“Then,” he went on, “came the long-promised month on the moors, at the edge of the Lochore Forest. Cosmo, in his kilt, at early dawn ... to see his crest of hair and his eagle feather flame in the first shaft of light! I don’t suppose that any feelings can ever be quite so pure, so strong, so ideal, as this sort of boy adoration for the man. Ideal!” repeated David, and struck with his buckled shoe against a fernlet that had found a home for itself between two stones of the tower flooring and cast a little shadow in the moonlight. Ellinor saw how he set his foot upon it, and thought the action symbolic. “Ideal!” cried he, gibing at himself. “That is my curse, you see, that I cannot even now, accept life as it is! Fie! How ugly is all reality to me! What is in the doom of corruption that we carry in the flesh compared to the doom of corruption in the spirit? No! Rather this stone at my feet and the stars above my head!” He lifted, as he spoke, his face towards the sky; but it caught now no reflection of serenity, only light upon its own trouble. “I was an idealiser in friendship—how much more when it came to love!” Impassively as she held herself, she could not control a slight start, a quick look at him. He was gazing beyond her, as if out there, in the night, the phantom of his first lost love had arisen before him. And when he went on speaking after a pause, it was as if he were addressing not Ellinor, but her—the Unknown—who had brought short joy and lasting sorrow into his life. Oh! Ellinor had been a fool not to have known how deep it had gone with him, since, after all these long years his every word, every action, bore witness to it! And yet, as she now looked at his face, she told herself she had not known it. “A little creature—a kind of sprite, as light as a little brown bird, as lissom, as hardy as a heather blossom!” Thus, from the unknown past, Ellinor’s rival rose before her: to be light, to be little, to be swift and lissom and brown—that was the way into his heart!... In every inch of her own splendid frame the listening woman felt great and massive, marble-white and still. He paused. His mind was miles and years away. She caught her breath with a sigh that sounded so loud in her own ears that she tried to cover it with a laugh. Quickly the man wheeled round upon her. “There is humour in my tale, is there not?” cried he, and his look and tone cut like the lash of a whip. “But give me your patience—the cream of the humour has yet to come!” “Oh, David,” cried she in anger. “If I am not light of body, neither am I light of mind!” If one like Colonel Harcourt, who understood the ways of women, had heard this cry, how knowing would have been his smile! What could David see of the heart laid bare? He looked upon her face and marked it scornful. The anger in her voice had struck him, but the wail of it had passed him by.