"It were hardly fitting, were Lakkon's daughter not to offer to Zitu's mouthpiece the freedom of Lakkon's house," she said at the last, when Croft had escorted her back to the mountain valley wherein the palace was placed. And her tone was vaguely wistful—there was something in her eyes that cried out to him, wholly unlike that blue fire of scorn they had held, when she flung the betrothal seal of Azil against his breast.
"Jason, the Mouthpiece, shall do himself the honor of Lakkon's house, when Lakkon is within it," he replied with meaning, as he bowed and turned and left her, and heard her catch her breath.
Yet he took with him a song in his heart because of the invitation which had faltered from her lips; because as he knew now the cry of spirit to spirit was beginning to actuate the flesh. And he walked more as a god indeed than a man as he made his way back to his workmen, threading his way on springing feet, glorying in the strength of his free-limbed stride on the wooded slopes, holding in his heart the knowledge that it was because she had felt he would be present—because of an urge to be near him, to speak with him as man and woman, that she had come to view the new work.
But he did not attempt to approach her again in the astral condition during the week longer that he remained at the site of the power-plant. Nor did Naia venture to it any more. And so soon as he was satisfied that his subordinates understood the exact scope of their duties, he returned to set about the actual construction of the dynamo that, water driven, should light Himyra with a myriad of glowing lamps.
But that night, after he had received Robur's report of progress, and they had talked over the dynamo plans, he sought his own apartment and stretched himself upon his couch. And then he went seeking the two women who in all his life he had known the best, because he thought that it would be on this first night, with Gaya, that Naia would unburden herself.
Failing to find them in the palace, he sought and found them in the garden, seated on a carved bench of stone, inside the vine-grown walls of the pool. Naia's eyes were fixed upon its surface, silvered by the light of Palos's moons. Very wide and dark they seemed beneath the shadow of her hair. Her lips moved.
"Whether these be dreams, induced by those things of which you told me, or whether too much thinking has tired my mind until it makes of vain imaginings the seeming of other thought, I know not," she said in a musing voice. "Yet even as you said, he had told my cousin Robur that he left his body, so has it seemed to me that I left my flesh, when he called me to him—that hand in hand we wandered forth together, to Himyra—over the mountains, and once that we leaped all space, as he says his spirit leaped from earth to Palos and stood upon the larger of the moons up yonder, whose light sparkles here on the pool."
"Zitu!" Gaya's tones were a trifle unsteady—filled with a certain awe, as Croft waited her answer. "But—Naia, sweet maid, may not dreams embody truth?"
"If dreams they be, I think it may be so," her companion rejoined. "For on that time we went to Himyra as it seemed, I saw my father asleep, and he whispered my name, and the next time he came to me he spoke to me about it; said that he saw me standing beside him and had called me.