"You do not mean to tell me," I said, "that you believe anything has happened that can concern us?"
She made no reply. I looked at her with some astonishment, and wondered if I had offended her by opposing her father's childish views.
"Perhaps," I persisted, "you, too, think I am stupidly unreasonable because I will not consent to be dishonestly chimerical."
I well remember the look of sad reproach with which she silently regarded me, and I well remember, too, the thought that came into my mind. I said to myself: "This is the same obduracy that her father has shown. Odd it is that I never noticed the trait in her before." Then I added, with an equal obduracy that I was not conscious of:
"Perhaps you, too, have discovered some peculiarity of good sense in me that is offensive, and you are afraid that something will happen if we——"
Here she interrupted me in her quiet, resolute, and reproachful way.
"Something has happened," she said.
I was amazed. If I had suddenly discovered that the woman I loved was unfaithful to me it could not have produced, in my frame of mind at that moment, a greater shock. It seemed to me then that the wooing of months, the confidence and affection of a year, were to be sacrificed in a moment of infatuated stubbornness. The very thought was so unnatural that it produced a revulsion in my own feelings.
"My darling," I said, as I went toward her impulsively, "we are playing the unworthy part of fools. Nothing can ever happen that will make us love each other less, or prevent you from being my wife."
I put my arm around her in the old familiar way. She was passive and irresponsive. She stood there, limply holding the curtain, with one white arm upraised, her beautiful head bent over and her eyes cast down so that I could not look into her face. This stony obduracy was so new and unlike her that I withdrew my arm and stepped back a little to regard her with astonishment, not unmingled with pique. At that moment she lifted her head slowly, and as she looked at me with a dreamy and far-away pathos I saw that her eyes were filled with tears.