshakably conscious that Glenfernie would tell none what Elspeth might have been provoked into giving away.  Old Steadfast, there was no denying, had that knightliness.  Three now knew—­no more than three.  If, through some mischance, there had been wider discovery, she would have written!  The Black Hill letter, too, would have had somewhat there to say.

Then, behind the challenge, stood old and new relations between Ian Rullock and Alexander Jardine!  It was what Glenfernie might choose to term the betrayal of friendship—­a deep scarification of Old Steadfast’s pride, a severing cut given to his too imperial confidence, poison dropped into the wells of domination, “No!” said to too much happiness, to any surpassing of him, Ian, in happiness, “No!” to so much reigning!