but he reserved Bhanavar to himself: and lo! twice she burst away from
them that held her to hang upon the lips of Almeryl, and twice was she
torn from him as a grape-bunch is torn from the streaming vine, and the
third time she swooned and the anguish of life left her.

Now, Bhanavar was borne to the harem of the Vizier, and for days she
suffered no morsel of food to enter her mouth, and was dying, had not the
Vizier in the cunning of his dissimulation fed her with distant glimpses
of Almeryl, to show her he yet lived. Then she thought, 'While my
beloved liveth, life is due to me'; and she ate and drank and reassumed
her fair fulness and the queenliness that was hers; but the Vizier had no
love of her, and respected her, considering in his mind, 'Time will
exhaust the fury of this tigress, and she is a fruit worth the waiting
for. Wullahy! I shall have possessed her ere the days of over-
ripening.'

There was in the harem of the Vizier a mountain-girl that had been
brought there in her childhood, and trained to play upon the lute and
accompany her voice with the instrument. To this little damsel Bhanavar
gave her heart, and would listen all day, as in a trance, to her luting,
till the desire to escape from that bondage and gather tidings of Almeryl
mastered her, and she persuaded one of the blacks of the harem with a
bribe to procure her an interview with the porter Ukleet. So at a
certain hour of the night Ukleet was introduced into the garden of the
harem, and he was in the darkness of that garden a white-faced porter
with knees that knocked the dread-march together; but Bhanavar
strengthened his soul, and he said to her, ''Twas the doing of Boolp the
broker: and he whispered the Vizier of thee and thy beauty, O my
mistress! Surely thy punishment and this ruin is but part payment to
Boolp of the price of the Jewel, the great Jewel that's in the hands of