This, to my mind, looks ill for the Count. Laura has preserved,
far more perfectly than most people do in later life, the child's
subtle faculty of knowing a friend by instinct, and if I am right
in assuming that her first impression of Count Fosco has not been
favourable, I for one am in some danger of doubting and
distrusting that illustrious foreigner before I have so much as
set eyes on him. But, patience, patience--this uncertainty, and
many uncertainties more, cannot last much longer. To-morrow will
see all my doubts in a fair way of being cleared up, sooner or
later.
Twelve o'clock has struck, and I have just come back to close
these pages, after looking out at my open window.
It is a still, sultry, moonless night. The stars are dull and
few. The trees that shut out the view on all sides look dimly
black and solid in the distance, like a great wall of rock. I
hear the croaking of frogs, faint and far off, and the echoes of
the great clock hum in the airless calm long after the strokes
have ceased. I wonder how Blackwater Park will look in the
daytime? I don't altogether like it by night.
12th.--A day of investigations and discoveries--a more interesting
day, for many reasons, than I had ventured to anticipate.
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