marble as in Agrippa's time, you will see the Immortals
passing by chained with dead leaves and weeping.

* * *

A great love is an absolute isolation and an absolute absorption.
Nothing lives or moves or breathes save one life; for one life alone the
sun rises and sets, the seasons revolve, the clouds bear rain, and the
stars ride on high; the multitudes around cease to exist, or seem but
ghostly shades; of all the sounds of earth there is but one voice
audible; all past ages have been but the herald of one soul; all
eternity can be but its heritage alone.

* * *

Perhaps she was right: for a few hours of joy one owes the debt of
years, and should give a pardon wide and deep as the deep sea.

This Love which she had made in his likeness, the tyrant and compeller
of the world, was to her as the angel which brings perfect dreams and
lets the tired sleeper visit heaven.

* * *

"And when the ship sails away without you?" I said brutally, and
laughing still, because the mention of the schooner had broken the bonds
of the silence that had held me against my will half paralysed, and I
seemed to be again upon the Tyrrhene shore, seeing the white sail fade
against the sky.

"And when that ship sails without you? The day will come. It always
comes. You are my Ariadne; yet you forget Naxos! Oh, the day will come!
you will kiss the feet of your idol then, and they will not stay; they
will go away, away, away, and they will not tarry for your prayers or
your tears--ay, it is always so. Two love, and one tires. And you know
nothing of that; you who would have love immortal."

And I laughed again, for it seemed to me so horrible, and I was half
mad.

No doubt it would have been kinder had I struck my knife down into her
breast with her words unspoken.

All shade of colour forsook her face; only the soft azure of the veins
remained, and changed to an ashen grey. She shook with a sudden shiver
from head to foot as the name she hated, the name of Ariadne, fell upon
her ear. The icebolt had fallen in her paradise. A scared and terrible
fear dilated her eyes, that opened wide in the amaze of some suddenly
stricken creature.

"And when he leaves you?" I said, with cruel iteration. "Do you remember
what you told me once of the woman by the marshes by the sea, who had
nothing left by which to remember love save wounds that never healed?
That is all his love will leave