wholesale and retail provision merchant, elder in the Guthrie
Memorial Kirk, and fifty-five years of age. Ay, that was the rub.
He was getting old. The woman had seen it and had advised him to
go home. Yet the plea was curiously irksome, though it gave him
the excuse he needed. If you played at being young, you had to
take up the obligations of youth, and he thought derisively of his
boyish exhilaration of the past days. Derisively, but also sadly.
What had become of that innocent joviality he had dreamed of,
that happy morning pilgrimage of Spring enlivened by tags from
the poets? His goddess had played him false. Romance had put upon
him too hard a trial.

He lay long awake, torn between common sense and a desire to be
loyal to some vague whimsical standard. Heritage a yard distant
appeared also to be sleepless, for the bed creaked with his turning.
Dickson found himself envying one whose troubles, whatever they
might be, were not those of a divided mind.



CHAPTER V


OF THE PRINCESS IN THE TOWER


Very early the next morning, while Mrs. Morran was still cooking
breakfast, Dickson and Heritage might have been observed taking the
air in the village street. It was the Poet who had insisted upon
this walk, and he had his own purpose. They looked at the spires of