never
spoken a word, they had both fallen in love. Voiceless _amourettes_ have
their advantages:--when a woman speaks, how often she snaps her spell!
For instance, when the lips are divine but the utterance is slangy, when
the mouth is adorably rosebud but what it says is most horrible horsy!

A tender pity, too, gave its spur to his passion; he saw that, all Queen
of the Serail though she might be, this fettered gazelle was not happy
in her rose-chains, and to Galahad, who had a wonderful twist of the
knight-errant and lived decidedly some eight centuries too late, no
wiliest temptation would have been so fatal as this.

He swore to get inside those white inexorable walls, and he kept his
oath: one morning the latticed door stood ajar, with the pomegranates
and the citrons nodding through the opening; he flung prudence to the
winds and peril to the devil, and entered the forbidden ground where it
was death for any man, save the fat Omar himself, to be found. The
fountains were falling into marble basins, the sun was tempered by the
screen of leaves, the lories and humming-birds were flying among the
trumpet-flowers, altogether a most poetic and pleasant place for an
erratic adventure; more so still when, as he went farther, he saw
reclining alone by the mosaic edge of a fountain his lovely Circassian
unveiled. With a cry of terror she sprang to her feet, graceful as a
startled antelope, and casting the silver shroud about her head, would
have fled; but the scream was not loud enough to give the alarm--perhaps
she attuned it so--and flight he prevented. Such Turkish as he had he
poured out in passionate eloquence, his love declaration only made the
more piquant by the knowledge that in a trice the gardens might swarm
with the Mussulman's guards and a scimitar smite his head into the
fountain. But the danger he disdained, _la belle_ Leilah remembered;
rebuke him she did not, nor yet call her eunuchs to rid her of this
terrible Giaour, but the antelope eyes filled with piteous tears and she
prayed him begone--if he were seen here, in the gardens of the women, it
were his death, it were hers! Her terror at the infidel was outweighed
by her fear for his peril; how handsome he was with his blue eyes and
fair locks, after the bald, black-browed, yellow, obese little Omar!

"Let me see again the face that is the light of my soul and I will obey
thee; thou shalt do with thy slave as thou wilt!" whispered Galahad in
the most