He followed--across a hugely pillared room where others of the vestals sat on cushions or divans, engaged in simple tasks--toward a mighty figure of a woman, carved from the strangely beautiful translucent stone the Tamarizians used mainly in their sculpture--the figure of a woman seated, brooding with a face of divinely maternal affection above the form of a babe stretched prone across her knees. Mighty, magnificent in her womanhood, beautiful in her maternity, she sat there, back of a silver altar on which leaped from an oil-fed sconce the eternal flame of life which never died. And this he thought was Ga, to whom Naia of Aphur had prayed that she might be spared the unclean ordeal of a marriage with Cathur's prince. This was the eternal woman, the eternal mother, the eternal source--the Tamarizian virgin who had given birth to Azil, the Angel of Life. Ga--the virgin, the madonna. This was the woman and--her child--woman the shrine of the fire eternal, watching it, guarding it, replenishing it against extinction through the eons of ages within and from herself. * * * * * A sudden passionate desire to do her and the members of her sex some form of honor seized him in an impulse which sent him without premeditation to his knees, bending before her majestic presence, forming the sign of the cross horizontal, beneath her brooding features; glancing up then, and then only, to meet the eyes of his guide--and find them less frigid, in a subtle manner pleased. But she made no comment as Croft rose slowly and once more followed her lead toward the door of a room, which she unlatched and pushed aside. Through the opening Croft's eyes leaped, to fall upon the figure of a woman, her hair as golden as the sunshine falling in a rippling, silken mass to the couch of wine-red wood on which she sat, her head bent above a frame in which her tapering fingers were embroidering a pattern in small, pierced jewels on a fabric of sheerest gauze. All that in a flash. Then, as though attracted by the opening of the door, the woman glanced up, lifting a pair of pansy-purple eyes. "Naia!" Croft's lips framed the word rather than spoke it. He stepped swiftly toward her through the door. It clicked shut behind him as the vestal closed it. Naia, of Aphur, rose. The last vestige of color seemed drained from her face, leaving her eyes very dark in its pallor, their pupils stretched wondrously wide. So for a moment, she stood staring straight before her at him she had known as Jasor of Nodhur, before her body took on a sudden panting, so that the tissues or the temple garment she was wearing became no more than a creamy ripple above her firmly rounded busts. And then while Croft waited, choked by his own emotions, drunk in his innermost being with her beauty, she moved and sank down on her slender, supple knees. "Beloved!" Croft went one swift pace toward her. He stretched out his hands. "Naia--mine own--arise."