... 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.
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