e face
slowly to him. He lays his own upon it for an instant, then draws back
to gaze again, while she still looks into his eyes, until he feels that
her soul is drawing his to such communion that--

". . . I could
Change into you, beloved! You by me,
And I by you; this is your hand in mine,
And side by side we sit: all's true. Thank God!"

But her silence is unbroken, and now he needs her voice--

"I have spoken: speak you!"

--yet though he thus claims her utterance, his own bliss drives him
onward in eager speech. "O my life to come"--the life with her . . . and
yet, how shall he work!

"Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth--
The live truth, passing and re-passing me,
Sitting beside me?"

Still she is silent; he cries again "Now speak!"--but in a new access of
joy accepts again that silence, for she must see the hiding-place he had
contrived for her letters--in the fold of his Psyche's robe, "next her
skin"; and now, which of them all will drop out first?

"Ah--this that swam down like a first moonbeam
Into my world!"

In his gladness he turns to her with that first treasure in his hand.
She is not looking. . . . But there is nothing strange in that--all the
rest is new to her; naturally she is more interested in the new things,
and adoringly he watches her as--

". . . Again those eyes complete
Their melancholy survey, sweet and slow,
Of all my room holds; to return and rest
On me, with pity, yet some wonder too . . ."

But pity and wonder are natural in her--is she not an angel from heaven?
Yet he would bring her a little closer to the earth she now inhabits;
so--

"What gaze you at? Those? Books I told you of;
Let your first word to me rejoice them too."

Eagerly he displays them, but soon reproves himself: he has shown first
a tiny Greek volume, and of course Homer's should be the Greek--

"First breathed me from the lips of my Greek girl!"

So out comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to
read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon
their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must
be--and _they_ will surely bring the word he increasingly longs for.
That of the "Almaign Kaiser," one day to be cast in bronze, is not worth
lingering at in its present stage, but this--_this_? She will recognise
t