, the willow leaves slept, the water stayed like dusky glass.
The air, pure and light, hung at rest in the ether. Minutes went by,
an hour. He might, Strickland thought, have lain there a long time. At
last he sat up, rose, began to walk around the pool. He went around it
thrice. Then again he sat down, his arms upon his knees, watching the
dusk water. He did not go nor sit like one overwrought or frenzied or
despairing. His great frame, his bearing, the air of him, had
quietude, but not listlessness; there seemed at once calm and
intensity as of a still center that had flung off the storm. Time
flowed. Thought Strickland:

"He is as far as I am from death in that water. I'll cease to spy."

He moved away, moss and ling muffling step, gained and dipped behind
the shoulder of the moor. The horse grazed on. The laird sat still,
his arms upon his knees, his head a little lifted, his eyes crossing
the Kelpie's Pool to the wave-line against the sky.

Strickland went to where the moor path ran by the outermost trees of
the glen head. Here he sat down beneath an oak and waited. Another
hour passed; then he heard the horse's hoofs. He rose and met
Glenfernie home-returning.

"It is good to see you, Strickland!"

"I found you yonder by the Kelpie's Pool. Then I came here and
waited."

"I have spent hours there.... They were not unhappy. They were not at
all unhappy."

They moved together along the moor track, the horse following.

"I am glad and glad again that you have come--"

"I have been coming a good while. But there were preventions."

"We have heard nothing direct for almost a year."

"Then my letters did not reach you. I wrote, but knew that they might
not. There is the smoke from Mother Binning's cot." He stood still to
watch the mounting feather. "I remember when first I saw that, a
six-year-old, climbing the glen with my father, carried on his
shoulder when I was tired. I thought it was a hut in a fairy-tale....
So it is!"

To Strickland the remarkable thing lay in the lack of strain, the
simplicity and fullness. Glenfernie was unfeignedly glad to see him,
glad to see home shapes and colors. The blue feather among the trees
had simply pleased him as it could not please a heart fastened to rage
and sorrow. The stream of memories that it had beckoned--many others,
it must be, besides that of the six-year-old's visit--seemed to have
washed itself clear, to have disintegrated, dissolved venom and
stinging.