“I am glad to hear you say so.  You are the only person in the house, or out of it, who can advise me.  Mr. Fairlie, in his state of health and with his horror of difficulties and mysteries of all kinds, is not to be thought of.  The clergyman is a good, weak man, who knows nothing out of the routine of his duties; and our neighbours are just the sort of comfortable, jog-trot acquaintances whom one cannot disturb in times of trouble and danger.  What I want to know is this:  ought I at once to take such steps as I can to discover the writer of the letter? or ought I to wait, and apply to Mr. Fairlie’s legal adviser to-morrow?  It is a question—­perhaps a very important one—­of gaining or losing a day.  Tell me what you think, Mr. Hartright.  If necessity had not already obliged me to take you into my confidence under very delicate circumstances, even my helpless situation would, perhaps, be no excuse for me.  But as things are I cannot surely be wrong, after all that has passed between us, in forgetting that you are a friend of only three months’ standing.”

She gave me the letter.  It began abruptly, without any preliminary form of address, as follows—­

“Do you believe in dreams?  I hope, for your own sake, that you do.  See what Scripture says about dreams and their fulfilment (Genesis xl. 8, xli. 25; Daniel iv. 18-25), and take the warning I send you before it is too late.

“Last night I dreamed about you, Miss Fairlie.  I dreamed that I was standing inside the communion rails of a church—­I on one side of the altar-table, and the clergyman, with his surplice and his prayer-book, on the other.

“After a time there walked towards us, down the aisle of the church, a man and a woman, coming to be married.  You were the woman.  You looked so pretty and innocent in your beautiful white silk dress, and your long white lace veil, that my heart felt for you, and the tears came into my eyes.

“They were tears of pity, young lady, that heaven blesses and instead of falling from my eyes like the everyday tears that we all of us shed, they turned into two rays of light which slanted nearer and nearer to the man standing at the altar with you, till they touched his breast.  The two rays sprang ill arches like two rainbows between me and him.  I looked along them, and I saw down into his inmost heart.

“The outside of the man you were marrying was fair enough to see.  He was neither tall nor short—­he was a little below the middle size.  A light, active, high-spirited man—­about five-and-forty years old, to look at.  He had a pale face, and was bald over the forehead, but had dark hair on the rest of his head.  His beard was shaven on his chin, but was let to grow, of a fine rich brown, on his cheeks and his upper lip.  His eyes were brown too, and very bright; his nose straight and handsome and delicate enough to have done for a woman’s.  His hands the same.  He was troubled from time to time with a dry hacking cough, and when he put up his white right hand to his mouth, he showed the red scar of an old wound across the back of it.  Have I dreamt of the right man?  You know best, Miss Fairlie and you can say if I was deceived or not.  Read next, what I saw beneath the outside—­I entreat you, read, and profit.