“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.  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.