"What is triumph?"
"Ye may well ask that! And yet," said M'Nab, "I know. It is the warm-feeling cloak that Good when it hath been naked wraps around it, seeing the spoiler spoiled and the wicked fallen into the pit that he digged!"
"Aye, the naked Good."
The minister looked afar, a dark glow and energy in his thin face. "They are in prison, and the scaffolds groan—they who would out with the Kirk and a Protestant king and in with the French and popery!"
"Your general wrong," said Glenfernie, "barbed and feathered also for a Scots minister's own inmost nerve! And is not my wrong general likewise? Who hates and punishes falsity, though it were found in his own self, acts for the common good!"
"Aye!" said the minister. "But there must be assurance that God calls you and that you hate the sin and not the sinner!"
"Who assures the assurances? Still it is I!"
Glenfernie rode on. Mr. M'Nab looked after him with a darkling brow. "That was heathenish—!"
Alexander passed kirk and kirkyard. He went home and sat in the room in the keep, under his hand paper upon which he made figures, diagrams, words, and sentences. When the next day came he did not ride, but walked. He walked over the hills, with the kirk spire before him lifting toward a vast, blue serenity. Presently he came in sight of the kirkyard, its gravestones and yew-trees. He had met few persons upon the road, and here on the hilltop held to-day a balmy silence and solitude. As he approached the gate, to which there mounted five ancient, rounded steps of stone, he saw sitting on one of these a woman with a basket of flowers. Nearer still, he found that it was Gilian Barrow.
She waited for him to come up to her. He took his place upon the steps. All around hung still and sunny space. The basket of flowers between them was heaped with marigolds, pinks, and pansies.