“Alone in my cuddy with no one near me I and my thoughts are struggling with each other,” Pearl wrote in late fall or early winter. “My thoughts have drifted off in a dream world. They have got the better of me. They keep drifting to that Nobody. In twilight hours my thoughts form swiftly of one fancy and then the other of him. They have woven a strong cord around my heart which seems never to be broken. I keep thinking of him and can’t help it. Aw shucks, he is in mind morning, noon and night. What makes me keep picturing him in my mind — his look, his ways, his talk and every thing about him — and what it all means, I can’t tell. I never thought of any one else as I do him. I can’t account for the uneasy feeling around my heart unless it is, I love him. Oh God, can it be I love him? Lord this has slipped upon me unexpected. Oh what sorrow it brought. It would have been a blessing to any one else, but to me it will eat my heart away. I guess I have loved him from urchin days but never realized it till just now. No hopes what ever of winning his love. God, what I have to suffer and why it is I can’t tell. I haven’t done any thing to any one that I would be chasened for, but God’s will be done. It’s a higher power above that controls our nature. We love whether it’s our wishes our not. I know it isn’t my will to love the one I do. It came with such a shock as if from the streaks of lightning. It shot through my weak body and unnerved me so I haven’t hardly recovered from the shock yet for it was all so strange and new and I’m not quite used to it yet.”

     “Winter passed on with her sleet and snow,” Pearl continued, perhaps in the spring. “I care but a little for the wind’s loud roar for I’m near the old fire place. I sit there sadly dreaming of my one love here no more. Aw, I dream of a bright future of happy moments I may spend with him when he returns home. My, the winter is gone before I hardly knew it for I heard every few days some thing of my Ideal man but I didn’t know he was till long after he had gone. As you know from girlhood days, I have had my Ideal for he is the one boy for me by and by. I have pictured my sweet many times — his height, his eyes, his weight, and last of all the color of his hair, but never dreamed of him being in miles of here, but when I did awaken I awoke with a shock to think I had known him a many a long day and had learned to love him very dearly before I knew it.”

     “Well, spring is here,” Pearl next wrote. “I have changed places but he is in my mind all the long spring days but I love him better each day and each day that passes I think I can’t love him any better but the dawning day brings on a stronger love than the preceding day. I guess there’s no limit to this love of mine.”

     “Spring days are slipping by as if on wings,” Pearl wrote, a little later. “The fleeter they are, the closer the summer draws nearer, the quicker I will get to see my honey for I have heard he will be here about the 26th of July.”

     The third volume of Pearl’s diary is almost entirely void of dates, although it does appear to reflect chronological writing.

     “This is Spring,” Pearl began. “This is a beautiful place with its birds and flowers. It would be an Ideal home if it wasn’t such an out away place. I like the inhabitants but don’t like the location of the site with all of its beauty. I don’t want to make my home here forever. Every one wants to be so good to us but for all their kindness I don’t like here by no means. I have a few friends but a very few they are. I have one that’s every thing to me. His name, that will never do to tell. Well, his name will be Mr. Nobody here.”

     About that time, Mr. Nobody became ill.

     “Spring yet. Mr. Nobody is quite sick,” she wrote. “I have prayed that he might get well.”

     “We have had company all day and have had a nice time in the afternoon,” Pearl wrote one Sunday. “Mr. Nobody came and he was so weak he could hardly walk.”

     “He is a lot better now,” Pearl wrote in an undated entry. “My, his loss of weight, parched lips and all symptoms of a sick person made a scarecrow of him. He has gone. Wished he had stayed longer. This is the first place he’s gone since he got better. The kid has left and gone some where or other.”

     Whatever illness it was that plagued Pearl’s “crush” proved to be of a lingering nature.

     “He is sick again,” she worredly wrote. “The Lord knows whether he will have strength to get over this.”

     “He’s worse,” she wrote, yet still. “Oh Lord, can’t he never get well? Oh, he is bad — worse, he’s just as bad as can be to live. In fact, there seems to be no better in this life for him.”

     And then, to Pearl’s relief, Mr. Nobody’s condition improved.

     “He is better after all. If he did narrowly escape the clutches of death, he is well and strong again. I’m so thankful that my prayer has been answered.”

     Not long thereafter, Mr. Nobody took off on a road trip, giving Pearl nothing much to write about until his return to Harts.

     “Nobody has come back,” she wrote. “My, oh, he looks like I don’t know what with his hair growed out in his temples. He had some pictures made while some where and brought them and showed them to me. They were the ugliest things I ever seen but I told him they were real nice looking and that they looked just like him and that he couldn’t have had one more like him than those were. Ha.”

     “Well, he is now back for a long stay,” Pearl again wrote at a later date. “I guess this old place won’t be quite so desolate now. Just to get a glimpse of him makes the long summer days seems shorter.”