a resistless inward fervor, he threw himself once more at her
feet--"See!--here do I pay my vows at Love's high altar!--heart's
desire shall be the prayer--heart's ecstasy the praise! ...
together we will celebrate our glad service of love, and heaven
itself shall sanctify this Eve of St. Edris and All Angels!"

She listened,--looking down upon him with grave, half timid
tenderness,--her tears dried, and a sudden hope irradiated her
fair face with a soft, bright flush, as lovely as the light of
morning falling on newly opened flowers. When he ceased, she
spoke--her accents breaking through the silence like clear notes
of music sweetly sung.

"So be it!" she said ... "May Heaven truly sanctify all pure
thoughts, and free the soul of my Beloved from sin!"

And slowly bending forward, as a delicate iris-blossom bends to
the sway of the wind, she laid her hands about his neck, and
touched his lips with her own...

Ah! ... what divine ecstasy,--what wild and fiery transport filled
him then! ... Her kiss, like a penetrating lighting-flash, pierced
to the very centre of his being,--the moonbeams swam round him in
eddying circles of gold--the white field heaved to and fro, ... he
caught her waist and clung to her, and in the burning marvel of
that moment he forget everything, save that, whether spirit or
mortal, she was in woman's witching shape, and that all the
glamour of her beauty was his for this one night at least, . . this
night which now in the speechless, glorious delirium of love that
overwhelmed him, seemed like the Mahometan's night of Al-Kadr,