near, and see) — and she saw him.

"On the crowded earth she saw him alone. Alone, but for a lyre upon his arm, which he clasped to himself as though it were a beloved to be wedded to him on the morrow. His head was bowed, and he was lost in thought.

"Time after time Shih Nu would leave her eternal dwellings and draw near the earth to see him. She understood what regrets gnawed at him, and what dreams turned to burdens weighed upon the young man's back. She knew that with her was the cure — that in her was the cure.

"In the sky Shih Nu wove herself a new gown; she spun its threads from drops of dew and figured it with the reflection of starlight in still waters. When she put it on, the moon turned away its darkened face, and upon the cheeks of the stars was traced a pallor that comes over them still.

"And she let down her red hair over her shoulders and her breast, so that nothing showed but one sly beauty-spot that knew where to alight!

"And they met. She knew him for a poet who had passed his days wrestling with love: one day love felled him, and one day he felled love, and on both days he uttered his verses as though he were breathing his last, and the lyre stirred as though fingers were moving its strings.

"She knew him, and he knew her not. Was he taken up with himself? Or did he suppose her and all else to be two moldings — and the clay one? He gazed into her eyes, and rested. Rested — but did not come back.

"He knew her not, and she knew him. Is not Mephistopheles accursed? But why then does he look on from above, watching the players and not playing? Or no? His little red beard tells her he is a frolicsome satyr — but why then is he alone and weary? Or is he a god, of a family other than hers, a god who 'knows, together with immortality, the depth of annihilation'?

"And she called him: she called Mephisto to play, not to look on; to sport, not to make pilgrimage. She called the satyr to leap over the mountains, to frolic in the thickets, to burst open the springs, to glide with the great river down to the living sea. She called the god to fulfill himself. And she began to reveal herself to him, letting fall from herself curtain after curtain, rending veil after veil. And with every mask that dropped, the watching pines listened to tremblings of the lyre — tremblings they had never known in it before.

"The whole winter long she called him and he did not wake. And the whole spring long she passed in unveiling, so that it was as if he were finding her, and finding himself, and his lyre, for the first time. And in summer, at midsummer, as the muezzin lifted his cry, the dread breathed its last, and the seventh and final curtain drew aside — and he awoke, and answered, and was."

•

And she was silent a long while, and I was silent. I gazed intently at Vega, but I glimpsed my companion's eyes straying: from Vega to the Lyre, and from the Lyre to Vega.

I do not remember how much time passed before J. returned to her tale. Had I not been certain it was she who was speaking to me, I should have thought from the voice that it was someone else.

•

"And then?

"They basked in bliss, as though they truly lived in a legend. But how am I to describe that bliss to you? Have you not noticed that Dante himself said this and said that of the Inferno, and of Purgatory, but when in his wandering he reached Paradise he fell short, and knew not what to say?

"He had feared, should she come to know him, that the enchantment would vanish — and behold, the enchantment only worked after the veils were drawn away; or that they would lose their bliss — and behold, only now were the two of them entering its palace, having stood till then on the threshold of its courtyard.

"Bliss, did I say? Fate itself hates bliss; nay, the gods do not grant bliss, when they grant it, except by portion. Why then should these two enjoy it alone?

"And besides, the sun was resentful, the stars reproachful, and the dawn downcast: who now would weave for that one her light and shadow, for those their radiance, and for this its pale colors?

"....Tell me, did I relate to you that near their hut there was a wild fox, come from beyond the twilight (in the manuscript of Confucius's disciple it says the sky sent it of set purpose)? It passed before the hut continually, looking on with cunning; but the bliss they dwelt in left them no room to think of that spoiler of the vineyards.

"Why should I draw it out for you: on a blazing evening the fox bit her a savage bite. Had she been a mortal she would have perished; but she was a daughter of the sky, and the sky snatched her up to its heights.

"That night he missed her and did not find her. And with her he missed a string of his lyre that used to dye its melodies with rapture and gladness — he understood that she had taken it with her: a keepsake, and a bond.

"Now he knew loneliness; now he knew the wandering that leads nowhere. Loneliness and wandering, which once had been a pleasure and an interval between two seasons, became a life (a life?) and a whole drama. And the merry nymphs wound themselves about him: they flitted before him and he did not see; they toyed with his beard and he was like a boulder; they stirred the lyre, and the songful string to whose tune they used to dance complained, as he did, of the emptiness.