I

I first saw the Glen when I was eleven years old, a small boy consumed with a passion for trout. Adventuring on a rusty bicycle I had penetrated to remote dales, and made baskets in streams which no Anglers’ Guide ever heard of. One day I had fished the sources of the Cauldshaw, and, the sun being yet high, bethought me of the Fawn, which flowed on the other side of the narrow watershed. I shouldered my rod and tramped up the mossy spaces of the burnhead, till I waded deep in the bracken of the ridge. There on the summit, the heather ended as if ruled by a gardener’s line. I was looking into a narrow glen which ran from a round hope till a broad green hill baulked the view. From beginning to end there was no house, not even a sheepfold or a dyke. I remember my amazement at its indescribable greenness. There was the yellow-green of moss, the old velvet of mountain-turf, the grey-green of bent on the hill-brow; but all was green, without tree or crag or heather bush to distract the eye. Through the middle of it ran the Fawn, a very fishable stream to my notion, and I ran down the brae with hope high in my heart.

But I never cast a fly in those waters. Long before I was down the hill the eeriness and the solitariness of the place weighed on my mind. There was no man here, and no sign of man. There were no whaups crying, or grouse to upbraid my presence. It was still as the grave, but for the lilt of the stream; and it was terribly green. I remembered a line of a song that ploughmen used to whistle⁠—“The wild glen sae green” and I thought how much deeper this green wildness was than any rock and heather. The still slopes and folds of hill seemed to my unquiet eye to stretch to eternity.

At the edge of the burn was a rude mound, embanked like some Roman fort. With a fluttering heart I began to put my rod together. The Fawn dashed and swirled in noble pools, but I could not keep my eyes on it. The green hills shut me in, and the awe of them brooded over me. I was mortally afraid, and not ashamed of my fear. I could not give a name to it, but something uncanny was in the air: not terrible exactly, or threatening, but inhumanly strange. I clutched my rod⁠—the butt and middle piece were put together⁠—and fled the way I had come. I do not think I stopped running till I fell panting by the side of the Cauldshaw among the friendly heather.

II

Twenty years later, when the doings of eleven are a faint memory, chance set me fishing the lower streams of the Fawn. It was a clear June day, but the waters were too low and my basket was light. I fished like an epicure, a cast in each pool sufficing for me; and presently I had rounded the shoulder of the green hill which cuts the valley in two. They call it the Green Dod, and there is no greener hill in that green country. I found myself in an upland glen, where the Fawn had sunk to a mountain burn. The place was very soothing and quiet, and idly I wandered on, drinking in the peace of the hills. Then something in the contours awakened a memory, and I recalled my boyish escapade. The years have their consolations, for what had once terrified now charmed. I laughed at the scared little sinner, whose trembling legs had once twinkled up those braes. I put by my rod and abandoned myself to the delights of the greenness. Far up on the hill shoulders white sheep were dotted, but the waterside was empty. Not even a water-crow was visible, and in the patches of bog there was no sign of snipe. The place was full of a delicious desolation. There were the strait green sides, the Green Dod at the foot, a green hope at the head, and only the clear singing water stired in the sunny afternoon.

I found a seat on a mound, and basked in deep content. It was the height of pastoral, yet without sheep or shepherd. The Fawn was a true Border stream, jewelled in sunlight, but wan as death under grey skies. I wondered how I had hitherto missed this happy valley. Nature had wrought it in a kindly mood, and hidden it very far from men. It must, I thought, have had a gracious history. There was no terror in its solitude. I could not imagine the cry of death from the burn, or harsh deeds done on those green lawns. Who had owned it in old days? Perhaps some Roman, pushing north with his bronze soldier against the Picts, had been caught by its grace, and christened it by the name of his woodland god. True Thomas may have walked by its streams. But its story must have been chiefly of elves and fairy folk, for it wore the fairy livery.

I looked at the mound on which I sat, and saw that it had once been the site of a dwelling. It was all crisp moorland turf, gemmed with eyebright and milkwort, but the rampart had been made by man. Scraping with the butt-end of my rod, I laid bare a chiselled block. This had been no sheepfold or shepherd’s cot, but a tower.

The discovery stirred a fresh strain of fancy. Some old raider had had his keep here, and filled the glen with ill-gotten cattle. I pictured the forays returning over the green hills in some autumn twilight. I saw beacons fired on the tops, and the winter snows reddened with blood. Just then a cloud came over the sun, and the grace of the valley vanished. Now the stream ran wan, and I saw that the glen was wild and very lonely. Terror had dwelt here as well as peace. I remembered the boy of eleven, who on this very mound had picked up his rod and rim.

That evening at Hardriding I hunted the library for local histories. They could not tell me much, being mostly the casual compilations of local ministers. But I found one thing of interest. I had been right about True Thomas. It seemed that the Rhymer had honoured the Fawn with a couplet of doubtful Latin:

Ubi Faunus fluit
Spes mortalis ruit.

I had no notion what he meant, and suspected the hand of the Reverend Mr. Gilfillan circa 1780.

III

Fortune and a broken leg gave me some leisure that winter, and I spent it in searching for the history of what I had come to call the Green Glen. For two hundred years back it was plain going. Along with a dozen other valleys it had been swept into the net of the noble house which had built its fortunes on the fall of the turbulent little Border septs. Earlier it had been by turns in the hands of two families, both long perished⁠—Home of Hardriding and Douglas of Cauldshaw. That took me back to the fourteenth century or thereabouts, where the history stopped short. But I found a charter of Melrose a century before, from which it appeared that the lands of Fawn, “the nether and hither glens thereof,” had been in the hands of the monks, who had profited by the good grazing. A chapel of Our Lady had stood by the burnside, endowed with a hundred merks a-year by a certain Simon de Fries in penance for the slaying of an erring wife. There my tale ended, but I hazarded a guess. Fifty years ago a slab was found near Hadrian’s Wall with a list of stations on the great road which ran north to the land of the Picts. You will find it copied in the Berlin Corpus, and there is much dispute about the identification of the names. One of them is a certain Fauni Castellum, which scholars have fastened on a dozen places between Ardoch and Melrose. I was myself convinced that the castellum was the mound in the Green Glen, the more so as Mr. Gilfillan reported a find there of gold coins of the Antonines in 1758. It is true that the place was some miles from the main line of transit, but it would command the hill-roads from the West. Besides, might it not have been a sacred place, half fort, half shrine, an outpost of the dying faith? Why, otherwise, the strange name of the woodland god?

These were all my facts⁠—too few on which to spin the delicate web of history. But my imagination was kindled, and I set to work. If I were right, this glen had a virtue which had drawn to it many races. Little as the recorded history was, it was far more than the due of an inconsiderable howe of the hills. Rome had made it a halting-place and consecrated it to her gods; the Church had built a shrine in it; two famous clans had fought furiously for its sake. My first impression was justified, for it had been no common place. Some ancient aura had brooded over its greenness and compelled men’s souls.

Bit by bit from monkish Latin, from fragments of ballads, from cumbrous family histories, and from musty chronicles, I built up the shadow of a tale. Rome gave me nothing⁠—the fog of years lay too thick over that greatest of mortal pages; but I hazarded a guess that the broken Satyr’s head, found in some unknown Border earthwork and now in the Grange collection, had come from my glen. Perhaps the Melrose monks had found it and copied it in their gargoyles. But of the Christian shrine I had something to tell. The chapel seems to have had an ill reputation for a holy place. The chapter of Melrose in or about 1250 held an inquisition into the doings of a certain John of Fawn, who tended the shrine with unhallowed service. There were complaints of his successor, a monk who bore the name of Lapidarius; and the grand climax was reached in the fate of one Andrew de Faun, a priest, says the record, who had the unpleasing gift diabolosconvocandi. He was hand in glove with Lord Soulis, whose castle of Hermitage lay some twenty miles over the hills. Of his iniquities it is recorded that the country folk grew weary, and one October night surprised him at the business. He confessed his sins under the pressure of boiling lead, was duly burned, and his ashes cast into Tweed to be borne to the cleansing sea.

To the monks succeeded the Barons, the first being the tragically fated house of Home. But side by side with the record of their moorland wars I found a ballad history. Fawn had caught the fancy of the wandering minstrel. The heroine of the ghastly “Riding of Etterick” had eyes “grey as Fawn.” (The other reading “grey as a fawn” is obvious nonsense.) The tryst for true love on Beltane’s E’en was the Fawn side, and it was in the Green Glen that young Brokyn found himself asleep on his return from Fairyland.

“And when ye come to Fawn water,”

says the wise wife in “May Margaret,”

“I bid ye lout fu’ low,
And say three prayers to Christes grace
Afore ye ride the flow.”

In the lovely fragment, “The Thorn of Life,” there is a variant, not given by Child, which tells how on Midsummer morning the lady washed herself with dew “clear as dawn”⁠—an absurd literary phrase which spoils the poem. My emendation “Fawn” is, I take it, certain. In the later riding ballads the name is still more frequent. The doomed raider in “Carlisle Town” swears that Fawn will run red as blood ere his wrongs are forgotten. In “Castle Gay” the dying Home craves, like King David, for a draught of Fawn water; and in “Lord Archibald’s Good Night” there is a strange line about “the holy wells of Fawn.” No doubt the line is corrupt, but the form of the corruption testifies to the spell of the Green Glen.

The Homes of Hardriding marched through disorder and violence to catastrophe. Never more than a hill clan, and kin to no powerful house, they persisted for three centuries by sheer audacity and pride. They held the Fawn glen and built a tower in it, but their real seat was Hardriding in the lower valley. The wave of Douglas aggression flowed round them, but they stoutly resisted, and it was only the power of the great Warden of the Marches that seized Fawnside for the Cauldshaw branch of his house. The battle in which Piers Home died by the hand of young Cauldshaw was fought in the Green Glen. Presently the Douglases were in trouble with the King, and a younger Piers, under a King’s commission, won back his lands and chased Cauldshaw into Northumberland. The Douglas clan was as often as not in treaty with the English Warden, while the Hardriding folk were vehemently Scottish, and, alone of their name, gave a good account of themselves at Flodden. The fortunes of the two houses seesawed so long as lands were won and kept by the strong arm alone. By-and-by came the day of smooth things, when a parchment was more potent than the sword, and both Home and Douglas withered, like hill plants brought into a lowland garden.

It was all an unedifying tale of blood and treason, but in reading it I was struck by one curious fact. Every critical event in the fortunes of the two clans befell in the Green Glen. There the leaders died in battle or in duel, and there a shameless victor celebrated his mastery. It was, so to speak, the citadel, of which the possession was the proof of triumph. It can have had but little value in itself, for the tower by the burn was scarcely a fortalice, and was never seriously dwelled in. Indeed it is referred to not as a castle but as a “bower.” When a Douglas defied a Home he summoned him to meet him by the “Bower o’ Fawn.” This same Bower was the centre of a pretty tale, when for once the bloodstained record emerges into the clear air of pastoral. The Fawn glen did not always pass by war; once it fell to the Douglases by marriage. Marjory of Hardriding, walking one evening by the stream, fell in with the young Douglas, sore wounded in a forest hunt. In the Bower she tended his wounds, and hid him from her fierce clan. Love ripened, and one July morn came the heir of Cauldshaw to Hardriding gates on an errand of peace. But the Home was surly, and the Douglas retired with a bitter denial and an arrow in his corselet. Thereupon Maid Marjory took the matter into her own hands, and rode over the hills to her lover. A gallant lass this, for, after a hurried wedding at the Kirk o’ Shaws, she returned with her man to the Fawn Bower to confront an angry father and six angrier brothers. She offered peace or war, but declared that, if war it should be, she herself would fight in the first rank of the Douglases. Whereupon, it is said, old Piers, struck with wonder and delight at the courage he had begotten, declared for peace, and the Green Glen was her dowry.

IV

The thing became an obsession with me, and I could not let this nook of history alone. Weary hours were spent in the search for Homes and Douglases. Why I wasted my time thus I cannot tell. I told myself it was part of the spell of the Green Glen. “The place was silent and aware,” as Browning says. I could not think that the virtue had departed and that the romance of Fawn was a past tale. Now it had no visitants save a shepherd taking a shortcut or a fisherman with a taste for moorland trout. But some day a horseman on a fateful errand would stir its waters, or the Bower witness a new pastoral. I told myself that the wise years might ordain a long interval, but sooner or later they would ring up the curtain on the play.

A needle in a haystack was a simple quest compared to mine. History, which loves to leave fringes and loose threads, had cut the record of Home and Douglas with her sharpest shears. The two families disappeared within the same decade. Cauldshaw had chosen the King’s side in the Covenant wars, and the head of the house, Sir Adam, had been a noted persecutor of the godly. He came to his end by a bullet of the Black Macmichael’s somewhere in the hills of Galloway. His son had fought in the Scots Brigade for the French King, and returned about 1710 to find an estate broken by fines and penalties. We see him last riding south with Mackintosh in the ’Fifteen, but history does not tell us of his fate. He may have died with Derwent-water, or, more likely, he may have escaped and lain low till the hunt passed. Cauldshaw was forfeited and sold, and there was an end of it. Thirty years later I find a Douglas, a locksmith in the High Street of Edinburgh, who may have been his son, since he was gently born and yet clearly of no other known Douglas sept. After that the shears are at work. My note at the end of my researches was, “merged in the burgesses of Edinburgh.”

Hardriding showed a similar tale, save that the Homes stood for the Covenant. One of them, Piers or Patrick, swung in the Grassmarket, and was the subject of the eulogies of Wodrow and Patrick Walker. An odd type of saint, his godliness was proved chiefly by his ferocity against the King’s officers, for whom he would lie in wait behind a dyke with a musket. He died gallantly, declaiming the 23rd Psalm. The Jacobite rising brought Hardriding round to the side of Cauldshaw. Home and Douglas rode south together, and the fate of the first at any rate is clear. He fell in the rout of Preston, charging with a mouthful of oaths and texts. He left landless sons who disappear into the mist, and the ancient name of Home of Hardriding died in the land. David Hume, the philosopher, in his cups used to claim kin with the house, but it is recorded that David’s friends did not take him seriously.

V

About that time I used to try to analyse the impression the Green Glen made upon me. I went to it often and in all weathers, but especially in the soft June days and the flaming twilights of October. At first I thought that the attraction was the peace of it, Wordsworth’s “sleep that is among the lonely hills.” Certainly it was very quiet and hallowed, with that brooding stillness which is a positive thing and not a mere absence of unrest. I have gone there, worried and distraught, and returned at ease with the world. Once, I remember, I came to it after fighting a forlorn bye-election in an English slum, with my brain fagged and dull and my nerves a torment. The Glen healed me, plunging me into the deeps of cool old-world shadows. But I soon discovered that the charm was not an opiate, but a stimulant. Its spell was the spell of life. It stirred the blood, comforting failure and nursing hope, but it did not lull to sleep. Once after a bad illness I went to Hardriding to rest, but I could not face the Glen. It only fevered a sick man. Its call was to action, and its ancient genius had no love for weaklings.

Often I tried to test it, to see if others could feel as I did. I was ridiculously unsuccessful. The sportsmen who frequented Hardriding, finding no grouse in the Glen, fought shy of it, and, if chance took them there, lamented the absence of heather. “Pretty place,” one young man observed to me, “but no more Scotch than my hat. It might be Sussex. Where’s the brown heath and shaggy wood? What! There isn’t cover for a tomtit. It’s a nasty big slice out of Harry’s shooting to have that long bare place taking up room.” It was too remote for ladies to picnic in, but one who penetrated as far called it “sweet,” and said it reminded her of Dartmoor. The people of the neighbourhood were no better. Keepers took the same view as the Hardriding sportsmen, and the farmer whose lease covered it spoke of it darkly as “Poaverty Neuk.” “Food for neither man nor beast,” he said. “Something might be done with phosphates, but I’ve no money to spend. It would make a grand dam if any town wanted a water-supply.” Good businesslike views, but no hint anywhere of the strangeness which to me had made it a kind of sanctuary.

There was one exception, the shepherd of the Nine Stane Rig. He was a young man, with a fiery red head and a taste for poetry. He would declaim Burns and Hogg with gusto, and was noted at “kirns” and weddings for his robust rendering of songs like “When the Kye Come Hame” and “Robin Tamson’s Smiddy.” I used to accompany him sometimes on his rounds, and he spoke to me of the Green Glen.

“It’s a bonny bit,” he once said, waving his arm towards the Green Dod. “And there’s ae queer thing about it. Sheep’ll no bide in it. Ye may pit a hirsel in at nicht, and every beast’ll be on the tap o’ the rig by the mornin’. How d’ye account for that? Mr. Yellowlees says the feedin’s no guid, and that it wants phosphates. I dinna agree wi’ him. I’ve herdit a’ my days, and I never saw better feedin’ than by yon burnside. I’ve no just fawthomed it yet, but I’ve an idea o’ my ain. I think the glen is an auld kirkyaird. I mind when I herdit in Eskdalemuir there was a bit on the hill whaur Covenanters had been buried, and the sheep were aye sweer to gang near it. Some day I’m thinkin’ o’ gettin’ a spade and howkin’. I micht find something queer.⁠ ⁠…”

VI

I came to regard the Green Glen as my own exclusive property, which shared with me a secret. It was a pleasant intimacy, and I had resigned myself to its limits, conscious that the curtain of the past was drawn too close to allow more than one little chink to be seen. Then one day Fate brought Linford across my path.

I had known him slightly for several years. I can see him now as I first knew him, a big solemn young man, too heavy for elegance, and an awkward weight for a horse. We met first one spring at Valescure, and a lonely fortnight established a kind of friendship between us. He was a modest being, full of halting sympathies and interests, for which he rarely found words. His family had been settled for two generations in Australia, sheep-farming in the good days when the big profits were made. His father had made a second fortune in a gold mine, and, disliking the land legislation of the country, had sold his farms and brought his boy to England. An undistinguished progress through a public school and Oxford had left him without a profession, and, his father having died, with no near relations, and a ridiculous amount of money. He should have been a soldier, but somehow had missed his chance. The man was in no way slack, but he gave me the impression of having no niche to fit into. He was very English in speech and manners, but he seemed to stand outside all the ordinary English occupations and look on. Not that he didn’t do most things well. He was a magnificent shot, a first-rate horseman, and the best man to sail a boat I have ever met. He read much, had travelled considerably, and had a keen interest in scientific geography. I thought he had found a job when he took a notion of exploring the Brahmaputra gorges, but the expedition fell through and his interest flagged. He belonged to many clubs, and had a few hundred acquaintances; but beyond myself I don’t think he had a friend.

He used to come to see me, and I tried to understand what puzzled him. For puzzled he was⁠—not unhappy or disillusioned, but simply puzzled with life. Somehow he did not fit in with the world around him. I used to think it would have been better if he had never left Australia. There he had a ready-made environment; here in England he had to make his own, and he did not seem to have the knack of it. People liked him, and thought him, for all his stiffness, a good fellow. But he never accepted anybody or anything as his own; he was always the observant and sympathetic stranger. I began to realise that my friend, with all his advantages, was desperately homeless.

To myself, as I thought about him, I prescribed marriage. Vix ea nostra voco might have been his motto about most things, but in a wife he would find something his very own. The thing was obvious, but I saw also that he would be a hard fellow to marry. He was hopelessly shy and curiously unimpressionable. I do not remember that he ever spoke to me of any woman, and he avoided every chance of meeting them. I only once saw his tall figure at a dance, when he looked like nothing so much as Marius among the ruins of Carthage.

Hunting was his main hobby, and one January I found myself staying under the same roof with him in the Cottesmore country. He was, as I have said, a bold and fine rider, but he had to know his horse, and on this occasion our host mounted both of us. There was an ugly banked fence where he misjudged his animal’s powers, and came down in a heap on a hardish bit of ground. I thought his neck was broken, and prepared for the worst, as I helped three other white-faced men to get him clear. But it was only a slight concussion, a broken finger, and a dislocated shoulder. He had a bad night, but next day was little the worse for his fall, and, frost having set in, I spent most of the afternoon in his bedroom.

He wore a ring which I had often noticed, a little engraved carnelian in a heavy setting of Australian gold. In doctoring his hand it had been removed, and now lay on the dressing-table. We were talking idly of runs and spills, and, as we talked, I picked it up and examined it.

The stone was old and curious. There was no motto, and the carving seemed to be a heart transfixed by an arrow. I thought it the ordinary trumpery love-token⁠—Cupid and his darts⁠—when I noticed something more. The heart was crowned, and the barb transfixing it was not an arrow but a spear.

The sight roused me to the liveliest interest. For the cognisance belonged to one house and one house alone. It was Douglas of Cauldshaw who had carried the family badge with this strange difference. Mary of Scots, it was said, had given them the spear, for to the last they had stood by that melancholy lady.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“What? The ring? It was my father’s. An ugly thing.”

I looked at it again. “It has an odd crest. Did you ever inquire about it?”

He said No. He knew little heraldry, and didn’t want to pretend to what didn’t belong to him. Then he corrected himself. He thought that the thing was a family relic, right enough. His father had got the stone in turn from his mother, and had had it reset. He thought, but he wasn’t sure, that it had been a long time in his grandmother’s family.

“What was her name?” I asked eagerly.

The answer was disappointing. “Brown,” he said. “They had the Wooramanga place.”

I asked if they came from Scotland. “No,” he said. “They were Yorkshire, I think. But wait a bit. I think⁠—yes⁠—I have heard my father say something about the Browns being Scotch⁠—Brouns, you know.”

This was a false scent and I tried again. But Linford had nothing to tell me. He had no family papers or jewels or pictures, nothing but the one ring. I could see that he was puzzled at my interest, and to my horror offered to pay the Heralds’ College to investigate matters. I made him promise to let the Heralds alone, and tried to get more about his grandmother. She had been a tall, thin old lady, as he remembered her, with a north-country accent. She had disliked Melbourne intensely. That was all he could tell; not a saying or a rhyme or a memory to link her with those who had borne the ring’s cognisance.

I heard, however, another startling thing that afternoon. Linford, blushing delightfully, confessed that he was in love. He had no chance, of course, wasn’t good enough, and all the rest of it. When I heard that the lady was Virginia Dasent I was inclined to agree with him. Miss Dasent was very high game for Linford to fly at⁠—or for anybody.

VII

Language is too coarse a medium in which to give a true portrait of Miss Virginia. Airy diaphanous colours and the sharp fineness of marble are needed; and something more, something to recapture that grace, wild and birdlike and only half mortal, which for three seasons turned all our heads. She was an astounding success. Coming from nowhere, and as innocent as a child of ambition, she made every man her most hopeless and humble servant. I think her charm was her pure girlishness⁠—neither childish nor womanly, you understand. She had the air of one who faces the world frankly but does not accept it. She was a changeling, a wanderer, a dainty solitary figure on the weary old roads of life. I remember thinking, when I first saw her, that she might have stood for a statue of incarnate Wonder.

I knew her a little, well enough to see the hopelessness of my friend’s case. She was an American⁠—from one of the Carolinas, I believe; and Lady Amysfort took her about in London. I do not think that they were related. I hope my friends beyond the Atlantic will forgive me for saying that Miss Virginia was like no American I have ever met. Not that she had any of the sad homeless vulgarity of the denationalised. She was a fervent patriot, and had a delicious variety of the national humour. But I could not fit her in with her great continent. Indeed, I could not place her anywhere in any society. She belonged to some fanciful world of her own; but all the time she seemed to me to be looking for something⁠—perhaps for her lost material heritage.

I was more interested, however, in Linford than in Miss Dasent. I could find out no more from him about his forbears, but I wondered if the Glen could tell me anything. Supposing I took him there, unprepared, of course, by any warning of mine, might not he feel the spell of it? If he did, I would be convinced of the Douglas blood; for I was certain that not otherwise would so prosaic a being feel so subtle a charm.

I persuaded him to take the Hardriding shootings; with an option to purchase, too, for Harry’s finances were now past praying for. The chance came two days before the Twelfth, when he and I were alone in the house. It was a mild, blue August day, with clear distances and a cool breeze, and as we rounded the Green Dod I thought that my Glen was nobly dressed for us. I had hoped for some cry of delight, but none came. Linford stalked through the bent, muttering something about black-game.

We came to the mound by the waterside, Maid Marjory’s Bower, and stretched ourselves on the scented turf. Then a curious thing happened to me. A light wind came up the stream, rippling the pools and sending a grey shiver over the grasses. Suddenly I became oppressed with a mortal fear. I must have lain limp and white, looking dumbly cut the opposite hill. I had no notion what I feared, but it was worse than my old boyish adventure, for, though I longed madly to flee, I knew I could not. The Green Glen was trying me, and if I failed I had lost its secret forever. I shut my teeth, and for a second or two hung at the limit of my endurance. Then it all passed. I found myself lying back on the mound, desperately sleepy and dripping with sweat, as if I had run twenty miles.

I mopped my brow and looked at Linford. He was quite unperturbed, and had got out his pouch and was filling his pipe. He glanced at me curiously.

“You’re in pretty bad condition, old chap,” he observed. “You’ll founder on the Twelfth if you drip like this in an afternoon saunter.”

He got up and stretched himself. “Let’s go back,” he said. “There isn’t a beast or bird in the place. I am glad I came here, for it will keep us from wasting time over it.”

I followed him, still shaky and acutely disappointed. The Glen had nothing to say to him. The ring was an accident, and the Cauldshaw stock was still to find. And yet, as we walked home, I began to doubt. The Glen had been not for Douglas or Home alone, but for both. What if a Home were needed to complete the circuit?

It was a possible explanation. Besides, the extraordinary seizure which had befallen me that afternoon seemed to argue that the visit had not been meaningless. I was perfectly well and normal, and I had sat on the mound a hundred times before. Might it not be that the Glen had been stirred, and was striving to tell us its secret? Then I began to laugh, and told myself that I was a fool to treat my fancies as solid facts.

VIII

That winter was made memorable to me, and a good many others, by Virginia Dasent. The Amysforts went to Egypt, leaving her very much to her own devices. She hunted a little and spent some time in country-houses; but mostly she was to be found in London, a city for which she had an inordinate love. This was bad for Linford, who stayed devotedly in town, and being deprived of healthful exercise put on flesh and lost spirits. I found him in the club one afternoon in a very bad temper. I alone knew of his hopeless plight, and with me he did not trouble to keep up appearances.

“I get no forrarder,” he groaned. “She tolerates me as she tolerates everybody else. Lord, how I hate that kind smile of hers! She isn’t a woman, Jack. She’s an adorable sort of bird that flits about and never settles. You know the way she holds her head forward and peers away beyond you. She’s always preening for another flight.”

Love was making him a psychologist, for Miss Virginia’s maddening charm lay in just that birdlike detachment. We had become very good friends, she and I; and often of a late afternoon we talked in the Amysforts’ big ugly drawing-room. She liked me because I was interested in old things and odd bypaths, for I found that the child bubbled over with romance. A lonely girlhood in some Carolinian manor had given her fancy rich feeding. Half in a world of books, half in a world of pure dreaming, she took her airy way. She had about as much worldliness as St. Theresa, and much less worldly knowledge. Frankly, I was a little afraid for her; some day disillusion would come, and come cruelly. There was a loneliness about her, as about Linford, but it was the loneliness of a happy preoccupation. Some day those wondering eyes would find the world less marvellous, and then her heart would break. Or would she carry her fresh childlike interest undimmed to the end? I could not tell, but I argued badly for Linford’s chances. He was far too eligible⁠—young, good-looking, preposterously rich. The man who was to win Miss Virginia’s heart, I thought, must come riding in the fearless old fashion. Linford was as romantic in the ordinary sense of the word as a Republican senator of Virginia’s native land.

That was my first impression, but I found cause to alter it slightly. As I came to know her better, new avenues opened up in her soul. She had an excellent brain, very clear, shrewd and subtle, and behind all her fancies I was aware of a solid rock of common-sense. She was not a ready talker, and never rhapsodised. Little odd phrases, a shrug and a laugh, gave the key to her whimsical world. But on a matter of prosaic fact I found her amazingly practical. More than once she offered me advice, with a little wise air which spoke of youth, but with a penetration, too, which took my breath away. I put my surprise into words. “Of course I’m practical,” she said. “I’m more than half Scotch, you know.”

I thought nothing of it at the time, for American girls have a habit of being either Scotch or early Norman. I remember asking her if she had ever been to Scotland, and she said⁠—No: not yet. She had not had time. But some day⁠ ⁠…

I was inclined to be a little angry with both her and Linford. He went about like a sheep, a ridiculous figure of purposeless melancholy, and the deeper he sank in this mood the worse it was for his chances. As for the lady, I began to think her almost inhuman. I wondered if she were not perfectly heartless, hollow within like an Ell-woman. She seemed unconscious of the havoc she was causing everywhere. I think I would have preferred a common flirt to this unearthly aloofness. But her eyes used always to make me revise my judgments: they were so innocent and young. Some day she would awaken, I told myself. Some day the sleeping princess would be kissed into life. But I was pretty certain that, unless a miracle happened, it would be none of Linford’s doing.

It was one morning in the Park in early May that she exploded the mine under my feet. She had been riding with Linford, and turned, as I came up, to accompany me. I don’t know what they had been talking about, but her eyes were shining, her colour high, and her lips very tight.

“We have been discussing Scotch places,” she volunteered. “It is very tiresome. I wanted a place, and Mr. Linford seems to have got a long lease of it. He offered to make it over to me, but of course that was impossible. It’s a great nuisance, for I had set my heart on it.”

I asked the name, and even as I asked I think I guessed the answer.

“Hardriding,” she said. “A little old place in the Borders. My family lived there long ago, and I have always meant to make a pilgrimage to it. Caroline Amysfort is going to Bayreuth, so I shall set up as hostess on my own account. If I can’t get Hardriding I must have Cauldshaw. Will you come and stay with me?”

I listened to her, I hope, with an impassive face, but inwardly I was a volcano of excitement. Hardriding and Cauldshaw! Home and Douglas! Was the circuit by some amazing chance to be completed? I wondered how soon I could decently make an appointment with Miss Virginia and get the whole story. She was going away for the week end, but would be free on Tuesday, rather late. I hugged my impatience for three beastly days.

I had expected a fragment, and found instead a complete and well-authenticated tale. I blessed that lovable American seriousness about genealogies. There was the pedigree neatly inscribed, with excerpts from registers and letters, as businesslike, as irrefutable, as a share certificate. After old Sir Piers fell at Preston his eldest son, Gideon, fled to France, and thence to the Canadas. He fought under the French flag, and rose to a colonelcy before he fell at Quebec. He had married a Frenchwoman, and their son⁠—Lewis, I think⁠—took to the sea and did good trade in the smuggling and privateering line along the New England coast. He settled in North Carolina, and, being rich from his ventures, bought a handsome property, and built a manor-house in the colonial style. With his granddaughter the male line of Home⁠—Miss Virginia pronounced it to rhyme with “loam”⁠—ended. She married a Dasent, son of a neighbouring squire, and was Miss Virginia’s grandmother. There it was, all set down in black and white, and very prettily she expounded it to me. I had found the Hardriding stock at last. It had come back to me out of the mist with ample credentials.

Miss Virginia at Cauldshaw, Linford at Hardriding, and between them the Green Glen! Surely the stag was being set at last for the play. My first impulse was to tell her the whole romance. I pictured her delight; I saw the prosaic Linford take on the colour of poetry. But a scruple deterred me. It would be breaking faith with the Green Glen. If the spell were there it needed no preparation of mine for its working. Those starry influences called for respectful treatment. I would go to Hardriding, and some day⁠—some mellow autumn day⁠—Miss Virginia would cross the hills, and Linford would be there by the Bower to meet her!

Meanwhile all that summer the course of true love ran badly. The two were friends after a fashion, but Linford was such a clumsy and uneasy being, and Miss Virginia so swift and evasive, that it seemed impossible that that friendship could ripen. I got very sick of the whole business, angry with Linford, and puzzled about the lady. At one moment I called her inhuman, at another angelic: but, whatever view one took (and after all they came to the same conclusion), she was the most heartbreaking beauty. Her wild childlike eyes looked through one as if to a pleasant country beyond. There is a Greek fable, isn’t there? about some hero who needed the touch of his mother the Earth to give him strength. I wondered if she would ever find that earthkinship, which means common humanity.

IX

In early August the Lammas floods were high, so that sultriness was purged from the air and the world left clean and rain-washed and sweet-scented. I was staying at Cauldshaw, in a small party which tried in vain to induce its dancing hostess to be still. She was in wild spirits, out at all hours, a crony of shepherds, already learned in the ways of the moors. She had come back, she said, to her own country, and lived every hour in a whirl of delight and wonder. The long round-shouldered hills, the clear burns, the very homely simplicity of the old land ravished her heart. I counted the days till I could take her to the Green Glen.

Then the party melted away, and it was arranged that she should pay a visit of state to Hardriding. I also was bidden, and Linford spent his days in a fever of expectation. Miss Virginia was scrupulous about the details. She would walk across the hills by the old raiding road from Cauldshaw. I showed her the way, which traversed the Green Glen, and on the map I pointed out the Bower. She clapped her hands with delight at my tale⁠—the barest sketch⁠—of the Home doings. “What an adventure!” she cried. “I shall tell you all about it at dinner. I feel like a princess coming home to her kingdom.”

I sincerely hoped that she was. If the Fates were kind this airy spirit should feel the antique spell of earth, and I dared to think that two wanderers might find a home.

To this hour I remember every incident of that autumn day. It was the 3rd of September. The morning broke cold and misty, but by ten o’clock the sun had burned up the rime, and the hills slept in a bright windless calm. I was shooting with Linford, and set out from Cauldshaw at eleven o’clock. Miss Virginia was to leave after luncheon, and, if she followed my directions, would be at Hardriding by six. She would reach the Green Glen about four o’clock, and I laid my plans accordingly.

I shot vilely, for I was full of a curious sense of anticipation. So was Linford, but nothing could impair his skill. We talked very little, I remember; but it took some manoeuvring on my part to have the afternoon beat where I wanted it. Linford would have had us try the moors near the house, for his mind was always turning to Hardriding; but after some persuasion I got him to keep to the hills by the Nine Stane Rig, where we looked down on the Green Glen. Had I told him that Miss Virginia was walking, he would have set off then and there to meet her, and spoiled everything. He kept asking me when she would start. “She’ll have to go round by the Red Ford,” he repeated, “and that means Hardriding at teatime. We needn’t stay too long up here. Hardriding is her family place, so to speak, and I want to be there to welcome her.”

Shortly after three we stood on the summit of the Dun Rig, and as I watched the green shoulders of the Fawn Hope I saw a figure cross the skyline. Then I told Linford the truth. I bade him go up the Glen to meet her and wait for her at the Bower. He looked at me shyly. “You arranged all this?” he asked. “Thanks very much, old man. You’ve been a pretty good friend to me.”

I set off for Hardriding without a glance behind. The Glen was now no place for me. Looking back at my frame of mind, I can see nothing but exhilaration. Some great thing was about to befall two people whom I loved. I had no doubt of the virtue of the place. By devious paths I had brought back to it its old masters. It had whispered its secret to me, and I had repaid it. For the moment I felt that time was not, that death was little, and change a mockery. The wise years let nothing die, and always the circle came full again, bringing back lost hopes and dreams. The still and golden afternoon spoke the same message to my heart. I felt the serene continuance of all things, the sense of something eternal behind the trivial ways of man.

I reached Hardriding a little after four, and according to my plan sat down to read and smoke. But I soon found that idleness was impossible. I was strung too high with expectation. I wandered into the library, and then into the garden, but my eyes were always turning to the shoulder of hill which marked the opening of the Fawn Glen. Then I resolved to go to meet Linford. Whatever had happened, it would be right for me to welcome Miss Virginia to Hardriding.

Before I had crossed the lawns my mood changed utterly. I suddenly became a prey to black forebodings. The doggerel Latin of True Thomas rang in my head like the croak of a raven:⁠—

Ubi Faunus fluit
Spes mortalis ruit.

I tried to laugh at it. I told myself that the verses were no doubt the work of a foolish eighteenth-century parson. What harm could follow the meeting of two friends in a hill glen where their forebears had fought and loved? But I reasoned in vain. A deadly depression overmastered me. The light had gone out of the sky, and the bent, all yellow in the westering sun seemed wan as death.

Where Fawn flows
Man’s hope goes.

The dolorous refrain would not leave me.

I emerged from the park into the water meadows where Fawn runs deep among flags and meadowsweet. Beyond them I came to the lower glen, where the fir-clad slopes leave a thin strip of pasture by the stream. Here I should have met the two, but there was no sign of them. I looked at my watch and found it after five.

Then I began to quicken my pace. My depression had turned to acute anxiety. Before me was half a mile of open strath, and then the Green Dod, where the Glen turned sharply to the right. I ran that half-mile with dread in my heart of what I might see beyond it. But when I came to the Green Dod there was still no sign of a human being. The Fawn flows round the shoulder of hill in a narrow defile, at the upper end of which begins the Green Glen. I resolved to wait there, for I realised that I could not enter the Glen. I can give no reason for this, but I knew the truth of it. My feet could not have carried me round the shoulder of hill.

I did not wait long. Suddenly down the defile came a single figure. It was Linford, but even to my distraught sight a different Linford from him I had known. As I have said he was a big fellow, a little ungainly, a little afraid of his size. But now he was a noble figure of a man, and as he strode along there was a strange mastery and dignity in him. But why was he alone? I blinked my eyes, for I saw that he was not alone. He carried in his arms something slim and white and very quiet. I crouched behind a boulder as he came near, but he had no eyes for anything but his burden. His head was bent over it, and his face was wild and drawn with grief. Then I saw that a fair head lay limply in the crook of his arm and that the face was very pale.⁠ ⁠…

The doctors called it heart failure. Miss Virginia, said one of them in a moment of poetry, had for years had a frail chariot for her body and the hones of her spirit had driven too fiercely. She must have had heart trouble, though no one had diagnosed it. The hill walk from Cauldshaw had been too much for her. The same man spoke wisely about the evils of our modern life. “Most people today,” he said, “have temperaments that prey on their bodies. They must live at white heat and the shell cracks.⁠ ⁠…”

Years afterwards, when time had taken the edge off his grief, Linford told me something of what happened. “She met me, looking very well and jolly, and we walked to the place you call the Bower. You may laugh at me, but I tell you I had a presentiment that something was going to happen, but I couldn’t be sure whether it was good or bad.⁠ ⁠… She looked all round the Glen and sighed happily, as if she had found something she liked very much. Then suddenly she gave a little cry and went very white. I caught her, and saw that she was all in a shiver. She was staring at the burn, and her eyes were round and frightened like a deer’s. Then she smiled again, and turned to me with a look⁠—Oh, my God, I can never forget it! It was so kind and happy and⁠ ⁠… She must have cared for me all the time, and like a blind fool I didn’t know it. She put her arms round my neck and said, ‘My ain true love’⁠—I suppose she was quoting from a Scotch song. And just as I was bursting with joy I felt that her cheek was cold.⁠ ⁠…”

Now it is a curious thing, but in the Scotichronicon of Hume of Calzeat⁠—it is in manuscript, and I do not think anyone living has read it besides myself⁠—there is a version of the story of Maid Marjory. And according to that version, when the lady confronted her father in the Green Glen, she put her arm around the Douglas’s neck, and said, “My ain true love.”