“Of all our many meeting-places, this looks most like the old cave in the glen!”

Ian moistened his lips.  He resumed his seat against the wall.  “I wondered, after Prestonpans, if you went home.”

“Did you?”

“No, you are right.  I did not.”

“At all times it is the liar’s wont still to lie.  Small things or great—­use or no use!”

“I am a prisoner and unarmed.  You are the captor.  To insult lies in your power.”

“That is a jargon that may be dropped between us.  Yet I, too, am bound by conventions!  Seeing that you are a prisoner, and not my prisoner only, I cannot give you your sword or pistols, and we cannot fight....  The fighting, too, is a convention.  I see that, and that it is not adequate.  Yet so do I hold you in hatred that I would destroy you in this poor way also!”

The two sat not eight feet apart.  Time was when either, finding himself in deadly straits, would have seen in the other a sure rescuer, or a friend to perish with him.  One would have come to the other in a burst of light and warmth.  So countless were the associations between them, so much knowledge, after all, did they have of each other, that even now, if they hated and contended, it must be, as it were, a contention within an orb.  To each hemisphere, repelling the other, must yet come in lightning flashes the face of the whole.

Glenfernie, under the lantern-light, looked like the old laird his father.  “No long time ago,” he said, “‘revenge,’ ‘vengeance,’ seemed to me words of a low order!  It was not so in my boyhood.  Then they were often to me passionate, immediate, personal, and vindicated words!  But it grew to be that they appeared words of a low order.  It is not so now.  As far as that goes I am younger than I was a year ago.  I stand in a hot, bright light where they are vindicated.  If fate sets you free again, yet I do not set you free!  I shall be after you.  I entered this place to tell you that.”

“Do as you will!” answered Ian.  Scorn mounted in his voice.  “I shall withstand the shock of you!”

The net of name and form hardened, grew more iron and closer meshed.  Each I contracted, made its carapace thicker.  Each I bestrode, like Apollyon, the path of the other.

“Why should I undertake to defend myself?” said Ian.  “I do not undertake to do so!  So at least I shall escape the hypocrite!  It is in the nature of man to put down other kings and be king himself!”

“Aye so?  The prime difficulty in that is that the others, too, are immortal.”  Glenfernie rising, his great frame seemed to fill the little room.  “Sooner may the Kelpie’s Pool sink into the earth than I forego to give again to you what you have given!  What is now all my wish?  It is to seem to you, here and hereafter, the avenger of blood and fraud!  Remember me so!”

He stood looking at the sometime friend with a dark and working face.  Then, abruptly turning, he went away.  The door of the small room closed behind him.  Ian heard the bolt driven.