Chapter LIX: With a Gift of Eastern Perfume

Egyptian baccharis! This gift I prize.
Of old your slave as now I watched you go
With one crowned with the pheasant’s topaz glow.
“Who’s that,” she cried, “whose heart shakes in her eyes?”
To me pointing. I dared not run nor rise,
But, crouching, o’er your baccar buds bent low.
A slave with flowers only a queen may know?
Some royal lover, hath she, I surmise!

Straightway within her eyes my doom I read.
Like lightning blue the lances shook o’er me.
I was not worth your crown! How could I be!
But when within your eyes the look I read,
I thought: “For this death’s cheap—aye! cheap the price—
For one such other I would meet it twice!”