Kate is obstinate; it is her one fault; I knew how vain would be my entreaties, yet I offered them; how unavailing my arguments, yet they were set forth; how useless my love and my sorrow, yet I showed them to her. "No," she answered, but she flung her arms round my neck as she spoke, and held me as one may hold one's best treasure. "No, no; you are poor, and he is rich. You wouldn't have me break my father's heart: he's so proud, and if he doesn't get some money next month, he will be ruined. I'm not deceiving any one. Mr. Benoliel knows I don't care for him; and if I marry him, he is going to advance my father a large sum of money. Oh, I assure you that everything has been talked over and settled. There is no going from it." "Child! child!" I cried, "how calmly you speak of it! Don't you see that you are selling your soul and throwing mine away?" "Father Fabian says I am doing right," she answered, unclasping her hands, but holding mine in them, and looking at me with those clear, grey eyes of hers. "Are we to be unselfish in everything else, and in love to think only of our own happiness? I love you, and I shall marry him. Would you rather the positions were reversed?" "Yes," I said, "for then I would make you love me." "Perhaps _he_ will," she said bitterly. Even in that moment her mouth trembled with the ghost of a smile. She always loved to tease. She goes through more moods in a day than most other women in a year. Drowning the smile came tears, but she controlled them, and she said-- "Good-bye; you see I am right, don't you? Oh, Jasper, I wish I hadn't told you I loved you. It will only make you more unhappy." "It makes my one happiness," I answered; "nothing can take that from me. And that happiness _he_ will never have. Say again that you love me!" "I love you! I love you! I love you!" With further folly of tears and mad loving words we parted, and I bore my heartache away, leaving her to bear hers into her new life. And now she was to be married to-morrow, and I could not sleep. When the darkness became unbearable I lighted a candle, and then lay staring vacantly at the roses on the wall-paper, or following with my eyes the lines and curves of the heavy mahogany furniture. The solidity of my surroundings oppressed me. In the dull light the wardrobe loomed like a hearse, and my violin case looked like a child's coffin. I reached a book and read till my eyes ached and the letters danced a _pas fantastique_ up and down the page. I got up and had ten minutes with the dumbbells. I sponged my face and hands with cold water and tried again to sleep--vainly. I lay there, miserably wide awake. I tried to say poetry, the half-forgotten tasks of my school days even, but through everything ran the refrain-- "Kate is to be married to-morrow, and not to me, not to me!"