ith my eyes closed I see a
million faces: they are all yours. And they are loving, and sweet, and
kind. But I am content with one, with the carnate symbol of them, with
you, and though you be cold and cruel. The divine splendour is here,
and here and here--"

"Why, your ardour is exhausting."

* * * * *

But on their way back to the Hotel, Khalid gives her this from
Swedenborg: "'Do you love me' means 'do you see the same truth that I
see?'"

There is no use. Khalid is impossible.

CHAPTER VII

A DREAM OF EMPIRE

"I'm not starving for pleasure," Khalid once said to Shakib; "nor
for the light free love of an exquisite caprice. Those little
flowers that bloom and wither in the blush of dawn are for the
little butterflies. The love that endures, give me that. And it
must be of the deepest divine strain,--as deep and divine as
maternal love. Man is of Eternity, not of Time; and love, the
highest attribute of man, must be likewise. With me it must endure
throughout all worlds and immensities; else I would not raise a
finger for it. Pleasure, Shakib, is for the child within us; sexual
joy, for the animal; love, for the god. That is why I say when you
set your seal to the contract, be sure it is of the kind which all
the gods of all the future worlds will raise to their lips in
reverence."

But Khalid's child-spirit, not to say childishness, is not, as he
would have us believe, a thing of the past. Nor are the animal and the
god within him always agreed as to what is and what is not a love
divine and eternal. In New York, to be sure, he often brushed his
wings against those flowerets that "bloom and wither in the blush of
dawn." And he was not a little pleased to find that the dust which
gathers on the wings adds a charm to the colouring of life. But how
false and trivial it was, after all. The gold dust and the dust of the
road, could they withstand a drop of rain? A love dust-deep, as it
were, close to the earth; too mean and pitiful to be carried by the
storm over terrible abysses to glorious heights. A love, in a word,
without pain, that is to say impure. In Baalbek, on the other hand, he
drank deep of the pain, but not of the joy, of love. He and his cousin
Najma had just lit in the shrine of Venus the candles of the altar of
the Virgin, when a villainous hand that of Jesuitry, issuing from the
darkness, clapped over them the snuffer and carried his Happiness o