"Enter Rador with the strangers!" a clear, sweet voice called. Rador bowed deeply and stood aside, motioning us to pass. We entered, the green dwarf behind us, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the doorway fade as abruptly as it had appeared and again the dense shadow fill its place. "Come closer, strangers. Be not afraid!" commanded the bell-toned voice. We approached. The woman, sober scientist that I am, made the breath catch in my throat. Never had I seen a woman so beautiful as was Yolara of the Dweller's city--and none of so perilous a beauty. Her hair was of the colour of the young tassels of the corn and coiled in a regal crown above her broad, white brows; her wide eyes were of grey that could change to a cornflower blue and in anger deepen to purple; grey or blue, they had little laughing devils within them, but when the storm of anger darkened them--they were not laughing, no! The silken webs that half covered, half revealed her did not hide the ivory whiteness of her flesh nor the sweet curve of shoulders and breasts. But for all her amazing beauty, she was--sinister! There was cruelty about the curving mouth, and in the music of her voice--not conscious cruelty, but the more terrifying, careless cruelty of nature itself. The girl of the rose wall had been beautiful, yes! But her beauty was human, understandable. You could imagine her with a babe in her arms--but you could not so imagine this woman. About her loveliness hovered something unearthly. A sweet feminine echo of the Dweller was Yolara, the Dweller's priestess--and as gloriously, terrifyingly evil! CHAPTER XIV The Justice of Lora As I looked at her the man arose and made his way round the table toward us. For the first time my eyes took in Lugur. A few inches taller than the green dwarf, he was far broader, more filled with the suggestion of appalling strength. The tremendous shoulders were four feet wide if an inch, tapering down to mighty thewed thighs. The muscles of his chest stood out beneath his tunic of red. Around his forehead shone a chaplet of bright-blue stones, sparkling among the thick curls of his silver-ash hair. Upon his face pride and ambition were written large--and power still larger. All the mockery, the malice, the hint of callous indifference that I had noted in the other dwarfish men were there, too--but intensified, touched with the satanic. The woman spoke again. "Who are you strangers, and how came you here?" She turned to Rador. "Or is it that they do not understand our tongue?" "One understands and speaks it--but very badly, O Yolara," answered the green dwarf. "Speak, then, that one of you," she commanded. But it was Marakinoff who found his voice first, and I marvelled at the fluency, so much greater than mine, with which he spoke. "We came for different purposes. I to seek knowledge of a kind; he"--pointing to me "of another. This man"--he looked at Olaf--"to find a wife and child."