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.