-I can't explain it--but I want to put my
arms round his neck and tell him about Mary.

March 14th. I locked up the end of the cravat in my writing-desk. No
change in the dreadful suspicions that the bare sight of it rouses in
me. I tremble if I so much as touch it.

March 15th, 16th, 17th. Work, work, work. If I don't knock up, I shall
be able to pay back the advance in another week; and then, with a little
more pinching in my daily expenses, I may succeed in saving a shilling
or two to get some turf to put over Mary's grave, and perhaps even a few
flowers besides to grow round it.

March 18th. Thinking of Robert all day long. Does this mean that he is
really coming back? If it does, reckoning the distance he is at from New
York, and the time ships take to get to England, I might see him by the
end of April or the beginning of May.

March 19th. I don't remember my mind running once on the end of the
cravat yesterday, and I am certain I never looked at it; yet I had the
strangest dream concerning it at night. I thought it was lengthened
into a long clew, like the silken thread that led to Rosamond's Bower.
I thought I took hold of it, and followed it a little way, and then got
frightened and tried to go back, but found that I was obliged, in spite
of myself, to go on. It led me through a place like the Valley of the
Shadow of Death, in an old print I remember in my mother's copy of
the Pilgrim's Progress. I seemed to be months and months following it
without any respite, till at last it brought me, on a sudden, face to
face with an angel whose eyes were like Mary's. He said to me, "Go on,
still; the truth is at the end, waiting for you to find it." I burst out
crying, for the angel had Mary's voice as well as Mary's eyes, and woke
with my heart throbbing and my cheeks all wet. What is the meaning of
this? Is it always superstitious, I wonder, to believe that dreams may
come true?

* * * * * * *

April 30th. I have found it! God knows to what results it may lead; but
it is as certain as that I am sitting here before my journal that I
have found the cravat from which the end in Mary's hand was torn. I
discovered it last night; but the flutter I was in, and the nervousness
and uncertainty I felt, prevented me from noting down this most
extraordinary and unexpected event at the time when it happened. Let me
try if I can preserve the memory of it in writing now.

I was going home rather late from where I work