it with you; there was about it nothing of spiritual or of mental congeniality.  But I played the big brother.  I took her to little dances; and to other college affairs.  I gave both to herself and to her widowed mother such little pleasures as it is possible for a man to give to two rather lonely women.  There were other students in the house, and I was not conscious that I was doing anything more than the rest of them.

Then there came a day when the yellow-haired child—–­shall I call her Kathy?—­wanted to go to a pageant in a neighboring town.  It was to last two days, and there was to be a night parade, and floats and a carnival.  Many of the students were going, and it was planned that Kathy and I should take a morning train on the first day, so that we might miss nothing.  Kathy’s mother would come on an afternoon train, and they would spend the night at a certain quiet hotel, while I was to go with a lot of fellows to another.

Well, when that afternoon train arrived, the mother was not on it.  Nor did she come.  Without one thought of unconventionality, I procured a room for Kathy at the place where she and her mother would have stopped.  Then I left her and went to the other hotel to join my classmates.  But carnival-mad; they did not come in at all, and went back on an express which passed through the town in the early morning.

When Kathy and I reached home at noon, we found her mother white and hysterical.  She would listen to no explanations.  She told me that I should have brought Kathy back the night before—­that she had missed her train and thus her appointment with us.  And she told me that I was in honor bound to marry Kathy.

As I write it, it seems such melodrama.  But it was very serious then.  I have never dared analyze the mother’s motives.  But to my boyish eyes her anxiety for her daughter’s reputation was sincere, and I accepted the responsibility she laid upon me.

Well, I married her.  And she put her slender arms about my neck and cried and thanked me.

She was very sweet and she was my—­wife—­and when I was given a parish and had introduced her to my people, they loved her for the white gentleness which seemed purity, and for acquiescent amiability which seemed—­goodness.

I have myself much to blame in this—­that I did not love her.  All these years I have known it.  But that I was utterly unawakened I did not know.  Only in the last few months have I learned it.

Perhaps she missed what I should have given her.  God knows.  And He only knows whether, if I had adored her, worshiped her, things would have been different.

I was very busy.  She was not strong.  She was left much to herself.  The people did not expect any great efforts on her part—­it was enough that she should look like a saint—­that she should lend herself so perfectly to the ecclesiastical atmosphere.