The hammered sunlight of her hair made curls and waves of beauty about the white shores of her shoulders. She had let the robe of insulative blue drop from her, exposing the very heart of her beauty he had feared to see when she was herself filled with the flow of the Pole of Life Energy. And Druga wondered a little whether she were not still somehow the center and pivot of the energy, for his senses reeled with looking, and his will crumbled into forgotten ashes. He sank to the silken couch beside her, and his eyes burned with flashing energies like meteors plunging into the Northern lights. Eos held her breath, and her eyes burned into his with greater and greater force, for she had been dreaming and weeping and waiting there at the Pole-of-all-Life for so many cold empty years--waiting for the curse to be lifted so that she could begin to live again. * * * * * With the last shred of her own will Eos murmured: "Let us go into the disk and leave at once for Armora, and think no more of each other or surely we will sink into the raptures we desire and forget to fight. Then I will awake and find you too turned into stone, and myself again alone against her. I have been unable to fight alone." "If that is your will, do not fail to shield your beauty with that robe you wear. For I cannot resist the power in your loveliness any more than a straw in the wind!" Eos closed the robe against his gaze, and like two people weighted down with lead in every limb, they got up and went out of the darkened chambers, and Druga closed the great doors and locked them. Silently, not touching each other, they walked down the bridge of glass. They entered the mansion on the disk, and Eos sent it sharply upward. There was blood on her lower lip where she had bit it, and Druga's nails had bitten into his palms. Druga noted that the great golden glow in the sky had approached near to the valley that Feronia had made her home, and he said: "This pole of life seems to follow you about! Is there some relation between you and it, so that you cannot be apart?" Eos looked at him, smiling sadly, her eyes far-off with other thoughts. "I have been taught, in the far past, that there was a Mother of Life, a real woman, mighty and majestic beyond thinking, who lived there at the pole and ordered life to be as it should be. That she is my ancestor, and that there is some relation between the life energies and myself, may be true, Druga. Whether the pole follows me, or whether coincidence is governed by some magic so that we are never far apart, I know not. Knowledge is a thing now lost from life, as we know it, Druga. We can only guess at these truths, and never learn them surely." "Now you are not telling me all you know, Eos." "I would not tell you what I only guess, Druga. And I do not surely know anything, any more. I have spent so much time brooding and alone."