“Free like that!  It is the freeness, the light, splendid freeness, I think of most.”

“The freeness!” he repeated.  “Yes, the freeness!”

“As for beauty,” I almost whispered, in a sort of reverence for visions I remembered, “I have stood on this moor a thousand times and seen loveliness which made me tremble.  One’s soul could want no more in any life.  But ‘Out on the Hillside’ I knew I was part of it, and it was ecstasy.  That was the freeness.”

“Yes—­it was the freeness,” he answered.

We brushed through the heather and the bracken, and flower-bells shook showers of radiant drops upon us.  The mist wavered and sometimes lifted before us, and opened up mystic vistas to veil them again a few minutes later.  The sun tried to break through, and sometimes we walked in a golden haze.

We fell into silence.  Now and then I glanced sidewise at my companion as we made our soundless way over the thick moss.  He looked so strong and beautiful.  His tall body was so fine, his shoulders so broad and splendid!  How could it be!  How could it be!  As he tramped beside me he was thinking deeply, and he knew he need not talk to me.  That made me glad—­that he should know me so well and feel me so near.  That was what he felt when he was with his mother, that she understood and that at times neither of them needed words.

Until we had reached the patch of gorse where we intended to end our walk we did not speak at all.  He was thinking of things which led him far.  I knew that, though I did not know what they were.  When we reached the golden blaze we had seen the evening before it was a flame of gold again, because—­it was only for a few moments—­the mist had blown apart and the sun was shining on it.

As we stood in the midst of it together—­Oh! how strange and beautiful it was!—­Mr. MacNairn came back.  That was what it seemed to me—­that he came back.  He stood quite still a moment and looked about him, and then he stretched out his arms as I had stretched out mine.  But he did it slowly, and a light came into his face.

“If, after it was over, a man awakened as you said and found himself—­the self he knew, but light, free, splendid—­remembering all the ages of dark, unknowing dread, of horror of some black, aimless plunge, and suddenly seeing all the childish uselessness of it—­how he would stand and smile!  How he would stand and smile!”

Never had I understood anything more clearly than I understood then.  Yes, yes!  That would be it.  Remembering all the waste of fear, how he would stand and smile!

He was smiling himself, the golden gorse about him already losing its flame in the light returning mist-wraiths closing again over it, when I heard a sound far away and high up the moor.  It sounded like the playing of a piper.  He did not seem to notice it.

“We shall be shut in again,” he said.  “How mysterious it is, this opening and closing!  I like it more than anything else.  Let us sit down, Ysobel.”