. 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.

Putting myself and my own feelings entirely out of the question (which
it is my duty to do, and which I have done), I, for one, have no doubt
of the propriety of adopting the first of these propos