ory's
coat on the floor an arm came forth, pushing the coat aside, and a
man slenderly built, with a youthful, sensitive face and somewhat
critically-drooping lids, sat up leisurely and looked about him in
slow surprise, kindling to distinct amusement.

"Upon my soul," he said softly, "what an admission--what an
admission! I can not have made such a night of it in years."

Upon which Jarvo dropped unhesitatingly to his knees.

"Melek! Melek!" he cried, prostrating himself again and again. "The
King! The King! The gods have permitted the possible."

CHAPTER XVIII

A MORNING VISIT

In an upper room in the Palace of the Litany, fair with all the
burnished devices of the early light, Prince Tabnit paced on that
morning of mornings of his marriage day. Because of his great
happiness the whole world seemed to him like some exquisite intaglio
of which this day was the design.

The room, "walled with soft splendours of Damascus tiles," was laid
with skins of forgotten animals and was hung with historic
tapestries dyed by ancient fingers in the spiral veins of the Murex.
There were frescoes uniting the dream with its actuality, columns
carved with both lines and names of beauty, pilasters decorated with
chain and checker-work and golden nets. A stairway led to a high
shrine where hung the crucified Tyrian sphinx. The room was like a
singing voice summoning one to delights which it described. But
whatever way one looked all the lines neither pointed nor seemed to
have had beginning, but being divorced from source and direction
expressed merely beauty, like an altar "where none cometh to pray."

Prince Tabnit, in his trailing robe of white embroidered by a
thousand needles, looked so akin to the room that one suspected it
of having produced him, Athena-wise, from, say, the great black
shrine. When he paused before the shrine he seemed like a child come
to beseech some last word concerning the Riddle, rather than a man
who believed himself to have mastered all wisdom and to have nailed
the world-sphinx to her cross.

"Surely there is a vein for the silver
And a place for the gold where they fine it.
Iron is taken out of the earth
And brass is moulton out of the stone.
Man setteth an end to darkness
And searcheth out all perfection:
The stones of darkness and of the shadow of death,"

he was repeating softly. "So it is," he added, "'and searcheth to
the farthest bound.