“Yes, I have had visions ... outward facts!...  Do you know the inner, northern ocean, where sleep all the wrecks?”

“As I have watched you since you were a boy, it is improbable that I should not have some divining power.  In Inverness, too, while you were fevered, you talked and talked....  You have walked with Tragedy, felt her net and her strong whip.”  Strickland lifted his eyes from the bowl, pushed back his chair a little, and looked full at the laird of Glenfernie.  “What then?  Rise, Glenfernie, and leave her behind!  And if you do not now, it will soon be hard for you to do so!  Remember, too, that I watched your father—­”

“After I find Ian Rullock in Holland or Lisbon or America—­”

Strickland made a movement of deep concern.  “You have met and fought this man.  Do you mean so to nourish vengeance—­”

“I mean so to aid and vindicate distressed Justice.”

“Is it the way?”

“I think that it is the way.”

Strickland was silent, seeing the uselessness.  Glenfernie was one to whom conviction must come from within.  A stillness held in the room, broken by the laird in the voice that was growing like his father’s.  “Nothing lacks now but strength, and I am gaining that—­will gain it the faster now!  Travel—­travel!...  All my travel was preparatory to this.”

“Do you mean,” asked Strickland, “to kill him when you find him?”

“I like your directness.  But I do not know—­I do not know!...  I mean to be his following fiend.  To have him ever feel me—­when he turns his head ever to see me!”

The other sighed sharply.  He thought to himself, “Oh, mind, thy abysses!”

Indeed, Glenfernie looked at this moment stronger.  He folded Jamie’s letter and put it by.  He drew the bowl of flowers to him and picked forth a rose.  “A week—­two at most—­and I shall be wholly recovered!” His voice had fiber, decision, even a kind of cheer.

Strickland thought, “It is his fancied remedy, at which he snatches!”

Glenfernie continued:  “We’ll set to work to-morrow upon long arrangements!  With you to manage here, I will not be missed.”  Without waiting for the morrow he took quill and paper and began to figure.

Strickland watched him.  At last he said, “Will you go at once in three ships to Holland, Portugal, and America?”

“Has the onlooker room for irony, while to me it looks so simple?  I shall ship first to the likeliest land....  In ten days—­in two weeks at most—­to Edinburgh—­”

Strickland left him figuring and, rising, went to the window.  He saw the great cedar, and in mind the pilgrim who planted it there.  All the pilgrims—­all the crusaders—­all the men in Plutarch; the long frieze of them, the full ocean of them ... all the self-search, dressed as search of another.  “I, too, I doubt not—­I, too!” Buried scenes in his own life rose before Strickland.  Behind him scratched Glenfernie’s pen, sounded Glenfernie’s voice: