Born in 1902, Elizabeth was too young for the first World War. By the time she reached college the War Veterans were returning, demigods, demidevils, a people apart. Elizabeth began to be aware she was shut out from something, but there was no sesame for that door. She stayed out and went on working. She worked like a puppy at a sandbank. By 1928 (when this story begins) she was organising the welfare services of a big paper mill. She ran to conferences and read reports and reviews, but tested all the bright new ideas with a level sobriety of judgment. The millgirls loved her like a sister.

"Our Bet's got her horns out," said her mother. "She was always a grand hand at arranging people's lives. It's a great mercy there's jobs about that lets her do it in peace."

Not only in peace, but to the tune of a salary that made her uncles and forty-second cousins, the small farmers and country carriers from whom she was sprung, chuckle with approval. They were proud of their Betsy, and what was more, they liked her, too; which isn't always the case with the ones that get on. A jolly brown girl, freckles on her nose and big teeth, no beauty, but with a frank open face that won immediate trust, and steady eyes. Red-headed, to be sure, but red heads kept you out of languor. Shoulders squared, she marched on life with such zest that she had nearly forgotten the door without the sesame. Yet sometimes she had dreams; she dreamed of engulfing seas, but no seas engulfed her. Busy, practical and gay, prodigal of herself in good works, like a little hill pony for sturdy strength, she lived on the solid earth and loved her life.

So, when she told her people she was going to marry that lank, stuck-up lad — half a corpse he looked even then — not one among her folk but thought her ill-advised. Not that they said the likes of that to Betsy, who was earning a mint, and had the right to keep her man in idleness if so she pleased. Her mother sniffed with one side of her nose in a way she had, and asked: "And which of the pair of you will stay at home and mind the bairns, I should like to be informed."

Elizabeth, who had a temper, kept it. She knew that the question was not a question, but a plummet dropped in the gulf between Elizabeth as her parents had made her, and Elizabeth as she had made herself; for already this marriage had swung her whole universe away from her habitual self. In a sallow hag-ridden prisoner of war, whose body had been released but not his mind — indeed whose body was still in bondage to the shucks he had eaten and the exposure he had endured — Elizabeth had found a freedom so immense that she trembled before it; and she resented angrily the conclaves of old men and spinsters who talked her man over. No wound, no pension, neither crippled nor blinded nor bedridden – what sort of man was he then, to let himself be kept by his wife? A disordered stomach seemed a queer sort of reason for living off a woman's wages.

"No guts, that's what ails the lad," they said.

"What business is it of theirs?" cried Elizabeth in fury.

"They'll make it their business, whether or no," said her mother, realist to the bone, "so you'd best tell them all about it to begin with."

She hated the need to justify her lover to her tribe. Old men! she thought, baring her teeth. But she was of the tribe; their forthright speech was her own. She knew that the old men were proud of her — their bonny Liz, kind and capable, a spirity lass that warmed you like a nip of Scotch. Half the things they said about her marriage were for the pleasure of her retorts.

"He's just like any other body," said Uncle Benjie. "A gey, ordinary kind o' chiel."

As though, scoffed Elizabeth, he knew all the great ones of the earth.

"A gey few," said Benjie. "I've spoken wi' the Marquis."

"Well," said Elizabeth, "he looks ordinary enough to me."

"O ay," said Benjie, "but he gets his name in the paper."

"Well, so will my man," said Elizabeth. "Just you wait and you'll see."

"And not even a stick leg," continued Uncle Benjie. "I thought I was to see a lad wi' a stick leg. What's come o' the timmer leg, lassie?"

"Ach," said Elizabeth, "it's his intimmers, Benjie." And she flung a phrase over her shoulder that caused the old fellow to double up with mirth. A dozen times in the evening he muttered over to himself "stickit intimmers," and, catching Elizabeth's eye, winked. But Elizabeth's face was stony.

At the wedding feast, Tommy made a sorry bridegroom.

"Ye were some ill," as Uncle Benjie said, "for forgetting he was there." He had not the knack of speech, not with these country folk, forcey with their drinking as with their tongues, and thanks to his connached stomach he couldn't even win their respect by the way he tackled his dram.

"Neither dram nor conversation — you might as well be with the nowt in the field," they thought. When he rose to the toast, he didn't even habber, a graceful thing in a bridegroom, reassuring to the herd. Four drawling chilly sentences, and he was down again. "What was you langnebbit word?" whispered a cousin — and Elizabeth was on her feet, laughing, flinging back the challenge of their indifferent eyes.

"I don't see why a bride can't speak for herself," she cried. And then Tommy heard her prophesy before them all the fame that waited for his book — the book that was his secret and his doom, that had been shaping itself in his tormented mind ever since he hung by the wrists in a German forest.

They cheered her with a bellow; but it wasn't the grand future they were cheering, it was the present, it was Elizabeth herself with her flushed face and shining eyes. When, seven years later, they buried her man (and Tommy Martin remained "yon man of Bet's" to most of his wife's relations, who hardly saw him from the day they married him to the day they saw Elizabeth stand erect and quiet beside his open grave), one and another recalled her sparkling face as she prophesied his fame. "Ay, and she believed it, too, that was the mischief o't."

But it was not the mischief of it. That she believed in Tommy, and he in her belief in him, began his slow release from captivity, which as yet had been nominal. She was the first on whom he had been able to discharge that wood — a handful of defiant boys in the power of a confident enemy. Idiots! They had committed the folly of telling the truth, in wartime, about themselves, and there they were, self-convicted engineers, told off to make enemy munitions. And to counter their refusal, the wood. Six of them hung up by the wrists, toes just off the ground. Life ended there — some other man was born. And between his two faints — Tommy brooded, his slow voice running on in the dusk — some sort of apocalypse. He couldn't explain it, nor why it was him it should have come to. Delirium, perhaps. But no, his brain was never clearer. He seemed to be out of the body, pain was gone: and with superhuman clarity he saw the truth of things. Then, he supposed, he must have fainted again. He remembered the untying and his vain...