Ahasuerus knelt, kissing her hand.
"Fair Melicent, such abominable persons as Demetrios and I are fatally alike. We may deny, deride, deplore, or even hate, the sanctity of any noble lady accordingly as we elect; but there is for us no possible escape from worshipping it. Your wind-fed Ferions, who will not ever acknowledge what sort of world we live in, are less quick to recognise the soul of Melicent. Such is our sorry consolation. Oh, you do not believe me yet. You will believe in the oncoming years. Meanwhile, O all-enduring and all-conquering! go now to your last labour; and--if my Brother dare concede as much--do you now conquer Perion."
Then he vanished. She never saw him any more.
She lifted the Jew's lamp. She bore it through the Women's Garden, wherein were many discomfortable shadows and no living being. She came to its outer entrance. Men were fighting there. She skirted a hideous conflict, and descended the Queen's Stairway, which led (as you have heard) toward the balcony about the Court of Stars. She found this balcony vacant.
Below her men were fighting. To the farther end of the court Orestes sprawled upon the red and yellow slabs--which now for the most part were red--and above him towered Perion of the Forest. The conqueror had paused to cleanse his sword upon the same divan Demetrios had occupied when Melicent first saw the proconsul; and as Perion turned, in the act of sheathing his sword, he perceived the dear familiar denizen of all his dreams. A tiny lamp glowed in her hand quite steadily.
"O Melicent," said Perion, with a great voice, "my task is done. Come now to me."
She instantly obeyed whose only joy was to please Perion. Descending the enclosed stairway, she thought how like its gloom was to the temporal unhappiness she had passed through in serving Perion.
He stood a dripping statue, for he had fought horribly. She came to him, picking her way among the slain. He trembled who was fresh from slaying. A flood of torchlight surged and swirled about them, and within a stone's cast Perion's men were despatching the wounded.
These two stood face to face and did not speak at all.
I think that he knew disappointment first. He looked to find the girl whom he had left on Fomor Beach.
He found a woman, the possessor still of a compelling beauty. Oh, yes, past doubt: but this woman was a stranger to him, as he now knew with an odd sense of sickness. Thus, then, had ended the quest of Melicent. Their love had flouted Time and Fate. These had revenged this insolence, it seemed to Perion, by an ironical conversion of each rebel into another person. For this was not the girl whom Perion had loved in far red-roofed Poictesme; this was not the girl for whom Perion had fought ten minutes since: and he--as Perion for the first time perceived--was not and never could be any more the Perion that girl had bidden return to her. It were as easy to evoke the Perion who had loved Mélusine....