She said no more; but he thought, just so had he seen a rose-crested golden-eyed bird of the great savannas look, shut in a cage in a showman's caravan, and dying slowly, with dulled plumage and drooped head, while the street mob of a town thrust their fingers through the bars and mocked it, and called to it to chatter and be gay.
"Show your beauty once—just once amidst us on the stage, and on the morrow you can choose your riches and your jewels from the four winds of heaven as you will," the players urged on her a hundred times.
But she refused always.
Her beauty—it was given to the gods, to take or leave, in life or death, for him.
The months went on; she searched for him always. A horrible, unending vigil that never seemed nearer its end. Vainly, day by day, she searched the crowds and the solitudes, the gates of the palaces and the vaults of the cellars. She thought she saw him a thousand times; but she could never tell whether it were truth or fancy. She never met him face to face: she never heard his name. There is no desert wider, no maze more unending, than a great city.
She ran hideous peril with every moment that she lived; but by the strength and the love that dwelt together in her she escaped them. Her sad, wide, open, pathetic eyes searched only for his face and saw no other; her ear, ever strained to listen for one voice, was dead to every accent of persuasion or of passion.
When men tried to tell her she was beautiful, she looked them full in the eyes and laughed, a terrible dreary laugh of scorn that chilled them to the bone. When the gay groups on balconies, that glanced golden in the sun, flung sweetmeats at her, and dashed wine on the ground, and called to her for her beauty's sake to join them, she looked at them with a look that had neither envy nor repugnance in it, but only a cold mute weariness of contempt.
One day a great sculptor waylaid her, and showed her a pouch full of money and precious stones. "All that, and more, you shall have, if you will let me make a cast of your face and your body once." In answer, she showed him the edge of her hidden knife.
One day a young man, unlike to all the ragged and toil-worn crowds that alone beheld her, came in those crowded quarters of the poor, and watched her with eyes aglow like those of the youth in the old market-square about the cathedral, and waylaid her, later, in solitude, and slid in her palm a chain studded with precious stones of many colors.
"I am rich," he murmured to her. "I am a prince. I can make your name a name of power, if only you will come."