e doing, and after months or years perceive ourselves in a second
older by all that period. We are jogged by the elbow, roused ruthlessly
and curtly bidden to look and see how we are changed, and wonder, weep,
or smile as may seem best to us in face of the metamorphosis. A moment
of such awakening came to me now; I seemed a man different from him who
had, no great number of minutes before, hastened to the house, inspired
by an insane hope, and aflame with a passion that defied reason and
summed up life in longing. The lackeys were there still, the maid's
smile altered only by a fuller and more roguish insinuation. On me the
change had passed, and I looked open-eyed on what I had been. Then came
a smile, close neighbour to a groan, and the scorn of my old self which
is the sad delirium wrought by moving time; but the lackey held the door
for me and I passed out.

A noise sounded from above as the casement of the window was thrown
open. She looked out; her anger was gone, her emotion also seemed gone.
She stood there smiling, very kindly but with mockery. She held in
either hand a flower. One she smelt and held her face long to it, as
though its sweetness kept her senses willing prisoners; turning to the
other, she smelt it for a short instant and then drew away, her face,
that told every mood with unfailing aptness, twisted into disappointment
or disgust. She leant out looking down on me; now behind her shoulder I
saw the King's black face, half-hidden by the hangings of the window.
She glanced at the first flower, then at the second, held up both her
hands for a moment, turned for an instant with a coquettish smile
towards the swarthy face behind, then handed the first flower with a
laugh into a hand that was stretched out for it, and flung the second
down to me. As it floated through the air, the wind disengaged its loose
petals and they drifted away, some reaching ground, some caught by gusts
and carried away, circling, towards the house-tops. The stalk fell by
me, almost naked, stripped of its bloom. For the second flower was
faded, and had no sweetness nor life left in it. Again her laugh sounded
above me, and the casement closed.

I bent and picked up the stalk. Was it her own mood she told me in the
allegory? Or was it the mood she knew to be in me? There had been an
echo of sorrow in the laugh, of pity, kindness, and regret: and the
laugh that she uttered in giving the fresh bloom to the King had seemed
pure der