There were five years between him and that memory as he stepped into that enchanted land for the second time.  The sweet figure of young womanhood to which he had turned his boyish soul in hopeless worship, when it should have been busied rather with birds’ nests and rabbit-snares, had, it is true, come to him in dimmer outline each Spring, but with magic the deeper for that.  As the form faded from the silver halo, and passed more and more into mythology, it seemed, indeed, as if she had never lived for him at all, save in dreams, or on another star.  Still, his memory held by those great shells, and he had come at last to the fabled country on the perilous quest—­who of us dare venture such a one to-day?—­of a ‘lost saint.’  Enquiry of his friends that evening, cautious as of one on some half-suspected diplomacy, told him that one with the name of his remembrance did live at the mill-house—­with an old father, too.  But how all the beauty of the singing morning became a scentless flower when, on making the earliest possible call, he was met at the door with that hollow word, ’Away’—­a word that seemed to echo through long rooms of infinite emptiness and turn the daylight shabby—­till the addendum, ‘for the day,’ set the birds singing again, and called the sunshine back.

A few nights after he was sitting at her side, by a half-opened window, with his arm about her waist, and her head thrillingly near his.  With his pretty gift of recitation he was pouring into her ear that sugared passage in Endymion, appropriately beginning, ‘O known unknown,’ previously ‘got up’ for the purpose; but alas! not too perfectly to prevent a break-down, though, fortunately, at a point that admitted a ready turn to the dilemma:—­

                            ’Still
  Let me entwine thee surer, surer ...’

Here exigency compelled N. to make surety doubly, yea, trebly, sure; but memory still forsaking him, the rascal, having put deeper and deeper significance into his voice with each repetition, dropped it altogether as he drew her close to him, and seemed to fail from the very excess of love.  An hour after, he was bounding into the moonlight in an intoxication of triumph.  She was won.  The beckoning wonder had come down to him.  And yet it was real moonlight—­was not that his own grace in silhouette, making a mirror even of the hard road?—­real grass over which he had softly stept from her window, real trees, all real, except—­yes! was it real love?

In the lives of all passionate lovers of women there are two broadly-marked periods, and in some a third:  slavery, lordship, and service.  The first is the briefest, and the third, perhaps, seldom comes; the second is the most familiar.