ment it was her whim to
assume. To cover the process, he smiled a little. Then her beauty,
as she stood before him, her queenly form clad in a more stiffly
fashionable dress than he had seen her wearing before, appealed afresh
and overwhelmingly to him. He rose to his feet.

"Have you forgotten our talk in the woods?" he murmured with a wooing
note. "Have you forgotten the kiss?"

She shook her head calmly. "I have forgotten nothing."

"Then why play with me so cruelly now?" he went on, in a voice of tender
deprecation. "I know you don't mean it, but all the same it bruises my
heart a little. I build myself so wholly upon you, I have made existence
itself depend so completely upon your smile, upon a soft glance in your
eyes, that when they are not there, why, I suffer, I don't know how to
live at all. So be kinder to me, Celia!"

"I was kinder, as you call it, when you came in," she replied. "I
told you to go away. That was pure kindness--more kindness than you
deserved."

Theron looked at his hat, where it stood on the carpet by his feet. He
felt tears coming into his eyes. "You tell me that you remember," he
said, in depressed tones, "and yet you treat me like this! Perhaps I am
wrong. No doubt it is my own fault. I suppose I ought not to have come
down here at all."

Celia nodded her head in assent to this view.

"But I swear that I was helpless in the matter," he burst forth. "I HAD
to come! It would have been literally impossible for me to have stayed
at home, knowing that you were here, and knowing also that--that--"

"Go on!" said Celia, thrusting forth her under-lip a trifle, and
hardening still further the gleam in her eye, as he stumbled over his
sentence and left it unfinished. "What was the other thing that you were
'knowing'?"

"Knowing--" he took up the word hesitatingly--"knowing that life would
be insupportable to me if I could not be near you."

She curled her lip at him. "You skated over the thin spot very well,"
she commented. "It was on the tip of your tongue to mention the fact
that Father Forbes came with me. Oh, I can read you through and through,
Mr. Ware."

In a misty way Theron felt things slipping from his grasp. The rising
moisture blurred his eyes as their gaze clung to Celia.

"Then if you do read me," he protested, "you must know how utterly my
heart and brain are filled with you. No other man in all the world can
yield himself so absolutely to the woman he worships as I can