mean--sacrificing herself?"

Theron gathered some of the outlying folds of her dress in his hand, and
boldly patted and caressed them. "You, so beautiful and so free, with
such fine talents and abilities," he murmured; "you, who could have the
whole world at your feet--are you, too, never going to know what love
means? Do you call that no sacrifice? To me it is the most terrible that
my imagination can conceive."

Celia laughed--a gentle, amused little laugh, in which Theron's ears
traced elements of tenderness. "You must regulate that imagination of
yours," she said playfully. "It conceives the thing that is not. Pray,
when"--and here, turning her head, she bent down upon his face a gaze of
arch mock-seriousness--"pray, when did I describe myself in these terms?
When did I say that I should never know what love meant?"

For answer Theron laid his head down upon his arm, and closed his
eyes, and held his face against the draperies encircling her. "I cannot
think!" he groaned.

The thing that came uppermost in his mind, as it swayed and rocked in
the tempest of emotion, was the strange reminiscence of early childhood
in it all. It was like being a little boy again, nestling in an
innocent, unthinking transport of affection against his mother's skirts.
The tears he felt scalding his eyes were the spontaneous, unashamed
tears of a child; the tremulous and exquisite joy which spread,
wave-like, over him, at once reposeful and yearning, was full of
infantile purity and sweetness. He had not comprehended at all before
what wellsprings of spiritual beauty, what limpid depths of idealism,
his nature contained.