Ian shook himself, thrust away the doubtful glimmer of a smile.  That way really did lie hell....

He came back to a larger if a much perplexed self.  He could not meet Glenfernie on that sea beach, fight him there.  He did not desire to kill Old Steadfast, though, as the world went, pleasure was to be had in now and then giving superiority pain.  Face to face upon those sands, some blood shed and honor satisfied, Alexander would be reasonable—­being by nature reasonable!  Ian shook himself.

“Now he draws me like a lodestone, and now I feel Lucifer to his Michael!  What old, past mountain of friendship and enmity has come around, full wheel?”

But it was impossible for him to go to that sea strand in Holland.

Elspeth!  He wondered what she was doing this April day.  Perhaps she walked in the glen.  It was colder there than here, but yet the trees would be budding.  He saw her face again, and all its ability to show subtle terror and subtle joy, and the glancing and the running of the stream between.  Elspeth....  He loved her again as he sat there, somewhat bowed together in the sunlight, Alexander’s challenge upon the floor by his foot.  There came creeping to him an odd feeling of long ago having loved her—­long ago and more than once, many times more than once.  Name and place alone flickered.  There might be something in Old Steadfast’s contention that one lived of old time and all time, only there came breaking in dozing and absent-mindedness!  Elspeth—­

He saw her standing by him, and it seemed as though she had a basket on her arm, and she looked as she had looked that day of the thunder-storm and the hour in the cave behind the veil of rain.  Without warning there welled into his mind broken lines from an old tale in verse of which he was fond: 

    “Me dreamed al this night, pardie,
    An elf-queen shall my leman be ... 
    An elf-queen wil I have, I-wis,
    For in this world no woman is
        Worthy to be my mate ... 
    Al other women I forsake
    And to an elf-queen I me take
        By dale and eke by down.”

Syllable and tone died.  With his hand he brushed from his eyes the vision that he knew to be nothing but a heightened memory.  Might, indeed, all women be one woman, one woman be all women, all forms one form, all times one time, like event fall softly, imperceptibly, upon like event until there was thickness, until there was made a form of all recurrent, contributory forms?  Events, tendencies, lives—­ unimaginable continuities!  Repetitions and repetitions and repetitions—­and no one able to leave the trodden road that ever returned upon itself—­no one able to take one step from the circle into a new dimension and thence see the form below....