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This garden of delights which Janus had made for his bride, environing this palace of Potamia, was alive with charm rippling with stolen streams, more costly than molten silver at the summer's height, which kept it in such vesture of luxuriant bloom as only a monarch might command.
Caterina Veneta, Queen of Cyprus, stood on a high balcony of the summer palace in the Casal of Potamia, one beautiful June morning at early dawn, waving farewell to the cavalcade of nobles who were winding up the pass that led to the great forests where the patricians of the island were wont to pursue their favorite pastime.
But to Hagios Johannes all courts were strange; the life of his mountain overflowed with possibilities of ministration which busied all his powers, and it was the first time that he had ever entered any of the palaces of the luxurious Kings of Cyprus of which, perhaps, this summer palace of Potamia was the most sumptuous.
Yet often the gentle Queen slipped away from the modest festivities she had devised for the pleasure of her slender mimic court the music tourneys the recitations the fanciful quibbles in words which could have had for her great weariness of empty hands but a pale moonlight charm to the lovely gardens of her hillside castle, to woo sad memories and sweet as sad of the far-off terraces of Potamia which Janus had prepared for his girl-bride.
It was to this loggia that Janus had first led her when he brought her to this summer palace of Potamia, that she might see what a vision of beauty he had prepared for his bride the far-reaching terraced gardens with their brilliancy of exotics, rivalling the plumage of the peacocks that proudly flaunted their jewelled eyes among them the pergolas of precious marbles from which the vines flung out a wealth of bloom, luring the birds to a perpetual feast of song; and behind them, spreading up to the deep groves of varied greens upon the hillsides, the snow of countless blossoms lay whiter than the wings of the swans, floating at leisure in silver pools among the beds of color.
Hagios Johannes, the holiest man in Cyprus, stood waiting in the vast, empty presence-chamber of the young Queen; for, since the sudden death of Janus, there had been no court-life in this palace of Potamia, and the gloom hung most heavily over the more sumptuous halls of ceremony.
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