in this dress and that dress, and was satisfied with
none. The dews of the bath stood cold upon her, and she trembled, and
fled from mirror to mirror, and in each she was the same surpassing
vision of loveliness. Then her women held a glass to her, and she
examined herself closely, if there might be a fleck upon her anywhere,
and all was as the snow of the mountains on her round limbs sloping in
the curves of harmony, and the faint rose of the dawn on slants of snow
was their hue. Twining her fingers and sighing, she thought, 'It is not
that! he cannot but think me beautiful.' She smiled a melancholy smile at
her image in the glass, exclaiming, 'What availeth it, thy beauty? for he
is away and looketh not on thee, thou vain thing! And what of thy
loveliness if the light illumine it not, for he is the light to thee, and
it is darkness when he's away.'

Suddenly she thought, 'What's that which needeth to light it no other
light? I had well-nigh forgotten it in my bliss, the Jewel!' Then she
went to a case of ebony-wood, where she kept the Jewel, and drew it
forth, and shone in the beam of a pleasant imagination, thinking, ''Twill
surprise him!' And she robed herself in a robe of saffron, and set lesser
gems of the diamond and the emerald in the braid of her hair, and knotted
the Serpent Jewel firmly in a band of gold-threaded tissue, and had it
woven in her hair among the braids. In this array she awaited his coming,
and pleased her mind with picturing his astonishment and the joy that
would be his. Mute were the women who waited on her, for in their lives
they had seen no such sight as Bhanavar beneath the beams of the Jewel,
and the whole chamber was aglow with her.

Now, in her anxiety she sent them one and one repeatedly to look forth at
the window for the coming of the Prince. So, when he came not she went
herself to look forth, and stretched her white neck beyond the casement.
While her head was exposed, she heard a cry of some one from the house in
the street opposite, and Bhanavar beheld in the house of the broker an
old wrinkled fellow that gesticulated to her in a frenzy. She snatched
her veil down and drew in her head in anger at him, calling to her maids,
'What is yonder hideous old dotard?'

And they answered, laughing, ''Tis indeed Boolp the broker, O fair
mistress and mighty!'

To divert herself she made them tell her of Boolp, and they told her a
thousand anecdotes of the broker, and verses of him, and