"Absolutely. He nearly always is when he acts or speaks on his own judgment, though in other respects he is a most excellent man, and one for whom I have the greatest regard. But he is like you, Reggie, in requiring some one at his elbow to give him good advice, though I do not think he is always as ready as you are to follow it."
My heart felt like lead. "And you think I am not justified in asking a girl of eighteen to marry me?"
"Certainly not. How can there be any real and satisfactory companionship between a girl of that age and a man of yours!"
I made one final appeal for happiness. "Not even if they love each other very much?"
"I don't see what that has to do with it. Parents love their children very much, but that doesn't prevent them from looking at things from the different points of view of their different generations. And it is natural that they should. I am sure I loved papa very much, but we did not see eye to eye in heaps of things, because the ideas of his generation were quite different from the ideas of ours. He was very narrow in some things. But differences which are quite allowable between parents and children seem to me to be unnatural between a husband and wife, and even more aggravating."
"Then that finally settles the matter," I said, walking out of the hall to the library, for fear that even the subdued glow of the firelight should reveal the misery that I knew must be written on my face. Arthur had opened the door of hope to me just a little; but Annabel had firmly shut it again, and naturally I was more influenced by Annabel than by Arthur—especially as her opinion coincided with my own.
But the matter was not finally closed after all.
After two bitter-sweet days—days when the happiness of my short visits to Fay was clouded by the iron self-restraint I was forced to exercise in her dear presence, and when love and duty waged their mortal combat in my soul—Annabel came to me as I was smoking in the library. She had just returned from the Rectory, and I noticed that the wintry wind must have caught her eyes, they looked so red and swollen. There certainly was a bitter wind that day.
"I have been talking to Arthur," she abruptly began, standing in front of the table and resting her two hands upon it, "and I have come to the conclusion that he was right and I was wrong."
I was surprised. It was so very unlike Annabel to own that she had been wrong about anything, I feared she must be ill.