"No," said that smiling individual, "it is the princess. We are going to listen to Princess Heru in the palace square. She reads the globe on the terrace again tonight, to see if omens are propitious for her marriage. She MUST marry, and you know the ceremony has been unavoidably postponed so far." "Unavoidably postponed?" Yes, Heaven wotted I was aware of the fact. And was Heru going to marry black Hath in such a hurry? And after all I had done for her? It was scarcely decent, and I tried to rouse myself to rage over it, but somehow the seductive Martian contentment with any fate was getting into my veins. I was not yet altogether sunk in their slothful acceptance of the inevitable, but there was not the slightest doubt the hot red blood in me was turning to vapid stuff such as did duty for the article in their veins. I mustered up a half-hearted frown at this unwelcome intelligence, turning with it on my face towards the slave girl; but she had slipped away into the throng, so the frown evaporated, and shrugging my shoulders I said to myself, "What does it matter? There are twenty others will do as well for me. If not one, why then obviously another, 'tis the only rational way to think, and at all events there is the magic globe. That may tell us something." And slipping my arm round the waist of the first disengaged girl--we were not then, mind you, in Atlantic City--I kissed her dimpling cheek unreproached, and gaily followed in the drift of humanity, trending with a low hum of pleasure towards the great white terraces under the palace porch. How well I knew them! It was just such an evening Heru had consulted Fate in the same place once before; how much had happened since then! But there was little time or inclination to think of those things now. The whole phantom city's population had drifted to one common centre. The crumbling seaward ramparts were all deserted; no soldier watch was kept to note if angry woodmen came from over seas; a soft wind blew in from off the brine, but told no tales; the streets were empty, and, when as we waited far away in the southern sky the earth planet presently got up, by its light Heru, herself again, came tripping down the steps to read her fate. They had placed another magic globe under a shroud on a tripod for her. It stood within the charmed circle upon the terrace, and I was close by, although the princess did not see me. Again that weird, fantastic dance commenced, the princess working herself up from the drowsiest undulations to a hurricane of emotion. Then she stopped close by the orb, and seized the corner of the web covering it. We saw the globe begin to beam with veiled magnificence at her touch.