. »Do you even
think of him? Not you! Look yourself in the face like a brave man, and you'll
find you're but a self-deceiver. The wife, the friend, the child, they're all
equally forgot, and you sunk in a mere bog of selfishness.«
    »Mackellar,« said he, with a wonderful return to his old manner and
appearance, »you may say what you will of me, but one thing I never was - I was
never selfish.«
    »I will open your eyes in your despite,« said I. »How long have we been
here? and how often have you written to your family? I think this is the first
time you were ever separate: have you written at all? Do they know if you are
dead or living?«
    I had caught him here too openly; it braced his better nature; there was no
more weeping, he thanked me very penitently, got to bed, and was soon fast
asleep; and the first thing he did the next morning was to sit down and begin a
letter to my lady: a very tender letter it was too, though it was never
finished. Indeed, all communication with New York was transacted by myself; and
it will be judged I had a thankless task of it. What to tell my lady, and in
what words, and how far to be false and how far cruel, was a thing that kept me
often from my slumber.
    All this while, no doubt, my lord waited with growing impatiency for news of
his accomplices. Harris, it is to be thought, had promised a high degree of
expedition; the time was already overpast when word was to be looked for; and
suspense was a very evil counsellor to a man of an impaired intelligence. My
lord's mind throughout this interval dwelled almost wholly in the Wilderness,
following that party with whose deeds he had so much concern. He continually
conjured up their camps and progresses, the fashion of the country, the
perpetration in a thousand different manners of the same horrid fact, and that
consequent spectacle of the Master's bones lying scattered in the wind. These
private, guilty considerations I would continually observe to peep forth in the
man's talk, like rabbits from a hill. And it is the less wonder if the scene of
his meditations began to draw him bodily.
 
It is well known what pretext he took. Sir William Johnson had a diplomatic
errand in these parts; and my lord and I (from curiosity,