He put his arm round her, and felt her tremble excessively as his hand unfastened the clasp of her tunic.  He stopped, surprised.

“Why do you tremble so?  Are you afraid of me?” he asked, looking down upon her, all the tenderness and strength of a great passion in his eyes.

“No, no,” she returned passionately, “I tremble because great waves of happiness rush over me at your touch.  I cannot tell you what I feel, Sahib; the love and happiness within me is breaking me into fragments.”

“Then you must break in my arms,” he murmured back softly, drawing her into his embrace, “so that I shall not lose even one of them.”

* * * * *

In the morning a flood of sunlight rushing into the room through the open windows, bringing with it the gay chatter of birds, roused the lovers.  Hamilton opened his eyes first, and, lifting his head from the pillow, looked down upon Saidie still asleep beside him.  In the rich mellow light of the room her loveliness glowed under his eyes like a jewel held in the sun.  He hardly drew his breath, looking down upon her.  Her heavy hair, full of deep purplish shades, and with the wave in it not unusual in the Asiatic, was pushed off the pale, pure bronze of the forehead, on which were drawn so perfectly the long-sweeping Oriental brows.  The nose, delicately straight, with its proud high-arched nostrils, and the tiny upper lip, led the eye on to the finely-carved Eastern mouth, of which the lips now were softly, firmly folded in repose.  How exquisitely Nature had fashioned those lips, putting more elaborate work in those lines and curves of that one feature than in the whole of an ordinary English face.  Hamilton hung over her, filled with a passion of tenderness, watching the gentle breath move softly the warm column of bronze throat and raise the soft, full breast.

Passion, in its highest phase, is indeed the supreme gift of the gods.  In giving it to a mortal for once they forget their envy:  for once they raise him to their level; for that once they grant him divinity.

Hamilton now marvelled at himself.  The whole fruit of his forty years of life—­all that accomplished work, success, wealth, rewarded worth, satisfied ambition, all the pleasures his youth, his health and strength, and powers had always brought him, crushed together—­could not equal this:  the charm and ecstasy with which he gazed down on this warm beauty of the flesh beside him.

And yet he knew that it was not really in that flesh, not even in that beauty, that lay the delight.  It was in himself, in his own intense desire, and the gratification of it, that the joy had birth; and if the gods give not this desire, no matter what else they give, it is useless.

The girl might have been as lovely, Hamilton himself, and all the circumstances the same, yet waking thus he might have been but the ordinary poor, cold, clay-like mortal a man usually is.  But the great desire for this beauty that had flamed up within him, now in its possession, gave him that fervour and fire, those wings to his soul, that seemed to make him divine.  It was for him one of those moments for which men live a life-time, as he indeed had done, but they repay him when they come.  To some, they come never.  To these life must indeed be dark.