WHY SHE WANTED A KISS.

Western Star, Issue 979, 5 September 1885, Page 1 (Supplement)

WHY SHE WANTED A KISS.

" Kiss me again." Sibyl Sartom spoke these words in a grave, calm manner that betokened the serions import in which she held them, and as Herbert Holdfast bent tenderly forward and pressed his lips softly to hers, she looked up to him in the sky, cat-on-the-back-fence fashion, that had so witched him in the goldenhued days of courtship. There was no tint of deception in the pure nature of this girJ, and her every act was the result of reflection, often profound. Brought up in Boston, she had all her life been accustomed to put to its best use the power of discern" went which a thoughtful mind gave her.

Surrounded as she was by the mystic influences of Emerson, the Concord School of Philosophy, and several large warehouses where mackerel vrvre sold, it is small wonder that when, standing on the threshold of womanhood, she beheld suitors for her heart and hand approaching, she had analysed with critical care the hopes and fears of each—had subjected the character of every wooer to the rigid scrutiny of a mind that, seated cross-legged on the starry summit of pyschological research, looked upon a man as only vivified protoplasm, and the deepest emotions of the heart as merely the manifestations of a too active nerve centre.

Herbert knew this. He knew that the rounded curves of whose figure and the dewy sweetness of whose lids would have made an anchorite leave hh j> ! » without a pang, had naught of passion in her nature. And so when he had complied- -oh, so gladly —with her request, there stalks from out the banquet hall of hisjimagination, where they had so long been unwelcome guests, the sheeted ghosts of doubt and apprehension. He knew now that Sibyl loved him with aflove that would never falter or fail—a love that, securely built upon a foundation of respect and admiration, was now crowned with the large, roomy, mansard roof of a deathless, neverchanging passion. Her words proved it. Never before had she even as much as hinted at a kiss, and when he had sought to take one she had submitted to his caresses more as a dutiful than as an ardent lover. But now all was changed, and it was she who sought the bliss —that a large, well-regulated, three-storey-and-basement kiss alone can give. The thought was ecstasy. " You love me better to-day, Sibyl," he said, " than you did yesterday. Is it not so, darling ?" " No," she answers, standing there calm and pulseless as a cairn at high tide.

" Then why," he says, "did you ask me to kiss you ?" " Because," Sibyl replies, " I desired to ascertain whether or not you had been drinking rum."