But two nights later he came to this place alone.
The moon was full. It hung like a wonder lantern above the hill and
the kirk; it made the kirkyard cloth of silver. The yews stood unreal,
or with a delicate, other reality. It was neither warm nor cold. The
moving air neither struck nor caressed, but there breathed a sense of
coming and going, unhurried and unperplexed, from far away to far
away. The laird of Glenfernie crossed long grass to where, for a
hundred years, had been laid the dead from White Farm. There was a
mound bare to the sunlight thrown from the moon. He saw the flowers
that Gilian had brought.
The flowers were colorless in the moonlight--and yet they could be,
and were, clothed with a hue of anger from himself. They lay before
him purple-crimson. They were withered, but suddenly they had sap,
life, fullness--but a distasteful, reminding life, a life in
opposition! He took them and threw them away.
Now the mound rested bare. He lay down beside it. He stretched his
arms over it. "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!" But Elspeth
did not answer--only the cool sunlight thrown back from the moon.
CHAPTER XXV
Ian traveled toward a pass through the Pyrenees. Behind him stretched
difficult, hazardous, slow travel--weeks of it. Behind those weeks lay
the voyage to Lisbon, and from Lisbon in a second boat north to Vigo.
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