He said it was the rock was pushing him; and sat dreaming again, who had called Robert dreamer: only for a moment, on the edge of tomorrow, all those tomorrows that awaited his feet by years and tracks Chris would never see, dropping the jargons and shields of his creed, thinking again as once when a boy, openly and honestly, kindly and wise:

There will always be you and I, I think. Mother. It’s the old fight that maybe will never have a finish, whatever the names we give to it—the fight in the end between FREEDOM and GOD.

The night was coming in fast Chris saw from her seat on the summit of the Barmekin. Far over, right of Bennachie’s ridges, a gathering of gold cloud gleamed a moment then dulled to dun red. The last of the light would be going soon.

Alow her feet, under the hills, she could see the hiddle of Cairndhu, all settled for the night as she’d left it, the two kye milked and the chickens meated, her corn coming fine in the little park that ran up the hill, its green a jade blur in the soft summer light. Tomorrow she’d be out to tackle the turnips, they were coming up fairly choked with weed.

At first they’d been doubtful about letting her the place, doubtful of a woman body at all. But they’d long forgotten her father, John Guthrie, and the ill ta’en in which he had flitted from Echt twenty-three years before. To them she was just a widow-body, Ogilvie, wanting to take on the coarse little place that hadn’t had a tenant this many a year. She’d moved in early in the April, setting the house to rights, working till she near bared her hands to the bone, scrubbing it out both but and ben, the room where she herself had been born, the kitchen where she’d sat and heard her mother, long syne, that night the twins were born…. And sometimes in the middle of that work in the house or tinkling a hoe out in the parks she’d close her eyes a daft minute and think nothing indeed of it all had happened—Kinraddie, Segget, the years in Duncairn—that beside her Will her brother was bending to weed, her father coming striding peak-faced from the house, she might turn and see her mother’s face…. And she’d open her eyes and see only the land, enduring, encompassing, the summer hills gurling in the summer heat, unceasing the wail of the peesies far off.

And the folk around helped, were kind in their way, careless of her, she would meet them and see them by this road and gate, they knew little of her, she less of them, she had found the last road she wanted and taken it, concerning none and concerned with none….

Crowned with mists, Bennachie was walking into the night: and Chris moved and sat with her knees hand-clasped, looking far on that world across the plain and the day that did not die there but went east, on and on, over all the world till the morning came, the unending morning somewhere on the world. No twilight land anywhere for shade, sun or night the portion of all, her little shelter in Cairndhu a dream of no-life that could not endure. And that was the best deliverance of all, as she saw it now, sitting here quiet—that that Change who ruled the earth and the sky and the waters underneath the earth, Change whose face she’d once feared to see, whose right hand was Death and whose left hand Life, might be stayed by none of the dreams of men, love, hate, compassion, anger or pity, gods or devils or wild crying to the sky. He passed and repassed in the ways of the wind, Deliverer, Destroyer and Friend in one.