e buttressed each the others with a grim strength. The
wind swept around them and around Glenfernie.

Mr. M'Nab, standing beside the laird, spoke earnestly. "We rejoice,
Glenfernie, that you are about once more! There is the making in you
of a grand man, like your father. It would have been down-spiriting if
that son of Belial had again triumphed in mischief. The weak would
have found it so."

"What is triumph?"

"Ye may well ask that! And yet," said M'Nab, "I know. It is the
warm-feeling cloak that Good when it hath been naked wraps around it,
seeing the spoiler spoiled and the wicked fallen into the pit that he
digged!"

"Aye, the naked Good."

The minister looked afar, a dark glow and energy in his thin face.
"They are in prison, and the scaffolds groan--they who would out with
the Kirk and a Protestant king and in with the French and popery!"

"Your general wrong," said Glenfernie, "barbed and feathered also for
a Scots minister's own inmost nerve! And is not my wrong general
likewise? Who hates and punishes falsity, though it were found in his
own self, acts for the common good!"

"Aye!" said the minister. "But there must be assurance that God calls
you and that you hate the sin and not the sinner!"

"Who assures the assurances? Still it is I!"

Glenfernie rode on. Mr. M'Nab looked after him with a darkling brow.
"That was heathenish--!"

Alexander passed kirk and kirkyard. He went home and sat in the room
in the keep, under his hand paper upon which he made figures,
diagrams, words, and sentences. When the next day came he did not
ride, but walked. He walked over the hills, with the kirk spire before
him lifting toward a vast, blue serenity. Presently he came in sight
of the kirkyard, its gravestones and yew-trees. He had met few persons
upon the road, and here on the hilltop held to-day a balmy silence and
solitude. As he approached the gate, to which there mounted five
ancient, rounded steps of stone, he saw sitting on one of these a
woman with a basket of flowers. Nearer still, he found that it was
Gilian Barrow.

She waited for him to come up to her. He took his place upon the
steps. All around hung still and sunny space. The basket of flowers
between them was heaped with marigolds, pinks, and pansies.

"For Elspeth," said Gilian.

"It is almost two years. You have ceased to grieve?"

"Ah no! But one learns how to marry grief and gladness."

"Have you learned that? That is a long lesson. Bu