The memory of the kiss abode with Theron.Like Aaron's rod, it swallowed up one by one all competing thoughts and recollections, and made his brain its slave.
Even as he strode back through the woods to the camp-meeting, it was the kiss that kept his feet in motion, and guided their automatic course.All along the watches of the restless night, it was the kiss that bore him sweet company, and wandered with him from one broken dream of bliss to another.Next day, it was the kiss that made of life for him a sort of sunlit wonderland.
He preached his sermon in the morning, and took his appointed part in the other services of afternoon and evening, apparently to everybody's satisfaction:
to him it was all a vision.
When the beautiful full moon rose, this Sunday evening, and glorified the clearing and the forest with its mellow harvest radiance, he could have groaned with the burden of his joy.He went out alone into the light, and bared his head to it, and stood motionless for a long time.
In all his life, he had never been impelled as powerfully toward earnest and soulful thanksgiving.The impulse to kneel, there in the pure, tender moonlight, and lift up offerings of praise to God, kept uppermost in his mind.
Some formless resignation restrained him from the act itself, but the spirit of it hallowed his mood.
He gazed up at the broad luminous face of the satellite.
"You are our God," he murmured."Hers and mine!
You are the most beautiful of heavenly creatures, as she is of the angels on earth.I am speechless with reverence for you both."It was not until the camp-meeting broke up, four days later, and Theron with the rest returned to town, that the material aspects of what had happened, and might be expected to happen, forced themselves upon his mind.The kiss was a child of the forest.So long as Theron remained in the camp, the image of the kiss, which was enshrined in his heart and ministered to by all his thoughts, continued enveloped in a haze of sylvan mystery, like a dryad.Suggestions of its beauty and holiness came to him in the odors of the woodland, at the sight of wild flowers and water-lilies.When he walked alone in unfamiliar parts of the forest, he carried about with him the half-conscious idea of somewhere coming upon a strange, hidden pool which mortal eye had not seen before--a deep, sequestered mere of spring-fed waters, walled in by rich, tangled growths of verdure, and bearing upon its virgin bosom only the shadows of the primeval wilderness, and the light of the eternal skies.His fancy dwelt upon some such nook as the enchanted home of the fairy that possessed his soul.The place, though he never found it, became real to him.As he pictured it, there rose sometimes from among the lily-pads, stirring the translucent depths and fluttering over the water's surface drops like gems, the wonderful form of a woman, with pale leaves wreathed in her luxuriant red hair, and a skin which gave forth light.
With the homecoming to Octavius, his dreams began to take more account of realities.In a day or two he was wide awake, and thinking hard.The kiss was as much as ever the ceaseless companion of his hours, but it no longer insisted upon shrouding itself in vines and woodland creepers, or outlining itself in phosphorescent vagueness against mystic backgrounds of nymph-haunted glades.It advanced out into the noonday, and assumed tangible dimensions and substance.
He saw that it was related to the facts of his daily life, and had, in turn, altered his own relations to all these facts.
What ought he to do? What COULD he do? Apparently, nothing but wait.He waited for a week--then for another week.
The conclusion that the initiative had been left to him began to take shape in his mind.From this it seemed but a step to the passionate resolve to act at once.
Turning the situation over and over in his anxious thoughts, two things stood out in special prominence.
One was that Celia loved him.The other was that the boy in Gorringe's law office, and possibly Gorringe, and heaven only knew how many others besides, had reasons for suspecting this to be true.
And what about Celia? Side by side with the moving rapture of thinking about her as a woman, there rose the substantial satisfaction of contemplating her as Miss Madden.She had kissed him, and she was very rich.
The things gradually linked themselves before his eyes.
He tried a thousand varying guesses at what she proposed to do, and each time reined up his imagination by the reminder that she was confessedly a creature of whims, who proposed to do nothing, but was capable of all things.
And as to the boy.If he had blabbed what he saw, it was incredible that somebody should not take the subject up, and impart a scandalous twist to it, and send it rolling like a snowball to gather up exaggeration and foul innuendo till it was big enough to overwhelm him.
What would happen to him if a formal charge were preferred against him? He looked it up in the Discipline.
Of course, if his accusers magnified their mean suspicions and calumnious imaginings to the point of formulating a charge, it would be one of immorality.
They could prove nothing; there was nothing to prove.
At the worst, it was an indiscretion, which would involve his being admonished by his Presiding Elder.
Or if these narrow bigots confused slanders with proofs, and showed that they intended to convict him, then it would be open to him to withdraw from the ministry, in advance of his condemnation.His relation to the church would be the same as if he had been expelled, but to the outer world it would be different.And supposing he did withdraw from the ministry?
Yes; this was the important point.What if he did abandon this mistaken profession of his? On its mental side the relief would be prodigious, unthinkable.
But on the practical side, the bread-and-butter side?
For some days Theron paused with a shudder when he reached this question.The thought of the plunge into unknown material responsibilities gave him a sinking heart.
