At the earliest opportunity she left a card at River View. Narcissus was the subject’s name, and in due time he came to dinner, and they had green grapes and black figs, nuts like sweet wax and wine like melted amethysts. The princess loved him so much that he visited her very often and stayed very late. He was only a poet and she a princess, so she could not possibly marry him although this was what she very quickly longed to do; but as she was only a princess, and he a poet clinking his golden spurs, he did not want to be married to her. He had thick curling locks of hair red as copper, the mild eyes of a child, and a voice that could outsing a thousand delightful birds. When she heard his soft laughter in the dim delaying eve he grew strange and alluring to the princess. She knew it was because he was so beautiful that everybody loved him and wanted to win and keep him, but he had no inclination for anything but his art—which was to express himself. That was very sad for the princess; to be able to retain nothing of him but his poems, his fading images, while he himself eluded her as the wind eludes all detaining arms, forest and feather, briar and down of a bird. He did not seem to be a man at all but just a fairy image that slipped from her arms, gone, like brief music in the moonlight, before she was aware.
When he fell sick she watched by his bed.
“Tell me,” she murmured, her wooing palms caressing his flaming hair, “tell me you love me.”
All he would answer was: “I dream of loving you, and I love dreaming of you, but how can I tell if I love you?”
Very tremulous but arrogant she demanded of him: “Shall I not know if you love me at all?”
“Ask the fox in your brake, the hart upon your mountain. I can never know if you love me.”
“I have given you my deepest vows, Narcissus; love like this is wider than the world.”
“The same wind blows in desert as in grove.”
“You do not love at all.”
“Words are vain, princess, but when I die, put these white hands like flowers about my heart; if I dream the unsleeping dream I will tell you there.”