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!