There was no sign of James as Archie sat down to his meal, though a second place was set at the table, and as he did not want to ask embarrassing questions, he made no inquiry about him. Besides which, being immoderately hungry, he was too well occupied to trouble about anyone. He went out upon the terrace when he had finished. The warm greyness of the autumn morning was lifting from the earth and it was still early enough for long shadows to lie cool on the westward side of the timber. As they shortened, the crystal of the dew was catching shafts from the sun, and the parks seemed to lie waiting till the energy of the young day should let loose the forces of life from under the mystery of its spangled veil. Where the gean-trees glowed carmine and orange, touches of quickening fire shot through the interstices of their branches, and coloured like a tress of trailing forget-me-not, the South Esk wound into the Basin of Montrose, where the tide, ebbing beyond the town, was leaving its wet sands as a feasting-ground for all sorts of roving birds whose crying voices came faintly to Archie, mellowed by distance. Truly this was a fascinating place, with its changing element of distant water, its great plain lines of pasture, its ordered vistas of foliage! The passion for beauty lay deep below the tossing, driving impulses of Flemington's nature, and it rose up now as he stood on the yew-edged terraces of Balnillo and gazed before him. For the moment everything in his mind was swallowed up but the abstract, fundamental desire for perfection, which is, when all is said and done, humanity's mainspring, its incessant though often erring guide, whose perverted behests we call sin, whose legitimate ones we call virtue; whose very existence is a guarantee of immortality. The world, this crystalline morning, was so beautiful to Archie that he ached with the uncomprehended longing to identify himself with perfection; to cast his body down upon the light-pervaded earth and to be one with it, to fling his soul into the heights and depths of the limitless encompassing ether, to be drawn into the heart of God's material manifestation on earth--the sun. He understood nothing of what he felt, neither the discomfort of his imprisonment of flesh, nor the rapturous, tentative, wing-sweeps of the spirit within it. He left the garden terrace and went off towards the Basin, with the touch of that elemental flood of truth into which he had been plunged for a moment fresh on his soul. The whole universe and its contents seemed to him good--and not only good, but of consummate interest--humanity was fascinating. His failure to snatch the map from Ferrier's hand last night only made him smile. In the perfection of this transcendent creation all was, and must be, well!