“What,” she asked, “will you not stay with me through the night, and situated as I am?”

“It is impossible; even now I am waited for, and should have been some hours on my way to an appointment which I must not break.  It is not with me as with you; I have obligations to others who depend on me, and who might suffer injury were I to deceive them.”

“But this night, Guy—­there is little of it left, and I am sure you will not be expected before the daylight.  I feel a new terror when I think I shall be left by all, and here, too, alone with the dead.”

“You will not be alone, and if you were, Ellen, you have been thus lonely for many months past, and should be now accustomed to it.”

“Why, so I should, for it has been a fearful and a weary time, and I went not to my bed one night without dreading that I should never behold another day.”

“Why, what had you to alarm you? you suffered no affright—­no injury?  I had taken care that throughout the forest your cottage should be respected.”

“So I had your assurance, and when I thought, I believed it.  I knew you had the power to do as you assured me you would, but still there were moments when our own desolation came across my mind; and what with my sorrows and my fears, I was sometimes persuaded, in my madness, to pray that I might be relieved of them, were it even by the hands of death.”

“You were ever thus foolish, Ellen, and you have as little reason now to apprehend as then.  Besides, it is only for the one night, and in the morning I shall send those to you who will attend to your own removal to another spot, and to the interment of the body.”

“And where am I to go?”

“What matters it where, Ellen?  You have my assurance that it shall be a place of security and good attendance to which I shall send you.”

“True, what matters it where I go—­whether among the savage or the civilized?  They are to me all alike, since I may not look them in the face, or take them by the hand, or hold communion with them, either at the house of God or at the family fireside.”

The gloomy despondence of her spirit was uppermost; and she went on, in a series of bitter musings, denouncing herself as an outcast, a worthless something, and, in the language of the sacred text, calling on the rocks and mountains to cover her.  The outlaw, who had none of those fine feelings which permitted of even momentary sympathy with that desolation of heart, the sublime agonies of which are so well calculated to enlist and awaken it, cut short the strain of sorrow and complaint by a fierce exclamation, which seemed to stun every sense of her spirit.

“Will you never have done?” he demanded.  “Am I for ever to listen to this weakness—­this unavailing reproach of yourself and everything around you?  Do I not know that all your complaints and reproaches, though you address them in so many words to yourself, are intended only for my use and ear?  Can I not see through the poor hypocrisy of such a lamentation?  Know I not that when you curse and deplore the sin you only withhold the malediction from him who tempted and partook of it, in the hope that his own spirit will apply it all to himself?  Away, girl; I thought you had a nobler spirit—­I thought you felt the love that I now find existed only in expression.”