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For something over a year things continued on this unpleasant footing. Then there came a day in spring, when Tweedside was tender with the bursting of buds and the lush green of young grass, when birds sang gaily from every thicket, and the hurrying brown water was dimpled into countless rings by the rising trout. To Helen, listless and indifferent even to Tweed’s charm in springtime, came one of the younger servants saying that a gentleman, desiring to speak to her, waited below. A gentleman to see her? Nay, there must certainly be some mistake, thought Helen. It must assuredly be one of the useless hangers-on of her husband come to ask her to plead for him in regard to some trumpery loan. Well! anything for a novelty, and to take her thoughts away from herself. In this frame of mind she entered the lower room, where the visitor stood with his back to the door, gazing from the window, beside him a large deerhound.

“Well, sir,” she exclaimed sharply, “what is there that I … My God! You!… Back from the dead! Back from the dead!” she wailed.

“Nay. Back from sickness and wounds; back from captivity. Many a message have I sent you, Helen, during the long years; little did I think to find you thus.”

Apathy and listlessness no longer held her in bondage; the full horror of the irrevocable gripped her. Tied for ever to a brute whom she despised and hated, sacrificed to no purpose; whilst here, alive and well, stood the man to whom in ardent youth she had plighted her undisciplined heart. The thought maddened her. And as she struggled to choke back this overwhelming rush of feeling, her husband’s unwelcome entrance broke the tension of a scene the strain of which was past bearing.

Surely it was in an evil moment for himself that her husband entered that room. In a clumsy effort to propitiate his wife’s guest, the unfortunate man laid his hand on the head of the visitor’s dog, and with vicious side-snap the animal bit his hand to the bone.

No consideration had the wife for her husband’s sufferings, no trace of sympathy did she show, as, with an oath, he hurried from the room to bind up the ugly wound–her whole being was centred in the man before her. And her very heart stood still when her stunned ears realised that that man was now saying farewell. Lamentations and entreaties were of no avail. “There remained nothing else for a man of honour to do,” he said. All these years he had been faithful to her; all these years no other woman had entered his thoughts. Had she been as true to him as he had ever been to her, the dearest wish of his heart would have been fulfilled. Nay, had he come home to find her a widow, even so all might yet perhaps have been well. But now, when, with his own eyes, he had seen what, manner of man she had preferred to him, the old love was killed–killed by her act.

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?