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, making 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.