o drew it was so much man as to shock
her with maidenly fears and set her mind and pulse thrilling with strange
thoughts and feelings. The old fascination of his neck was there, and
there was sweetness in the thought of laying her hands upon it. It
seemed still a wanton impulse, but she had grown more used to it. She
did not dream that in such guise new-born love would epitomize itself.
Nor did she dream that the feeling he excited in her was love. She
thought she was merely interested in him as an unusual type possessing
various potential excellencies, and she even felt philanthropic about it.

She did not know she desired him; but with him it was different. He knew
that he loved her, and he desired her as he had never before desired
anything in his life. He had loved poetry for beauty's sake; but since
he met her the gates to the vast field of love-poetry had been opened
wide. She had given him understanding even more than Bulfinch and
Gayley. There was a line that a week before he would not have favored
with a second thought--"God's own mad lover dying on a kiss"; but now it
was ever insistent in his mind. He marvelled at the wonder of it and the
truth; and as he gazed upon her he knew that he could die gladly upon a
kiss. He felt himself God's own mad lover, and no accolade of knighthood
could have given him greater pride. And at last he knew the meaning of
life and why he had been born.

As he gazed at her and listened, his thoughts grew daring. He reviewed
all the wild delight of the pressure of her hand in his at the door, and
longed for it again. His gaze wandered often toward her lips, and he
yearned for them hungrily. But there was nothing gross or earthly about
this yearning. It gave him exquisite delight to watch every movement and
play of those lips as they enunciated the words she spoke; yet they were
not ordinary lips such as all men and women had. Their substance was not
mere human clay. They were lips of pure spirit, and his desire for them
seemed absolutely different from the desire that had led him to other
women's lips. He could kiss her lips, rest his own physical lips upon
them, but it would be with the lofty and awful fervor with which one
would kiss the robe of God. He was not conscious of this transvaluation
of values that had taken place in him, and was unaware that the light
that shone in his eyes when he looked at her was quite the same light
that shines in all men's eyes w