I helped Aryenis from her mare, and we went up the grey stone steps to the open door with the firelight gleaming in the hall. She checked on the threshold, and I remembered just in time that it is ill fortune for a bride to cross the doorway of her home for the first time on foot. I picked her up in my arms and carried her into the hall, and as I put her down our lips met in the first kiss in our own home, in the firelit hall with the carved timbers, the half-seen trophies, the gleaming wood of floor and chair and settle. After dinner we sat on the couch by the fire in silent content at being one at last--just realizing to the full the bliss of being together, of really belonging each to each. Just such another evening of flickering firelight playing across Aryenis’s hair and face, across the white slimness of neck and arm, as recalled those evenings of the past--the dragon evenings at Aornos, the ribbon evening in this same hall of ours. “I want you to say really nice things to me to-night, please, Harilek.” “What shall I say, sweetheart? Tell you that your frock is pretty, or that you are looking your very nicest?” “No; not things like that.” I looked down into Aryenis’s eyes, upturned in the half-light, gleam of white below the luminous wide circle of the iris, and on the soft curves of her parted lips. “Tell you that I love you, then?” I felt her arm draw tighter round me. “Tell you that I love you with every little bit of me? ’cause that’s true, you know. I just worship you, sweetheart.” Aryenis’s arms were very tight as she strained against me, drawing my lips down to hers, pausing to whisper ere they met: “And, man of mine, I love you--always--with everything that’s in me.” And in that long dear kiss I could feel the rhythm of her measured words, and all the depth of feeling that prompted them--words that moved me more than any I have ever heard in all my life; and in the silences that followed as we sat in the firelight glow I could almost hear the echo of her words ringing down the long avenue of years in front, like the music of the stars above--unchanging, undying rhythm down the trackless vaults of time. At last Aryenis stood up, smoothing the ruffled coils of the burnished copper of her hair, slim arms outlined against the dark wood panelling. I was going to get up, too, when she bent over and kissed me, whispering as she pushed me back on to my seat: “I want you to look for pictures in the fire just a little while, Harilek. All the things you’ve seen since you came to Sakaeland, and then come and tell me what you’ve found.” And with another kiss she was gone.