So brother and sister set forth on their wandering—­and truly it was a happy journey.  The weather favoured them, and their hearts were light.  Lilias, delivered from terrible, hopeless captivity, her brother beside her, and now not a brother to be pitied and protected, but to protect her and be exulted in, trod the heather with an exquisite sense of joy and freedom that buoyed her up against all hardships; and Malcolm was at peace, as he had seldom been.  His happiness was not exactly like his sister’s in her renewed liberty and restoration to love and joy, for he had known a wider range of life, and though really younger than Lily, his more complicated history could not but make him older in thought and mind.  Another self-abnegation was beginning to rise upon him, as he travelled slowly southwards by stages suited to his sister’s powers, and by another track than that by which he had gone.  On the moor, or by the burn side, there was peace and brightness; but wherever he met with man he found something to sadden him.  Did they rest in a monastery, there was often irregularity, seldom devotion, always crass ignorance.  The manse was often a scene of such dissolute life that Malcolm shunned to bring his sister into the sight of it; the peel tower was the dwelling of savagery; the farm homestead either rude and lawless or in constant terror; the black spaces on many a brae side showed where dwellings had been burned; more than once they passed skeletons depending from the trees or lying rotting by the way-side.  And it was frightful to Malcolm, after his four years’ absence, to find how little Lilias shared his horror, taking quite naturally what to Alice Montagu would have seemed beyond the bounds of possibility, and would have set Esclairmonde’s soul on fire, while Lilias seemed to think it her brother’s amiable peculiarity to be shocked, or to long to set such things straight.

He felt the truth of James Kennedy’s words—­that reformation could not be the sole work of the King, but that his hands must be strengthened by all the few who knew that a different state of things was possible, and that, above all, the clergy needed to be awakened into vigour and intelligence.  Formerly, the miserable aspect of the country had merely terrified him, and driven him to strive to hide his head in a convent; but the strength and the sense of duty he had acquired had brought his heart to respond to Kennedy’s call to work.

Esclairmonde’s words wrought within him beyond her own ken or purpose in speaking them.  He began to understand that to bury himself in an Italian university and dive into Aristotle’s sayings, to heap up his own memory with the stores of thought he loved, or to plunge into the mazes of mathematics, philosophy, and music, while his brethren in his own country were tearing one another to pieces for lack of any good influence to teach or show them better things, would be a storing of treasure for himself on earth, a pursuit of the light of knowledge indeed,