Well--child! (You are nothing more--nothing!) Our guest has gone. Now let us hope you will straightway begin to get back your color. You look like the travesty of Hope Deferred. Dress you for Pierrot, and you'd serve well for the ghost of youthful folly. But you have behaved excellently. Socially speaking, you have watched beside your arms. Consider yourself knighted. Shall I tell you a secret? The Forest of Arden is not a proper trysting-place for folk who have met in the town; at least, if one of them has been learning the sweet directness of the woods. For I, whom this man somewhat enchains and always did,--when I saw him among the trees, I knew he was very worldly and a trifle fat! And he does not swim well. And he slept o' mornings, and I could not help thinking of you wandering--albeit like a zany whose bauble is hid--in the dewy brake. Understand plainly, you are at this moment dear to me. The thought of you is sweet as Endymion to Diana; yet I who am no Dian, but a poor _fin de siecle_ spinster, her being distorted by culture, would withdraw from you were you here, as the chaste huntress from Actaeon. I like you; but I mean nothing by the saying, nothing, nothing! Nay, and I said "I love," it would be but lightly, as if we were both in a little play: a play which nobody wrote, and no man saw acted, and which the actors themselves will speedily forget. Think of the thistle-downiest thing you ever saw, the most fleeting: the glow that rises in the sunset sky and flees before the sight. That is what I mean when I say you are dear to me. Do not make me repent having said it. [Sidenote: _Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose_] June was it, June, sweet mistress of the changing year, (She of the brow serene, unpressed by cypress fear, Nor darkened under bitter bud and leaf By earth's old travail and the gray world's grief,-- Delighted by her changeful diadem And fringed with roses round her mantle hem,) Who laid thy hand in mine, And said, with voice divine, Like low-toned winds that wander to and fro Searching out reedy pipes wherein to blow: "This is your sacrament. Drink ye, and be content. This is life's flowering. Now are ye queen and king." O thought too poor and pale! O words that wanly fail For godlike Love's divine expressing, And all the rhythm of his sweet confessing, Whose full-voiced cry should be Harmonious ecstasy.