A Book of Myths, by Jean Lang - Umnet

could not avoid. When morning came, her handmaids, white-faced and
red-eyed, came to deck her in all the bridal magnificence that befitted
the most beautiful daughter of a king, and when she was dressed right
royally, and as became a bride, there started up the mountain a
procession at sight of which the gods themselves must have wept. With
bowed heads the king and queen walked before the litter upon which
lay their daughter in her marriage veil of saffron colour, with rose
wreath on her golden hair. White, white were the faces of the maidens
who bore the torches, and yet rose red were they by the side of Psyche.
Minstrels played wedding hymns as they marched onwards, and it
seemed as though the souls of unhappy shades sobbed through the
reeds and moaned through the strings as they played.
At length they reached the rocky place where they knew they must
leave the victim bride, and her father dared not meet her eyes as he
turned his head to go. Yet Psyche watched the procession wending its
way downhill. No more tears had she to shed, and it seemed to her that
what she saw was not a wedding throng, but an assembly of
broken-hearted people who went back to their homes with heavy feet
after burying one that they loved. She saw no sign of the monster who
was to be her bridegroom, yet at every little sound her heart grew sick
with horror, and when the night wind swept through the craggy peaks
and its moans were echoed in loneliness, she fell on her face in deadly
fear and lay on the cold rock in a swoon.
Yet, had Psyche known it, the wind was her friend. For Eros had used
Zephyrus as his trusty messenger and sent him to the mountain top to
find the bride of him "whom neither man nor god could resist."
Tenderly--very tenderly--he was told, must he lift her in his arms, and
bear her to the golden palace in that green and pleasant land where Eros
had his home. So, with all the gentleness of a loving nurse to a tired
little child Zephyrus lifted Psyche, and sped with her in his strong arms
to the flowery meadows behind which towered the golden palace of
Eros, like the sun behind a sky of green and amber and blue and rose.
Deeply, in the weariness of her grief, Psyche slept, and when she
awoke it was to start up with the chill hands of the realisation of terrible
actualities on her heart. But when her eyes looked round to find the