“No!” and her sweet lips smiled—“you did not call, ... I came!”
“Why did you come?” he asked, still faintly.
“For my own joy and yours!” she answered in thrilling tones—“Sweeter than all the heavens is Love, and Love is here!”
An icy cold crept through him as he heard the rapture in her accents,—such rapture!—like that of a lark singing in the sunlight on a fresh morning of May. And like the dim sound of a funeral bell came the words of the monk, tolling solemnly across his memory, in spite of his efforts to forget them, “With Lilith’s love comes Lilith’s freedom.”
“No, no!” he muttered within himself—“It cannot be,—it shall not be!—she is mine, mine only. Her fate is in my hands; if there be justice in Heaven, who else has so much right to her body or her soul as I?”
And he stood, gazing irresolutely at the girl, who stirred restlessly and flung her white arms upward on her pillows, while the music he had heard suddenly ceased. He dared not speak,—he was afraid to express any desire or impose any command upon this “fine sprite” which had for six years obeyed him, but which might now, for all he could tell, be fluttering vagrantly on the glittering confines of realms far beyond his ken.
Her lips moved,—and presently she spoke again.
“Wonderful are the ways of Divine Law!” she murmured softly—“and infinite are the changes it works among its creatures! An old man, despised and poor, by friends rejected, perplexed in mind, but pure in soul; such Was the Spirit that now Is. Passing me flame-like on its swift way heavenward,—saved and uplifted, not by Wisdom, but by Love.”
El-Râmi listened, awed and puzzled. Her words surely seemed to bear some reference to Kremlin?
“Of the knowledge of the stars and the measuring of light there is more than enough in the Universe;”—went on Lilith dreamily—“but of faithful love, such as keeps an Angel for ever by one’s side, there is little; therefore the Angels on earth are few.”