"What do you think Cathy has told me?" exclaimed Garth one day, when he found his wife sitting alone in their favorite room--a handsome library, with a side window commanding a view of Church-Stile House and the church. "I really think the girl must be clean daft to dream of such a thing, but she declares that with or without my consent she means to marry Logan." "Well?" and Queenie laid down her work and smiled placidly in his face. "Well, how can you sit there in that provokingly unconcerned way, you very tiresome woman, and looking exactly as though it were no news to you at all? our Cathy, too!" "Because I have expected it all along," returned his wife calmly. "I knew, however much she might resist it, that in the end she would be true to herself and him." "Why, if this is not enough to try a man's patience," exclaimed Garth, quite irritably for him. "You talk as though you approve of this monstrous match." "So I do. Mr. Logan is a good man; and then he loves Cathy so dearly." "But he is double her age; he is forty-five if he is a day, and Cathy not more than three-and-twenty. Why, they will look like a father and daughter! The very idea is absurd!" "The discrepancy between their ages is a pity of course," returned Queenie, with an admiring look at her own "gude-man." Garth was handsomer than ever, every one said so. "But I know one thing, that Cathy will never fancy any one else." And, as usual, Garth soon discovered that his wife's surmises were correct. "So you are going to stand on tiptoe all your life, trying to get a peep at your husband's excellences?" Queenie said to her, with a lively recollection of a conversation between them. "Oh, you foolish Cathy!" "No; I am the wise Catherine now," returned her friend. "You see we poor women can't escape our fate after all. I am tired of running away from myself and him, and pretending not to care for his liking me; so I just told him that he must put up with me, faults and all, for I won't promise to mend; but if I am not the better for being with him--" and then she stopped suddenly, and her eyes were full of tears. "Oh, Queenie, don't laugh at me, and don't let Garth say a word against it; for, though he were as old as my father, I love and honor and venerate him, and I mean to take care of him, and make him happy all his life long." And Cathy kept her word. Garth grumbled a good deal, and would not be reconciled, and turned sulky when he met them strolling up the lane together; but even he was driven at last to confess that it had made a woman of Cathy, and that it had not turned out amiss after all. Mr. Logan was no longer poor when they married, and it was by her brother's advice that they left Miss Cosie to take care of the vicarage, and came to live at Church-Stile House, where Ted was holding solitary state.