On this point all was a wilderness, vague, inconclusive, confused and crowded within my understanding. I believed that he had approached my wife with evil designs--I believed, without a doubt, that he had passed the boundaries of propriety in his intercourse with her; but I believed not that she had fallen! No! I had an instinctive confidence in her purity, that rendered it apparently impossible that she should lapse into the grossness of illicit love. What, then, was my fear? That she did love him, though, struggling with the tendency of her heart, she had not yielded in the struggle. I believed that his grace, beauty, and accomplishments--his persevering attention--his similar tastes--had succeeded in making an impression upon her soul which had effectually eradicated mine. I believed that his attentions were sweet to her--that she had not the strength to reject them; and, though she may have proved herself too virtuous to yield, she had not been sufficiently strong to repulse him with virtuous resentment. That Edgerton had not succeeded, did not lessen HIS offence. The attempt was an indignity that demanded atonement--that justified punishment equally severe with that which should have followed a successful prosecution of his purpose. Women are by nature weak. They are not to be tempted. He who, knowing their weakness, attempts their overthrow by that medium, is equally cowardly and criminal. I could not doubt that he had made this attempt; but now it seemed necessary that I should suspend my indignation, in obedience with what appeared to be a paramount duty. A selfish reasoning now suggested compliance with this duty as a mean for procuring better intelligence than I already possessed. I need not say that the doubt was the pain in my bosom. I felt, in the words of the cold devil Iago, those “damned minutes” of him “who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves.” The shapeless character of my fears and suspicions did not by any means lessen their force and volume. On the contrary it caused them to loom out through the hazy atmosphere of the imagination, assuming aspects more huge and terrible, in consequence of their very indistinctness; as the phantom shapes along the mountains of the Brocken, gathering and scowling in the morning or the evening twilight. To obtain more precise knowledge--to be able to subject to grasp and measure the uncertain phantoms which I feared--was, if not to reduce their proportions, at least to rid me of that excruciating suspense, in determining what to do, which was the natural result of my present ignorance.