And I have always yielded: mute, joyless, fettered, I have trod the world of the Soul's choosing, and served and been unrewarded. Now I am broken before my time; bloodless, sleepless, breathless,--half-blind, racked at every joint, trembling with every leaf. "Perhaps I have been too hard," said the Soul; "you shall have a rest." The boon has come too late. The roses are beneath my feet now, but the perfume does not reach me; the willows trail across my cheek and the great arch is overhead, but my eyes are too weary to lift to it; the wind is upon my face, but I cannot bare my throat to its caress; vaguely I hear the singing of the Night through the long watches when sleep does not come, but the answering vibration thrills no more. Hands touch mine--I longed for them so once--but I am as a corpse. I remember that I wanted all these things, but now the power to want is crushed from me, and only the memory of my denial throbs on, with its never-dying pain. And still I think, if I were left alone long enough--but already I hear the Tyrant up there plotting to slay me.--"Yes," it keeps saying, "it is about time! I will not be chained to a rotting carcass. If my days are to pass in perpetual idleness I may as well be annihilated. I will make the wretch do me one more service.--You have clamored to be naked in the water. Go now, and lie in it forever." Yes: that is what It is saying, and I--the sea stretches down there---- The Triumph of Youth The afternoon blazed and glittered along the motionless tree-tops and down into the yellow dust of the road. Under the shadows of the trees, among the powdered grass and bushes, sat a woman and a man. The man was young and handsome in a way, with a lean eager face and burning eyes, a forehead in the old poetic mould crowned by loose dark waves of hair; his chin was long, his lips parted devouringly and his glances seemed to eat his companion's face. It was not a pretty face, not even ordinarily good looking,--sallow, not young, only youngish; but there was a peculiar mobility about it, that made one notice it. She waved her hand slowly from East to West, indicating the horizon, and said dreamingly: "How wide it is, how far it is! One can get one's breath. In the city I always feel that the walls are squeezing my chest." After a little silence she asked without looking at him: "What are you thinking of, Bernard?" "You," he murmured. She glanced at him under her lids musingly, stretched out her hand and touched his eyelids with her finger-tips, and turned aside with a curious fleeting smile. He caught at her hand, but failing to touch it as she drew it away, bit his lip and forcedly looked off at the sky and the landscape: "Yes," he said in a strained voice, "it is beautiful, after the city. I wish we could stay in it." The woman sighed: "That's what I have been wishing for the last fifteen years."