“Oh, and I speak for your own good, my darling, for there is a condition to be fulfilled before I may trust you and may give you all.”
Gerald answered: “No, Evelyn, not to-night—But indeed I entreat your pardon, my dear. My mind must have been wandering. Yes, yes! as I was saying, the difference is that Helen speaks!”
“For your own good, my dearest.”
“Yes; you speak, naturally, of a condition for my own good, just as Glaum hinted that so many more or less friendly persons would be doing in these parts.”
“I speak, though, of a very easy condition. You must yourself perform a tiny Asvamedha; and you must immolate before my mirror, not any really valuable horse, of course, nor even a good-looking horse, but only that hideous and wholly worthless horse which you have brought with you into the land of Dersam.”
Then Gerald said: “And that is a small price to pay for the attainment of the one thing which my heart quite earnestly desires, is it not? For all my life I have hungered, as I believe that all poets hunger, for that unflawed beauty, seemingly not ever to be found upon this earth, which now stands revealed in the form of a woman, and which now speaks to me with the voice of a woman—oh, quite with the voice of a woman!—and speaks, too, for my own good. Yes, it is a small price, such as any boy of nineteen or thereabouts would pay gladly. For I must tell you, who are the delight of gods and—well! of adolescent boys, at least, in every quarter of the world,—that all this very strongly reminds me of that first sonnet which I made about you when I was a boy of nineteen.”
Evarvan did not wholly conceal her uneasiness over the prospect of hearing this sonnet. But there was none the less in her voice a tenderness almost motherly now that she asked of Gerald, “And did you make verses, then, about me, dear, so early?”
“To prove it,” Gerald replied, “I will now recite to you that identical sonnet.”
And he did.
But his voice was so shaken with emotion that, when he had completed the octave, he paused, because it was never within Gerald’s power to resist the beauty of a sublime thought when it was thus adequately expressed in flawless verse. So for an instant he stayed silent. He caught up the lovely hands of Evarvan of the Mirror, and he pressed them to his trembling lips.