Gold! You are to me the specter
of the Kelpie's Pool!"
Silence held for a minute or two. The clouds, passing between earth
and sun, made against the mountain slopes impalpable, dark, fantastic
shapes. An eagle wheeled above its nest at the mountain-top. Ian spoke
again. His tone had altered.
"If I do not decline remorse, I at least decline the leaden cope of it
you would have me wear! There is such a thing as fair play to oneself!
Two years ago come August Elspeth Barrow and I agreed to part--"
"Oh, 'agreed'--"
"Have it so! I said that we must part. She acquiesced--and that
without the appeals that the stage and literature show us. Oh,
doubtless I might have seen a pierced spirit, and did not, and was
brute beast there! But one thing you have got to believe, and that is
that neither of us knew what was to happen. Even with that, she was
aware of how a letter might be sent, with good hope of reaching me.
She was not a weak, ignorant girl.... I went away, and within a
fortnight was deep in that long attempt that ends here. I became
actively an agent for the Prince and his father. A hundred names and
their fates were in my hands. You can fill in the multitude of
activities, each seeming small in itself, but the whole preoccupying
every field.... If Elspeth Barrow wrote I never received her letter.
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