Then through the mob of brawlers Michael stepped Straight to where Lion stood. "I come," he said, "To give you back some words which I have kept Safe in my heart till I could see them paid. You lied about Sue Jones; she died a maid As far as I’m concerned, and there’s your lie, Full in your throat, and there, and there, and in your eye. "And there’s for stealing Mary" ... as he struck, He slipped upon a piece of peel and dropped Souse in a puddle of the courtyard muck; Loud laughter followed when he rose up sopped. Friends rushed to intervene, the fight was stopped. The two were hurried out by different ways. Men said, "’Tis stopped for now, but not for many days." * * * * * April appeared, the green earth’s impulse came, Pushing the singing sap until each bud Trembled with delicate life as soft as flame, Filled by the mighty heart-beat as with blood; Death was at ebb, and Life in brimming flood. But little joy in life could Lion see, Striving to gird his will to set his loved one free, While in his heart a hope still struggled dim That the mad hour would pass, the darkness break, The fever die, and she return to him, The routed nightmare let the sleeper wake. "Then we could go abroad," he cried, "and make A new life, soul to soul; oh, love! return." "Too late," his heart replied. At last he rode to learn. Bowed, but alive with hope, he topped the pass, And saw, below, her cottage by the way, White, in a garden green with springing grass, And smoke against the blue sky going gray. "God make us all the happier for to-day," He muttered humbly; then, below, he spied, Mary and Michael entering, walking side by side. Arm within arm, like lovers, like dear lovers Matched by the happy stars and newly wed, Over whose lives a rosy presence hovers. Lion dismounted, seeing hope was dead. A child was by the road, he stroked his head, And "Little one," he said, "who lives below There, in the cottage there, where those two people go?" "They do," the child said, pointing: "Mrs. Gray Lives in the cottage there, and he does, too. They’ve been back near a week since being away." It was but seal to what he inly knew. He thanked the child and rode. The Spring was blue, Bluer than ever, and the birds were glad; Such rapture in the hedges all the blackbirds had. He was not dancing to that pipe of the Spring. He reached The Roughs, and there, within her room, Bowed for a time above her wedding ring, Which had so chained him to unhappy doom; All his dead marriage haunted in the gloom Of that deserted chamber; all her things Lay still as she had left them when her love took wings. He kept a bitter vigil through the night, Knowing his loss, his ten years’ passion wasted, His life all blasted, even at its height, His cup of life’s fulfilment hardly tasted. Gray on the budding woods the morning hasted, And looking out he saw the dawn come chill Over the shaking acre pale with daffodil.