; her very
inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." Yet she loves to hear
her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there
seem to be for him.

"Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune--
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares?
But 'tis twilight, you see--with such suites to explore,
Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"

Listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." It is
not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms:
it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." What does _that_
house contain--where is _she_? He seems to hold her, yet she "goes out
as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek
at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms!

She listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a
secret. For she never meant to be--she cannot feel that she _is_; and
thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? Perhaps she must always
elude? She does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! And he
quickly answers:

"Escape me?
Never--
Beloved!
While I am I, and you are you,
So long as the world contains us both,
Me the loving and you the loth,
While the one eludes, must the other pursue."

But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find
her. And this, in its turn, scares _him_.

"My life is a fault at last, I fear:
It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."

It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her. . . . They look at
one another, and he takes heart again.

"But what if I fail of my purpose here?
It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
And, baffled, get up and begin again--
So the chase takes up one's life, that's all."

But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she _wants_ him
to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says:

"Look but once from your farthest bound
At me so deep in the dust and dark,
No sooner the old hope goes to ground
Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
I shape me--
Ever
Removed!"

Is not th