bodies till they were as free of surplus hair as those of newborn infants.
A dozen peoples served them: merchants from Damascus and Baghdad brought them cloths the like of which were seldom seen in Europe; scores of dark-eyed Syrians were at their instant call; courteous Arabs and sleek Greeks had taught them prosody, philosophy and rhetoric. They spoke—and read and wrote—French, Arabic, Latin and Greek with easy interchangeability.
As they mounted the first range of foothills young Gaussin touched the gold-bossed bridle of his saddlemate. "Wilt tarry beneath the trees with me a while, Sylv'ette?" he asked. "There is somewhat I would say to thee."
The girl looked at him, smiling, and drew her Arab pacer’s rein. A moment later, as their friends rode down into the farther valley, they walked their horses to the grove of flowering almond trees and Gaussin leaped down from his saddle to take the girl’s slim foot in his hand and assist her to dismount.
Since Adam first looked into Eve’s eyes there has been no woman in creation who could not tell when she was about to receive the offer of a man’s devotion, and the telegraph of Eros warned Sylvanette de Gavaret. A flush as delicate as the almond blossoms overhead spread up her throat, across her cheeks and on her high, white brow. She looked at him, eyes wide, lips parted; she was breathing faster as he took her hand, slipped off the pearl-sewn gauntlet, and kissed her fingers.
No chevalier’s kiss this, no mere salute of gallantry, but homage, worship utter and complete as that of worshipper before a shrine.
"Sylv’ette ma drue!" he paraphrased the Arthurian romance, "Sylv’ette mia mie, en vous ma mort, en vous ma vie! (Sylvette my little bird, Sylvette my dear, in you my death, in you my life).”
Her eyes were soft with love and trust as she laid her other hand upon his crisply curling auburn hair and capped the verse in a voice scarcely louder than a fluttering breath:
"Bel ami, ainsi, va de nous!
Ne vous sans moi, ni moi sans vous!
Fair love, let us together be,
Not thou sans me, nor I sans thee!"
He looked up, wondering incredulity in his eyes. "Lovest thou me, then, Sylv’ette?”
"With all the heart of me, my Gaussin.”
Time and life are one, eternity is different, immeasurable; and eternity, though but an instant clipped from time’s relentless dial, was theirs as they exchanged their first kiss. He drew her to him slowly, unbelievingly, and the utterness of her sweet self-surrender was almost terrifying as she leant against him, lips apart, and offered him a kiss that shook him to the final cell and fiber of his being. She groaned softly, as in pain, went flaccid in his arms, then tightened her arms round his shoulders, pulling his face down to hers, pressing against him until he felt the flutter of her heart as it beat echoes to the pounding of his pulses.
AFTERWHILES they sat beneath the almond trees on a net of spangled shade, the coiling fronds of the new grasses cool against their hands. The delicate odor of the a1mond blossoms came to them, and the warm scent of fern-grass. Beneath its overtone of pink, with the verdure of the sward below, and the bright blue of anemones to punctuate it, the orchard might have been a fragment of the Magic Carpet of the Arab story-tellers, torn off and drifted here to light among the foothills of the Lebanons.
At noon they rose to their knees and, hands joined piously, recited the sweet salutation of the angel to the Blessed Mother while the bells of half a hundred
