"Your name is among those of our guests for tonight," she said. "Your welcome will be doubly great after today, and—you will accept our invitation to the mountains?"
"If you add your invitation to your father's, so soon as I may arrange the work on other moturs," Croft agreed.
"Then you will come," she told him softly without lifting her eyes. And Croft thrilled at her manner as much as at her words. He stopped the car, reached up and rang the gong as Chythron had done the first day he came to Aphur, leaped out and assisted Naia to alight.
CHAPTER XIV
THE SLIP 'TWIXT CUP AND LIP
And that night all Himyra was en fête. Under the light of fire, oil lamps, and flaring torches, whose glare lit up the sky above the walls, the Red City of Aphur made holiday. Crowds swarmed the public squares and clustered about the free entertainments, the free refreshment booths erected by order of Jadgor, Aphur's king, to celebrate the coming alliance between Cathur and the state.
Processions of the people moved through the streets, laughing, singing, shouting and making merry in honor of the event. Once before when Robur brought a princess of Milidhur to Himyra the city had flared thus red in the night. Now again Jadgor was making greater his prestige of power and increasing Aphur's political might.
Croft, returning to his quarters in the palace from a day spent in starting intensive work on a hundred engines and a marine adoption of the same, met a surprise.
Upon his copper couch was a noble dress consisting of a golden cuirass embossed in silver, a kilted skirt, gold and silver leg casings, and sandals, a leathern belt, and a tempered copper sword. As he came in a Mazzerian servant rose and bade him to one of the palace baths. Returning from that, Croft donned a sleeveless shirt of silklike tissue and the cuirass over that. Kneeling, the servant adjusted the sandals and rose to buckle on the sword. These things he mentioned were a gift from Jadgor himself, a mark of Croft's service to the state.