“I’m going to Scotland to-night, at once.” He found himself repeating the summons of the letter. “Pack up my things. Order the trap.” Howson showed no surprise. A flight from the house of death was only natural. Gavan, when he was gone, went to the table and closed the box of pistols with a short, decisive snap--a decision in sharp contrast to the mist in which his mind was steeped. The peace the pistols promised, the peace of the northern sky and the heather: why did he choose the latter? But then he did not choose. Something had chosen for him. Something had called him back. Was it that he was too weary to resist? or did all his strength consist in yielding? He could not have told. Let the play go on. Its next act would be sweet to watch. Of that he was sure. PART III I The moor was like an amethyst under a radiant August sky, and the air, with its harmony of wind and sunlight, was like music. Eppie walked beside him and Peter trotted before. The forms were changed, but it might almost have been little Eppie, the boy Gavan, and Robbie himself who went together through the heather. The form was changed, but the sense of saneness so strong that it would have seemed perfectly natural to pass an arm about a child Eppie’s neck and to talk of the morning’s reading in the Odyssey. Never had the feeling of reality been so vague or the dream sense been so beautiful. His instinctive choice of this peace, instead of the other, had been altogether justified. It was all like a delightful game they had agreed to play, and the only rule of the game was to take each other’s illusions for granted and, in so doing, to put them altogether aside. It was as if they went in a dream that tallied while, outside their dream, the sad life of waking slept. It was all limpid, all effortless, all clear sunlight and clear wind: limpid, like a happy dream, yet deliciously muddled too, as a happy dream is often muddled, with its mazed consciousness that, since it is a dream, ordinary impossibilities may become quite possible, that one only has to direct a little the turnings of the fairy-tale to have them lead one where one will, and yet that to all strange happenings there hovers a background of contradiction that makes them the more of an enchanted perplexity. In the old white house the general and Miss Barbara would soon be expecting them back to tea, both older, both vaguer, both, to Gavan’s appreciation, more and more the tapestried figures, the background to the young life that still moved, felt, thought in the foreground until it, too, should sink and fade into a tapestry for other dramas, other fairy-tales.