It was a wonderful satisfaction, too, to be able to converse with Itza in a dialect that no one else could understand; to be able to exchange our thoughts, our hopes, our desires and to make love without others overhearing us. Moreover, the fact that she could understand and converse in the strange language, which the people implicitly believed was the secret dialect of the Tutul Zius, raised Itza tremendously in the estimation of her people. To them, she was now semi-divine. She was the chosen mate of the son of Kukulcan, she conversed in the language of the gods, she could read the magic, sacred writing of Itzimin Chac, and she was accorded the homage, the respect and the reverence due a queen and a goddess. We wanted for nothing, there was no earthly reason why I should not have been happy, content, willing to remain forever in the lovely valley with Itza. I had no kith or kin in the outside world; among my own people I would be forced to struggle, to work in order to maintain even a modest existence; I would be but a rather obscure unit among millions of my fellows; I could never hope for great wealth, position or prominence. Here in Mictolan my life was easy, work was rather a recreation than a necessity; I had everything man could ask--wealth, position, power, and, most precious of all, a loving devoted and most beautiful companion. Why could I not be content, satisfied to remain here, to accept conditions as they were, to forget the outside world, to resign myself to remaining the virtual ruler of these lovable, peaceful, simple people? It was not that I lacked anything, that I was not happy, that I could not marry Itza. I had long since cast the obstacle of that formality aside as an unreasonable, nonsensical and illogical impediment to our happiness. The ceremony of the priest--even had he been willing to go through with it--would have had no true significance to me or to my people; even had we been married according to the rites of the Mictolan faith, I should have wanted a Christian wedding if we ever escaped from the valley. Arguing to myself along these lines, I scrapped all my obsolete, old, narrow-minded, puritanical ideas aside and took Itza for my bride by the simple Scotch custom of declaring her my wife in the presence of the prince and the princesses, and subsequently announced it from the temple.