"He has forbidden. It will never happen."

"Is she dead?" asked Catherine, but not too quickly for common decency. She was not one to pass such bounds.

"Not that I know of."

It was hard to repress a sneer.

"Then what makes you so sure—that he never could?"

"Well, he never will in my time!"

"You are good to me," said Catherine, gratefully.

"Not a bit good," said I, "or—only to myself ... I have been good to no one else in this whole matter. That's what it all amounts to, and that's what I really came to tell you. Catherine ... I am married to her myself!"

THE END