"Each with a tale to tell, Could my Love but attend as well." But as she cannot, he will not. . . . Only, things will get lovelier every day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand--the spring, when the almond-blossom blows. "We shall have the word In a minor third There is none but the cuckoo knows: Heaps of the guelder rose! I must bear with it, I suppose." For he would choose, if he could choose, that November should come back. Then there would be nothing for her to love but love! In such a world as spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there, and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the heart cries: "Why should I freeze? Another heart, as chill as mine is now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one": "Heart, shall we live or die? The rest . . . settle by-and-bye!" Three months ago they were so happy! They lived blocked up with snow, the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get: "Not to our ingle, though, Where we loved each the other so!" If it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring, when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to love--and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, and that guelder-rose which he will have to bear with . . . But, after all, it _is_ November for their hearts! Hers is chill as his; she cannot live without him, as he cannot without her. If it were winter, "she'd efface the score and forgive him _as before_" (thus we perceive that this is not the first quarrel, that he has offended her before with that word which was _not_ so many things!)--and what else is it but winter for their shivering hearts? So he begins to hope. In March, too, there are storms--here is one beginning now, at noon, which shows that it will last. . . . Not yet, then, the too lovely spring! "It is twelve o'clock: I shall hear her knock In the worst of a storm's uproar: I shall pull her through the door, I shall have her for evermore!" . . . I think she came back. She would want to see how well he understood the spring--he who could make that picture of the Pampas' sheen and the wild horse. Why should spring's news unfold itself, and he not "say things" about it to her, like those he could say about the mere _Times_ news? And it _is_ impossible to bear with the guelder-rose--the guelder-rose must be adored. They will adore it together; she will efface the score, and forgive him as before. What fun it will be, in the worst of the storm, to feel him pull her through the door! In _The Lost Mistress_ it is really finished: she has dismissed him. We are not told why. It cannot be because he has not loved her--he who so tenderly, if so whimsically, accepts her decree. He will not let her see how much he suffers--he still can say the "little things" she liked.