ork hard.... Its old task used to be to keep asleep
upon the subject. But now for a considerable time this had been its
task. Old feeling, old egoism, awakened up and down, drove it hard! It
had to make bricks without straw. It had to fetch and carry from the
ends of the earth.

Emotion, when it must rest, provided for it a dull place of
listlessness and discontent. But the taskmaster now would have it up
at all hours, fashioning reasons and justifications. The soonest found
straw in the fields lay in the faults of others--of the world in
general and Alexander Jardine in particular. Feeling got its anodyne
in gloating over these. It had the pounce of a panther for such a
bitter berry, such a weed, such a shameful form. It did not always
gloat, but it always held up and said, _Who could be weaker here--more
open to question?_ It made constant, sore comparison.

The lake gleamed below him, the herded mountains slept in a gray
silver light. How many were the faults of the laird of Glenfernie!
Faults! He looked at the dark old plains of the moon. That was a light
word! He saw Alexander pitted and scarred.

Pride! That had always been in the core of Glenfernie. That has been
his old fortress, walled and moated against trespass. Pride so high
that it was careless--that its possessor could seem peaceable and
humble.... But find the quick and touch it--and you saw! What was his
was his. What he deemed to be his, whether it was so or not! Touch him
there and out jumped jealousy, hate, and implacableness--and all the
time one had been thinking of him as a kind of seer!

Ian turned upon the rock above Como. And Glenfernie was ignorant! The
seer had seen very little, after all. His touch had not been precisely
permeative when it came to the world, Ian Rullock. If liking meant
understanding, there had not been much understanding--which left
liking but a word. If liking was a degree of love, where then had been
love, where the friend at all? After all, and all the time,
Glenfernie's notion of friendship was a sieve. The notion that he had
held up as though it were the North Star!

The world, Ian Rullock, could not be so contemned....

He felt with heat and pain the truth of that. It was a wrong that
Glenfernie should not understand! The world, Ian Rullock, might be
incomplete, imperfect--might have taken, more than once, wrong turns,
left its path, so to speak, in the heavens. But what of the world,
Alexander Jardine? Had it n