She had heard stories; she had vague ideas of the temptations to which young men--young officers more than all--are subjected; and Jack might have been the victim of some hour of weakness, or evil, or treachery. Holding by the bannisters, she ascended to her bedroom--_their_ room, as it was but one short hour ago--and there on every hand were souvenirs of Jack which had once seemed so strange amid the appurtenances of her toilet; the slippers she had worked for him were under the dressing-table; his razors and brushes lay thereon; his pipes littered the mantelpiece; and his portmanteaux and helmet-case, ready for Egypt, stood in a corner. Novels Maude had read, plays she had seen, stories she had heard of, in which concealed marriages and other horrors had been amply detailed; and in the heart of one of these episodes she now found herself, as they crowded on her memory with bewildering force and pain. She strove to think, to gather her thoughts, in vain. Jack could not be so vile, and yet there was that letter--that horrible letter! 'If this woman is his wife--what then am I? Oh, horror and misery--horror and misery!' thought Maude, covering her face with her tremulous hands, while the hot tears gushed between her slender fingers. Was all this happening to her or to some one else? She almost doubted her own identity--the evidence of her senses. A moment or two she lingered at a window wistfully looking over the landscape, which she had often viewed from thence with Jack's arm round her, and her head on his shoulder, watching dreamily the light of the setting sun falling redly on the long wavy slope of the lovely Pentlands, or the nearer hills of Braid, so green and pastoral, the scene of Johnnie of Braidislee's doleful hunting in the ancient time, and where in a lone and wooded hollow lies the dreary Hermitage beside the Burn, haunted, it is said, in the present day by the unquiet spirit of the beautiful Countess of Stair, the victim of a double and repudiated marriage, and whose wrongs were of the days when George IV. was king; and now as Maude looked, the farewell rays of the sun were fading out on the summit of bluff Blackford, the haunt of Scott's boyhood, and then the sober hues of twilight followed. Of the hill he wrote: 'Blackford! on whose uncultured breast A truant boy I sought the nest, Or listed as I lay at rest; While rose on breezes thin The murmur of the city crowd: And from his steeple jangling loud St. Giles's mingling din.' 'All is over and ended--God help me!' wailed the girl many times as she wrung her white and slender hands, and yet prepared nervously and quickly to take measures that were stern and determined. There seemed to be a strange loneliness in the sunset landscape as she turned from it, and thought how beautiful, yet cruel and terrible, the world of life can be, and choking sobs rose in her throat.