"At your service completely," I told her, "Winfield Fowler, of White Deer, Texas, and New York City, not to mention other points. But I own to some surprise at finding a knowledge of the idiom in a denizen of so remote a locality." "I can understand," she smiled. "But I think you could talk--more simply. So you are Winfield, who came with Austen across the great--ocean from America?" "You guessed it," I said, trying to keep my growing excitement in hand, while I marveled at her beauty. "Is mind reading common in these parts?" "Doctor Austen--the American--told me about you, his friend. And he gave me two books. Tennyson's poems, and--'The Pathfinder.'" "So you have seen Austen?" I cried in real astonishment. "Are you Melvar? Are you the 'maiden of the crystal city?'" "I am Melvar," she told me. "And Austen stopped in Astran one _sutar_--that is thirty-six days." "Where is he now?" I eagerly demanded. "He was a strange man," the golden voice replied. "He did not fear the Krimlu, as do the men of Astran. He walked off toward the pass in the north that leads around--around the Silver Lake, he called it. He had been watching the Krimlu as they came at night, and doing strange things with some stuff he took from--the Silver Lake. While he was here, the hunters brought in one of the--" again she hesitated, at a loss for a word. "--The Purple Ones," she concluded. "He took that to examine it." "What are the Krimlu?" I exclaimed. "What--or who--are the Purple Ones? What is the Silver Lake?" "You are a man of many questions," she laughed. For a moment she hesitated, with her blue eyes resting on my face. "The Krimlu, so say the old men of Astran, are the spirits of the dead who come back from the land beyond the Silver Lake to watch the living, and to carry off the evil for their food. So the priests taught us, and so I believed until Austen came and told me of the world that is beyond. He told the Elders of the outer world, but they put upon him the curse of the sun, and drove him away. And indeed it is well that he was ready to go so willingly beyond the Silver Lake, for Jorak would have offered him to the Purple Sun had he been in the city another night." Suddenly she must have become conscious of the intensity of my unthinking gaze, for she abruptly dropped her eyes, and flushed a little. "Go on," I urged her. "What about the Purple Ones and the Silver Lake? Your account is certainly entertaining, if somewhat more mystifying than illuminating. At this rate you will have me a raving maniac in an hour, but the process is not unpleasant. Proceed." * * * * * Fowler Grows Bold