What could have happened? He had hitherto always been awaiting her at their place of meeting. How could he allow anything to curtail, even by a few moments, the short hour to which they both looked forward so eagerly? Although he could not be to blame, still she felt aggrieved. Pluto, too, seemed to find his absence very unnatural. He pawed the ground impatiently with his fore-foot and shook his black mane; then pricked his delicate ears with a neigh as a distant crackling of the underbrush was heard, and a minute afterwards Kurt made his appearance. He was very warm and quite out of breath with the haste he had made to atone for his want of punctuality.
"Now this I call scant courtesy!" exclaimed Celia, who had intended to punish him by a cool reception for his tardiness. She was quickly appeased, however, when she saw how warm he looked from his hasty walk. She held out her hand to him, and when he took it leaned down towards him. "You do not deserve a kiss for keeping me waiting so long, but I will temper justice with mercy. Poor fellow! you are terribly warm; you ought not to have walked so fast!"
What had become of Kurt's good resolutions? They had shared the fate that awaits such resolutions generally. How could he resist when Celia smiled so bewitchingly upon him? The temptation was too great. Besides, he had only resolved never by a single word to betray Celia's childlike trust in him, to treat her as a brother would treat a tenderly-loved sister, and is it not perfectly allowable for a brother to kiss a dear sister? He was not wrong in kissing her. Had he been wrong several weeks before, when Celia, after some slight dispute, offered him her rosy lips in token of reconciliation, not to refuse the precious gift? Celia, in her innocent purity, never could have comprehended such a refusal, and would have been deeply grieved by it.
Since then it had become a custom for the young girl to receive him daily with a kiss, and to take leave of him with a kiss, and they called each other by their first names. It would have been ridiculous in Kurt, after becoming so intimate with Celia, to adhere to the formal "Fräulein von Hohenwald" in addressing her. It had vanished; neither Kurt or Celia could tell when or how; it had done so so naturally.