lds or roads; nor had
they any notion of what fields or roads they would be. Their boots were
beginning to break up and the confusion of stones tried them severely,
so that they were glad to lean on their swords, as if they were the
staves of pilgrims. MacIan thought vaguely of a weird ballad of his own
country which describes the soul in Purgatory as walking on a plain full
of sharp stones, and only saved by its own charities upon earth.

If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon
Every night and all,
Sit thee down and put them on,
And Christ receive thy soul.

Turnbull had no such lyrical meditations, but he was in an even worse
temper.

At length they came to a pale ribbon of road, edged by a shelf of rough
and almost colourless turf; and a few feet up the slope there stood
grey and weather-stained, one of those big wayside crucifixes which are
seldom seen except in Catholic countries.

MacIan put his hand to his head and found that his bonnet was not there.
Turnbull gave one glance at the crucifix--a glance at once sympathetic
and bitter, in which was concentrated the whole of Swinburne's poem on
the same occasion.

O hidden face of man, whereover
The years have woven a viewless veil,
If thou wert verily man's lover
What did thy love or blood avail?
Thy blood the priests mix poison of,
And in gold shekels coin thy love.

Then, leaving MacIan in his attitude of prayer, Turnbull began to look
right and left very sharply, like one looking for something. Suddenly,
with a little cry, he saw it and ran forward. A few yards from them
along the road a lean and starved sort of hedge came pitifully to an
end. Caught upon its prickly angle, however, there was a very small and
very dirty scrap of paper that might have hung there for months, since
it escaped from someone tearing up a letter or making a spill out of
a newspaper. Turnbull snatched at it and found it was the corner of a
printed page, very coarsely printed, like a cheap novelette, and just
large enough to contain the words: "_et c'est elle qui_----"

"Hurrah!" cried Turnbull, waving his fragment; "we are safe at last.
We are free at last. We are somewhere better than England or Eden or
Paradise. MacIan, we are in the Land of the Duel!"

"Where do you say?" said the other, looking at him heavily and with
knitted brows, like one almost dazed with the grey doubts of des