In this his judgment proved right, as he found so soon as he reached the wing of the palace in which he had formerly lived. Here, in the portion given over to Robur and his wife, was a court containing a private bath, set in the center, surrounded on all sides by growing shrubs and flowers, the tessellated pavements about it dotted with chairs and couches of the wine-red wood and silklike canopies to offer shade against the Palosian sun. It was a favorite resting-place of Gaya in the afternoons, when, attended by her servants, she either bathed in the limpid, sun-warmed water or received such guests as might elect to pay a social call.
On two of the red couches he found the women he had come in search of. They reclined beneath a yellow awning supported by standards, with a low table between them, holding small cakes, fruit conserves such as the women of Tamarizia affected, and crystal glasses, scarcely larger than a thimble, filled with an amber-colored wine.
But it was to Naia Croft gave his major attention once he had reached the palace. She lay pale, her eyes shadowed by darkened circles beneath their lids, her features weary, drawn with what he recognized at a glance as a dangerous tension of the nerves. Her figure was draped in a robe of exquisite green, across the upper part of which a strand of her fair hair made a sheen of gold. To Croft she had never seemed more appealing than now, in this mood of acute distress. He glanced at Gaya, and found her eyes fixed in an anxious inspection of her companion's face.
Abruptly Naia's breast swelled sharply and she spoke: "I shall become Gayana. There is nothing else."
"Nay! Nay, daughter of Lakkon—you are overwrought. Robur thinks not so, nor Jadgor, his father. To Lakkon there is none other, since your mother died, save yourself. Would you leave him to finish his life alone?"
Naia sat up upon the couch. "That was true," she returned in a tone gone bitter, "until this trouble came upon me. Now Lakkon holds me disgraced—in that I have yielded my lips to Zitu's Mouthpiece, against all the laws of custom for a woman of my caste. Yet, in Zitu's name, wherein was I to blame, who loved as never a woman loved before—who was asked in marriage by the one she loved, by one who had sworn, aye, and done many deeds to win her? In what did I wrong? How could I foresee that he was not—what—what he appeared?"
"Nay," Gaya said, while Croft's soul quivered at this confession from the lips of the woman he loved above all else. "Say not that in any way were you to blame, Naia, fairest of Aphur's maids. For have you and I not spoken concerning your love ere this, and did you not first to me confess it, when you stood pledge to Cathur's heir, from whom this man of Zitu saved you?"
"Man," Naia caught her up, interrupting quickly. "Say you that he is a man—Gaya, my friend—or is the word but used as a means of expressions since you know not what to call him save as he seems?"
"Nay, I mean man, child," Gaya returned. "Man he appears, and man he claims to be, and man he is. You know Robur for his friend. Much to Robur has he explained since he wakened from the last of his strange sleeps. Yet is he such a man as never was seen on Palos before; and though of mortal birth, as we are, yet was he not born on Palos, but of a woman on earth."
"Earth?" Naia's eyes widened swiftly.