f love. Lying there
with open eyes he saw in procession Unhappy Love. He lay long awake,
but at last he turned and addressed himself to sleep. "He's a strong
climber! Whatever it is, maybe he'll climb out of it."

But in the keep, Alexander, sitting by the fire with lowered head and
hanging hands, saw not the time when he would climb out of it....

He went no more to White Farm. He went, though not every Sunday, to
kirk and sat with his aunt and with Strickland in the laird's boxlike,
curtained pew. Mr. M'Nab preached of original sin and ineffable
condemnation, and of the few, the very, very few, saved as by fire. He
saw Jarvis Barrow sitting motionless, sternly agreeing, and beyond him
Jenny Barrow and then Elspeth and Gilian. Out of kirk, in the
kirkyard, he gave them good day. He studied to keep strangeness out
of his manner; an onlooker would note only a somewhat silent,
preoccupied laird. He might be pondering the sermon. Mr. M'Nab's
sermons were calculated to arouse alarm and concern--or, in the case
of the justified, stern triumph--in the human breast. White Farm made
no quarrel with the laird for that quietude and withdrawing. In the
autumn he had told Jarvis Barrow of that hour with Elspeth in the
stubble-field. The old man listened, then, "They are strange warks,
women!" he said, and almost immediately went on to speak of other
things. There seemed no sympathy and no regret for the earthly
happening. But he liked to debate with the laird election and the
perseverance of the saints.

Jenny Barrow, only, could not be held from exclamation over
Glenfernie's defection. "Why does he na come as he used to? Wha's done
aught to him or said a word to gie offense?" She talked to Menie and
Merran since Elspeth and Gilian gave her notice that they were wearied
of the subject. Perhaps Jenny's concern with it kept her from the
perception that not Glenfernie only was changing or had changed.
Elspeth--! But Elspeth had been always a dreamer, rather silent, a
listener rather than a speaker. Jenny did not look around corners; the
overt sufficed for a bustling, good-natured life. Gilian's arrival,
moreover, made for a diversion of attention. By the time novelty
subsided again into every day an altered Elspeth had so fitted into
the frame of life that Jenny was unaware of alteration.

But Gilian was not Jenny.

Each of Jarvis Barrow's granddaughters had her own small bedroom.
Three nights after Gilian's home-coming she came