She is gone, and she remains for ever. Her age is past, but not the hearts that ached in it. We curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning? "If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?" Such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their utterance, and it is here. IV.--IN A YEAR Nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the "dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _The Laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder at her lover's mutability. "Was it something said, Something done, Vexed him? was it touch of hand, Turn of head? Strange! that very way Love begun: I as little understand Love's decay."[238:1] Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So greatly that still, still, she can dream: "Would he loved me yet, On and on, While I found some way undreamed --Paid my debt! Gave more life and more, Till, all gone, He should smile, 'She never seemed Mine before.'" But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over" too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her? "Well, this cold clay clod Was man's heart: Crumble it, and what comes next? Is it God ?" . . . The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child! "'Dying for my sake-- White and pink! Can't we touch these bubbles then But they break?'" That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done since the world began, and will do till it ends.[239:1] Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . Again, the supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love, can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who loves truly? Yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him? "I had wealth and ease, Beauty, youth: Since my lover gave me love, I gave these. That was all I meant --To be just, And the passion I had raised To content. Since he chose to change Gold for dust, If I gave him what he praised, Was it strange?" And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that "way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . . I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted above: