By this time Stair had finished his letter to Patsy, but with unusual care he corrected it, and had it recopied before it was time to set out. He would send it on to Jean that night, and it would be in Patsy's hands before these wise people, to whom she had not written, had done taking counsel together. Meanwhile he stood at the door of the Bothy, looking across the dim wastes of white, hardly a single heather-bush showing up under the solid cover of snow. Only here and there he could see a deep black gash which was the side of a moss-hag at the bottom of which a pool of ink-black water lay frozen solid.
Nevertheless, in spite of the stern grip of winter, there was a tingle in his blood and a difference, subtle but quite unmistakable, which told of a change.
Spring was in the air. Far-off as yet, and only, as it were, a conditional promise, there came a softness on the light airs that came breathing up over the sea, which told that the frost-sting was gone. The snow had stopped creaking underfoot, and the march would be easier—which would be just as well, for they had a long road and a dark before them, and Julian Wemyss was neither by age nor training an expert hill-man.
But something else oppressed Stair's mind. The soft breathing off the sea would melt the snow, clear away the ice and lay the Bothy of the Wild open to attack. At Cairnryan the press-gang would be re-formed. They might find their way to a spot to which they had once been led, and—most important of all, some night towards the dark of the moon, the Good Intent would be seen, between the star-shine and the luminous sea, making her way up the firth with the first "run" of the year.
And with her Julian Wemyss would depart for Lisbon on his way to Vienna, where he would prepare the way for the future Princess of Altschloss.
Stair's lips tightened. He watched the treacly pour of the yellow fog thickening about him. His eyes noted mechanically the precise shade of darkness when it would be wise for them to set out for the High Stile, but his heart was sick with a sense of his own loneliness. He would be left to fight out a useless battle—with Patsy far off and eternally inaccessible. What after all would it matter if he took the king's shilling and went to the wars?
But his own observant eyes automatically reporting on the darkening landscape checked him.
"It is time for us to start!" he said quietly enough to Julian Wemyss, who rose to his feet and put away the letter of the Princess which he had been going over for the twentieth time.