“I don’t remember that we mentioned that,” she replied.  “How do you 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.

“We were speaking of our respective religions,” he heard Celia say, as imperturbably as if there had been no digression worth mentioning.

“Yes,” he assented, and moved his head so that he looked up at her back hair, and the leaves high above, mottled against the sky.  The wish to lie there, where now he could just catch the rose-leaf line of her under-chin as well, was very strong upon him.  “Yes?” he repeated.

“I cannot talk to you like that,” she said; and he sat up again shamefacedly.

“Yes—­I think we were speaking of religions—­some time ago,” he faltered, to relieve the situation.  The dreadful thought that she might be annoyed began to oppress him.

“Well, you said whatever my religion was, it was yours too.  That entitles you at least to be told what the religion is.  Now, I am a Catholic.”

Theron, much mystified, nodded his head.  Could it be possible—­was there coming a deliberate suggestion that he should become a convert?  “Yes—­I know,” he murmured.