Still the girl danced on, heedless, unperceiving perhaps, of the prince who watched her from his lofty seat. The musicians, after one quick glance upward of apprehension, risked boldly and played on with undisturbed solemnity. She danced with a sinuous grace that held the eye in fascination, with an intensity of restrained movement, daringly provocative though were her postures, which thrilled the watcher with a sense of suppressed and concentrated passion whose potentialities might not be measured. She danced, the incarnation of the fierce pulse of life that beats beneath the fallacious languor of the East, her body charged with vitality as it bent and straightened with lithe precision to another curve, her face carven, expressionless, as though her soul were withdrawn to its mysterious centre. The prince clapped his hands in irrepressible enthusiasm. She stopped dead, stood rigidly upright facing him, arms close to her sides, arabesqued breastlets thrust forward, a slim statue that quivered with magically arrested life, in a motionless effrontery that challenged his regard, his very power. Their eyes met, looked into each other while the musicians ceased to play. What was that of intense communion which sped between them? With a sudden gesture the prince flung a handful of golden coins into the mat, made a grave inclination of his head.
The elephant moved onward. With a smile of triumph, with a breath long-drawn through her nostrils, and eyes that closed ecstatically for a moment as in a dream realized, the girl followed in the train of his gorgeously attired retinue....
_They knew_--those watchers who gazed as through the rent veils of eternity, apprehending with minds that had ceased to be corporeal--recognizing themselves once more, though in an incarnation immeasurably remote, an incarnation whose transient language was long ago forgotten.
The vision changed abruptly. They gazed into the hall of an Oriental palace, arabesqued arches in a colonnade on either side, tessellated marble in cool colours patterning the floor, ebony-black slaves waving peacock fans above a cushioned divan on which the prince reclined. An indulgent smile played over his handsome features as he toyed with the unbraided hair of the beautiful girl who sat at his feet, in confident lassitude against his knee, and turned her head back to gaze up into his face with eyes voluptuously fond. She sighed with happiness--her face no longer expressionless as in the public dance, but charged with a yearning intensity of love. He, too, yearned over her with his grave smile, bent his head down for the kiss her lips put up to him....