You shall live in a palace where the perfume of flowers lingers always, with the sound of running water in your ears, a palace from which all sordid things and all manner of ugliness are banished because we alone have found the key to the garden of happiness." He raised his hand, and it seemed as though unseen eyes watched them from every quarter.

The silken curtains through which he had issued were drawn back by invisible hands, and the inner apartment was disclosed.
Its faint illumination was obscured with purple shades.

There was a high lacquer bedstead, with little ivory ladders on either side, a bedstead hung with silks of black and purple and mauve.

There was a huge couch, a shrine opposite the bed, in which was a kneeling figure of black marble.
A faint odour, as though from thousand-year-old sachets, very faint indeed and yet with its mead of intoxication, seemed to steal out from the room, which had borrowed from its curious hangings, its marvellous adornments, its strangely attuned atmosphere, all the mysticism of a fabled world.
"You have come," he said.

"Will you stay ?" The inertia seemed suddenly to leave her limbs.