'Love?' brooded Kenneth, a little while later, when he was again alone. 'It seems to me that I am utterly done with it, now, in all its conceivable forms. . . Solarion, whom in a sense I could have worshipped, has become Well, no matter.' He laughed again, but very low, almost so low that no listener could more than just have heard him. 'I will take poor, dear Hilda's advice. I will go to the barber in the village and have my hair cut.'

He did so. Meanwhile a silence nearly if not quite unbroken was maintained between Solarion and himself. For hours that afternoon and evening the two did not exchange a word. On the following day Kenneth paid his visit to Celia.

The servant who admitted him knew him, and declared, with a doubtful shake of the head, "I'm afraid, Mr. Stafford, that Miss Celia will not see any one. But in your case I may be wrong, sir."

XI.

He was wrong. Mourning did not specially become Celia; it rarely suits a woman of her dark type. But, on the other hand, grief had not marred her beauty, and as Kenneth gazed upon it he grew convinced that this beauty had been only brilliantly matured by a somewhat considerable lapse of years. The old sorcery had him under its control almost on the instant. He could scarcely trust himself to speak, at first, while he watched the sad lustre of Celia's eyes and saw the lines of her delicate mouth tremble. But she referred to the horrors of the shipwreck with firm enough tones, and her voice betrayed signs of complete surrender only when she mentioned how a wave had literally torn her father from her grasp as they stood together on the oscillant, shriek-haunted deck. Kenneth felt a keen relief when at last he had won her to dwell on less painful matters. And all the while he was saying to himself, 'How beautiful she is! how time has given her new witcheries and not stolen a tint from her former girlish freshness! She must be seven-and-twenty, yet her cheek is even a lovelier bit of coloring and chiselling than when I saw it last.'

"How the years have swept along !" he presently found himself saying aloud. "Did you not stay abroad much longer than you had designed to do?"

"Yes," said Celia, a sweetly retrospective look seeming to possess her eyes. "At first we were a good deal in England, but afterward we went to Italy. Mamma loved it so! She was so filled with enthusiasms about it! And papa, too!"

"I can easily understand that," said Kenneth, off his guard.

Celia gave a distinct start, and looked at him with her milky brows drawn a little, either querulously or in a simply troubled way.

Kenneth had dropped into his old sarcastic habit of comment, without really knowing it. He bit his lips, while his color rose; he would have thanked the floor if it had swallowed him. He was pierced by a sense of his brutality toward the dead. But at the same time he felt a desire to make plain the unintentional character of his apparent rude

ness.

"They were both," he began to stammer, "so-so given to-to enthusiasms."

Nothing, in the circumstances, could have been much worse than this. But he soon saw what a woman of the world time and experience had made of Celia.

"Yes, you are right," she said, using a cold courtesy that filled him with hate of self. And then she went on, with what struck him as a veiled and subtle defiance of his own ill-timed satire. "Papa wrote many sweet poems while we were in Italy. They were all lost, with his other manuscripts. That is one of my deepest regrets, for I should so have loved to bring them out. Papa was not a great poet, perhaps, but he had a gift as unmistakable as it was fine and sincere. He had arranged with an American publisher while we were living at Sorrento, just before our homeward voyage. But, too unfortunately, the manuscript had been returned to him for a final revision, and now there is no other copy!"

She drooped her head, making two white oval curves of her lower visage against the blackness of her gown. Kenneth could have fallen at her feet in abject contrition. He did not afterward remember what he said, but his words vaguely occurred to him, in subsequent thought of them, as a dreary blending of falsehood and fatuity.

There is no doubt that all this while Celia kept telling herself he had become even a more awkward person than when she had last seen him. He had the air of a timid-mannered valetudinarian, and there were points of a careless kind about his dress which made it pleasant not to find these hopelessly abetted by tokens of actual personal neglect as well. He had so thoroughly failed in making a good impression that she almost felt like offendedly quitting the room when she at length heard him say, and with none of the calm assurance that women like men to show in their delivery of bold personalities,

"You, Miss Celia, have had your noteworthy heart-troubles while abroad? Or do I trespass too much on our old childish acquaintanceship by alluding to them?"

Celia scanned the dark breadths of her gown, for an instant, with compressed lips. Then she lifted her beautiful head and looked Kenneth full in the eyes with a glance that seemed to him the tender sublimity of forgiveness.

"How odd you are!" she said, smiling. "But you were always odd, were you not?"

Kenneth now had another droll desire to fall at her feet, from sheer gratitude at her sudden clemency.

"I-I feel like a positive boor," he faltered. "Do forgive me! I have been in great solitude for a long time. That is my only excuse if I have offended you."

"You have not offended me," Celia said, and her repeated smile was like an abrupt sunburst to him from a sky of lead.

"I am so glad,-so very glad!" he continued, half wildly, as it were. "But I heard" And then he paused, looking at her with helpless regret and shame.

"I think you must mean my engagement to Prince Soriato," she said, the next instant, with faultless composure.

"Yes, that is what I mean," he managed, quite piteously.

Her smile deepened. She sat before him, mondaine to her fingertips, wearing the purple of high breeding and elegance with just the right unstudied air. "And you want to know about that little affair of mine? Well, there really isn't very much to tell, Kenneth." (It seemed to him as if she were showing a seraphic benignancy in thus calling him "Kenneth.") "The Prince Soriato was a rather important Italian who did me the honor of asking me to marry him while we were living for a while in Rome. One day I became aware that I had done the most senseless and trivial thing in binding myself to a man whom I could neither love nor respect. Just at this time our old friend Caryl Dayton made his appearance in Rome. You remember Caryl Dayton, of course."

"Oh, yes; perfectly."

66

I asked him to help me, and he did so,-very effectually, and with the nicest art of the diplomat. Prince Soriato was furious, and a duel was talked of between himself and either Caryl or else poor papa. That rumor nearly drove me to despair; I seemed in my own eyes the worst type of a vulgar, heartless jilt, and on the verge of a horrible yet wholly just punishment. It is all a good while ago; I had more imagination then than I have now, and perhaps I made a more willing instrument, as well, for the grisly fingers of remorse to play upon. In reality no duel took place; but before very long, on our leaving Rome for Venice, an affair of a much less hostile character did take place. This, I suppose, is a rather bungling way of telling you that I became engaged to Caryl Dayton."

"To Caryl Dayton !

"Yes. You had not heard of it till now?"

"No," replied Kenneth, staring into her face brusquely; "I had not." Ah, you've indeed been living out of the world! They said shocking things of me in New York; it's odd how one hears those shocking things when one is abroad. They get into the eastwardbound steamers; they are like rats; only, rats don't leave a ship after it reaches port, and they do; they travel direct to the unhappy person for whom they've been intended."

Kenneth had grown more at his ease. to you, in this case? What were they?

"And they travelled direct Were they so very terrible?" She looked down at her hands, dropped like two curled, listless lilies upon the darkness of her lap. "They hurt me very much," she answered, "though perhaps they were not, after all, so terrible. They said that I had learned the Prince Soriato was not half so rich as report had stated, and that I had planned to make Caryl Dayton cancel my engagement for me with a clear understanding of my becoming betrothed to him as soon as I could decently extricate myself from the princely toils... But perhaps I should not have made any reference whatever to this part of my life. Still, you asked me for some definite information, did you not ?"

"I shall think it very indefinite if you pause here," said Kenneth. "It will be like seeing the first two acts or so of a play"

"Which did not end at all tragically," Celia broke in, with a

staccato trill of laughter. "Oh, no. Mr. Dayton and I were engaged for about four months in Venice and about six more in Paris. Then it was broken off."

Kenneth could not resist saying, "Did you also decide that you neither loved nor respected him?"

If the sarcasm hurt she did not show it. Indeed, her tones were full of a dreamy sadness, now; and she soon said, still watching the fair, placid hands in her lap as though they were somehow not her

own,

She

"No. I liked him. I often thought that I liked him very much indeed. It was so strange. I did not break it off, you know." raised her eyes, now, and their soft rays pierced Kenneth's heart with a new, delicious, and yet remembered pain. "One day we parted by mutual assent. We parted very good friends, by the way. There was no quarrel. Caryl said something that ought to have angered me, but it did not."

"What was it?" Kenneth asked.

"He told me that I did not know how to love."

"Perhaps he was right."

"I hope he was wrong," said Celia.

There had been a simplicity about her later words which made the most singular contrast with her tranquil, worldly, collected maintien. 'Does it mean,' thought her observer, the profoundest and most adroit artifice of a trained coquette?-one whom the ablest European schools for flirtation have amply and dangerously equipped? But no; surely no; her mood is too sorrowful for that, and the gloom of her recent bereavement hangs too heavy upon her soul.'

A little later, when he had taken his leave of Celia and was walking homeward along the familiar roadside in the sweet, exuberant June weather, he asked himself if she had shown any real wish to see him. again. Well, at least she had not forbidden future visits. And then her little confidential outburst . . . that might or might not have been a graceful tribute to the distant yet appreciable kinship which existed between them. And could it really be true, after all, that she did not know how to love? He had heard or read or dreamed about this queer, stubborn virginity of the heart among certain women. Yet why should a woman like Celia find it so difficult to love? Nature had surely made her no great intellectual or moral exception to her sex. Might not the terms of that bond between herself and Dayton be resumed hereafter under conditions of still rosier romance? Kenneth smiled bitterly to himself as a pang of the old jealousy shot through his heart. To feel like this again,' he thought, after all those years! It's almost incredible!'

When he again met Solarion it was with an utter change of feeling. He could not account for the dissipation of his own late wrath. He strove to look into his heart and rigidly analyze its workings. Then, startled, he recoiled from this introspective course. Had he discovered the truth? Had love leaped up burningly within his being once again, and had ambition ceased to hold forth, as only yesterday, its lure of intoxicating promise?

He found himself capable of reflecting that the complete loss of fame would be, after all, as trifling as its acquirement. Love had taken entire possession of him after a period of at least seeming desertion. It was like the return of the reinstated sovereign who has come to claim his own; and yet Kenneth was not without a mystic inward faith, just now, that this potentate had never left the throne at all, but had been carrying on a sort of drowsy reign there, perhaps even as somnolent a one as that of the sire of the Sleeping Princess in the tale. And with the unselfish feelings begotten by that one divine selfishness, both sympathy and affection for Solarion returned in greater than their previous force. He was not without a sense of humor, and the speed of this alteration in him plainly provoked it. But, like almost all his emotions, it had a bitter touch. What ludicrous little puppets we are!' he mused, and what fun we must make for our wire-holder,provided such office be filled by a consciousness and not a mere blind force! ... How if our whole universe, by the way, from Canopus to an asteroid, were so contemptible a proceeding in the eye of some remote and sublime mightiness that time, space, the travail of worlds, everything which means human felicity or suffering, stood for that Power in the same light as some theatrical matinée performance stands for us? How if all were a mere transitory episode with Him (or Her), surveyed as a brief recreation between demands of an inconceivable urgency? Man expresses a little holiday stroll, as it were; the Deity (if He be) creates and destroys a universe as we cause an egg to be hatched and then crack it... Who was the poet who wrote in a transcendently ideal mood that he saw "space at his feet, like a star"? I forget; . . I've always read the poets-even those that I liked the best-with such a sense of poor dead old Aurelia's rhapsodies.'

The silence of Solarion seemed like that of the Sphinx. Kenneth had a certain awe about breaking it. But after he had once done so their former relations were genially renewed. Lessons and discussions began again. But it soon became evident to Kenneth that his pupil saw some difference between then and now.

"Your heart is not in your work," said Solarion, after a day or two. "What does it mean?"

Kenneth smiled. "Where did you get that phrase from?" he asked. "It is like many others that you use, and yet its oddity specially strikes me."

"I can't tell you whence it came," was the reply. "No doubt from your talk, rather than from the books you have both read aloud to me and arranged that I should read unaided by you. Perhaps it is quite true, as you once told me, that I possess the largest powers of language... But you do not realize the greatness, the depth, of your own instructive methods."

Kenneth shook his head for a moment, and then bowed it. “I realize," he said, "your incomparable mind.. As I before told you,

there is nothing that I can now teach you. You are

"I am anxious to learn why you do not teach me as you did of old," Solarion here interrupted. His wonderful eyes were riveted on Kenneth's face, and the latter drooped his own look before them.