Like a wraith of dreams, it seemed that she stood before him—a form, a figure pure as a blade of silver, emitting a faint auric play of blue and gold. Man and woman they confronted one another, and the moonlight striking upon that divine something he had called from its lovely mansion, set it aquiver and struck through it in a million tiny points of scintillating fire.
"Beloved." Croft stretched forth a dim hand.
It floated toward him.
"Come," he said again, and caught her hand in his, and led her out through the window, where he had entered, under the moon and the stars.
Out, out he led her. They were free as the winds on which it seemed they rode. Like a sheet of molten silver the pool in the garden lay beneath them. About them and beyond them spread the wide panorama of the wooded mountains, marked here and there by the bone-white windings of the road. Beneath them swam the wide expanse of the desert. Far off to the east and south, in a ruddy glow, the fire-urns of Himyra flared.
Croft turned his face to that of the shape beside him, and found it the face of a sleeper who sees visions, and knew that though the soul of Naia obeyed him, it was still asleep. "Art afraid?" he questioned gently.
"Nay, Jason, I am not afraid."
Some way the words afforded him a great pleasure, for he knew he would not have had fear in any circumstance whatever, in the spirit he regarded as the complement of his.
"Thy father—would see him?" he questioned once more, deciding upon a further stretching of the astral cord.