frequently, to the test, and exposed to
detection. The next door neighbour might, in that country, be ten miles
off. We used to have a frolic, sometimes at one house and sometimes at
another. Here, where female eyes are very much on the alert, no secret
can long be kept; and very soon father, mother, brothers and the whole
neighbourhood looked upon the thing as certain, not excepting herself,
to whom I, however, had never once even talked of marriage, and had
never even told her that I _loved_ her. But I had a thousand times done
these by _implication_, taking into view the interpretation that she
would naturally put upon my looks, appellations and acts; and it was of
this, that I had to accuse myself. Yet I was not a _deceiver_; for my
affection for her was very great: I spent no really pleasant hours but
with her: I was uneasy if she showed the slightest regard for any other
young man: I was unhappy if the smallest matter affected her health or
spirits: I quitted her in dejection, and returned to her with eager
delight: many a time, when I could get leave but for a day, I paddled in
a canoe two whole succeeding nights, in order to pass that day with her.
If this was not love, it was first cousin to it; for as to any
_criminal_ intention I no more thought of it, in her case, than if she
had been my sister. Many times I put to myself the questions: 'What am I
at? Is not this wrong? _Why do I go?_' But still I went.

149. Then, further in my excuse, my _prior engagement_, though carefully
left unalluded to by both parties, was, in that thin population, and
owing to the singular circumstances of it, and to the great talk that
there always was about me, _perfectly well known_ to her and all her
family. It was matter of so much notoriety and conversation in the
Province, that GENERAL CARLETON (brother of the late Lord Dorchester),
who was the Governor when I was there, when he, about fifteen years
afterwards, did me the honour, on his return to England, to come and see
me at my house in Duke Street, Westminster, asked, before he went away,
to see my _wife_, of whom _he had heard so much_ before her marriage. So
that here was no _deception_ on my part: but still I ought not to have
suffered even the most distant hope to be entertained by a person so
innocent, so amiable, for whom I had so much affection, and to whose
heart I had no right to give a single twinge. I ought, from the very
first, to have prevented the possibility