“You are joking,” he answered, with a wounded air, “and I am terribly serious.  Let me tell you the rest.  I never suspected this superior conspiracy till something less than a year ago.  My father, wishing to provide against his death, informed me of it very solemnly.  I was neither elated nor depressed; I received it, as I remember, with a sort of emotion which varied only in degree from that with which I could have hailed the announcement that he had ordered me a set of new shirts.  I supposed that was the way that all marriages were made; I had heard of their being made in heaven, and what was my father but a divinity?  Novels and poems, indeed, talked about falling in love; but novels and poems were one thing and life was another.  A short time afterwards he introduced me to a photograph of my predestined, who has a pretty, but an extremely inanimate, face.  After this his health failed rapidly.  One night I was sitting, as I habitually sat for hours, in his dimly-lighted room, near his bed, to which he had been confined for a week.  He had not spoken for some time, and I supposed he was asleep; but happening to look at him I saw his eyes wide open, and fixed on me strangely.  He was smiling benignantly, intensely, and in a moment he beckoned to me.  Then, on my going to him—­’I feel that I shall not last long,’ he said; ’but I am willing to die when I think how comfortably I have arranged your future.’  He was talking of death, and anything but grief at that moment was doubtless impious and monstrous; but there came into my heart for the first time a throbbing sense of being over-governed.  I said nothing, and he thought my silence was all sorrow.  ’I shall not live to see you married,’ he went on, ’but since the foundation is laid, that little signifies; it would be a selfish pleasure, and I have never thought of myself but in you.  To foresee your future, in its main outline, to know to a certainty that you will be safely domiciled here, with a wife approved by my judgment, cultivating the moral fruit of which I have sown the seed—­this will content me.  But, my son, I wish to clear this bright vision from the shadow of a doubt.  I believe in your docility; I believe I may trust the salutary force of your respect for my memory.  But I must remember that when I am removed you will stand here alone, face to face with a hundred nameless temptations to perversity.  The fumes of unrighteous pride may rise into your brain and tempt you, in the interest of a vulgar theory which it will call your independence, to shatter the edifice I have so laboriously constructed.  So I must ask you for a promise—­the solemn promise you owe my condition.’  And he grasped my hand.  ’You will follow the path I have marked; you will be faithful to the young girl whom an influence as devoted as that which has governed your own young life has moulded into everything amiable; you will marry Isabel Vernor.’  This was pretty ‘steep,’ as we used to say at school.