It is the state we were made for. I
have delayed this matter all too long. But, thank heaven, I am engaged
at last--I hope for all the rest of my life. Now, will you not
congratulate me?"

"It may be very nice as you put it, but engagements end as well as
begin," I insisted. "You cannot be a law unto yourself in these
matters. When will you get married?"

"Good Heavens!" exclaimed my uncle. "Get married and end this
delightful state! You don't think she will want me to marry her, do
you? Besides, she told me some time ago that she did not intend to
marry again. It was only that encouraged me to suggest an engagement
to her. Though she is a wonderful woman, George--a wonderful woman.
Still, I think she looks at things very much as I do."

He paused thoughtfully. Then added with fervour, "At least I hope so."

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

A RHAPSODY

I found him in his own apartments, and strangely disordered. He went
to and fro, raving--beginning so soon as I entered the room. I noticed
a book half out of its cover, flung carelessly into the corner of the
room.

"I am enchanted of an impalpable woman, George," he said, "I am in
bonds to a spirit of the air. I can neither think nor work nor eat nor
sleep because of her. Sometimes I go out suddenly, tramping through
seething streets, through fog and drizzle or dry east wind, mourning
for her sake. My life is rapidly becoming one colourless melancholy
through her spells and twining sorceries. I sometimes wish that I were
dead.

"Yet I have never seen her. Often, indeed, I imagine her, anon as of
this shape, and anon of that. I know her only by her victims, those
she slays daily, and daily revives to slay. They come to me with their
complaints, mutilated, pathetic, terrible. I try to shut my ears to
them in vain. I have tried wool, but it made little or no difference.

"The business always begins with the slamming of a door and a healthy
footfall across the room. The piano is opened. Then some occasional
noises--the falling of a piece of music behind the piano, perhaps, and
its extraction by means of the tongs--I know it is tongs she uses by
the clang. Then the music-stool creaks, and La Belle Dame is ready to
play. She puts both her hands upon the key-board, and the treble
shrieks apprehensively, and the bass roars like a city in revolt.
After that this hush. Just this interval.

"Yet I sometimes think this hush is really the wor