“Beware the end! With Lilith’s love comes Lilith’s freedom.”
But Lilith smiled with placid sweetness, and still left her hand confidingly in his; he held that hand, so warm and soft and white, and was loath to let it go,—he studied the rapt expression of the beautiful face, the lovely curve of the sweet shut lips, the delicately-veined lids of the closed eyes,—and was dimly conscious of a sense of vague happiness curiously intermingled with terror. By and by he began to collect his ideas which had been so suddenly scattered by the one word “Belovëd,”—and he resolved to break the mystic silence that oppressed and daunted him.
“Dreaming or waking, is she?” he queried aloud, a little tremulously, and as though he were talking to himself. “She must be dreaming!”
“Dreaming of joy!” said Lilith softly, and with quick responsiveness—“only that Joy is no dream! I hear your voice,—I am conscious of your touch,—almost I see you! The cloud hangs there between us still—but God is good,—He will remove that cloud.”
El-Râmi listened, perplexed and wondering.
“Lilith,” he said in a voice that strove in vain to assume its wonted firmness and authority—“What say you of clouds,—you who are in the full radiance of a light that is quenchless? Have you not told me of a glory that out-dazzles the sun, in which you move and have your being,—then what do you know of Shadow?”
“Yours is the Shadow,” replied Lilith—“not mine! I would that I could lift it from your eyes, that you might see the wonder and the beauty. Oh, cruel Shadow, that lies between my love and me!”
“Lilith! Lilith!” exclaimed El-Râmi in strange agitation, “Why will you talk of love!”
“Do you not think of love?” said Lilith—“and must I not respond to your innermost thought?”
“Not always do you so respond, Lilith!” said El-Râmi quickly, recovering himself a little, and glad of an opportunity to bring back his mind to a more scientific level. “Often you speak of things I know not,—things that perhaps I shall never know——”