, biscuits,
and, as a last thought, half a dozen bottles of old liqueur brandy. It
was to be carefully packed, addressed to Mrs. Morran, Dalquharter
Station, and delivered in time for him to take down by the 7.33 train.
Then he drove to the terminus and dined with something like a desperate
peace in his heart.

On this occasion he took a first-class ticket, for he wanted to be
alone. As the lights began to be lit in the wayside stations and the
clear April dusk darkened into night, his thoughts were sombre yet
resigned. He opened the window and let the sharp air of the
Renfrewshire uplands fill the carriage. It was fine weather again
after the rain, and a bright constellation--perhaps Dougal's friend
O'Brien--hung in the western sky. How happy he would have been a week
ago had he been starting thus for a country holiday! He could sniff
the faint scent of moor-burn and ploughed earth which had always been
his first reminder of Spring. But he had been pitchforked out of that
old happy world and could never enter it again. Alas! for the roadside
fire, the cosy inn, the Compleat Angler, the Chavender or Chub!

And yet--and yet! He had done the right thing, though the Lord alone
knew how it would end. He began to pluck courage from his very
melancholy, and hope from his reflections upon the transitoriness of
life. He was austerely following Romance as he conceived it, and if
that capricious lady had taken one dream from him she might yet reward
him with a better. Tags of poetry came into his head which seemed to
favour this philosophy--particularly some lines of Browning on which he
used to discourse to his Kirk Literary Society. Uncommon silly, he
considered, these homilies of his must have been, mere twitterings of
the unfledged. But now he saw more in the lines, a deeper
interpretation which he had earned the right to make.

"Oh world, where all things change and nought abides,
Oh life, the long mutation--is it so?
Is it with life as with the body's change?--
Where, e'en tho' better follow, good must pass."

That was as far as he could get, though he cudgelled his memory to
continue. Moralizing thus, he became drowsy, and was almost asleep
when the train drew up at the station of Kirkmichael.

CHAPTER VII

SUNDRY DOINGS IN THE MIRK

From Kirkmichael on the train stopped at every station, but no
passenger seemed to leave or arrive at the little platforms white in
the moon. At Da