“I ought to have sent up my name, I know,” he said, “but I couldn’t bear to wait. I just saw your name on the register and—you will forgive me, won’t you?—I ran to you at once. I know you won’t have the heart to send me away!”
She stood where she had halted, her arms behind her, looking him fixedly in the face. He had made a movement to advance, and offer his hand in greeting, but her posture checked the impulse. His courage began to falter under her inspection.
“Must I really go down again?” he pleaded. “It’s a crushing penalty to suffer for such little indiscretion. I was so excited to find you were here—I never stopped to think. Don’t send me away; please don’t!”
Celia raised her head. “Well, shut the door, then,” she said, “since you are so anxious to stay. You would have done much better, though, very much better indeed, to have taken the hint and gone away.”
“Will you shake hands with me, Celia?” he asked softly, as he came near her.
“Sit there, please!” she made answer, indicating a chair in the middle of the room. He obeyed her, but to his surprise, instead of seating herself as well, she began walking up and down the length of the floor again. After a turn or two she stopped in front of him, and looked him full in the eye. The light from the windows was on her countenance now, and its revelations vaguely troubled him. It was a Celia he had never seen before who confronted him.
“I am much occupied by other matters,” she said, speaking with cold impassivity, “but still I find myself curious to know just what limits you set to your dishonesty.”
Theron stared up at her. His lips quivered, but no speech came to them. If this was all merely fond playfulness, it was being carried to a heart-aching point.
“I saw you hiding about in the depot at home last evening,” she went on. “You come up here, pretending to have discovered me by accident, but I saw you following me from the Grand Central this morning.”
“Yes, I did both these things,” said Theron, boldly. A fine bravery tingled in his veins all at once. He looked into her face and found the spirit to disregard its frowning aspect. “Yes, I did them,” he repeated defiantly. “That is not the hundredth part, or the thousandth part, of what I would do for your sake. I have got way beyond caring for any consequences. Position, reputation, the good opinion of fools—what are they? Life itself—what does it amount to? Nothing at all—with you in the balance!”
“Yes—but I am not in the balance,” observed Celia, quietly. “That is where you have made your mistake.”
Theron laid aside his hat. Women were curious creatures, he reflected. Some were susceptible to one line of treatment, some to another. His own reading of Celia had always been that she liked opposition, of a smart, rattling, almost cheeky, sort. One got on best with her by saying bright things. He searched his brain now for some clever quip that would strike sparks from the adamantine mood which for the moment 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 underlip 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
