Indeed you must come home, indeed I cannot bear—I know not where you are. Was such your commands? My lord, your father, says he will send this with the other letters, the Lord can alone tell if you will get this, as my lord, your father, as you know, lies to me without pity, yet complaints of him are not the reason of my writing, yet I would say few women would take from him what I do patiently being past long since all attempts to move either you or him to any consideration for me whose fate is the heartbroken and neglected, with no friend but one whom you know—and do not like, I mean Tom Wharton, who is often here now; but I cannot help it; he knew my boy and the house is killing me with its emptiness and loneliness; my lord is morose and hates me and therefore, though God knows I would be willing never to see your face again, I do ask you to come back if you would not find me mad or flown; perhaps you do not care that my heart is broken and that since the boy— The Master of Stair tore the letter savagely across. “Why did I open it?” he cried passionately. “Why does she reproach me? Can I give her back her boy?” He crossed to the dying fire and thrust the half-unread, ill-written letter into the heart of the flames and his face was very bitter. “Had I not mated with a fool, my luck might have been better,” he said fiercely. “When I have fought and silenced all the world her wails rise to unnerve me—the boy!—what does she know what it was to me to lose that boy! But you shall not forget grief, madam, in the company of Tom Wharton.” He flung himself into his old place at the table; outside a clock struck three; on the hearth his wife’s letter flared into a tall thin flame above the dead coals. “God knows I would be willing never to see your face again—” The sentence recurred to him dully; so utterly alone—who was there that would care to see him again? He knew of none; the boy was dead. “I care not,” he muttered to himself. “I am the Master of Stair. I am Scotland. I do not need a home—a woman’s affection—those things are for smaller men and what matter if they point at me as a man accursed—is not my name stately high above it all? I care not.” Yet even as he spoke his head sank wearily into his hand and the helpless, useless tears were blinding him. CHAPTER XII THE LOVE OF DELIA Delia Featherstonehaugh sat alone in the back parlor of “The Sleeping Queen”; it was New Year’s Eve, about six o’clock and the quiet little inn was deserted. It stood in a dreary back street close to Westminster Abbey and was a resort well-known to Jacobites and almost unheard of by others; in the upper rooms was a printing-press that turned out hundreds of the lampoons and pamphlets that daily strewed the city and in this dull chamber more than one famous gentleman had drunk to the health of King James.