Page:A Scene in the Life of Nourmehal.pdf/6

Rh art mine! but I—I can never be thine again. Life, throne, fortunes, we will yet share together; but my heart, never, never more!" For a few listless minutes she gazed from the window, rather for distraction than amusement. The Jumna was flowing like a dark and glittering beryl amid its melon trees. Perched on the topmost boughs, the herons rested their long and snowy necks beneath their wings, breaking with their white presence the long lines of shade. Some three or four little flames, like meteors, seemed dancing down the river, now flinging their tremulous lustre on the waters, now all but shipwrecked by the broad leaves and crimson flowers of the lotus. They were the tiny barks launched by her young slaves, formed of a cocoa-nut shell, and filled with fragrant oil, whose burning was to be an augury for the gentle hopes that trusted themselves to such frail freightage. Nourmahal smiled bitterly, and turned aside. Such graceful fantasies belong to the childhood of Love: to Love, the credulous and the dreaming; and such Love had long since passed away from Nourmahal. She asked of Fate for a sterner sign, and a darker omen. The river seemed to mock her feverish unrest with its tranquil beauty. She looked out from another window, which commanded one of those vast plains—dry; bare, like the human heart, which so often exhausts its own fertility; yet there was something striking in the very desolation. The