, he lay down upon this and tried to sleep, but
could not. With all his will he closed off the future, and then as
best he might the immediately environing present. After all, these
armies--these struggles--these eery ambitions.... The feeling of _out
of it_ crept over him. It was an unfamiliar perception, impermanent.
Yet it might leave a trace to work in the under-consciousness, on a
far day to emerge, be revalued and added to.

This December air! Fire would be good--and with that thought he seemed
to catch a gleam through the small-paned, small window, and in a
moment through the opening door. He rose from the bench. A man in a
long cloak entered the room, behind him a soldier bearing a lantern
which he set upon a shelf above a litter of boards and kegs.
Dismissed by a gesture, he went out, shutting the door behind him.
The first man dropped his cloak, drew a heavy stool from the
thrust-aside lumber, and sat down beneath the lantern. He spoke:

"Of all our many meeting-places, this looks most like the old cave in
the glen!"

Ian moistened his lips. He resumed his seat against the wall. "I
wondered, after Prestonpans, if you went home."

"Did you?"

"No, you are right. I did not."

"At all times it is the liar's wont still to lie. Small things or
great--use or no use!"

"I am a prisoner and unarmed. You are the captor. To insult lies in
your power."

"That is a jargon that may be dropped between us. Yet I, too, am bound
by conventions! Seeing that you are a prisoner, and not my prisoner
only, I cannot give you your sword or pistols, and we cannot fight....
The fighting, too, is a convention. I see that, and that it is not
adequate. Yet so do I hold you in hatred that I would destroy you in
this poor way also!"

The two sat not eight feet apart. Time was when either, finding
himself in deadly straits, would have seen in the other a sure
rescuer, or a friend to perish with him. One would have come to the
other in a burst of light and warmth. So countless were the
associations between them, so much knowledge, after all, did they have
of each other, that even now, if they hated and contended, it must be,
as it were, a contention within an orb. To each hemisphere, repelling
the other, must yet come in lightning flashes the face of the whole.

Glenfernie, under the lantern-light, looked like the old laird his
father. "No long time ago," he said, "'revenge,' 'vengeance,' seemed
to me words of a low order! It wa