my hert.... Ye've speired my advice, sirs, and
ye've gotten it. Now I maun clear awa' your supper."

Dickson asked for a candle, and, as on the previous night, went
abruptly to bed. The oracle of prudence to which he had appealed had
betrayed him and counselled folly. But was it folly? For him,
assuredly, for Dickson McCunn, late of Mearns Street, Glasgow,
wholesale and retail provision merchant, elder in the Guthrie Memorial
Kirk, and fifty-five years of age. Ay, that was the rub. He was
getting old. The woman had seen it and had advised him to go home.
Yet the plea was curiously irksome, though it gave him the excuse he
needed. If you played at being young, you had to take up the
obligations of youth, and he thought derisively of his boyish
exhilaration of the past days. Derisively, but also sadly. What had
become of that innocent joviality he had dreamed of, that happy morning
pilgrimage of Spring enlivened by tags from the poets? His goddess had
played him false. Romance had put upon him too hard a trial.

He lay long awake, torn between common sense and a desire to be loyal
to some vague whimsical standard. Heritage a yard distant appeared
also to be sleepless, for the bed creaked with his turning. Dickson
found himself envying one whose troubles, whatever they might be, were
not those of a divided mind.

CHAPTER V

OF THE PRINCESS IN THE TOWER

Very early the next morning, while Mrs. Morran was still cooking
breakfast, Dickson and Heritage might have been observed taking the air
in the village street. It was the Poet who had insisted upon this
walk, and he had his own purpose. They looked at the spires of smoke
piercing the windless air, and studied the daffodils in the cottage
gardens. Dickson was glum, but Heritage seemed in high spirits. He
varied his garrulity with spells of cheerful whistling.

They strode along the road by the park wall till they reached the inn.
There Heritage's music waxed peculiarly loud. Presently from the yard,
unshaven and looking as if he had slept in this clothes, came Dobson
the innkeeper.

"Good morning," said the poet. "I hope the sickness in your house is
on the mend?"

"Thank ye, it's no worse," was the reply, but in the man's heavy face
there was little civility. His small grey eyes searched their faces.

"We're just waiting for breakfast to get on the road again. I'm jolly
glad we spent the night here. We found quarters after all, you know.