"What did the other do? You be judge! Look at us, Edith! Here are we both! Give him his six whole years: I grudge None of the life with you, nay, loathe Myself that I grudged his start in advance Of me who could overtake and pass. But, as if he loved you! No, not he, Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain" . . . --for he who speaks, though he so loved and loves her, knows that he is and was alone in his worship. He knows even that such worship of her was among unaccountable things. That _he_, young, prosperous, sane, and free, as he was and is, should have poured his life out, as it were, and held it forth to _her_, and said, "Half a glance, and I drop the glass!" . . . For--and now we come to those amazing stanzas which place this passionate love-song by itself in the world-- "Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held, More than they said; I was 'ware and watched: * * * * * The others? No head that was turned, no heart Broken, my lady, assure yourself!" Her admirers had quickly recovered: one married a dancer, others stole a friend's wife, or stagnated or maundered, or else, unmarried, strove to believe that the peace of singleness _was_ peace, and not--what they were finding it! But whatever these rejected suitors did, the truth about her was simply that "On the whole, you were let alone, I think." And laid so, on the shelf, she had "looked to the other, who acquiesced." He was a poet, was he not? "He rhymed you his rubbish nobody read, Loved you and doved you--did not I laugh?" Oh, what a prize! Had she appreciated adequately her pink of poets? . . . But, after all, she had chosen him, before _this_ lover: they had both been tried. "Oh, heart of mine, marked broad with her mark, _Tekel_, found wanting, set aside, Scorned! See, I bleed these tears in the dark Till comfort come, and the last be bled: He? He is tagging your epitaph." And now sounds that cry of the girl of _In a Year_. "If it could only come over again!" She _must_ have loved him best. If there had been time. . . . She would have probed his heart and found what blood is; then would have twitched the robe from her lay-figure of a poet, and pricked that leathern heart, to find that only verses could spurt from it. . . . "And late it was easy; late, you walked Where a friend might meet you; Edith's name Arose to one's lip if one laughed or talked; If I heard good news, you heard the same; When I woke, I knew that your breath escaped; I could bide my time, keep alive, alert."