And suddenly the lips of Zollaria's monarch moved. He muttered in his slumber, "Lost--all is lost--defeat--dishonor." For a moment while the slave girls eyed one another without stilling the sweep of their fans there was silence, and then Helmor groaned. He stirred, he knotted the fingers of a heavy hand. "Thou--thou treacherous one," he muttered. "Through thee Helmor stands undone." Croft thrilled. The thing was succeeding. In his mind Kalamita answered. "Aye, Helmor, through me, these things have transpired to my ends. Defeat have I brought upon you. Tamarizia would have held back the sword, had you possessed the child to place safely in her hands." And then suddenly, as though to point the moral, appeared Naia, clasping the form of the infant the tawny siren had announced as slain, lifting it toward Helmor in suppliant fashion, even as in the flesh she had held it to him once. And she spoke sinking upon her knees. "Take him and give him back to his father, O Helmor, and all will be well with thee again." And Helmor, seizing the infant, lifted it toward the skies and--Kalamita screamed, covering her face, and turned to stagger out of his presence, while a multitude of voices sounded, crying; "Hail to Helmor, saviour of his nation! Hail to Helmor the Wise!" Whereat Helmor surged suddenly up in his bed, and sat blinking in the half dusk of his chamber, from one to another of his attendant slaves. So for a moment he sat, and then, throwing off his coverings, he rose. "Go," he directed in a voice that quivered with the emotion of his vision. "Rouse Gazar and say to him that I have dreamed, and require his presence." * * * * * And on the instant one of the slave-girls dropped her fans and ran lithely from the room, leaving Helmor to sink back to a sitting posture on the couch, his heavy hands clasping his naked knees, his expression a thing of brooding, introspection, excited by his dream. So he remained until a man entered the apartment and advanced toward him shuffling across the rug-littered tiles of the floor. Old he was, bent, with no more than a fringe of ragged silver about an otherwise bald poll. Reaching the emperor's couch, he paused and bowed before him, in little more than an accentuation of his already stooping posture. "Helmor of Zollaria calls," he quavered, "and Gazar, servant of Helmor, appears. Speak to me the things thou hast seen in a vision, O Helmor, that I may make plain their meaning to your ears." Helmor dismissed the remaining slave-girls and complied. Oddly enough Croft had an opportunity to test the success of his endeavor at first hand, as Helmor recited each detail of his dream, and Gazar listened, nodding his head less in silent accentuation of the several points than because of some form of palsy that continually shook him; watching his patron with dark and observant eyes.