Bright tears filled her eyes and fell fast and thick through her long, drooping lashes, and Alwyn, smitten with remorse at the sight of such grief, sprang to her side overcome by shame, love, and penitence.
"Weeping? ... and for me?"--he exclaimed--"Sweet Edris! ... Gentlest of maidens! ... Weep not for one unworthy, . . but rather smile and speak again of love! ..." and now his words pouring forth impetuously, seemed to utter themselves independently of any previous thought,--"Yes! speak only of love,--and the discourse of those tuneful lips shall be my gospel, . . the glance of those, soft eyes my creed, . . and as for pardon and blessing I crave none but thine! I sought a Dream.. I have found a fair Reality ... a living proof of Love's divine omnipotence! Love is the only god--who would doubt his sovereignty, or grudge him his full measure of worship? ... Not I, believe me!"--and carried away by the force of a resistless inward fervor, he threw himself once more at her feet--"See!--here do I pay my vows at Love's high altar!--heart's desire shall be the prayer--heart's ecstasy the praise! ... together we will celebrate our glad service of love, and heaven itself shall sanctify this Eve of St. Edris and All Angels!"
She listened,--looking down upon him with grave, half timid tenderness,--her tears dried, and a sudden hope irradiated her fair face with a soft, bright flush, as lovely as the light of morning falling on newly opened flowers. When he ceased, she spoke--her accents breaking through the silence like clear notes of music sweetly sung.
"So be it!" she said ... "May Heaven truly sanctify all pure thoughts, and free the soul of my Beloved from sin!"
And slowly bending forward, as a delicate iris-blossom bends to the sway of the wind, she laid her hands about his neck, and touched his lips with her own...
Ah! ... what divine ecstasy,--what wild and fiery transport filled him then! ... Her kiss, like a penetrating lighting-flash, pierced to the very centre of his being,--the moonbeams swam round him in eddying circles of gold--the white field heaved to and fro, ... he caught her waist and clung to her, and in the burning marvel of that moment he forget everything, save that, whether spirit or mortal, she was in woman's witching shape, and that all the glamour of her beauty was his for this one night at least, . . this night which now in the speechless, glorious delirium of love that overwhelmed him, seemed like the Mahometan's night of Al-Kadr, "better than a thousand months!"
Drawn to her by some subtle mysterious attraction which he could neither explain nor control, and absorbed in a rapture beyond all that his highest and most daring flights of poetical fancy had ever conceived, he felt as though his very life were ebbing out of him to become part of hers, and this thought was strangely sweet, --a perfect consummation of all his best desires! ...