t!--for Glenfernie, after all,
avenges himself!"

Alexander, looking like his father, spoke slowly, with laboring
breath. "Had one asked me, I should have said that you above all might
understand. But you, too, betray!" With a sweep of his arms abroad, a
gesture abrupt and desolate, he turned. He quitted the sunny bare
space, the kirkyard and the woman sitting with her basket of marigolds
and pansies.

But two nights later he came to this place alone.

The moon was full. It hung like a wonder lantern above the hill and
the kirk; it made the kirkyard cloth of silver. The yews stood unreal,
or with a delicate, other reality. It was neither warm nor cold. The
moving air neither struck nor caressed, but there breathed a sense of
coming and going, unhurried and unperplexed, from far away to far
away. The laird of Glenfernie crossed long grass to where, for a
hundred years, had been laid the dead from White Farm. There was a
mound bare to the sunlight thrown from the moon. He saw the flowers
that Gilian had brought.

The flowers were colorless in the moonlight--and yet they could be,
and were, clothed with a hue of anger from himself. They lay before
him purple-crimson. They were withered, but suddenly they had sap,
life, fullness--but a distasteful, reminding life, a life in
opposition! He took them and threw them away.

Now the mound rested bare. He lay down beside it. He stretched his
arms over it. "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!" But Elspeth
did not answer--only the cool sunlight thrown back from the moon.

CHAPTER XXV

Ian traveled toward a pass through the Pyrenees. Behind him stretched
difficult, hazardous, slow travel--weeks of it. Behind those weeks lay
the voyage to Lisbon, and from Lisbon in a second boat north to Vigo.
From Vigo to this day of forested slopes and brawling streams,
steadily worsening road, ruder dwellings, more primitive, impoverished
folk, rolled a time of difficulties small and great, like the mountain
pebbles for number. It took will and wit at strain to dissolve them
all, and so make way out of Spain into France--through France--to
Paris, where were friends.

Spanish travel was difficult at best--Spanish travel with scarcely any
gold to travel on found the "best" quite winnowed out. Slow at all
times, it grew, lacking money, to be like one of those dreams of
retardation. Ian gathered and blew upon his philosophy, and took
matters at last with some amusement, at time