She was now within a yard of Prince Shan himself. He made no
effort to intercept her, no movement of any sort to stop her. Only his
eyes never left her face, and she felt a madness which seemed to be
choking the life out of her, a pounding of her heart against her ribs, a
strange and wonderful joy, a joy in which there was no fear, a joy of
new things and new hopes. With the papers for which she had come only a
few yards away, she forgot them. She turned her head slowly. His arms
seemed to steal out from those long, silken sleeves. She suddenly felt
herself held in a wonderful embrace.
"Dear lady of all my desires," he whispered in her ear, "you shall make
me happy and find the secret of happiness yourself in giving, in
suffering, in love."
For a long and wonderful moment she lay in his arms. She felt the soft
burning of his kisses, the call of the room with its intoxicating, yet
strangely ascetic perfume, the room to which all the time he seemed to
be gently leading her. And then a flood of strange, alien recollections
and realisations seemed to bring her from a better place back to a
worse,--the sound of a passing taxicab, the distant booming of Big Ben,
sounds of the world outside, the actual day-by-day world, with its
day-by-day code of morals, the world in which she lived, and her
friends, and all that had made life for her. She drew away, and he
watched the change in her.
"I want to go!" she cried. "Let me go!"
"You are no prisoner," he assured her sadly.
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