kneel, there in the pure,
tender moonlight, and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost
in his mind. Some formless resignation restrained him from the act
itself, but the spirit of it hallowed his mood. He gazed up at the broad
luminous face of the satellite. "You are our God," he murmured. "Hers
and mine! You are the most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of
the angels on earth. I am speechless with reverence for you both."

It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron
with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had
happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his
mind. The kiss was a child of the forest. So long as Theron remained in
the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and
ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of
sylvan mystery, like a dryad. Suggestions of its beauty and holiness
came to him in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers
and water-lilies. When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the
forest, he carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere
coming upon a strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen
before--a deep, sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by
rich, tangled growths of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only
the shadows of the primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal
skies. His fancy dwelt upon some such nook as the enchanted home of
the fairy that possessed his soul. The place, though he never found it,
became real to him. As he pictured it, there rose sometimes from among
the lily-pads, stirring the translucent depths and fluttering over the
water's surface drops like gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with
pale leaves wreathed in her luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave
forth light.

With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account
of realities. In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard. The
kiss was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no
longer insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or
outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds
of nymph-haunted glades. It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed
tangible dimensions and substance. He saw that it was related to the
facts of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to
all these facts.

What ough