the Enchanted Sea. She sang to him, luting deliriously; and he was
intoxicated with the blissfulness of his fortune, and took a lute and
sang to her love-verses in praise of her, rhyming his rapture. Then they
handed the goblet to each other, and drank till they were on fire with
the joy of things, and life blushed beauteousness. Surely, Rabesqurat
was becoming forgetful of her arts through the strength of those
draughts, till her eye marked the Lily by his side, which he grasped
constantly, the bright flower, and she started and said, 'One grant, O my
King, my husband!'

So he said courteously, 'All grants are granted to the lovely, the
fascinating; and their grief will be lack of aught to ask for?'

Then said she, 'O my husband, my King, I am jealous of that silly flower:
laugh at my weakness, but fling it from thee.'

Now, he was about to cast it from him, when a vanity possessed his mind,
and he exclaimed, 'See first the thing I will do, a wonder.'

She cried, 'No wonders, my life! I am sated with them.'

And he said, 'I am oblivious, O Queen, of how I came by this flower and
this phial; but thou shalt hear a thing beyond the power of common magic,
and see that I am something.'

Now, she plucked at him to abstain from his action, but he held the phial
to the flower. She signed imperiously to some slaves to stay his right
wrist, and they seized on it; but not all of them together could withhold
him from dropping a drop into the petals of the flower, and lo, the Lily
spake, a voice from it like the voice of Noorna, saying, 'Remember the