"It should be delightful, princess," the blue girl replied. "All this day Zitu warmed it with his light."
Naia tapped with her foot. "Procure fresh raiment and bring it thither," she said. "The ride was tiresome and I will bathe."
Five minutes later, accompanied by Maia, who bore fresh robes, she left the room and led the way to one end of the corridor and through a small door to an outer stair. Descending that she passed through a sort of sunken garden, laid out in odd geometric designs and planted with shrubs and trees and flowers, among which gleamed the white of ornamental urns, fire-urns, and statues toward a low, white wall in which an opening appeared. Passing this, she turned about the angle of a protecting inner stone screen and stood on the margin of an open bath, its water clear as crystal and tinted a delicate amber from the yellow bottom and sides of the peculiar onyxlike stone.
Naia bathed. Refusing to spy upon her, Croft waited without the concealing wall, while twilight fell and the sounds of soft splashings came to his ear. The bath took a long time. Croft fancied the girl found some vague comfort in the soft, warm kiss of the waters tempered all day by the sun—that to lie wrapped in their liquid caress soothed somewhat her spirit, torn by the revelations her recent journey had held. While he waited twilight deepened, and after a time a softer light stole through the garden.
He lifted his gaze to the skies. Three moons hung there, casting their blended light over mountain and valley and plain. Vaguely he wondered which of the three he had visited during the night before—that night with its weird experience, ending on the edge of this day which, after all, had been but little less weird—this day in which he had found and recognized and yielded to the one feminine counterpart of his nature, only to find her destined to another less worthy than himself, and to know himself unable to intervene between her and her fate.
While he sat there brooding the whole strange situation—a man in all save material body—a consciousness, suffering all the pangs of spirit he was unable to physically express, Naia came forth and moved with her accompanying servant, a pure, white figure, through the garden to the house.
Like her shadow, Croft pursued her every step. He stood beside her while she sat waiting for the evening meal. He was behind her when she reclined on the couch beside the table, opposite her father, and ate. He dogged her steps when she once more sought the quiet of her room, and bade Maia leave her for the night.
Hence he witnessed what no other eyes beheld as the flaring oil-lamp, with its guttering wick little better than a candle extinguished, and the apartment flooded only by the light of the Palosian moons, she knelt by the mirror basin, before the winged figure on the wine-red pedestal.
And he heard what no other ears save her own could hear as she lifted her hands to the figure, before which she knelt—the cry of her soul—her womanhood's suppliant prayer.