Mrs. Grizel went to bed.  Alexander, with Alice and Strickland, sat by the fire in the hall.  There was much that the laird wished to say that he said.  They spoke in low voices, leaning toward the burning logs, the light playing over their faces, the light laughing upon old armor, crossed weapons, upon the walls.  Alice, a bonny woman with sense and courage, sat beside Glenfernie.  Strickland, from his corner, saw how much she looked like her mother; how much, to-night, Alexander looked like her.

They talked until late.  They came to agreement, quiet, moved, but thorough.  Glenfernie rose.  He took Alice in his arms and kissed her thrice.  Moisture was in the eyes of both.

“Sleep, dear, sleep!  So we understand, things grow easy!”

“I think that you are right, and that is a long way to comfort,” said Alice.  “Good night, good night, Alexander!”

When she was gone the two men talked yet a little longer, over the dying fire.  Then they, too, wished each other good night.  Strickland went to his room, but Alexander left the house and crossed the moon-filled night to the keep.  It was now he and Ian.

There was no strain.  “Old Steadfast” and “Old Saracen,” and a long pilgrimage together, and every difference granted, yet, in the background, a vast, an oceanic unity....  Ian rose from the settle.  He and the laird of Glenfernie sat by the table and with pen and paper made a diagram of escape.  They bent to the task in hand, and when it was done, and a few more words had been said, they turned to the pallets which Davie had spread on either side of the hearth.  The moon and the low fire made a strange half-light in the room.  The two lay still, addressed to sleep.  They spoke and answered but once.

Said Ian:  “I felt just then the waves of the sea!—­The waves of the sea and the roads of France....  The waves and roads of the days and nights and months and years.  I there and you here.  There is an ether, doubtless, that links, but I don’t tread it firmly....  Be sure I’ll turn to you, call to you, often, over the long roads, from out of the trough of the waves! Senor Nobody!  Senor Nobody!” He laughed, but with a catch of the breath.  “Good night!”

“Good night, Old Saracen!” said Alexander.

Morn came.  That day Glenfernie House heard still that all that region was searched.  The day went by, short, gray, with flurries of snow.  By afternoon it settled to a great, down-drifting pall of white.  It was falling thick and fast when Alexander Jardine and Ian Rullock passed through the broken wall beyond the school-room.  The pine branches were whitening, the narrow, rugged path ran a zigzag of white.

Strickland had parted from them at the wall, and yet Strickland seemed to be upon the path, following Glenfernie.  Ian wore a dress of Strickland’s, a hat and cloak that the countryside knew.  He and Strickland were nearly of a height.  Keeping silence and moving through a dimness of the descending day and the shaken veil of the snow, almost any chance-met neighbor would have said, in passing, “Good day, Mr. Strickland!”