"I have heard you, my love," replied he calmly; "yet you have urged, and you can urge nothing which can persuade me to break my solemn pledge. The hitherto spotless honour of Inverawe shall never be tarnished in my person. Dreadful as is the curse which has been denounced upon me, I am still resolved to act as an honourable man. Yet I will do this much. I will again visit the man in the cave, and insist with him that he shall seek some other place of refuge. I have done enough for him. I have suffered enough on his account. He must go elsewhere. Perhaps I should have come to this resolve yesterday--the time, alas! may now be past. But, come what come may, I am determined that the visit of this night shall be the last that I shall pay to him. He must go elsewhere. Even his own safety requires that he shall do so--and mine! But no matter, he must seek some other asylum." Even this resolve--late though it might be, was, for the time, some consolation to the afflicted mind of his wife. Nay, it was in some degree matter of alleviation to his own sufferings. The broad sunlight of Heaven, and the bustling action of the creatures of this world while all creation is awake, produces a wonderful effect upon the human mind, in relieving it from all those phantoms of anticipated evil which the silent shades of night are so apt to conjure up within it. Inverawe and his lady were less oppressed with gloomy thoughts during that day than might have been supposed possible. It is true, that he often secretly repeated over the denunciation of the apparition, but even yet he would have fain persuaded himself, as he tried to persuade his wife, that he had been the sport of dreams, resulting from some morbid state of his system. "Ticonderoga!" said he, "where is Ticonderoga? I know of no such place; nay, I never heard of any such place; and, in truth, I do not believe that any such place really exists on the face of this earth. Ticonderoga! A name so utterly unknown to me, and so strangely uncouth in itself, would lead me to believe that it is the coinage of my own distempered brain; and, if so, then the whole must have been an illusion. Yet it is altogether unaccountable and inexplicable." Thus it was that Inverawe reasoned during that day; but as night again approached, it brought all its phantoms of the imagination along with it.