rabbit-snares, had, it is true, come to him in dimmer outline each
Spring, but with magic the deeper for that. As the form faded from the
silver halo, and passed more and more into mythology, it seemed, indeed,
as if she had never lived for him at all, save in dreams, or on another
star. Still, his memory held by those great shells, and he had come at
last to the fabled country on the perilous quest--who of us dare venture
such a one to-day?--of a 'lost saint.' Enquiry of his friends that
evening, cautious as of one on some half-suspected diplomacy, told him
that one with the name of his remembrance did live at the
mill-house--with an old father, too. But how all the beauty of the
singing morning became a scentless flower when, on making the earliest
possible call, he was met at the door with that hollow word, 'Away'--a
word that seemed to echo through long rooms of infinite emptiness and
turn the daylight shabby--till the addendum, 'for the day,' set the
birds singing again, and called the sunshine back.

A few nights after he was sitting at her side, by a half-opened window,
with his arm about her waist, and her head thrillingly near his. With
his pretty gift of recitation he was pouring into her ear that sugared
passage in _Endymion_, appropriately beginning, 'O known unknown,'
previously 'got up' for the purpose; but alas! not too perfectly to
prevent a break-down, though, fortunately, at a point that admitted a
ready turn to the dilemma:--

'Still
Let me entwine thee surer, surer ...'

Here exigency compelled N. to make surety doubly, yea, trebly, sure; but
memory still forsaking him, the rascal, having put deeper and deeper
significance into his voice with each repetition, dropped it altogether