So he waited, but in the game of love he that waits is ever the loser.  That night, when the moon was rising over the white and deep green of Damascus, Dilama walked, humming to herself, in the garden, full of a great leaping desire, born of her youth and fine health and the breath of the May night, to love and be loved.  Suddenly, when she came to the corner, under the drooping boughs of the grove without the garden, an orange fell, and, just escaping her head struck her heavily on her bosom.  With a great shock she stood still, looking up, and there, on the summit of the high wall, amid the green boughs, was a man sitting, leaning over down towards her, with fiery eyes looking upon her from under a dark green turban.

“It is death to be here,” she whispered, her face pallid in the moonlight, “do not stay;” yet her whole being leapt up with hope that he would disobey.  The man laughed softly.

“It is life to look on you,” he said merely, and to her terrified joy and horrified delight he slid down between the lemon-trees and the wall, and stood before her in the angle it made, where two buttresses jutting forward hid him from all view unless one stood directly opposite.

Dilama shook from head to foot; in one fierce, sweeping rush, love passed over and through her as she stood staring with wild dilated eyes on the form before her.  Tall, tall as Ahmed, with all the grace and strength of youth, lithe and supple, with a straight-lined, dark-browed face above a stately throat, and dark kindling eyes, wells of living fire that called all her soul and heart and womanhood into life.

“I have often watched you walking in the garden,” he murmured, gently taking in his, one nerveless hand.  “I come from your village in the hills, where you were taken from long ago.  I am a Druze,” and he threw his head higher, as the stag of the forest throws his at the first note of the challenge.  Dilama knew well that he was of her own people.  Infant memories, instinctive, implanted consciousness told her this without the aid of Druze clothing, or the short, gay dagger thrust into his waist-sash.

“I think you are not yet the wife of Ahmed Ali?” he went on, as she simply trembled in silence, wave after wave of emotion passing through her, striking her heart and choking her voice.  “Tell me?”

Dilama shook her head, and a triumphant smile curved the handsome lips before her.

“I knew it; you are mine,” he said, in reply, and, bending over her as she stood shrinking, on the verge of fainting, between terror and wonder and joy, he kissed her on the lips, not roughly—­even gently—­but with such a fire of life on his that it seemed to the girl, in the destruction of all her usual feelings, in the havoc of the new ones called in their place, that the actual moment of dissolution had come.