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 wicked, and you my pure good wife.”

“See, then, I have had no temptations, but thou hast lived in the midst of great ones.  Then, how natural and how easy was it for thee to do wrong!”

“Oh, how you love me, Katherine!”

“God knows.”

“And for this wrong you will not forsake me?”

She took from her bosom the St. Nicholas ribbon.  “I give it to thee again.  At the first time I loved thee; now, my husband, ten thousand times more I love thee.  As I went through the papers, I found it.  So much it said to me of thy true love!  So sweetly for thee it pleaded!  All that it asks for thee, I give.  All that thou hast done wrong to me, it forgives.”