“Eh, Glenfernie!  I am glad to see that you are yourself again!  Well, my sister’s son has broken prison.”

“Yes, one prison.”

“God knows they were all mad!  But I could not wish to see him in my dreams, hanging dark from the King’s gallows!”

“From the King’s gallows and for old, mad, Stewart hopes?  I find,” said Glenfernie, “that I do not wish that, either.  He would have gone for the lesser thing—­and the long true, right vengeance been delayed!”

“What is that?” asked Mr. Touris, dully.

“His wrong shall be ever in his mind, and I the painter’s brush to paint it there!  Give me, O God, the power of genius!”

“Are you going to follow him and kill him?”

“I am going to follow him.  At first I thought that I would kill him.  But my mind is changing as to that.”

Mr. Touris sighed heavily.  “I don’t know what is the matter with the world....  One does one’s best, but all goes wrong.  All kinds of hopes and plans....  When I look back to when I was a young man, I wonder....  I set myself an aim in life, to lift me and mine from poverty.  I saved for it, denied for it, was faithful.  It came about and it’s ashes in my mouth!  Yet I took it as a trust, and was faithful.  What does the Bible say, ‘Vanity of vanities’?  But I say that the world’s made wrong.”

Glenfernie left him at last, wrinkled and shrunken and shriveled, cold on a summer day, plying himself with wine, a serving-man mending the fire upon the hearth.  Alexander went to Mrs. Alison’s parlor.  He found her deep chair placed in the garden without, and she herself sitting there, a book in hand, but not read, her form very still, her eyes upon a shaft of light that was making vivid a row of flowers.  The book dropped beside her on the grass; she rose quickly.  The last time they had met was before Culloden, before Prestonpans.

She came to him.  “You’re well, Alexander!  Thanks be!  Sit down, my dear, sit down!” She would have made him take her chair, but he laughed and brought one for himself from the room.  “I bless my ancestors for a physical body that will not keep wounds!”

She sank into her chair again and sat in silence, gazing at him.  Her clear eyes filled with tears, but she shook them away.  At last she spoke:  “Oh, I see the other sort of wounds!  Alexander! lay hold of the nature that will make them, too, to heal!”

“Saint Alison,” he answered, “look full at what went on.  Now tell me if those are wounds easy to heal.  And tell me if he were not less than a man who pocketed the injury, who said to the injurer, ’Go in peace!’”

She looked at him mournfully.  “Is it to pocket the injury?  Will not all combine—­silently, silently—­to teach him at last?  Less than man—­man—­more than man, than to-day’s appearing man?...  I am not wise.  For yourself and the ring of your moment you may be judging inevitably, rightly....  But with what will you overcome—­and in overcoming what will you overcome?”