"Well, never mind it now. I grow weary of Feronia this and Feronia that. I will judge for myself whether she understood you or no."
"She was extremely understanding," said Druga.
Days passed, and much hard work, Eos studying the laboratory notes of Feronia, and Druga himself reading them over and trying to think of some way he himself might strike back at their mutual enemy.
"Nothing that she has developed can be used directly against Diana without her surviving to fight back. This would have been fatal to Dionaea, but after all, as you have said—she is dead."
"She ought to be dead, I cut her head off!"
"That usually does the trick."
They decided to leave the laboratory the next morning, and that evening Druga picked up the stone statue of his Feronia and carried it carefully aboard the disk, placing her there—one woman among the thousand-odd dead heroes of the long dead past. Druga sadly made a place for her at the head of the board. He did not think of it, but Feronia now sat where Eos herself had spent many a sad hour, sitting and gazing at her dead lovers.
With the stone Feronia gone, the vast and multiplex-walled chambers of mystery and magic assumed a new atmosphere, and Druga found himself talking to Eos that night as if he was not a man whose heart was dead.
She sat in the place from which he had removed the black stone body of Feronia, and Druga could not help but compare the glowing life of her with the dead thing that had sat there.