“Alas, I have dreamed of your sweetness and what is the dream to the truth? I am drowned in it. O give it to me; make it mine that in life and death it may enfold me and that I may never again behold a lesser light, having seen the ineffable.”
And he caught her hand passionately and drew her towards him, she yielding gently and slowly, resisting a very little, and looking at him as if with compassion.
And very softly in a voice like the breathing of a flute she said:
“O my cousin, how should we face the wrath of the Emperor?” as though all her soul were in that question.
And he, kissing her hands with frenzy, said in broken words:
“Ah, Moon of my delight that knows no wane, let me but watch with you through the starry hours of one night, and then, then if the Padshah’s will be to slay me, I shall at least have lived.”
“And I also,” she said, looking down like the feminine incarnation of modesty, so that enraptured he flung his arms about the yielding softness of her most exquisite form and kissed her on the lips as a thirsty man in the desert grasps the cup nor can sever his mouth from it. And when he would permit her to speak she leaned her head backward to gain space, and she said:
“What is my lord’s will with his slave? And in what shall I obey him?”
Now I, standing in the recess would have warned him, if I could, that not thus—O not thus, does the proudest and wisest of women abandon herself to such as he! For I had pity on his youth and the manly beauty of him, and the Imperial blood that he shared with her. But who was this creature of dust to obstruct the design of the Imperial Princess? And indeed even I wavered and was uncertain that I guessed her meaning, with such veiled submissive sweetness did she hold his hand in hers and touch it to her lovely brows.
And trembling like a man in a fever, he replied.