vi, and found him at Cairo the morning after
he had spoken to the Sphinx in the great silences. And to him under
the blue Egyptian sky came an answering throb of romance. The
womanhood that had not moved him in the flesh thrilled him, vaguely
imaged from afar, mystically, spiritually.

"Let her be sent for," he said, and his disciples noted an unwonted
restlessness in the weary weeks while his ambassadors were away.

"Dost think she will come?" he said once to Abraham Rubio.

"What woman would not come to thee?" replied the beggar. "What dainty
is not offered thee? I trow natheless that thou wilt refuse, and that
I shall come in for thy leavings."

Sabbatai smiled faintly.

"What have I to do with women?" he murmured. "But I would fain know
what hath been prophetically revealed to her!"

One afternoon his ambassadors returned, and announced that they had
brought her. She was resting after the journey, and would visit him on
the morrow. He appointed their meeting in the Palace of the
Saraph-Bashi. Then, unable to rest, he mounted the hill of the citadel
and saw an auspicious golden glow over the mosques and houses of
Cairo, illumining even the desert and the Pyramids. He stood watching
the sun sink lower and lower, till suddenly it went out like a snuffed
candle.

XIII

On the morrow he left his mean brick dwelling in the Jewry, and
received her alone in a marble-paved chamber in the Palace, the walls
adorned with carvings of flowers and birds, minutely worked, the
ceiling with arabesques formed of thin strips of painted wood, the air
cooled by a fantastic fountain playing into a pool lined with black
and white marbles and red tiling. Lattice-work windows gave on the
central courtyard, and were supplemented by decorative windows of
stained glass, wrought into capricious patterns.

"Peace, O Messiah!" Her smile was dazzling, and there was more of
gaiety than of reverence in her voice. Her white teeth flashed 'twixt
laughing lips. Sabbatai's heart was beating furiously at the sight of
the lady of his dreams. She was clad in shimmering white Italian silk,
which, draped tightly about her bosom, showed her as some gleaming
statue. Bracelets glittered on her white wrists, gems of fire sparkled
among her long, white fingers, a network of pearls was all her
head-dress. Her eyes had strange depths of passion, perfumes breathed
from her skin, lustreless like dead ivory. Not thus came the maidens
of Israel to wedlock,