. You have
taken possession of me so wholly, I am not in the least master of myself
any more. I don't know what I say or what I do. I am not worthy of you,
I know. No man alive could be that. But no one else will idolize and
reverence you as I do. Believe me when I say that, Celia! And how can
you blame me, in your heart, for following you? 'Whither thou goest,
I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my
people, and thy God my God; where thou diest, will I die, and there will
I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death
part thee and me!'"

Celia shrugged her shoulders, and moved a few steps away from him.
Something like despair seized upon him.

"Surely," he urged with passion, "surely I have a right to remind you of
the kiss!"

She turned. "The kiss," she said meditatively. "Yes, you have a right
to remind me of it. Oh, yes, an undoubted right. You have another right
too--the right to have the kiss explained to you. It was of the good-bye
order. It signified that we weren't to meet again, and that just for one
little moment I permitted myself to be sorry for you. That was all."

He held himself erect under the incredible words, and gazed blankly at
her. The magnitude of what he confronted bewildered him; his mind was
incapable of taking it in. "You mean--" he started to say, and then
stopped, helplessly staring into her face, with a dropped jaw. It was
too much to try to think what she meant.

A little side-thought sprouted in the confusion of his brain. It grew
until it spread a bitter smile over his pale face. "I know so little
about kisses," he said; "I am such a greenhorn at that sort of thing.
You should have had pity on my inexperience, and told me just what brand
of kiss it was I was getting. Probably I ought to have been able to
distinguish, but you see I was brought up in the country--on a farm.
They don't have kisses in assorted varieties there."

She bowed her head slightly. "Yes, you are entitled to say that," she
assented. "I was to blame, and it is quite fair that you should tell
me so. You spoke of your inexperience, your innocence. That was why I
kissed you in saying good-bye. It was in memory of that innocence of
yours, to which you yourself had been busy saying good-bye ever since I
first saw you. The idea seemed to me to mean something at the moment. I
see now that it was too subtle. I do not usually err on that side."

Theron kept his hold