There came another of these pauses now--an odd, unaccountable halt in what seemed the middle of everything.
He stared intently down upon her statuesque, dreaming face during the hush, and caught his breath as he waited.
There fell at last a few faltering ascending notes, ****** a half-finished strain, and then again there was silence.
Celia opened her eyes, and poured a direct, deep gaze into the face above hers.Its pale lips were parted in suspense, and the color had faded from its cheeks.
"That is the end," she said, and, with a turn of her lithe body, stood swiftly up, even while the echoes of the broken melody seemed panting in the air about her for completion.
Theron put his hands to his face, and pressed them tightly against eyes and brow for an instant.Then, throwing them aside with an expansive downward sweep of the arms, and holding them clenched, he returned Celia's glance.
It was as if he had never looked into a woman's eyes before.
"It CAN'T be the end!" he heard himself saying, in a low voice charged with deep significance.He held her gaze in the grasp of his with implacable tenacity.
There was a trouble about breathing, and the mosaic floor seemed to stir under his feet.He clung defiantly to the one idea of not releasing her eyes.
"How COULD it be the end?" he demanded, lifting an uncertain hand to his breast as he spoke, and spreading it there as if to control the tumultuous fluttering of his heart.
"Things don't end that way!"
A sharp, blinding spasm of giddiness closed upon and shook him, while the brave words were on his lips.
He blinked and tottered under it, as it passed, and then backed humbly to his divan and sat down, gasping a little, and patting his hand on his heart.There was fright written all over his whitened face.
"We--we forgot that I am a sick man," he said feebly, answering Celia's look of surprised inquiry with a forced, wan smile."I was afraid my heart had gone wrong."She scrutinized him for a further moment, with growing reassurance in her air.Then, piling up the pillows and cushions behind him for support, for all the world like a big sister again, she stepped into the inner room, and returned with a flagon of quaint shape and a tiny glass.
She poured this latter full to the brim of a thick yellowish, aromatic liquid, and gave it him to drink.
"This Benedictine is all I happen to have," she said.
"Swallow it down.It will do you good."
Theron obeyed her.It brought tears to his eyes; but, upon reflection, it was grateful and warming.He did feel better almost immediately.A great wave of comfort seemed to enfold him as he settled himself back on the divan.
For that one flashing instant he had thought that he was dying.He drew a long grateful breath of relief, and smiled his content.
Celia had seated herself beside him, a little away.
She sat with her head against the wall, and one foot curled under her, and almost faced him.
"I dare say we forced the pace a little," she remarked, after a pause, looking down at the floor, with the puckers of a ruminating amusement playing in the corners of her mouth.
"It doesn't do for a man to get to be a Greek all of a sudden.
He must work along up to it gradually."
He remembered the music."Oh, if I only knew how to tell you,"he murmured ecstatically, "what a revelation your playing has been to me! I had never imagined anything like it.
I shall think of it to my dying day."
