d exceedingly,
she had gone, and still is gone--and he sits marvelling. Three months!
Is she going to stay away for ever? Is she going to cast him off for a
word, a "bubble born of breath"? Why, they had been _one_ person!

"Me, do you leave aghast
With the memories We amassed?"

Just for "a moment's spite." . . . She ought to have understood.

"Love, if you knew the light
That your soul casts in my sight,
How I look to you
For the pure and true,
And the beauteous and the right--"

But so had she looked to _him_, and he had shown her "a moment's
spite." . . . Yet he cannot believe that a hasty word can do all this
against the other memories. Things like that are indeed for ever
happening; trivialities thus can mar immensities. The eye can be blurred
by a fly's foot; a straw can stop all the wondrous mechanism of the ear.
But that is only the external world; endurance is easy there. It is
different with love.

"Wrong in the one thing rare--
Oh, it is hard to bear!"

And especially hard now, in this "dawn of day." Little brooks must be
dancing down the dell,

"Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love but attend as well."

But as she cannot, he will not. . . . Only, things will get lovelier
every day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand--the
spring, when the almond-blossom blows.

"We shall have the word
In a minor third
There is none but the cuckoo knows:
Heaps of the guelder rose!
I must bear with it, I suppose."

For he would choose, if he could choose, that November should come back.
Then there would be nothing for her to love but love! In such a world as
spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there,
and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the
heart cries: "Why should I freeze? Another heart, as chill as mine is
now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one":

"Heart, shall we live or die?
The rest . . . settle by-and-bye!"

Three months ago they were so happy! They lived blocked up with snow,
the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get:

"Not to our ingle, though,
Where we loved each the other so!"

If it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring,
when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to
love--and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, and tha