"Intellectual understanding of a problem never solves it, though it may help. Eileen takes your word for these being purely natural phenomena. She's not superstitious. It might help if she were! Because explaining the horror doesn't lessen it to her. Man is not a rational animal, Joseph, though he likes to pretend he is."
"Can't she be helped? Psychology?"
"No." The old voice held pity, but it did not waver. "I've studied such cases. If you keep her here much longer, she'll have a miscarriage and go insane. The insanity might be curable, back at Sol, or it might not, but as soon as she returned it would come again. Not that she could ever stand to come back.
"She is inherently unable to adapt herself to an utterly foreign environment. You'll have to send her home, Joseph. Soon."
"But—she's my wife...."
Chang said nothing. A shining golden head swooped past in the darkness, laughing at them, and the laughter was visible as red pulses in the night.
There came a step on the veranda. Langdon turned and saw Chang's wife coming out with Eileen. The girl walked more steadily now. In the dim radiance from the window, her face was calmer than it had been for some time, and for an instant there was a flood of love and joy and relief within Langdon.
Chang was wrong. Eileen would learn. She was already starting to learn. Tonight was the turning point. Tanith would take her to itself and they would be together forever.
"Eileen," he said, very softly, and got up and walked toward her. "Eileen, darling."
The atmosphere trembled between them. She saw the flesh run from his bones, it was a skull that grinned at her, shining evilly green against the dark, and the sounds that rasped from it were the mouthings of nightmare.