It was so cool and so heavenlike that Abdullah got up and went in search of the hidden water, wandering down the arcade, where starry blooms brushed his face, all white and hushed in the moonlight, and bell-like flowers breathed out the headiest and gentlest of scents. As one does in dreams, Abdullah fingered a great waxy lily here and detoured deliciously there into a dell of pale roses. He had never before had a dream that was anything like so beautiful.

The water, when he found it beyond some big fernlike bushes dripping dew, was a simple marble fountain in another lawn, lit by strings of lamps in the bushes, which made the rippling water into a marvel of gold and silver crescents. Abdullah wandered toward it raptly.

There was only one thing needed to complete his rapture, and as in all the best dreams, it was there. An extremely lovely girl came across the lawn to meet him, treading softly on the damp grass with bare feet. The gauzy garments floating around her showed her to be slender, but not thin, just like the princess from Abdullah’s daydream. When she was near Abdullah, he saw that her face was not quite a perfect oval as the face of his dream princess should have been, nor were her huge dark eyes at all misty. In fact, they examined his face keenly, with evident interest. Abdullah hastily adjusted his dream, for she was certainly very beautiful. And when she spoke, her voice was all he could have desired, being light and merry as the water in the fountain and the voice of a very definite person, too.

“Are you a new kind of servant?” she said.

People always did ask strange things in dreams, Abdullah thought. “No, masterpiece of my imagination,” he said. “Know that I am really the long-lost son of a distant prince.”

“Oh,” she said. “Then that may make a difference. Does that mean you’re a different kind of woman from me?”

Abdullah stared at the girl of his dreams in some perplexity. “I’m not a woman!” he said.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “You are wearing a dress.”

Abdullah looked down and discovered that, in the way of dreams, he was wearing his nightshirt. “This is just my strange foreign garb,” he said hastily. “My true country is far from here. I assure you that I am a man.”