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I smiled. “You will pardon me, Judge, but it seems to me,” I said, “that you are trying to invest the whole affair with an occult significance that is subjective. I suppose that in a few hours the matter will be explained and forgotten.”

In a moment we were in one of those foolish little wrangles in which, so far as argument is concerned, the younger man is at a great disadvantage, when the elder, however unreasonable his claims, enforces them with the advantage of age and position. I remember that the desire to convince Kate on the one hand that I was free from what I conceived to be her father’s unreasonableness, and sustain my independence of views on the other hand, led me to say much more than was polite, for I exasperated the old gentleman, and with a curt and not altogether complimentary remark he got up and left the room.

The moment he was gone I turned to the daughter and laughingly said: “Well, my dear, I am afraid I have offended your father without intending it, but you at least understand me, and are free from his superstition.”

To my surprise she regarded me with a serious air, and replied: “I do not know what you mean by superstition. My father believes that something has happened, and I feel that he is right.”

“You do not mean to tell me,” I said, “that you believe anything has happened that can concern us?”

She made no reply. I looked at her with some astonishment, and wondered if I had offended her by opposing her father’s childish views.

“Perhaps,” I persisted, “you, too, think I am stupidly unreasonable because I will not consent to be dishonestly chimerical.”

I well remember the look of sad reproach with which she silently regarded me, and I well remember, too, the thought that came into my mind. I said to myself: “This is the same obduracy that her father has shown. Odd it is that I never noticed the trait in her before.” Then I added, with an equal obduracy that I was not conscious of:

“Perhaps you, too, have discovered some peculiarity of good sense in me that is offensive, and you are afraid that something will happen if we—-“

Here she interrupted me in her quiet, resolute, and reproachful way.

“Something has happened,” she said.

I was amazed. If I had suddenly discovered that the woman I loved was unfaithful to me it could not have produced, in my frame of mind at that moment, a greater shock. It seemed to me then that the wooing of months, the confidence and affection of a year, were to be sacrificed in a moment of infatuated stubbornness. The very thought was so unnatural that it produced a revulsion in my own feelings.

“My darling,” I said, as I went toward her impulsively, “we are playing the unworthy part of fools. Nothing can ever happen that will make us love each other less, or prevent you from being my wife.”

I put my arm around her in the old familiar way. She was passive and irresponsive. She stood there, limply holding the curtain, with one white arm upraised, her beautiful head bent over and her eyes cast down so that I could not look into her face. This stony obduracy was so new and unlike her that I withdrew my arm and stepped back a little to regard her with astonishment, not unmingled with pique. At that moment she lifted her head slowly, and as she looked at me with a dreamy and far-away pathos I saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

“It seems to me,” she said, with a voice that sounded as if it was addressed to an invisible phantom way beyond me. “It seems to me that I shall never be your wife!”

I must have stared at her several seconds in silence. Then I said:

“You are ill. You are not yourself. When you have recovered your normal condition I will come back.”