Thou art what all the winds have uttered not,
What the still night suggesteth to the heart.
Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth,
Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea;
Thy face remembered is from other worlds,
It has been died for, though I know not when,
It has been sung of, though I know not where.'"

"God," Winsor whispered, "that's beautiful."

"Hush. This is the best part."

"'It has the strangeness of the luring West,
And of sad sea-horizons; beside thee
I am aware of other times and lands,
Of birth far back, of lives in many stars.
O beauty lone and like a candle clear
In this dark country of the world! Thou art
My woe, my early light, my music dying.'"

Hugh and Winsor remained silent while the young voice went on reading
_Maressa's_ reply, her gentle refusal of the god and her proud
acceptance, of the mortal. Finally they heard the last words:

"When she had spoken, Idas with one cry
Held her, and there was silence; while the god
In anger disappeared. Then slowly they,
He looking downward, and she gazing up,
Into the evening green wandered away."

When the voice paused, the poem done, the two boys walked slowly down
the hall, down the steps, and out into the cool night air. Neither said
a Word until they were half-way across the campus. Then Winsor spoke
softly:

"God! Wasn't that beautiful?"

"Yes--beautiful." Hugh's voice was hardly more than a whisper.
"Beautiful.... It--it--oh, it makes me--kinda ashamed."

"Me, too. Poker when we can have that! We're awful fools, Hugh."

"Yes--awful fools."

CHAPTER XXII

Prom came early in May, and Hugh looked forward to it joyously, partly
because it would be his first Prom and partly because Cynthia was
coming. Cynthia! He thought of her constantly, dreamed of her, wrote
poems about her and to her. At times his longing for her swelled into an
ecstasy of desire that racked and tore him. He was lost in love, his
moods sweeping him from lyric happiness to black despair. He wrote to
her several times a week, and between letters he took long walks
composing dithyrambic epistles that fortunately were never written.