So far, then, Woodward, she felt, stood without blame with respect to his brother.  And how could she suspect Caterine to have been the agent of that gentleman, when she knew now that her object in seeking an interview with herself was to put her on her guard against him?  The case was clear, and, to her, dreadful as it was clear.  She felt herself now, however, in that mood which no sympathy can alleviate or remove.  She experienced no wish to communicate her distress to any one, but resolved to preserve the secret in her own bosom.  Here, then, was she left to suffer the weight of a twofold affliction—­the dread of Woodward, with which Caterine’s intelligence had filled her heart, feeble, and timid, and credulous as it was upon any subject of a superstitious tendency—­and the still deeper distress which weighed her down in consequence of Charles Lindsay’s treachery and dishonor.  Alas! poor Alice’s heart was not one for struggles, nurtured and bred up, as she had been, in the very wildest spirit of superstition, in all its degrading ramifications.  There was something in the imagination and constitution of the poor girl which generated and cherished the superstitions which prevailed in her day.  She could not throw them off her mind, but dwelt upon them with a kind of fearful pleasure which we can understand from those which operated upon our own fancies in our youth.  These prepare the mind for the reception of a thousand fictions concerning ghosts, witches, fairies, apparitions, and a long catalogue of nonsense, equally disgusting and repugnant to reason and common-sense.  It is not surprising, then, that poor Alice’s mind on that night was filled with phantasms of the most feverish and excited description.  As far as she could, however, she concealed her agitation from her parents, but not so successfully as to prevent them from perceiving that she was laboring under some extraordinary and unaccountable depression.  This unfortunately was too true.  On that night she experienced a series of such wild and frightful visions as, when she was startled out of them, made her dread to go again to sleep.  The white hare, the Black Spectre, but, above all, the fearful expression her alarmed fancy had felt in Woodward’s eye, which was riveted upon her, she thought, with a baleful and demoniacal glance, that pierced and prostrated her spirit with its malignant and supernatural power; all these terrible images, with fifty other incoherent chimeras, flitted before the wretched girl’s imagination during her feverish slumbers.  Towards morning she sank into a somewhat calmer state of rest, but still with occasional and flitting glimpses of the same horrors.

So far the master-spirit had set, at least, a portion of his machinery in motion, in order to work out his purposes; but we shall find that his designs became deeper and blacker as he proceeded in his course.