A MORNING VISIT In an upper room in the Palace of the Litany, fair with all the burnished devices of the early light, Prince Tabnit paced on that morning of mornings of his marriage day.

Because of his great happiness the whole world seemed to him like some exquisite intaglio of which this day was the design.
The room, "walled with soft splendours of Damascus tiles," was laid with skins of forgotten animals and was hung with historic tapestries dyed by ancient fingers in the spiral veins of the Murex.
There were frescoes uniting the dream with its actuality, columns carved with both lines and names of beauty, pilasters decorated with chain and checker-work and golden nets.

A stairway led to a high shrine where hung the crucified Tyrian sphinx.

The room was like a singing voice summoning one to delights which it described.

But whatever way one looked all the lines neither pointed nor seemed to have had beginning, but being divorced from source and direction expressed merely beauty, like an altar "where none cometh to pray." Prince Tabnit, in his trailing robe of white embroidered by a thousand needles, looked so akin to the room that one suspected it of having produced him, Athena-wise, from, say, the great black shrine.