When the wedding cakes were eaten it was nearly midnight. The oldest female relative now led the young couple across the peristyle to the quiet sleeping room. All the guests followed, and the nuptial hymn was sung once more outside of the closed door. But when the last visitor had gone and the porter closed the heavy house-door with a noise that echoed through the peristyle, Lycon clasped Myrtale’s hand, saying:
“That noise is dearer to me than the notes of the nuptial hymn. Now we are alone; now I have you forever.”
He drew her towards him and his lips sought hers, but Myrtale, reared in the seclusion of the virgin-chamber, had never been alone with any man, and blushing deeply, averted her face.
Lycon took the clay lamp, shaped like a couch on which lay a sleeping Eros, and pointing to the little god, said:
“The love that fills my breast will never slumber until my hair is white and my back bowed with age. It would be an evil omen if I let this lamp burn on our bridal night. Neither now nor in the future shall it shine for us.”
With these words, he flung it down so that it was broken in the fall and lay shattered on the tiled floor.
In the intense darkness which had surrounded them, he drew Myrtale to his breast. His heart throbbed as it never had before, and the gloom seemed filled with little dancing flames like those of the broken lamp. With the perfume from Myrtale’s hair, he felt as if he were breathing an atmosphere of warm, ardent youth, and in the silence which Eros commands his mouth again sought the small, fresh lips.
This time Myrtale did not avert her face.
XIV.
Time passes swiftly to the happy; ere they realized it a year had gone by.