I expect nobody to approve of what I have next to tell of myself.  In three weeks from the day when my mother had identified her with the Woman of the Dream, I took Alicia Warlock to church, and made her my wife.  I was a man bewitched.  Again and again I say it—­I was a man bewitched!

During the interval before my marriage, our little household at the cottage was broken up.  My mother and my aunt quarreled.  My mother, believing in the Dream, entreated me to break off my engagement.  My aunt, believing in the cards, urged me to marry.

This difference of opinion produced a dispute between them, in the course of which my aunt Chance—­quite unconscious of having any superstitious feelings of her own—­actually set out the cards which prophesied happiness to me in my married life, and asked my mother how anybody but “a blinded heathen could be fule enough, after seeing those cairds, to believe in a dream!” This was, naturally, too much for my mother’s patience; hard words followed on either side; Mrs. Chance returned in dudgeon to her friends in Scotland.  She left me a written statement of my future prospects, as revealed by the cards, and with it an address at which a post-office order would reach her.  “The day was not that far off,” she remarked, “when Francie might remember what he owed to his aunt Chance, maintaining her ain unbleemished widowhood on thratty punds a year.”

Having refused to give her sanction to my marriage, my mother also refused to be present at the wedding, or to visit Alicia afterwards.  There was no anger at the bottom of this conduct on her part.  Believing as she did in this Dream, she was simply in mortal fear of my wife.  I understood this, and I made allowances for her.  Not a cross word passed between us.  My one happy remembrance now—­though I did disobey her in the matter of my marriage—­is this:  I loved and respected my good mother to the last.

As for my wife, she expressed no regret at the estrangement between her mother-in-law and herself.  By common consent, we never spoke on that subject.  We settled in the manufacturing town which I have already mentioned, and we kept a lodging-house.  My kind master, at my request, granted me a lump sum in place of my annuity.  This put us into a good house, decently furnished.  For a while things went well enough.  I may describe myself at this time of my life as a happy man.

My misfortunes began with a return of the complaint with which my mother had already suffered.  The doctor confessed, when I asked him the question, that there was danger to be dreaded this time.  Naturally, after hearing this, I was a good deal away at the cottage.  Naturally also, I left the business of looking after the house, in my absence, to my wife.  Little by little, I found her beginning to alter toward me.  While my back was turned, she formed acquaintances with people of the doubtful and dissipated sort.  One day, I observed something in her manner which forced the suspicion on me that she had been drinking.  Before the week was out, my suspicion was a certainty.  From keeping company with drunkards, she had grown to be a drunkard herself.