hought
Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall,
Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!"

* * * * *

But it is not painless in its working? She does not desire that: she
wants the other to _feel_ death; more--she wants the proof of death to
remain,

"Brand, burn up, bite into its grace[236:1]--
He is sure to remember her dying face!"

Is it done? Then he must take off her mask; he must--nay, he need not
look morose about it:

"It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close."

She is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor:

"_If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?_"

There it lies--there. . . .

"Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill,
You may kiss me, old man, on the mouth if you will!"

--and, looking her last look round the den, she prepares to go; but what
is that mark on her gorgeous gown? Brush it off! Brush off that dust! It
might bring horror down on her in an instant, before she knows or
thinks, and she is going straight from here to dance at the
King's. . . . She is gone, with her jealousy and her anguish and her
passion, and, clutched to her heart, the phial that shall end but one of
those torments.

+ + + + +

She is gone, and she remains for ever. Her age is past, but not the
hearts that ached in it. We curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison
now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning?

"If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?"

Such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their
utterance, and it is here.

IV.--IN A YEAR

Nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the
"dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can
even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _The
Laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder
at her lover's mutability.

"Was it something said,
Something done,
Vexed him? was it touch of hand,
Turn of head?
Strange! that very way
Love begun:
I as little understand
Love's decay."[238:1]

Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon
it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is
abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So
greatly that still, still, she can drea