"
She nodded and left him. He made no attempt to follow--he felt no
suspicion that she was deceiving him.
"It's strange, but I can't help believing her," he said to
himself, and walked away, bewildered, toward home.
On entering the house, his mind was still so completely absorbed
by its new subject of interest that he took no notice of what his
mother was doing when he came in with the bottle of medicine. She
had opened her old writing-desk in his absence, and was now
reading a paper attentively that lay inside it. On every birthday
of Isaac's since she had written down the particulars of his
dream from his own lips, she had been accustomed to read that
same paper, and ponder over it in private.
The next day he went to Fuller's Meadow.
He had done only right in believing her so implicitly. She was
there, punctual to a minute, to answer for herself. The last-left
faint defenses in Isaac's heart against the fascination which a
word or look from her began inscrutably to exercise over him sank
down and vanished before her forever on that memorable morning.
When a man, previously insensible to the influence of women,
forms an attachment in middle life, the instances are rare
indeed, let the warning circumstances be what they may, in which
he is found capable of freeing himself from the tyranny of the
new ruling passion.
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