Almeryl stretched his arm to the lattice, and drew it open, letting in the soft night wind, and the sound of the fountain and the bulbul and the beam of the stars, and versed to her in the languor of deep love: 

     Whether we die or we live,
      Matters it now no more: 
     Life has nought further to give: 
      Love is its crown and its core. 
     Come to us either, we’re rife,—­
      Death or life!

     Death can take not away,
      Darkness and light are the same: 
     We are beyond the pale ray,
      Wrapt in a rosier flame: 
     Welcome which will to our breath;
      Life or death!

So did these two lovers lute and sing in the stillness of the night, pouring into each other’s ears melodies from the new sea of fancy and feeling that flowed through them.

Ere they ceased their sweet interchange of tenderness, which was but one speech from one soul, a glow of light ran up the sky, and the edge of a cloud was fired; and in the blooming of dawn Almeryl hung over Bhanavar, and his heart ached to see the freshness of her wondrous loveliness; and he sang, looking on her: 

     The rose is living in her cheeks,
      The lily in her rounded chin;
     She speaks but when her whole soul speaks,
      And then the two flow out and in,
     And mix their red and white to make
      The hue for which I’d Paradise forsake.

     Her brow from her black falling hair
      Ascends like morn:  her nose is clear
     As morning hills, and finely fair
      With pearly nostrils curving near
     The red bow of her upper lip;
      Her bosom’s the white wave beneath the ship.

     The fair full earth, the enraptured skies,
      She images in constant play: 
     Night and the stars are in her eyes,
      But her sweet face is beaming day,
     A bounteous interblush of flowers: 
      A dewy brilliance in a dale of bowers.

Then he said, ’And this morning shall our contract of marriage be written and witnessed?’

She answered, ‘As my lord willeth; I am his.’

Said he, ‘And it is thy desire?’

She nestled to him and dinted his bare arm with the pearls of her mouth for a reply.

So that morning their contract of marriage was written, and witnessed by the legal number of witnesses in the presence of the Cadi, with his license on it endorsed; and Bhanavar was the bride of Almeryl, he her husband.  Never was youth blessed in a bride like that youth!

Now, the twain lived together the circle of a full year of delightful marriage, and love lessened not in them, but was as the love of the first day.  Little cared they, having each other, for the loneliness of their dwelling in that city, where they knew none save the porter Ukleet, who went about their commissions.  Sometimes to amuse themselves with his drolleries, they sent for him, and were bountiful with him, and made him drink with them on the lawn of their garden leaning to an inlet of the sea; and then he would entertain them with all the scandal and gossip of the city, and its little folk and great.  When he was outrageously extravagant in these stories of his, Bhanavar exclaimed, ’Are such things, now? can it be true?’