"So. Thou knowest the story?"
"This slave knows all that concerns the Honour of the King," she replied proudly.
The frown grew.
"The King can keep his honour without thy help, woman! Aye! and his promises too; so this coward shall be saved." Then, as was so often the case with him, eager questioning swept away everything else. "Yet wherefore coward? Tell me that, thou, her sister in sex? Wherefore should a young girl not shrink from burning with an old profligate whose very age hath prevented natural fulfilment of husbandhood? By the sun, my very stomach turns at the thought of it; yet womanhood accepts it dutifully. Lo! couldst thou but tell me--but thou canst not--whence comes this sense of sin which makes women prostitute, and tempts men to be far worse than the beasts, I would give thee----." He paused, looking into her soft dark eyes whence the fierceness had died away giving place to wise surprise at ignorance.
"The Most Excellent must know," she replied. "Our mothers teach it to us. It is the love which seeks for pleasure, which forgets motherhood. Lo! in the beginning we were the nothingness which tempted form, even as Siyâla the courtesan sang; so we cannot live save through that which we create. We are 'thieves of form, and sanctuaries of souls,' even as the Princess Sanyogata told Prithvirâj. Aye! though she had lured him with the love that is illusion! But she was brave also. She left her womanhood to die, and followed the immortal in the man."
"Then this mortal love is woman's only?" he asked critically, eager as ever in argument.
"Aye!" she answered simply. "In the beginning it was so; but we have taught it to man; thus it returns to us again in every soul to which we give a body. Yea! it is so! Look how far we are, Most Excellent"--she pointed with slim finger to the distant cranes--"from yonder birds to whom pairing time is breeding time, who know not sex save for the life they have to give to the world."
She paused, and there was silence; for once again, the example she had chosen fitted in with past thoughts. Far away on the primrose verge a sword-shaped shaft of red-encircled cloud hid the rising sun.
"And there is no other Love?" he asked moodily, forgetful as ever of his entourage in the absorption of inquiry. Her face grew paler, her hand went up almost unconsciously to her throat round which the green stone of the rebeck player hung; but no essence of rose assailed her senses; or if it did she denied the fact strenuously.
"I know not, my King," she said quietly. "There be some who talk of it; but my father--he was very learned, Most High--held that Love, needing both subject and object" (she spoke quite simply of such abstruse idea as many a nigh naked coolie in India will do, if so be he is Brâhmin), "lay outside the Great Unity and so was illusion. Yet to me----" she hesitated and looked at him almost appealingly out of her large, dark, unfathomable eyes. "Lo! I am woman, so I cannot think--wherefore should not Love be all things?"