The handsome Laureate looked amused.
"Let her do so then!" he laughed carelessly. "Were she to leave me I should not miss her greatly; a thousand pieces of gold will purchase me another voice as sweet as hers,--another maid as fair! Meanwhile the child is free to shape her own fate,--her own future. I bind her no longer to my service; nevertheless, like the jessamine-flower, she clings,--and will not easily unwind the tendrils of her heart from mine."
"Poor jessamine-flower!" murmured Lysia negligently, with a touch of malice in her tone. "What a rock it doth embrace; how little vantage-ground it hath wherein to blossom!" And her drowsy eyes shot forth a fiery glance from under their heavily fringed drooping white lids.
Sah-luma met her look with one of mingled vexation and reproach; she smiled and raising a goblet of wine to her lips, kissed the brim, and gave it to him with an indescribably graceful, swaying gesture of her whole form that reminded one of a tall white lily bowing in the breeze. He seized the cup eagerly, drank from it and returned it,--his momentary annoyance, whatever it was, passed, and a joyous elation illumined his fine features. Then Lysia, refilling the cup, kissed it again and handed it to Theos with so much soft animation and tenderness in her face as she turned to him, that his enforced calmness nearly gave way, and he had much ado to restrain himself from falling at her feet in a transport of passion, and crying out! ... "Love me, O thou sorceress-sovereign of beauty! ... love me, if only for an hour, and then let me die! ... for I shall have lived out all the joys of life in one embrace of thine!" His hand trembled as he took the goblet, and he drank half its contents thirstily,--then imitating Sah-luma's example, he returned it to her with a profound salutation. Her eyes dwelt meditatively upon him.
"What a dark, still, melancholy countenance is thine, Sir Theos!" she said abruptly--"Thou art, for sure, a man of strongly repressed and concentrated passions, ... 'tis a nature I love! I would there were more of thy proud and chilly temperament in Al- Kyris! ... Our men are like velvet-winged butterflies, drinking honey all day and drowsing in sunshine--full to the brows of folly,--frail and delicate as the little dancing maidens of the King's seraglio, . . nervous too, with weak heads, that art apt to ache on small provocation, and bodies that are apt to fail easily when but slightly fatigued. Aye!--thou art a man clothed complete in manliness,--moreover..."
She paused, and leaning forward so that the dark shower of her perfumed hair brushed his arm ... "Hast ever heard travellers talk of volcanoes? ... those marvellous mountains that oft wear crowns of ice on their summits and yet hold unquenchable fire in their depths? ... Methinks thou dost resemble these,--and that at a touch, the flames would leap forth uncontrolled!"