“I wonder,” I said after a little while, when she had praised my verses, and I sat by her side holding her hands and looking into her strange far-away eyes, “I wonder if you are the answer to my prayer—for so soon as I looked upon you, I gave you all my love, and, if you cannot give me yours in return, my heart will break—”
She shook her head sadly, and her eyes seemed to grow still more far-away, but she made no answer more, for all my entreaties, till at last the day had gone, and the moon was rising through the wood—and she still sitting by my side like a spirit in the spectral light. Once I seemed to hear her moan in the silence, and a shiver passed through her body. Then she turned her eyes upon me—they seemed like wells brimming with stars:
“I love you,” she said, “but we can never be each other’s. My name is Once-Upon-a-Time.”
At this I threw myself at her feet face down in the grass and wept bitterly, and I felt her hand soothingly laid upon my hair, and heard her voice softly bidding me be comforted. And for a long time it was so with us, till methinks I must have fallen asleep of the sweet soothing of her hand on my hair, and the murmur of her sweet voice—for, when I raised my head from the grass, the place was empty and the dawn was stealing with feet of pearl through the wood.
“She feared,” I cried, bitterly, “she feared that I might sing her my aubade!”
But this, of course, was only the lip-cynicism of my sad young heart, stricken with the arrows of that haunted beauty.
Once-Upon-a-Time! Thus had the Princess met me again as she had said, and often as I grew up to be a man, and walked but seldom in that old wood of dreams, her words would come back to me: “You are of those who are foredoomed to love the shadow of joy, and the dream of love. Your happiness will always be—Once-Upon-a Time.” For, as I walked the ways of the world, I saw that my old wood had only been a dream picture of the real world outside, and that the real world itself, in which my manhood was now called on to play its part, was no less a dream of beauty and terror, of love and death, of good and evil, than my old wood itself; and, like my old wood, it seemed haunted for me by the face of a Princess—some dear, desired face of woman lost amid these drifting faces, as in my boyhood it had been lost among the leaves of the wood. Beautiful faces, beautiful faces, drifting by in the crowded streets—but never my face among all the faces. Hints of my face, even glimpses perhaps—sometimes almost the certainty that it is she yonder—but a sudden turn of the head, and alas! It is not she! Yet a day did come at last, when the mob of unmeaning faces seemed suddenly to open, as the clouds fall away right and left before the moon; or as in a wilderness of leaves without a blossom, one should come upon the breathless beauty of some lonely flower.
Yes! It was my face at last.
We looked at each other but for a moment in the street, which her beauty had suddenly made silent for me as the desert—but for a moment, yet Eternity must be like that look we gave each other.