torn from him as a grape-bunch is torn from the streaming vine, and the
third time she swooned and the anguish of life left her.

Now, Bhanavar was borne to the harem of the Vizier, and for days she
suffered no morsel of food to enter her mouth, and was dying, had not the
Vizier in the cunning of his dissimulation fed her with distant glimpses
of Almeryl, to show her he yet lived. Then she thought, 'While my beloved
liveth, life is due to me'; and she ate and drank and reassumed her fair
fulness and the queenliness that was hers; but the Vizier had no love of
her, and respected her, considering in his mind, 'Time will exhaust the
fury of this tigress, and she is a fruit worth the waiting for. Wullahy!
I shall have possessed her ere the days of over-ripening.'

There was in the harem of the Vizier a mountain-girl that had been
brought there in her childhood, and trained to play upon the lute and
accompany her voice with the instrument. To this little damsel Bhanavar
gave her heart, and would listen all day, as in a trance, to her luting,
till the desire to escape from that bondage and gather tidings of Almeryl
mastered her, and she persuaded one of the blacks of the harem with a
bribe to procure her an interview with the porter Ukleet. So at a certain
hour of the night Ukleet was introduced into the garden of the harem, and
he was in the darkness of that garden a white-faced porter with knees
that knocked the dread-march together; but Bhanavar strengthened his
soul, and he said to her, ''Twas the doing of Boolp the broker: and he
whispered the Vizier of thee and thy beauty, O my mistress! Surely thy
punishment and this ruin is but part payment to Boolp of the price of the
Jewel, the great Jewel that's in the hands of the Vizier.'

Then she questioned him: 'And Almeryl, the Prince, my husband, what of
him?'

Ukleet was dumb, and Bhanavar asked to hear no more. Surely she was at
the gates of pale spirits within an hour of her interview with Ukleet,
and there was no blessedness for her save in death, the stiffer of ills,
the drug that is infallible. As is said:

Dark is that last stage of sorrow
Which from Death alone can borrow
Comfort:--

Bhanavar would have died then, but in a certain pause of her fever the
Vizier stood by her. She looked at him long as she lay, and the life in
her large eyes was ebbing away slowly; but there seemed presently a
check, as an eddy comes in the stream, and the light of