Philip promised to return the horse or its equivalent; gave a swift acknowledgment of thanks, and a curt good-night; and made off, leaving old Meadows to foot it, and row it, once more back to New York.

’Twas now, till he should reach the camp, but a matter of steady galloping, with ears alert for the sound of other hoof-beats, eyes watchful at crossroads and open stretches for the party he hoped to forestall.  While he had had ways and means to think of, and had been in peril of detection by the British, or in doubt of obtaining a horse without a long trudge to Ellis’s hut, his mind had been diverted from the unhappy interview with Margaret.  But now that swept back into his thoughts, inundating his soul with grief and shame, of the utmost degree of bitterness.  These were the more complete from the recollection of the joyous anticipations with which he had gone to meet her.

Contemplation of this contrast, sense of his desertion, overcame his habitual resistance to self-pity, a feeling against which he was usually on the stronger guard for his knowledge that it was a concomitant of his inherent sensibility.  He quite yielded to it for a time; and though ’twas sharpened by his comparison of the Margaret he had just left, with the pretty, soft-smiling Madge of other days, that comparison eventually supplanted self-pity with pity for her, a feeling no less laden with sorrow.

He dared not think of what her perverseness might yet lead her to.  For himself he saw nothing but hopeless sorrow, unless she could be brought back to her better self.  But, alas, he by whose influence that end might be achieved—­for he could not believe that her heart had quite cast him out—­was flying from her, and years might pass ere he should see her again:  meanwhile, how intolerable would life be to him!  His heart, with the instinct of self-protection, sought some interest in which it might find relief.

He thought of the cause for which he was fighting.  That must suffice; it must take the place of wife and love.  Cold, impersonal, inadequate as it seemed now, he knew that in the end it would suffice to fill great part of that inner heart which she had occupied.  He turned to it with the kindling affection which a man ever has for the resource that is left him when he is scorned elsewhere.  And he felt his ardour for it fanned by his deepened hate for the opposing cause, a hate intensified by the circumstance that his rival was of that cause.  For that rival’s sake, he hated with a fresh implacability the whole royal side and everything pertaining to it.  He pressed his teeth together, and resolved to make that side pay as dearly as lay in him to make it, for what he had lost of his wife’s love, and for what she had lost of her probity.