slight breeze that came over the
wilderness from the Jordan, and the big round stars that were already
floating in the skies were the brilliant heralds of the splendour of
a Syrian night. The beauteous hour and the sacred scene were alike in
unison with the heart of Tancred, softened and serious. He mused in
fascinated reverie over the dazzling incident of the day. Who was this
lady of Bethany, who seemed not unworthy to have followed Him who had
made her abiding place so memorable? Her beauty might have baffled the
most ideal painter of the fair Hebrew saints. Raffaelle himself could
not have designed a brow of more delicate supremacy. Her lofty but
gracious bearing, the vigour of her clear, frank mind, her earnestness,
free from all ecstasy and flimsy enthusiasm, but founded in knowledge
and deep thought, and ever sustained by exact expression and ready
argument, her sweet witty voice, the great and all-engaging theme on
which she was so content to discourse, and which seemed by right to
belong to her: all these were circumstances which wonderfully affected
the imagination of Tancred.

He was lost in the empyrean of high abstraction, his gaze apparently
fixed on the purple mountains, and the golden skies, and the glittering
orbs of coming night, which yet in truth he never saw, when a repeated
shout at length roused him. It bade him stand aside on the narrow path
that winds round the Mount of Olives from Jerusalem to Bethany, and let
a coming horseman pass. The horseman was the young Emir who was a guest
the night before in the divan of Besso. Though habited in the Mamlouk
dress, as if only the attendant of some great man, huge trousers and
jacket of crimson cloth, a white turban, a shawl round his waist holding
his pistols and sabre, the horse he rode was a Kochlani of the highest
breed., By him was a running footman, holding his nargileh, to which
the Emir frequently applied his mouth as he rode along. He shot a keen
glance at Tancred as he passed by, and then throwing his tube to his
attendant, he bounded on.

In the meantime, we must not forget the lady of Bethany after she so
suddenly disappeared from the kiosk. Proceeding up her mountain garden,
which narrowed as she advanced, and attended by two female slaves, who
had been in waiting without the kiosk, she was soon in that hilly chink
in which she had built her nest; a long, low pavilion, with a shelving
roof, and surrounded by a Saracenic arcade; the whole p