"
"Upon my word," her father explained, "I had no idea how obstinate
you are!"
She knew herself that she was obstinate, and it gave her a certain
joy. She was now a middle-aged woman.
About a year after this, the accident that the Doctor had spoken of
occurred; he took a violent cold. Driving out to Bloomingdale one
April day to see a patient of unsound mind, who was confined in a
private asylum for the insane, and whose family greatly desired a
medical opinion from an eminent source, he was caught in a spring
shower, and being in a buggy, without a hood, he found himself soaked
to the skin. He came home with an ominous chill, and on the morrow
he was seriously ill. "It is congestion of the lungs," he said to
Catherine; "I shall need very good nursing. It will make no
difference, for I shall not recover; but I wish everything to be
done, to the smallest detail, as if I should. I hate an ill-
conducted sick-room; and you will be so good as to nurse me on the
hypothesis that I shall get well." He told her which of his fellow-
physicians to send for, and gave her a multitude of minute
directions; it was quite on the optimistic hypothesis that she nursed
him. But he had never been wrong in his life, and he was not wrong
now. He was touching his seventieth year, and though he had a very
well-tempered constitution, his hold upon life had lost its firmness.
He died after three weeks' illness, during which Mrs.
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