aint: "I don't remember, Hugo. Perhaps with him. But it
wasn't his saying so that made it true. It is the way I feel ..."

"That brings us back to the beginning again. I have done my best to
persuade you that this feeling is an hallucination."

Over and over this ground they went with quickening exchanges, Canning's
patience wearing sharper at each circuit, Carlisle growing steadily
whiter, but unluckily not more yielding. At last Canning said:

"You are going to trust your whole future life to me, Carlisle. It is
hard for me to grasp that you refuse to trust me in this, the first
thing I have ever asked of you. Tell me plainly that you mean to have no
regard for my wishes."

Carlisle felt ready to scream. How had this miserable misunderstanding
arisen? What was it all about? Her mind glanced back, but she could not
remember, could not begin to retrace the bewildering steps. Worse yet,
she hardly seemed to want to now, for Hugo could not possibly speak to
her in this way if he loved her as he had said.

She said in a small, chilled voice: "That's unjust, Hugo. I have every
regard--"

"So you say, Carlisle. But nothing else that you say supports it in the
slightest."

The girl made no reply. And then Canning struck out:

"My entreaties carry no weight with you, it seems. Well, then I forbid
you."

For the first time a tinge of color touched Carlisle's cheek.

"You forbid me?"

He had no sooner said the words than he regretted them. In the beginning
nothing of this sort had been within his dreams; had he foreseen the
possibility, it is probable that he would have given Carlisle her head
at the start without argument. But, once the position taken, he could
not bend back his pride to recede. And to him, too, came prodding
thoughts, of a bride who was revealing strange sides of her nature,
strange unlovelinesses....

"Good God!" broke from him. "With such excessive consideration for _two_
other men, haven't you an atom for the man you are to marry? Hasn't it
occurred to you that in a matter seriously involving my life as well as
yours, I have a claim, a joint authority with yourself?"

"Occurred to me? It has never been out of my mind."

"Yet you resent it, it seems. I say that I forbid your doing something
so full of painful consequences to us both, and you show that you resent
it ... Don't you?"

"It's a surprise to me that you would want to use your authority in such
a way. But--"

"Then you must have