By the half-dozen who retained their youth, however, Gerald was enraptured. As he looked from one of them to the other, each in her turn appeared so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld.... But, no! Glaum was his benefactor. Glaum at this instant, in Lichfield, was toiling away at that unfinished romance about Dom Manuel of Poictesme which by and by was to make the name of Gerald Musgrave famous everywhere. It would, therefore, never do to encourage these so shapely and chromatically meritorious dears to follow out the dictates of womanly confidence and generosity to the point where they could bleat about it. No, to permit them all to deceive one husband would be an unfriendly and injudicious pleonasm, Gerald reflected. And Gerald sighed whole-heartedly. The seven women had sighed earlier. “What else is now come to trouble us?” said the wives of the Sylan when Gerald came. He answered them, with a great voice: “Ladies, I am Fair-haired Hoo, the Helper and the Preserver, the Lord of the Third Truth, the Well-beloved of Heavenly Ones. Yet, I pray you, do not be unduly alarmed by this revelation! I am not a ruthless deity, I deal fiercely with none save my misguided opponents. I, in a word, am he of whom it was prophesied that I, my dear ladies, or perhaps I ought to say that he—although, to be sure, it does not really matter which pronoun a strict grammarian would prefer, since in any case the meaning is unmistakable and very sublime,—would at his or at my appointed season appear, in unexampled and appropriate splendor, to reign over Antan, riding upon the silver stallion Kalki.” But the wives of Glaum seemed unimpressed. “Your meaning, sir,” said one of them, “may be terrible, but certainly it is not plain.” This wife had reddish golden hair, uncovered: she wore a blue gown, so fashioned that it left her right breast wholly uncovered also; and, doubtless for some sufficient purpose, she carried an iron candlestick with seven branches. Gerald asked, with indignation tempered by her good looks: “And do you doubt my divine word? Do you dispute my Dirghic godhead?” Another wife answered him, a glorious dark sultry creature in purple, who wore a semi-circular crown and had about the upper part of each bare arm two broad gold bands. She said: “Why should we question that? Gods by the score and by the hundreds, gods in battalions, have passed through the land of Dersam, going downward toward Antan, to enter into well-earned rest after their long labors in this world.” “Ah, so it appears that Antan is the heaven of all deserving gods, and that I am to rule a celestially populated kingdom well worthy of me!”