impassioned and poetical Turkish he could muster, thinking the
style of Hafiz understood better here than the style of Belgravia, while
the almond-eyed Leilah trembled like a netted bird under his look and
his touch, conscious, pretty creature, that were it once known that a
Giaour had looked on her, poison in her coffee, or a sullen plunge by
night into the Bosphorus, would expiate the insult to the honor of Omar,
a master whom she piteously hated. She let her veil float aside,
nevertheless, blushing like a sea-shell under the shame of an
unbeliever's gaze--a genuine blush that is banished from Europe--his
eyes rested on the lovely youth of her face, his cheek brushed the

Loose train of her amber dropping hair,

his lips met her own; then, with a startled stifled cry, his coy gazelle
sprang away, lost in the aisles of the roses, and Galahad quitted the
dangerous precincts, in safety so far, not quite clear whether he had
been drinking or dreaming, and of conviction that Pera had changed into
Paradise. For he was in love with two things at once, a romance and a
woman; and an anchorite would fairly have lost his head after the divine
dawn of beauty in Leilah Derran.

The morrow, of course, found him at the same place, at the same hour,
hoping for a similar fortune, but the lattice door was shut, and defied
all force; he was just about to try scaling the high slippery walls by
the fibres of a clinging fig-tree, when a negress, the sole living thing
in sight, beckoned him, a hideous Abyssinian enough for a messenger of
Eros; a grinning good-natured black, who had been bought in the same
bazaar and of the same owner as the lovely Circassian, to whose service
she was sworn. She told him by scraps of Turkish, and signs, that Leilah
had bidden her watch for and warn him, that it were as much as both
their lives were worth for him to be seen again in the women's gardens,
or anywhere near her presence; that the merchant Omar was a monster of
jealousy, and that the rest of the harem, jealous of her supremacy and
of the unusual liberty her ascendancy procured her, would love nothing
so well as to compass her destruction. Further meeting with her infidel
lover she pronounced impossible, unless he would see her consigned to
the Bosphorus; an ice avalanche of intelligence, which, falling on the
tropical Eden of his passion, had the effect, as it was probably meant
that it should have, of drowning the lingering remnant of prudence