It was answered. Maia repeated, and paused, and whistled again. Then touching Croft on the arm, she urged him forth from the shadow until he stood revealed in the rays of the Palosian moons.
And from the shadows beyond him another shape appeared. Slight it was and slender, graceful as a faun, as it came swiftly toward him on flying feet, graceful as a dryad of the forest in its every supple, sweeping line save for where it was girdled by a band of white.
So much Croft saw, and advanced to meet it, and found it Naia, veiled as she stood before him from head to waist in the heavy cloud of her auburn-tinted hair.
And then she lay against him—his arms were straining her to his breast, and that cloud of ruddy hair was like the kiss of satin against his naked chest. And her hands were clinging to him, her arms were holding him fast.
"Jason, beloved," she panted, "you are safe—uninjured, alive!"
"Yes—thanks to you, beloved, and to Maia," Croft replied, and kissed her.
"Thou"—Naia of Aphur flung up her head and turned to the girl of Mazzer—"thou who this night have brought me more than life or anything besides—thou shall never leave me—thou shall remain always with me—and with him. My children you shall cradle in your arms—and if love comes to you as to me and offspring, I swear it—to me they shall be as mine."
"My mistress," Maia faltered, bending her head before Naia.
"Nay—you are my sister," said Naia, smiling, and took her by the hand. And after that she spoke again to Croft. "Yet—I am forgetting. Not yet are we free from danger. Thrice today have men roamed through the forest while I hid me beneath the leaves. But thy huge bird waits to bear us high above them. Come, beloved, come."
For an hour after that, his arm about her, or walking hand in hand—as though now they were once more together they sought the assurance of the fact through every thrilling sense—they hurried on. And then once more the moonlight filled all the bowl of a tree-ringed opening in the forest, and struck dull gleams from the copper body of the waiting airplane. Huge, impotent, in seeming, it squatted there, waiting their touch to wake it; its interlacing struts and trusses making a spider-webbed pattern in shadow on the ground.