Three weeks had passed since that eventful night when Miriam had confessed to having taken Barton's will--three weeks passed by her in misery and alone, for on that night her husband had left her. In vain had she pleaded the innocence of her act--in vain she had tried to show him that what she had done, she had done for love of him, by sacrifice of self, in charity, and not in depredation--a pure great act of love, wholly for him, and counting not the cost to herself. Evil that good might come if you will, but evil only so. But all explanation had been futile; he had been deaf to all her pleading, and to her entreaty too. And not that alone, but worse. Without the strong arm of John Dundas to defend her, assuredly he would have struck her. For his puny brain could picture only the material deprivations of the past two years, and the thought of what his body had been denied roused all the brute in him. He refused altogether to believe what she, amid her tears, tried so earnestly to explain--his uncle's mad scheme of revenge. He had railed at her, and stormed, had stamped his feet and sworn, and finally, having exhausted his pitiable rage, had left the house with the coarsest insult on his lips. Since then she had not seen him. Upon John Dundas it had all come with overwhelming force. When the confession fell from her lips he could hardly believe his ears. Was it really she who stood there speaking, out of her own lips condemned--in the words of his wife, a common thief? It could not be. He would have staked his life that if ever honour breathed, it breathed in her. And as he listened there that night to what she had to say his faith in her was justified, nay, intensified a thousand-fold. More than ever--a thousand times more--did she call for admiration in his eyes, for love, aye, and for reverence. She had sacrificed all for her love--for the welfare of the soul of him with whom some strange fate had ordained she should be joined. Strange! more than strange, incomprehensible that such a man should have touched the spring of love in such a woman! With her, love signified self-sacrifice. For it, for him she loved, she must immolate herself--for him, a worthless reprobate, whose only claim to leniency was through pity; while _he_ who would have lived for her and her alone, could only serve her now by leaving her. It was all very terrible to the Major, and taxed sorely his unpretentious little stock of philosophy. For he had a big heart and a single mind, and his life had to be spent beside a woman who had neither. He felt he had a right to growl at fate, and for the past three weeks he had been taking full advantage of that right.