ginning to end, had arrived at his conclusions, and had definitely
settled his future plans.

Reflection had strengthened him in the resolution to follow his first
impulse when he parted from Zack in the street, and begin the attempt to
penetrate the suspicious secret that hid from him and from every one the
origin of Valentine's adopted child, by getting possession of the Hair
Bracelet which he had seen laid away in the inner drawer of the bureau.
As for any assignable reason for justifying him in associating this Hair
Bracelet with Madonna, he found it, to his own satisfaction, in young
Thorpe's account of the strange words spoken by Mrs. Peckover in Mr.
Blyth's hall--the suspicions resulting from these hints being also
immensely strengthened, by his recollections of the letter signed "Jane
Holdsworth," and containing an enclosure of hair, which he had examined
in the cattle-shed at Dibbledean.

According to that letter, a Hair Bracelet (easily recognizable if
still in existence, by comparing it with the hair enclosed in Jane
Holdsworth's note) had once been the property of Mary Grice. According
to what Zack had said, there was apparently some incomprehensible
confusion and mystery in connection with a Hair Bracelet and the young
woman whose extraordinary likeness to what Mary Grice had been in her
girlhood, had first suggested to him the purpose he was now pursuing.
Lastly, according to what he himself now knew, there was actually a
hair Bracelet lying in the innermost drawer of Mr. Blyth's bureau--this
latter fragment of evidence assuming in his mind, as has been already
remarked, an undue significance in relation to the fragments preceding
it, from his not knowing that hair bracelets are found in most houses
where there are women in a position to wear any jewelry ornament at all.

Vague as they might be, these coincidences were sufficient to startle
him at first--then to fill him with an eager, devouring curiosity--and
then to suggest to him the uncertain and desperate course which he was
now firmly resolved to follow. How he was to gain possession of the
Hair Bracelet without Mr. Blyth's knowledge, and without exciting the
slightest suspicion in the painter's family, he had not yet determined.
But he was resolved to have it, he was perfectly unscrupulous as to
means, and he felt certain beforehand of attaining his object. Whither,
or to what excesses, that object might lead him, he never stopped and
never cared