The lake gleamed below him, the herded mountains slept in a gray silver light.  How many were the faults of the laird of Glenfernie!  Faults!  He looked at the dark old plains of the moon.  That was a light word!  He saw Alexander pitted and scarred.

Pride!  That had always been in the core of Glenfernie.  That has been his old fortress, walled and moated against trespass.  Pride so high that it was careless—­that its possessor could seem peaceable and humble....  But find the quick and touch it—­and you saw!  What was his was his.  What he deemed to be his, whether it was so or not!  Touch him there and out jumped jealousy, hate, and implacableness—­and all the time one had been thinking of him as a kind of seer!

Ian turned upon the rock above Como.  And Glenfernie was ignorant!  The seer had seen very little, after all.  His touch had not been precisely permeative when it came to the world, Ian Rullock.  If liking meant understanding, there had not been much understanding—­which left liking but a word.  If liking was a degree of love, where then had been love, where the friend at all?  After all, and all the time, Glenfernie’s notion of friendship was a sieve.  The notion that he had held up as though it were the North Star!

The world, Ian Rullock, could not be so contemned....

He felt with heat and pain the truth of that.  It was a wrong that Glenfernie should not understand!  The world, Ian Rullock, might be incomplete, imperfect—­might have taken, more than once, wrong turns, left its path, so to speak, in the heavens.  But what of the world, Alexander Jardine?  Had it no memories?  He brooded over what these memories might be—­must be; he tried to taste and handle that other’s faults in time and space.  But he could not plunge into Alexander’s depths of wrath.  As he could not, he made himself contemptuous of all that—­of Old Steadfast’s power of reaction!

A star shot across the moon-filled night, so large a meteor that it made light even against that silver.  A mass within Ian made a slow turn, with effort, with thrilling, changed its inclination.  He saw that disdain, that it was shallow and streaked with ebony.  He moved with a kind of groan.  “Was there—­is there—­wickedness?...  What, O God, is wickedness?”

He pressed the rock with his hand—­sat up.  The old taskmaster, alarmed, gathered his forces.  “I say that it is just that—­pride, vengefulness, hard misunderstanding!”

A voice within him answered.  “Even so, is it not still yourself?”

He stared after the meteor track.  There was a conception here that he had not dreamed of.

It seemed best to keep still upon the rock.  He sat in inner wonder.  There was a sense of purity, of a fresh coolness not physical, of awe.  He was in presence of something comprehensive, immortal.

“Is it myself?  Then let it pour out and make of naught the old poison of myself!”

The perception could not hold.  It flagged and sank, echoing down into the caves.  He sat still and felt the old taskmaster stir.  But this time he found strength to resist.  There resulted, not the divine novelty and largeness of that one moment, but a kind of dim and bare desert waste of wide extent.  And as it ate up all width, so it seemed timeless.  Across this, like a person, unheralded, came and went two lines from “Richard III”