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.
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 upon her gaze, as if it afforded him bodily support. He felt that he ought to stoop and take up his hat, but he dared not look away from her. “Do you not err now, on the side of cruelty?” he asked her piteously.