year old, I
can put aside. I will forgive every one but my Lady Suffolk."

So Katherine decided as she broke the seal with firmness and rapidity.
The first paper within the cover made her tremble. It was a half sheet
which she had taken one day from Bram's hand, and it had Bram's name
across it. On it she had written the first few lines which she had had
the right to sign "Katherine Hyde." It was, indeed, her first "wife"
letter; and within it was the precious love-token, her own
love-token,--_the bow of orange ribbon_.

She gave a sharp cry as it fell upon the desk; and then she lifted and
kissed it, and held it to her breast, as she rocked herself to and fro
in a passionate transport of triumphant love. Again and again she fed
her eyes upon it. She recalled the night she wore it first, and the
touch of her mother's fingers as she fastened it at her throat. She
recalled her father's happy smile of proud admiration for her; the
afternoon, next, when she had stood with Joanna at the foot of the
garden and seen her lover wearing it on his breast. She remembered what
she had heard about the challenge, and the desperate fight, and the
intention of Semple's servant to remove the token from her senseless
lover's breast, and her father's noble interference. The bit of fateful
ribbon had had a strange history, yet she had forgotten it. It was her
husband who had carefully sealed it away among the things most precious
to his heart and house. It still kept much of its original splendid
colour, but it was stained down all its length with blood. Nothing that
Hyde could have done, no words that he could have said, would have been
so potent to move her.

"I will give it to him again. With my own hands I will give it to him
once more. O Richard, my lover, my husband! Now I will hasten to see
thee."

[Illustration: "O Richard, my lover, my husband!"]

With relays at every post-house, she reached London the next night, and,
weary and terrified, drove at once to the small hostelry where Hyde lay.
There was a soldier sitting outside his chamber-door, but the wounded
man was quite alone when Katherine entered. She took in at a glance the
bare, comfortless room, scarcely lit by the sputtering rush-candle, and
the rude bed, and the burning cheeks of the fevered man upon it.

"Katherine!" he cried; and his voice was as weak and as tearful as that
of a troubled child.

"Here come I, my dear one."

"I do not deserve it. I have been so