"As once more you yield it." Croft lowered his lips to the strange, lambent outline of hers beneath them. He kissed her in a strange kiss such as he had never dreamed of—a thing all inexpressible softness, seeming to hold in its contact a something that tingled like fire. And as though that fire were a strange, cosmic solvent, for an instant as short as a breath, as long as eternity, it was as though their two individualities dissolved and flowed together, blended into one.
Croft tore away his mouth. The thing had been too real. It left a weird, staggering sensation quivering through him, and the form within his strong arms quivered. Its auric fires of white and gold and purple were more radiant than they had ever been. Naia's hands clung to him. Her eyes were uplifted. "Go—go!" she panted. "Send me back to my body. Yet wait not so long to come to me again."
"In the morning I shall see you with Robur," said Croft as he released her. For now he felt assured that she was very, very close to a conscious understanding of the nature of their love—its wonder—its glory—its truth.
CHAPTER XV
THE KING'S MESSENGER
And that she stood very near indeed to the threshold of understanding, the weeks that followed their third astral meeting showed.
It showed in a changed demeanor of their meeting the next day. Croft waked with the sound of her voice in his ears, and lay for an instant startled in the half world between waking and slumber before he realized that it drifted from the bathing court of the palace.
Instantly he sprang up, recalling her words of the day before concerning Robur's daily practice at throwing curves with a baseball. He glanced out. Already Naia and her cousin were at work. Croft had overslept, as it seemed, but now his pulses quickened at the picture Naia made.
As he reached the window Robur threw the ball, and the princess ran to retrieve it. All in white she was—a single fluttering garment, its skirt tucked up and caught together for greater freedom of movement, revealing a flashing play of speeding limbs. Bare on the tiles of the tessellated pavement were her pink-arched flying feet, and bare her outstretched reaching arms. And her hair, free, was a cloud of flying gold about her face. An old-time story flashed into Jason's mind. So he thought might Atalanta have appeared, free-limbed, glorious, and unrestrained, as she ran her race. He turned away, tearing his eyes from her youth and grace and beauty, and hastened to dress.