d, and where he gazed seemed
dark and empty. It was deep night when finally he dipped quill into
ink and wrote:

IAN RULLOCK,--Stay or go as you will! I do not
follow you now as I did before. I come to see the crudeness,
the barrenness, of that. But within--oh, are you not my
enemy still? I ask Justice that, and what can she do but
echo back my words? "Within" is a universe.--ALEXANDER
JARDINE.

Five days later he knew that Ian with the Frenchman in whose company
he was had departed Rome. On that morning he went again without the
city and lay among the grasses. But the sky to-day was closed, and all
dead Rome that had been proud or violent or a lover of self seemed to
move around him multitudinous. He fought the shapes down, but the sea
in storm then turned sluggish, dead and weary.... What was he going to
do? Scotland? Was he going back to Scotland? The glen, the moor, White
Farm and the kirk, Black Hill and his own house--all seemed cold and
without tint, gray, small, and withered, and yet oppressive. All that
would be importunate, officious. He cried out, "O my God, I want
healing!" For a long time he lay there still, then, rising, went
wandering by arches and broken columns, choked doorways, graved slabs
sunken in fairy jungles. Into his mind came a journey years before
when he had just brushed a desert. The East, the Out-of-Europe, called
to him now.

CHAPTER XXIX

Ian guided the boat to the water steps. Above, over the wall, streamed
roses, a great, soundless fall of them, reflected, mass and color, in
the lake. Above the roses sprang deep trees, shade behind shade, and
here sang nightingales. Facing him sat the Milanese song-bird, the
singer Antonia Castinelli. She had the throat of the nightingale and
the beauty of the velvety open rose.

"Why land?" she said. "Why climb the steps to the chatter in the
villa?"

"Why indeed?"

"They are not singing! They are talking. There is deep, sweet shadow
around that point."

The boat turned glidingly. Now it was under tall rock, parapeted with
trees.

"Let Giovanni have the boat. Come and sit beside me! You are too far
away for singing together."

Old Giovanni at the helm, boatman upon this lake since youth, used
long since to murmuring words, to touching hands, stayed brown and
wrinkled and silent and unspeculative as a walnut. Perhaps his mind
was sunk in his own stone hut behind vine leaves. The two under the
rose-a