"Before the _last_ time we were born," corrected the Yellow Girl. "But the first time--at least, the first time that I can recollect--the barred windows of a prince's palace failed to keep you from me. And eunuchs with crescent-bladed simitars likewise failed. But in the end--why must all loveliness have an end?--a bowstring for me, and a swordstroke for you...." The Yellow Girl shuddered as she stroked her smooth throat with fingers that sought to wipe off the last lingering memory of a cord of hard-spun silk. "And from the first," continued the girl, "I knew what our doom would be. So I started weaving, and completed my task before they suspected us and the bowstring did its work. My soul, my self, being woven cunningly and curiously into silk rich enough to hang on the wall of the khan's palace, waited patiently and wondered whether you and I could have our day again. Thus it was in the beginning----" "Ah ... how it does come back to me," interrupted Clarke, "as in a dream dimly remembered. How compactly and stiflingly they would wrap me in a bale of silk and carry me past the guards and into your presence. And by what devious routes I would leave you ... yes, and how painlessly swift is the stroke of a simitar...." The Yellow Girl shuddered. "A simitar truly wielded is really nothing, after all," continued Clarke. "I might have been sawn asunder between planks.... Well, and that meeting in the garden these short twenty years ago was after all not our first ... it seems that I knew then that it was not the first. Though but for an evening----" "Yes. Just for an evening. So to what end were we spared bowstrings and the stroke of swift simitars, since we had but an evening?" And thinking of the empty years of luxurious imprisonment that followed, she smiled somberly. "For only an evening. And then you forgot, until this rug--this same rug I wove centuries ago--interrupted your pleasant adventuring, and reminded you. "Death stared me in the face. The end of life more vainly lived than the first. I knew that I was leaving this avatar after having lived but one stolen evening. So I sent a trusted servant to carry this very rug to Meshed. For when we met in the garden, you were hunting rugs for him who now seeks them for your delight. And I knew that he would find you if you still lived. Thus it is that I have crossed the Border, and stand before you as I did once before--this time on that very rug which I wove centuries ago, while living in hope of another meeting and in dread of the bowstring I knew would in the end find me." The moon patch had marched toward the end of the rug from Samarcand, and was cutting into the blue web at its end. Clarke knew that when there remained no more room for her tiny feet, she would vanish, not ever to reappear. But Clarke hoped against knowledge.