"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 accusation! A wife of five years, and a mother of only a few weeks, that she should sin with an honorable man who is her friend and her husband's friend! Did Livingstone say, according to that dastard hiding in the wood, that his heart was with us? That was with our cause, and not with me. Did he say honor hindered him? That was not honor towards you, it was honor towards his colors. But honor is a strange word in your ears now, my lord. I have never thought of Livingstone more than any other man who has a good name and has never betrayed a trust. This night my heart is favorable to him, for I saw him in an agony about his honor, and I judge if he were a woman's husband, and she was such a woman as I am before God this day, he would rather die than insult her."