I was eighteen years of age when love opened my eyes with its magic rays and touched my spirit with its fiery fingers, and Selma Karamy was the first woman who awakened my soul with her beauty and led me into the garden of high affection, where days pass like dreams and nights like weddings.

Every young man remembers his first love and tries to recapture that strange hour, the memory of which changes the deepest feeling of his heart and makes him so happy in spite of all the bitterness with which its mystery is packed.

Selma was beautiful; not with the superficial beauty that draws the greedy gaze of the crowd, but with that spiritual radiance which inspires reverent awe and bows the heart in worship.

Yet darkness was gathering over our sanctuary. The greedy Bishop of Beirut sought to marry Selma to his nephew Mansour Bey, a dissolute and cruel man who cared nothing for Selma's soul, but coveted her father's vast estate.

Once every month, under the compassionate cloak of dusk, Selma would slip away to an ancient, abandoned chapel on the outskirts of Beirut, where the olive trees kept silent watch.

'Do not weep, my beloved,' Selma whispered through her tears. 'Love that cannot dwell upon this earth will find its home among the stars. Our love was not born of dust, and dust cannot extinguish it.'

They laid her to rest in the cemetery of Beirut, beneath the green branches of the weeping cypresses. I stood alone by her grave when the crowd had dispersed, the evening wind whispering through the grasses like the echo of her voice.

And in the darkening sky above, the first star of evening shone with a brilliant, steady fire—the star of Selma, burning forever in the heaven of my heart.