At the end she nodded. "I am convinced," she said. "Him I knew as Jasor was Jason indeed. Your words, your plans are the same. Thanks be to Ga and Azil, I am happy. You, Jason, are he whom I—"
"Love," Croft supplied as once more she faltered.
"Aye, love." For the second time her astral figure glowed with its auric fires. "With you I am happy—free thus and alone, with a strange new happiness—such as I have never known. Canst not hold me thus beside you? Must I return again to the prison of the body? Canst not claim me now, and keep me wholly thine own?"
"No—not yet," Croft stammered, shaken as never before by her words and taking alarm at the mood which was upon her. "Yet, some time I shall claim you mine before all men. Come now, for the present we must return."
Across a twilight sky they flitted back, drifting into the red and yellow paved court where the red-and-yellow steps ran up at either end to the yellow balcony supported on its carved pillars of red, and the giant figure of a straining man, did battle with a beast not unlike a tiger, to protect a crouching woman from its fangs.
"See!" said Croft. "So shall I fight for you—protect you—guard you, wage warfare against all else for you, until indeed you are mine."
She smiled upon him. "So shall I wait for thee," she began, and broke off sharply: "Behold!"
Croft turned his eyes. Maia knelt the length of her azure form crouched in a posture of woe beside the couch on which Naia's body still reclined. Her arms were thrown out across her mistress's breasts, her face buried from sight between them. Beside her stood Mitlos, gazing on blue girl and white, his entire posture and expression indicative of distress.
"Woe, woe!" Maia wailed in choked accents. "Cursed be Zilla who came upon her in her sleep! She moved not, neither did she speak. Yet when I sought to wake her at the hour for her bath, she answered not to my voice. Again and again I cried to her, 'Naia, my mistress,' yet she did not wake. Mitlos—Mitlos, we are undone. This is not of our doing, yet will Lakkon seek our lives."
"Go," said Croft to the lovely presence beside him. "Spare her alarm. I thought not of your bathing. I have kept you overlong."