“You are too wonderful,” he went on, “to remain a daughter of the crude West.  I want to take you back with me to the land where life still moves to poetry, to the land where one can live in a world unknown by these struggling hordes.  You shall live in a palace where the perfume of flowers lingers always, with the sound of running water in your ears, a palace from which all sordid things and all manner of ugliness are banished because we alone have found the key to the garden of happiness.”

He raised his hand, and it seemed as though unseen eyes watched them from every quarter.  The silken curtains through which he had issued were drawn back by invisible hands, and the inner apartment was disclosed.  Its faint illumination was obscured with purple shades.  There was a high lacquer bedstead, with little ivory ladders on either side, a bedstead hung with silks of black and purple and mauve.  There was a huge couch, a shrine opposite the bed, in which was a kneeling figure of black marble.  A faint odour, as though from thousand-year-old sachets, very faint indeed and yet with its mead of intoxication, seemed to steal out from the room, which had borrowed from its curious hangings, its marvellous adornments, its strangely attuned atmosphere, all the mysticism of a fabled world.

“You have come,” he said.  “Will you stay?” The inertia seemed suddenly to leave her limbs.  She threw up her head as though gasping for air, escaped, somehow or other, from the thrall of his eyes, and passed across the smooth floor with flying footsteps.  Her fingers seized the handle of the door and turned it, only to find it held by some invisible fastening.  She shook it passionately.  There was not even sound.  She turned back once more.  Prince Shan had only slightly changed his position.  He stood upon the threshold of the inner room, and his arms were outstretched in invitation.

“Am I a prisoner?” she sobbed.

“You came of your own free will,” he replied.  “You will stay for my pleasure and for the joy of my being.  As for these things,” he went on, moving slowly to the cabinet, picking up the pile of papers and throwing them on one side contemptuously, “these are only one’s amusements.  I pass my lighter hours with them.  They interest me in the same manner as a chess problem.  We do not care, we in the mighty East, which of you holds your head highest this side of Suez.  All you western nations are to us a peck of dust outside our palace gates.  Listen, dear one.  We can leave, if you will, to-night, and top the clouds before sunrise.  And I promise you this,” he went on, “when you pass from the greyness of these sordid lands into the everlasting sunshine of the East, you will not care any longer about these people who go about the world on all fours.  Day by day you will know what life and love mean.  You will find the cloying weight of material things pass from your brain and body, and the joy of holy and wonderful living take their place.”