put that matter aside.
At any rate, things stood there better than he had feared. "I shall be
gone a month or two. But you'll still be here when I come home?"

"As far as I know I'll be here through the summer. I have no plans....
If the leaf remains dry and dead, what should you say to taking ship
at Leith in September for Holland? Amsterdam--then Antwerp--then the
Rhine. We might see the great Frederick--push farther and look at the
Queen of Hungary."

"No, I may not. I look to be a home-staying laird."

They sat with the table between them, and the light from the four
sides of the room rippled and crossed over them. Books were on the
table, folios and volumes in less.

"The home-staying laird--the full scholar--at last the writer--the
master ... it is a good fortune!"

As Ian spoke he stretched his arms, he leaned back in his chair and
regarded the room, the fireplace, the little furnace, and the shelves
ranged with the quaint, makeshift apparatuses of boyhood. He looked at
the green boughs without the loophole windows and at the crossing
lights and shadows, and the brown books upon the brown table, and at
last, under somewhat lowered lids, at Alexander. What moved in the
bottom of his mind it would be hard to say. He thought that he loved
the man sitting over against him, and so, surely, to some great amount
he did. But somewhere, in the thousand valleys behind them, he had
stayed in an inn of malice and had carried hence poison in a vial as
small as a single cell. What suddenly made that past to burn and set
it in the present it were hard to say. A spark perhaps of envy or of
jealousy, or a movement of contempt for Alexander's "fortune." But he
looked at his friend with half-closed eyes, and under the sea of
consciousness crawled, half-blind, half-asleep, a willingness for
Glenfernie to find some thorn in life. The wish did not come to
consciousness. It was far down. He thought of himself as steel true to
Alexander. And in a moment the old love drew again. He put out his
hands across the board. "When are we going to see Mother Binning and
to light the fire in the cave?... There are not many like you,
Alexander! I'm glad to get back."

"I'm glad to have you back, old sworn-fellow, old Saracen!"

They clasped hands. Gray eyes and brown eyes with gold flecks met in a
gaze that was as steady with the one as with the other. It was
Alexander who first loosened handclasp.

They talked of affairs, particular and