Long, then, from life and love been parted?’
‘For forty years!’ I heard her say.
‘Indeed, I’m seventy to-day!…
But never mind! So are lives charted
And so they pass. Thy spring has flown
And mine has too. We are, I own,
Old, both, but be thou not disheartened
By fickle youth’s swift passage. True,
I’m grey, a trifle crooked too,
Less lively and perhaps less charming
Than once I was…’ This in disarming
Tones she declared, her voice a squeak.
‘Come, do not look, I beg, so tragic…
I am – in confidence I speak —
Like thee become well versed in magic.’
“A sorceress! What had she said!…
Struck dumb was I by the admission
And felt a fool, a dunderhead
For all my store of erudition.
“But worse by far was that the spell
That I had cast worked far too well.
My shrivelled idol flared with passion;
She loved me – loved me to obsession!
Her grey lips twisted in a smile,
In graveyard tones the old hag muttered
The wildest of avowals, while
I suffered silently, in utter
Disgust and loathing, and upon
The ground my eyes kept. She wheezed on,
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