ace.
Why, better even have burst like a thief
_And borne you away to a rock for us two,
In a moment's horror, bright, bloody and brief_" . . .

Well, _he_ had not done this. But--

"What did the other do? You be judge!
Look at us, Edith! Here are we both!
Give him his six whole years: I grudge
None of the life with you, nay, loathe
Myself that I grudged his start in advance
Of me who could overtake and pass.
But, as if he loved you! No, not he,
Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain" . . .

--for he who speaks, though he so loved and loves her, knows that he is
and was alone in his worship. He knows even that such worship of her
was among unaccountable things. That _he_, young, prosperous, sane, and
free, as he was and is, should have poured his life out, as it were, and
held it forth to _her_, and said, "Half a glance, and I drop the
glass!" . . . For--and now we come to those amazing stanzas which place
this passionate love-song by itself in the world--

"Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held,
More than they said; I was 'ware and watched:

* * * * *

The others? No head that was turned, no heart
Broken, my lady, assure yourself!"

Her admirers had quickly recovered: one married a dancer, others stole a
friend's wife, or stagnated or maundered, or else, unmarried, strove to
believe that the peace of singleness _was_ peace, and not--what they
were finding it! But whatever these rejected suitors did, the truth
about her was simply that

"On the whole, you were let alone, I think."

And laid so, on the shelf, she had "looked to the other, who
acquiesced." He was a poet, was he not?

"He rhymed you his rubbish nobody read,
Loved you and doved you--did not I laugh?"

Oh, what a prize! Had she appreciated adequately her pink of
poets? . . . But, after all, she had chosen him, before _this_ lover:
they had both been tried.

"Oh, heart of mine, marked broad with her mark,
_Tekel_, found wanting, set aside,
Scorned! See, I bleed these tears in the dark
Till comfort come, and the last be bled:
He? He is tagging your epitaph."

And now sounds that cry of the girl of _In a Year_.

"If it could only come over again!"

She _must_ have loved him best. If there had been time. . . . She would
have probed his heart and found what b