you are
become to me in your remoteness. But oh, if you appear so beautiful
from this summit, what must you appear from the summit of the clouds?"
And he glanced from the earth to the sky, and saw the sun running down
his airy hill. "Dear Temptress!" he said, "how cunningly you would
snare me from my purpose." And he kissed his hand to her thrice, sealed
up his lips, and entered the Ring.

Between the two tall beeches he knelt down, and drowned the following
hours in thought and prayer; till that deep lake of meditation was
divided by the sound of singing, as though a shoal of silver fishes
swam and leaped upon its surface, putting all quietness to flight, and
troubling its waters with a million lovelinesses. For now it was as
though the bird's enchanting song came partly from within and partly
from without, and if the fall of its music shattered his dream like
falling fish, certain it seemed to him that the fish had first leaped
from his own heart, out of whose unsuspected caves darted a shoal of
nameless longings. He too leaped up and darted through the trees, and
with head bent down, for fear of he knew not what, made his way to the
Pond. Here he knelt again, drinking in the tremulous song of the bird,
as tremulous as youth and maidenhood, until at last it ceased with a
sweet uncompleted cry of longing. And at that instant, in the mirror of
the Pond, he saw the uncompleted disc of the half-moon, and dipped his
head.

Ah wonder! when he lifted it again, dazzled and dripping, he saw across
the Pond a figure rising from the water, the figure, as he could now
perceive in the fuller light, of a girl, clear to the waist. Her face
was half turned from him, and her hair flowed half to him and half
away, but within that cloudy setting gleamed the lines of her lovely
neck and one white shoulder and one moonlit breast, whose undercurve
appeared to float upon the Pond like the petal of a waterlily. So he
knelt on his side and she on hers, both motionless, and he heart leaped
(even as it had leaped at the bird's song) with a longing to kneel
beside and even touch that loveliness; or, if he could not, at least to
call to her across the Pond so that he would turn and reveal to him
what still was hidden. He was in fact about to do so, when suddenly his
senses were overwhelmed with a sweet anguish, darkness fell on him, and
from its very core he sneezed twice, violently. This interruption of
the previous spell was sufficient to br