Application of The Question

But how to save him? How to approach him? How to keep down my
own sense of wrong, my own feeling of misery, while representing
the wishes and the feelings of that good old man--that venerable
father? These were questions to afflict, to confound me! Still,
I was committed; I must do what I had promised; undertake it at
least; and the conviction that such a task was to be the severest
trial of my manliness, was a conviction that necessarily helped to
strengthen me to go through with it like a man, What I had heard from Mr. Edgerton in relation to his son, though
new, and somewhat surprising to myself, had not altered, in any
respect, my impressions on the subject of his conduct toward, or
with, my wife. Indeed, it rather served to confirm them. I could
have told the old man, that, in losing all traces of his son in
the neighborhood of my dwelling the night when he pursued him, he
had the most conclusive proofs that he had gone to no gaming-houses.
But where did he go? That was a question for myself. Had he entered
my premises, and hidden himself amidst the foliage where I had myself
so often harbored, while my object had been the secret inspection
of my household? Could it be that he had loitered there during the
last few nights of my wife's illness, in the vain hope of seeing
me take my departure? This was the conclusion which I reached,
and with it came the next thought that he would revisit the spot
again that night. Ha! that thought! "Let him come!" I muttered to
myself. "I will endeavor to be in readiness!"