him about the streets of London, watching him among the crowd which gathered at Liverpool to see the expedition embark, and he positively asserts that he heard the name of Anne Catherick pronounced behind him as he got into the boat.  His own words are, “These events have a meaning, these events must lead to a result.  The mystery of Anne Catherick is not cleared up yet.  She may never cross my path again, but if ever she crosses yours, make better use of the opportunity, Miss Halcombe, than I made of it.  I speak on strong conviction—­I entreat you to remember what I say.”  These are his own expressions.  There is no danger of my forgetting them—­my memory is only too ready to dwell on any words of Hartright’s that refer to Anne Catherick.  But there is danger in my keeping the letter.  The merest accident might place it at the mercy of strangers.  I may fall ill—­I may die.  Better to burn it at once, and have one anxiety the less.

It is burnt.  The ashes of his farewell letter—­the last he may ever write to me—­lie in a few black fragments on the hearth.  Is this the sad end to all that sad story?  Oh, not the end—­surely, surely not the end already!

29th.—­The preparations for the marriage have begun.  The dressmaker has come to receive her orders.  Laura is perfectly impassive, perfectly careless about the question of all others in which a woman’s personal interests are most closely bound up.  She has left it all to the dressmaker and to me.  If poor Hartright had been the baronet, and the husband of her father’s choice, how differently she would have behaved!  How anxious and capricious she would have been, and what a hard task the best of dressmakers would have found it to please her!

30th.—­We hear every day from Sir Percival.  The last news is that the alterations in his house will occupy from four to six months before they can be properly completed.  If painters, paperhangers, and upholsterers could make happiness as well as splendour, I should be interested about their proceedings in Laura’s future home.  As it is, the only part of Sir Percival’s last letter which does not leave me as it found me, perfectly indifferent to all his plans and projects, is the part which refers to the wedding tour.  He proposes, as Laura is delicate, and as the winter threatens to be unusually severe, to take her to Rome, and to remain in Italy until the early part of next summer.  If this plan should not be approved, he is equally ready, although he has no establishment of his own in town, to spend the season in London, in the most suitable furnished house that can be obtained for the purpose.