The clatter of his departing horse's feet rang loud in her ears; and now, great as of old had been her detestation of the man to whom she was tied, it was but a feeble flame in comparison with the furnace of hate that began to rage in her heart. Daily and hourly the anguish of the "might have been" tormented her. Incessantly the words her lover had spoken seethed in her brain: "If even you had been a widow," he had said. "A widow?" ... Ever to the same word her thoughts returned--"a widow." What if he were to die now? If only...! Then she thought of the bitten hand. Was it not more than likely that the dog was mad when, unprovoked, it bit a man? And if it _were_ mad ... But assuredly it was mad! She would ask old Elspeth. Who so wise as Elspeth, who so skilled as she in the treatment of wounds? And if she could _cure_ wounds, why ... perhaps...! Did not wounds sometimes refuse to heal, and did not the patient sometimes gradually sink and die without anybody being to blame? But no comfort was found in Elspeth--no help. Surely the woman was in her dotage. Fool! Why did the feckless old idiot not know that the dog _must_ have been mad? The man was drinking heavily now, goaded by grim terror of that very thing, and sodden with drink. Body and soul the old nurse was hers, she believed. Then, what so easy to make as a mistake in her treatment of the wound--to dress it with an irritating salve instead of with a healing one? what so easy as to inflame a mind already stricken by fear and maddened by drink? _Must_ she speak more plainly the thing that had arisen in her mind? * * * * * Day followed day, and soon rumour spread and grew to certainty that of a surety the dog was mad that had bitten the master. From his room, they said, came the sound of ravings and of shouts. Folk spoke below their breath of how it was said he foamed at the mouth, and few dared venture near. At last there came a night when Elspeth's son crept stealthily by the back stairs to aid his mother in holding down the sick man in the paroxysms of his madness; and the guilty wife, cowering alone in her room, stopped her ears lest awful sounds should reach them. * * * * * Summer was spent, and Tweed murmured seaward between banks ruddy and golden with autumn's foliage. In a house in Edinburgh, not far removed from Holyrood, clad in deep black, there lingered restlessly a Border woman, for whom the months had dragged with halting foot since a certain spring night near Norham. "Will he come?" to herself she whispered for the hundredth time. "Surely he must come." And as she waited, a flush leapt to her cheek at the sound of a step nearing her door. A man entered, grave, almost stern, of face, and she sprang to her feet with a cry, and with outstretched arms, that sank slowly to her side, as her eyes questioned those of her visitor.