t punishment, the worst agony on earth.
Slowly, slowly for three days, three nights, three eternities, they will
have watched the honey of their love turn, drop by drop, into gall.
Their passion--slowly, slowly--will turn into loathing; their desire
into disgust. For no love in the world can survive the chain of
monotony!"

* * * * *

Thus it was done.

A chain of unbreakable steel, ten feet long, was welded to the girl's
right wrist and the man's left, and they were locked into a house--a
house such as lovers dream of--that was guarded day and night by armed
warriors, who let none within hailing distance, whose windows were
shuttered and curtained so that not even the golden eye of the sun might
look in, and around which a vast circular clearing had been made with
torch and spade and scimitar so that neither bird nor insect nor beast
of forest and jungle might live there and no sound drift into the
lovers' room except, perhaps, the crooning sob of the dawn wind; and at
the end of the third night carefully, stealthily, silently the king and
the Brahmin walked up to the house and pressed their ears against the
keyhole, and they heard the man's voice saying:

"I love you, little flower of my happiness! I love you--you who are all
my dreams come true! When I look into your face the sun rises, and the
waters bring the call of the deep, and the boat of my life rocks on the
dancing waves of passion!"

And then the girl's answer, clear, serene:

"And I love _you_, Madusadan, captain of horse! You have broken the
fetters of my loneliness, the shackles of my longing! I waited, waited,
waited--but you came, and I shall never let you go again! You have
banished all the drab, sad dreams of the past! You have made your heart
a prison for my love, and you have tossed away the key into the
turbulent whirlpool of my eternal desire!"

_"Did the chain gall them?" asked the Foolish Virgin, who had
come to Jehan Tugluk Khan, a wise man in Tartary and milk
brother to Ghengiz Khan, Emperor of the East and the North and
Captain General of the Golden Horde._

_"No, Foolish Virgin," replied Jehan Tugluk Khan. "Their love
could not have lived without the chain. It was their love which
WAS the chain--made it, held it, welded it, eternal, unbreaking,
unbreakable. Ten feet long was the chain. Each foot of
steel--eternal, unbreaking, unbreakable--was a link of their
lo