Then Perion perceived that love may be a power so august as to bedwarf consideration of the man and woman whom it sways. He saw that this is reasonable. I cannot justify this knowledge. I cannot even tell you just what great secret it was of which Perion became aware. Many men have seen the sunrise, but the serenity and awe and sweetness of this daily miracle, the huge assurance which it emanates that the beholder is both impotent and greatly beloved, is not entirely an affair of the sky's tincture. And thus it was with Perion. He knew what he could not explain. He knew such joy and terror as none has ever worded. A curtain had lifted briefly; and the familiar world which Perion knew, for the brief instant, had appeared to be a painting upon that curtain.
Now, dazzled, he saw Melicent for the first time....
I think he saw the lines already forming in her face, and knew that, but for him, this woman, naked now of gear and friends, had been to-night a queen among her own acclaiming people. I think he worshipped where he did not dare to love, as every man cannot but do when starkly fronted by the divine and stupendous unreason of a woman's choice, among so many other men, of him. And yet, I think that Perion recalled what Ayrart de Montors had said of women and their love, so long ago:-- "They are more wise than we; and always they make us better by indomitably believing we are better than in reality a man can ever be."
I think that Perion knew, now, de Montors had been in the right. The pity and mystery and beauty of that world wherein High God had-- scornfully?--placed a smug Perion, seemed to the Comte de la Forêt, I think, unbearable. I think a new and finer love smote Perion as a sword strikes.
I think he did not speak because there was no scope for words. I know that he knelt (incurious for once of victory) before this stranger who was not the Melicent whom he had sought so long, and that all consideration of a lost young Melicent departed from him, as mists leave our world when the sun rises.
I think that this was her high hour of triumph.
CAETERA DESUNT