“Yes,” he answered, confidently.  “I am asking you to be my wife.  Not, however,” he added hastily, “in the common, vulgar understanding of that relation.  I am offering you, dear friend, that which is vastly higher than the union of the merely animal, which is based wholly upon the purely physical and material attraction.  I am proposing marriage of our souls—­a union, if you please, of our higher intellectual and spiritual selves.  I feel, indeed, that by those higher laws which the vulgar, beastlike minds are incapable of recognizing, we are already one.  I sense, as it were, that oneness which can exist only when two souls are mated by the great over-soul; I feel that you are already mine—­that, I am—­that we are already united in a spiritual union that is—­”

The young woman checked him with a gesture, which, had he interpreted it rightly, was one of repulsion.  “Please stop, Professor Parkhill,” she gasped in a tone of disgust.

He was surprised, and not a little chagrined.  “Am I to understand that you do not reciprocate my sentiment, Miss Reid?  Is it possible that I have been so mistaken?”

Kitty turned her head, as though she could not bear even to look at him.  “What you ask is so impossible,” she said in a low tone.  “Impossible!”

Strive as she might, the young woman could not altogether hide her feeling of abhorrence.  And yet, she asked herself, why should this man’s proposal arouse in her such antagonism and repugnance?  He was a scholar, famed for his attainments in the world of the highest culture.  As his wife, she would be admitted at once into the very inner circle of that life to which she aspired, and for which she was leaving her old home and friends.  He had couched his proposal in the very terms of the spiritually and intellectually elect; he had declared himself in that language which she had so proudly thought she understood, and in which she had so often talked with him; and yet she was humiliated and ashamed.  It was, to her, as though, in placing his offer of marriage upon the high, pure ground of a spiritual union, he had insulted her womanhood.  Kitty realized wonderingly that she had not felt like this when Phil had confessed his love for her.  In her woman heart, she was proud and glad to have won the love of such a man as Phil, even though she could not accept the cowboy as her mate.  On that very spot which the professor had chosen for his declaration, Patches had told her that she was leaving the glorious and enduring realities of life for vain and foolish bubbles—­that she was throwing aside the good grain and choosing the husks.  Was this what Patches meant? she wondered.

“I regret exceedingly, Miss Reid,” the professor was saying, “that the pure and lofty sentiments which I have voiced do not seem to find a like response in your soul.  I—­”

Again she interrupted him with that gesture of repulsion.  “Please do not say any more, Professor Parkhill.  I—­I fear that I am very human, after all.  Come, it is time that we were returning to the house.”