“It will be all right,” he said to himself with that sigh of resignation with which we yield to the inevitable, as if there were a certain choice and merit in doing it.  “It is well that the affairs of men are in higher hands than ours.”  John Archdale’s piety was of the kind that utters itself in solitude, or under the breath.

Katie at the moment was upstairs with her mother examining a package of wedding gear that had arrived that day.  She had no hesitation as to whom her choice should have been.  Yet, as she stood holding a pair of gloves, measuring the long wrists on her arm and then drawing out the fingers musingly, it was not of Stephen that she was thinking, or of him that she spoke at last, as she turned away to lay down the gloves and take up a piece of lace.

“Mother,” she said, “I do sometimes feel badly for Master Harwin; he is the only man in all the world that I ever had anything like fear of, and now and then I did of him, such a fierceness would come over him once in a while, not to me, but about me, I know, about losing me.  He was terribly in earnest.  Stephen never gets into these moods, he is always kind and lovable, just as he has been to me as far back as I can remember, only, of course more so now.”

“But things have gone differently with him and with poor Master Harwin,” answered Mrs. Archdale.  “If you had said ‘no’ to Stephen, you would have seen the dark moods in him, too.”

The young girl looked at her mother and smiled, and blushed a little in a charming acknowledgment of feminine power to sway the minds of the sterner half of humanity.  Then she grew thoughtful again, not even flattery diverting her long from her subject.

“But Stephen never could be like that,” she said.  “Stephen couldn’t be dark in that desperate sort of way.  I can’t describe it in Master Harwin, but I feel it.  Somehow, he would rather Stephen would die, or I should, than have us marry.”

“Did he ever say so?”

“Why, no, but you can feel things that nobody says.  And, then, there is something else, too.  I am quite sure that sometime in his life he did something, well, perhaps something wicked, I don’t know what, but I do know that a load lies on his conscience; for one day he told me as much.  It was just as he was going away, the day after I had refused him and he knew of my engagement.  He asked permission to come and bid me goodby.  Don’t you remember?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Archdale.

“He looked at me and sighed.  ‘I’ve paid a heavy price,’ he said half to himself, ‘to lose.’  Then he added, ’Mistress Archdale, will you always believe that I loved you devotedly, and always have loved you from the hour I first saw you?  If I could undo’—­then he waited a moment and grew dreadfully pale, and I think he finished differently from his first intention—­’If I could undo something in the past,’ he said, ’I would give my life to do it, but my life would be of no use.’”