ith fury, as when the forked lightning
bursts from the cloud and shatters a house or strikes a living person
dead. And it was like her that she spoke almost as quietly as Graham,
neither shrinking nor trembling.

"This, then, is the cause of your strange carriage, Lord Dundee, which
I noted on your coming, and tried to explain in a simple and honorable
way, for I had no key to your mind, and have not known you for what
you are till this night. So that was the base thing you have been
imagining in your heart, as you rode through the North Country, and
that was the spur that drave you home with such haste--to guard your
honor as a husband, and to put to shame an adulterous wife? Pardon me
if I was slow in catching your meaning, the charge has taken me
somewhat by surprise." And already, before her face, Dundee began to
weaken and to shrink for the first time in his life.

"And you are the man whom I, Jean Cochrane, have loved alone of
all men in the world, and for whose love I forsook my mother and my
house, and became a stranger in the land! You are the husband whom
I trusted utterly, for whom I was willing to make the last sacrifice
of life, of whom I boasted in my heart, in whom I placed all my joy! I
knew you were a bigot for your cause; I knew you were cruel in the
doing of your work; I knew you had a merciless ambition; I knew you
had an unmanageable pride; I have not lain in your arms nor lived
by your side, I have not heard you speak nor seen you act, without
understanding how obstinate is the temper of your mind, and how fiery
is your heart. For those faults I did not love you less, and of
them I did not complain, for they were my own also. That you were
incapable of trusting, that you could suspect your wife of dishonor,
that you would be moved by the report of a spy, a baseborn peasant
man, that you could offer the last gross, unpardonable insult to a
virtuous woman, is what I never could have even imagined. The
Covenanters called you by many evil names, and I did not believe
them. I believe every one of them now--they did not tell half the
truth. They called you persecutor and murderer, they forgot to call
you what I now do. As when one strikes a cur with a whip, so to
your fair, false face I call you liar and coward. Peace till I be
done, and then you may kill me, for it were better I should not live,
and if I had the sword of one of my kinsfolk here I would kill you
where you stand. God in heaven, what an