d of Tower Place in
Surrey!"

"Is she so bonny?"

"She's more than bonny. She's beautiful and high-born and an heiress.
When I'm a colonel of dragoons--"

"Are you going to be a colonel of dragoons?"

"Something like that. You talk of thinking that you were this and that
in the past. Well, I was a fighting-man!"

"We're all fighting-men. It's only what we fight and how."

"Well, say that I had been a chief, and they lifted me on their
shields and called me king, the very next day I should have made her
queen!"

"You think like a ballad. And, oh, man, you talk mickle of the
lasses!"

Ian looked at him with long, narrow, dark-gold eyes. "They're found in
ballads," he said.

Alexander just paused in his stride. "Humph! that's true!..."

They entered the glen. The stream began to brawl; on either hand the
hills closed in, towering high. Some of the trees were bare, but to
most yet clung the red-brown or the gold-brown dress. The pines showed
hard, green, and dead in the shadow; in the sunlight, fine,
green-gold, and alive. The fallen leaves, moved by foot or by breeze,
made a light, dry, talking sound. The white birch stems clustered and
leaned; patches of bright-green moss ran between the drifts of leaves.
The sides of the hills came close together, grew fearfully steep.
Crags appeared, and fern-crowded fissures and roots of trees like
knots of frozen serpents. The glen narrowed and deepened; the water
sang with a loud, rough voice.

Alexander loved this place. He had known it in childhood, often
straying this way with the laird, or with Sandy the shepherd, or Davie
from the house. When he was older he began to come alone. Soon he came
often alone, learned every stick and stone and contour, effect of
light and streak of gloom. As idle or as purposeful as the wind, he
knew the glen from top to bottom. He knew the voice of the stream and
the straining clutch of the roots over the broken crag. He had lain on
all the beds of leaf and moss, and talked with every creeping or
flying or running thing. Sometimes he read a book here, sometimes he
pictured the world, or built fantastic stages, and among fantastic
others acted himself a fantastic part. Sometimes with a blind turning
within he looked for himself. He had his own thoughts of God here, of
God and the Kirk and the devil. Often, too, he neither read, dreamed,
nor thought. He might lie an hour, still, passive, receptive. The
trees and the clouds, crag life, b