in a modified form, he wishes to steal her, if
necessary, from another, or kill the enemy who steals her from him.

But the Sun of the Soul is there, too, so the poor old world is not in
such a very bad case after all.

And how the _bon Dieu_ must smile sadly to Himself when He looks down on
priests and nuns and hermits and fanatics, and sees how they have
distorted His beautiful scheme of things with their narrow ideas. Trying
to eliminate the red out of His spectrum, instead of ennobling and
glorifying it all with the Sun of the Soul.

And all of you who are great reasoners and arguers will laugh at this
ridiculous little simile of life drawn by a woman; but I do not care. I
have had my outburst, and said what I wanted to. So now we can get back
to the two--who were not yet lovers--under their green tree in the
Forest of Marly.

"But you must be able to guess the end," Theodora was saying; "and oh, I
want to know, if all the roads were barred by love--how did they get out
of the wood?"

"They took him with them," said Lord Bracondale, and he touched the edge
of her dress gently with a wild flower he had picked in the grass, while
into his eyes crept all the passion he felt and into his voice all the
tenderness.

Now if Theodora had ever read _La Faute de L'Abbe Mouret_ she would have
known just what proximity and the spring-time was doing for them both.

But she had not read, and did not know. All she was conscious of was a
wild thrilling of her pulses, an extraordinary magnetic force that
seemed to draw her--draw her nearer--nearer to what? Even that she did
not know or ask herself. Beyond that it was danger, and she must fly
from it.

"I do not want to talk of any of those things to-day," she said,
suddenly dropping her parasol between them. "I only want to laugh and be
amused, and as you were to devise schemes for my happiness, you must
amuse me."

He looked up at her again and he noticed, for all this brave speech,
that her hands were trembling as she clutched the handle of her blue
parasol.

Triumph and joy ran through him. He could afford to wait a little longer
now, since he knew that he must mean something, even perhaps a great
deal, to her.

And so for the next half-hour he played with her, he skimmed over the
surface of danger, he enthralled her fancy, and with every sentence he
threw the glamour of his love around her, and fascinated her soul. All
his powers of attraction--and they were many-