It was as a flower he looked at her, no more. It was all a dream, of course. It had come in dream-fashion, it would go in the fashion of a dream. At that moment she was not a warm human girl with a lovely face. She was not the clever, lonely, subtle-simple maiden in the house of books. She was a flower he had met.
His mind began to weave words, the shuttle to glide in the loom of the poet, but words came to him that were not his own.
"Come hither, Child! and rest;
This is the end of day,
Behold the weary West!
"Now are the flowers confest
Of slumber; sleep as they!
Come hither, Child! and rest."
And then he sighed, for he thought of the other poet who had written those lines and of what had brought him to his dreadful death.
Why did thoughts like these come into the flower garden?