y the
tears
Of the Spring and the kiss of the sun.

For he comes, and my heart that was chill as a lake in the season
of snow,
Is molten, and glows as with fire.
And the Love that I knew not is born and he laughs in my heart,
and I know
The name and the flame of Desire.

As a flame I am kindled, a flame that is blown by a wind from the
North,
By a wind that is deadly with cold,
And the hope that awoke in me faints, for the Love that is born
shall go forth
To my Love, and shall die as of old!

Now the song sobbed itself away, but the heart of the Wanderer echoed to
its sweetness as a lyre moans and thrills when the hand of the striker
is lifted from the strings.

For a while he stood thus, hidden by the web upon the loom, while his
limbs shook like the leaves of the tall poplar, and his face turned
white as turn the poplar leaves. Then desire overcame him, and a longing
he could not master, to look upon the face of her who sang, and he
seized the web upon the loom, and rent it with a great rending noise, so
that it fell down on either side of him, and the gold coils rippled at
his feet.

VII

THE SHADOW IN THE SUNLIGHT

The torn web fell--the last veil of the Strange Hathor. It fell, and all
its unravelled threads of glittering gold and scarlet rippled and coiled
about the Wanderer's feet, and about the pillars of the loom.

The web was torn, the veil was rent, the labour was lost, the pictured
story of loves and wars was all undone.

But there, white in the silvery dusk of the alabaster shrine, there was
the visible Helen, the bride and the daughter of Mystery, the World's
Desire!

There shone that fabled loveliness of which no story was too strange, of
which all miracles seemed true. There, her hands folded on her lap, her
head bowed--there sat she whose voice was the echo of all sweet voices,
she whose shape was the mirror of all fair forms, she whose changeful
beauty, so they said, was the child of the changeful moon.

Helen sat in a chair of ivory, gleaming even through the sunshine of her
outspread hair. She was clothed in soft folds of white; on her breast
gleamed the Starstone, the red stone of the sea-deeps that melts in the
sunshine, but that melted not on the breast of Helen. Moment by moment
the red drops from the ruby heart of the star fell on her snowy raiment,
fell and van