"Old and rooted."
"So I wish you joy.... And I remember when you thought you would not marry!"
"Oh—memories! I'm sweeping them away! I'm beginning again!... I hold fast the memory of friendship. I hold fast the memory that somehow, in this form or that, I must have loved her from the beginning of things!" He rose and moved about the room. Going to the fireplace, he leaned his forehead against the stone and looked down at the laid, not kindled, wood. He turned and came back to Ian. "The world seems to me all good."
Ian laughed at him, half in raillery, but half in a flood of kindness. If what had stirred had been ancient betrayal, alive and vital one knew not when, now again it was dead, dead. He rose, he put his arm again about Alexander's shoulder. "Glenfernie! Glenfernie! you're in deep! Well, I hope the world will stay heaven, e'en for your sake!"
They left the old room with its hauntings of a boy's search for gold, with, back of that, who might know what hauntings of ancient times and fortress doings, violences and agonies, subduings, revivings, cark and care and light struggling through, dark nights and waited-for dawns! They went down the stair and out of the keep. Late June flamed around them.
Ian stayed another hour or two ere he rode back to Black Hill. With Glenfernie he went over Glenfernie House, the known, familiar rooms. They went to the school-room together and out through the breach in the old castle wall, and sat among the pine roots, and looked down through leafy tree-tops to the glint of water. When, in the sun-washed house and narrow garden and grassy court, they came upon men and women they stopped and spoke, and all was friendly and merry as it should be in a land of good folk. Ian had his crack with Davie, with Eppie and Phemie and old Lauchlinson and others. They sat for a few minutes with Mrs. Grizel where, in a most housewifely corner, she measured currants and bargained with pickers of cherries. Strickland they came upon in the book-room. With the Jardines and this gentleman the sense of employed and employee had long ago passed into a larger inclusion. He and the young laird talked and worked together as members of one family. Now there was some converse among the three, and then the two left Strickland in the cool, dusky room. Outside the house June flamed again. For a while they paced up and down under the trees in the narrow garden atop the craggy height. Then Ian mounted Fatima, who all these years was kept for him at Black Hill.
"You'll come over to-morrow?"
"Yes."
Glenfernie watched him down the steep-descending, winding road, and thought of many roads that, good company, he and Ian had traveled together.
This was the middle of the day. In the afternoon he walked to White Farm.... It was sunset when he turned his face homeward. He looked back and saw Elspeth at the stepping-stones, in a clear flame of golden sky and golden water. She had seemed kind; he walked on air, his hand in Hope's. Hope had well-nigh the look of Assurance. He was going away because it was promised and arranged for and he must go. But he was coming again—he was coming again.