Deirdre stood still. Her arms dropped from her face. She threw back her head, her eyes met his unflinchingly.
"You—you have killed him?"
His voice was harsh with the effort to speak.
"Yes," she said.
A gust of passion rushed over him. It flooded him with a vigour, and exultation that transformed him.
He strode towards her. His arms imprisoned her. He held her, and kissed her with the hungry kiss of a lover, long denied.
"Deirdre, Deirdre!" he sobbed. "That you should have—It was for me to do—that. I meant to, to-night. Do you think I could have lived ... breathed ... been sane, while you ... were near him?"
He crushed her in his arms again. They sobbed together childishly.
Mrs. Cameron went into the other room—her sitting-room with its shiny black horse-hair furniture, and the cupboard in which her spinning wheel had stood since the days of Donald Cameron's greatness. The beloved blue vase that she had saved from the fire was still on the chiffonier. She sat in the room she had been so proud of, a long time, her hands clasped in her lap, reviewing her memories.
They came in straggling lines and phalanxes—memories of her youth, of an old sad time, of her voyage across the seas beside Donald Cameron, of their journey into the hills, of the days of struggle and toil and domestic tranquility that had given her a son, of her first fear and loneliness in the silent world of the trees, and of the gaunt men who had come to her out of them.