“Ruth!” I spoke sharply now, in my own perplexity. “You do know. You must tell us—for his sake.” I pointed toward Ventnor.
She drew a long breath.
“You're right—of course,” she said unsteadily. “Only I—I thought maybe I could fight it out myself. But you'll have to know it—there's a taint upon me.”
I caught in Drake's swift glance the echo of my own thrill of apprehension for her sanity.
“Yes,” she said, now quietly. “Some new and alien thing within my heart, my brain, my soul. It came to me from Norhala when we rode the flying block, and—he—sealed upon me when I was in—his”—again she crimsoned, “embrace.”
And as we gazed at her, incredulously:
“A thing that urges me to forget you two—and Martin—and all the world I've known. That tries to pull me from you—from all—to drift untroubled in some vast calm filled with an ordered ecstasy of peace. And whose calling I want, God help me, oh, so desperately to heed!
“It whispered to me first,” she said, “from Norhala—when she put her arm around me. It whispered and then seemed to float from her and cover me like—like a veil, and from head to foot. It was a quietness and peace that held within it a happiness at one and the same time utterly tranquil and utterly free.
“I seemed to be at the doorway to unknown ecstasies—and the life I had known only a dream—and you, all of you—even Martin, dreams within a dream. You weren't—real—and you did not—matter.”
“Hypnotism,” muttered Drake, as she paused.