afraid of
hurting her, as if she expected sweets from both hands. It is easy for
you to see through her empty head: do cot give her up till she has had
time to look a little way into your eyes."

"Eveena," I answered, almost as much pained as touched by the
unaffected humility which had so accepted and carried out my ironical
comparison, "one simple magnet-key would unlock the breast whose
secrets seem so puzzling; but it has hardly a name in your tongue, and
cannot yet be in your hands."

"Ah, yes!" she said softly, "you gave it me; do you think I have lost
it in two nights? But the esve cannot be loved as she loves her
master. I could half understand the prodigal heart that would buy a
girl's life with yours, and all that is bound up in yours. No other
_man_ would have done it--in our world," she added, answering my
gesture of dissent; "but they say that the terrible _kargynda_ will
stand by his dying mate till he is shot down. You bought my heart, my
love, all I am, when you bought my life, and never asked the cost."
She continued almost in a whisper, her rose-suffused cheeks and moist
eyes hidden from my sight as the lips murmured their loving words into
my ear,--"Though the nestling never looked from under the wing, do you
think she knows not what to expect when she is bought from the nest?
She dares not struggle in the hand that snatches her; much more did
she deserve to be rated and rapped for fluttering in that which saved
her life. Bought twice over, caged by right as by might--was her
thought midnight to your eyes, when she wondered at the look that
watched her so quietly, the hand that would not try to touch lest it
should scare her, the patience that soothed and coaxed her to perch on
the outstretched finger, like a flower-bird tamed at last? Do you
think that name, given her by lips which softened even their words of
fondness for her ear, did not go to her heart straight as the esve
flies home, or that it could ever be forgotten? There is a chant young
girls are fond of, which tells more than I can say."

Her tones fell so low that I should have lost them, had her lips not
actually touched my ear while she chanted the strange words in the
sweetest notes of her sweet voice:--

"Never yet hath single sun
Seen a flower-bird tamed and won;
Sun and stars shall quit the sky
Ere a bird so tamed shall fly.

"Never human lips have kissed
Flower-bird tamed 'twixt mist and mist;
Bird so tam