"I have told you," said Croft, "that those things I did were done by Zitu's grace. But I have not explained my full meaning. That I had reserved for another time, and for your ears alone. Yet I swear now by Zitu and Ga and Azil that I meant in my heart to tell you all things before I claimed you as my wife—make all things plain."
"Then—" Once more Naia's figure stiffened. One hand crept up and lay pressed in above her heart. "Abbu said truth—your spirit is not Jasor's, but another's?"
"Yes," said Croft, dully refusing further evasion, "Abbu said the truth. Yet not all the truth, and Zud overshot the mark in his interpretation." He paused.
For the figure before him had risen, stretching upward on the balls of its rosy feet, lifting its arms in a high-flung gesture with fingers outstretched, extending, as it seemed, in every line of its slender, rounded length, with head back-tilted until its golden hair hung half-way down its tapering thighs in a shimmering cascade, its face raised, its lips parted, its eyes half closed. So sudden was the change that the girl's form seemed to have flung itself into that strange posture of abandonment to woe, as a stricken creature leaps in its death throes when struck by the hunter's shaft. And as Croft broke off, arrested by that tragic and yet still beautiful pose, a scream came out from the round, soft pillar of Naia of Aphur's throat.
"Zitu! Ga! Befriend me!"
All life went out of her glorious body. It sank down, seemed to shrink, to bend and sway before him like a tempest-riven reed.
Croft caught it as it fell and lifted it in his arms—lifted it and held it, the dearest burden they had ever known—held it and bent above it with sick despair in his heart, despair for her whom he held, whose pliant glory now lay impotently unconscious, upborne, saved from the injury of its fall by his strong and reverent hands—despair for her and for himself—for them both—victims of Zud's curious meddling in their affairs.
Zud! He ground his teeth together. He was not done with Tamarizia's high priest. Zud—or another—or ten thousand others—must pay for this. Something like a sob caught in his throat as he gazed at the down-dropped lids above those pansy-purple eyes in which Zud's interference had waked the look of horror they had held before they closed.
The sound of a muffled groan escaped his lips. How different was this meeting from the one he had planned as taking place. Then, too, he had thought to hold her in his arms, but that she would lie there willing, gladly, responsive in her inmost being to his presence, not like this. And suddenly moved again by a strange impulse, because Zitu or God—what mattered it as to name, since, by any name whatever, there was for life but one source?—he lifted that splendid form and held it stretched prone and motionless before him, extended face uppermost across his powerful arms. And—