you have no right to ask me. If Anthy tells
me to go, I will go. It is between us. Can't you see it?"

"Wull," said Fergus, hopelessly, "you an' me must ha' it oot."

With this, Fergus turned about and began to take off his coat. Nort
remembered long afterward the look of Fergus deliberately taking off
his coat--his angular, bony form, his wiry, freckled neck, his rough,
red hair, his loose sleeves held up by gayly embroidered armlets, the
trousers bagging in extremity at his knees. Even in that moment he felt
a curious deep sense of pity, pity mingled with understanding, sweep
over him. He had come some distance in the few short hours since Anthy's
face had looked up into his.

Fergus laid his coat and hat at the trunk of a beech tree and began
slowly to roll up his sleeves.

"Will ye fight wi' yer coat on or off?"

Nort suddenly laughed aloud. It was unbelievable, ridiculous! Why, it
was uncivilized! It simply wasn't done in the world he had known.

Nort had never in his life been held down to an irrevocable law or
principle, never been confronted by an unescapable fact of life. Some
men go through their whole lives that way. He had never met anything
from which there was not some easy, safe, pleasant, polite way out--his
wit, his family connections, his money. But now he was looking into the
implacable, steel-blue eyes of Fergus MacGregor.

"But, Fergus," he said, "I don't want to fight. I like you."

"There's them that _has_ to fight," responded Fergus.

"I never fought anybody in my life," said Nort, as though partly to
himself.

"That may be the trouble wi' ye."

Fergus continued, like some implacable fate, getting ready. He was now
hitching up his belt.

Every artistic nature sooner or later meets some such irretrievable
human experience. It asks only to see life, to look on, to enjoy. But
one day this artistic nature makes the astonishing discovery that nature
plays no favourites, that life is, after all, horribly concrete,
democratic, little given to polite discrimination, and it gets itself
suddenly taken seriously, literally, and dragged by the heels into the
grime and common coarseness of things.

Nort was still inclined to argue, for it did not seem real to him.

"It won't prove anything, Fergus, fighting never does."

"'Fraid, are ye?"

"Yes," said Nort, "horribly."

And yet at the very moment that Nort was saying that he was horribly
afraid, and he spoke the literal truth, a very str