absorption fear seemed to him merely a waste of time. "It all comes
of treating the thing as a business proposition," he told himself.

But there was far more in his heart than this sober resolution.
He was intoxicated with the resurgence of youth and felt a rapture
of audacity which he never remembered in his decorous boyhood.
"I haven't been doing badly for an old man," he reflected with glee.
What, oh what had become of the pillar of commerce, the man who
might have been a bailie had he sought municipal honours, the elder
in the Guthrie Memorial Kirk, the instructor of literary young men?
In the past three days he had levanted with jewels which had once
been an Emperor's and certainly were not his; he had burglariously
entered and made free of a strange house; he had played hide-and-seek
at the risk of his neck and had wrestled in the dark with a foreign
miscreant; he had shot at an eminent solicitor with intent to kill;
and he was now engaged in tramping the world with a fairytale Princess.
I blush to confess that of each of his doings he was unashamedly proud,
and thirsted for many more in the same line. "Gosh, but I'm seeing life,"
was his unregenerate conclusion.

Without sight or sound of a human being, they descended to the Laver,
climbed again by the cart track, and passed the deserted West Lodge
and inn to the village. It was almost full dawn when the three
stood in Mrs. Morran's kitchen.

"I've brought you two ladies, Auntie Phemie," said Dickson.

They made an odd group in that cheerful place, where the new-lit fire
was crackling in the big grate--the wet undignified form of Dickson,
unshaven of cheek and chin and disreputable in garb; the shrouded