Had a spark of it yet
lived in his heart, suspicion could have found no place. Gone now was
all pride, all control; at his feet she threw herself, clasping her
knees.
"Have you no pity--no pity? He is dead, I tell you. I always cared only
for you."
"Good God!" he cried hoarsely, and pushed her from him; and the horror
in his eyes smote her as his bitterest words could not have done.
Alone once more in the room, she lay face downwards on the floor, and
the echo of his footfall on the stair beat into her brain like the
stroke of doom. Alone till the end of her days she lived a friendless,
wretched woman, eating out her heart with the canker of "the might have
been."
THE GHOST OF PERCIVAL REED
When we look back on the past history of the Border, we might almost
think that St. Andrew and St. George, who are supposed to keep watch and
ward over North and South Britain, had overlooked that hilly stretch of
country that lies between the Solway and the Tyne, leaving the heathen
god Mars to work his turbulent will with it. From the days of the Roman
Wall it was always a tourney-ground, and in the long years when English
and Scots warred against each other, scarcely one day in any year went
past without the spilling of blood on one or other of its hills or
moors.
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