Ukleet replied, 'O my Prince, he is or he is not: 'tis of the maybes. I
wot truly Boolp is one that baiteth the hook of an emergency.'

The brows of the Prince were downcast, and he said no more; but on the
following morning he left Bhanavar early under a pretext, and sallied
forth from the house of their abode alone.

Since their union in that city they had not been once apart, and Bhanavar
grieved and thought, 'Waneth his love for me?' and she called her women
to her, and dressed in this dress and that dress, and was satisfied with
none. The dews of the bath stood cold upon her, and she trembled, and
fled from mirror to mirror, and in each she was the same surpassing
vision of loveliness. Then her women held a glass to her, and she
examined herself closely, if there might be a fleck upon her anywhere,
and all was as the snow of the mountains on her round limbs sloping in
the curves of harmony, and the faint rose of the dawn on slants of snow
was their hue. Twining her fingers and sighing, she thought, 'It is not
that! he cannot but think me beautiful.' She smiled a melancholy smile at
her image in the glass, exclaiming, 'What availeth it, thy beauty? for he
is away and looketh not on thee, thou vain thing! And what of thy
loveliness if the light illumine it not, for he is the light to thee,
and it is darkness when he's away.'

Suddenly she thought, 'What's that which needeth to light it no other
light? I had well-nigh forgotten it in my bliss, the Jewel!' Then she
went to a case of ebony-wood, where she kept the Jewel, and drew it
forth, and shone in the beam of a pleasant imagination, thinking, ''Twill
surprise him!' And she robed herself in a robe of saffron, and set
lesser gems of the diamond and the emerald in the braid of her hair, and