She glanced up. A quiver shook the perfect curve of her mouth. And then for the first time her lips writhed open. "How speaks the Mouthpiece of Zitu in a lover's guise?" "Arise," repeated Croft, and waiting until she had once more regained her feet before he went on: "Were I to answer your question, beloved, would any hear?" She regarded him strangely. It was almost as though she sensed some new, some unsuspected meaning in his words, some hint of something of which she had not dreamed, yet which, now that her intuition gave it seeming, she desired to have made plain. "No," she made answer slowly. "This is my own apartment--set aside for my use for such time as I remain with the Gayana. What things may be said within it shall remain unknown." "Then--" In a single stride Croft approached her. He swept her into his arms. They closed about her with an almost yearning gesture. He drew her to him, held her against his breast. The warmth of her, the glorious litheness, the pliant softness of her figure, struck against his own. He gloried in it, thrilled in every cell to the sudden contact--to the quick, instinctive tremor which shook her form. "Hark ye, beloved," he cried softly into the shell-pink ear beneath his lips. "Hark ye--mark well my answer. The Mouthpiece of Zitu is no supernatural being, but a man and a lover--thy lover in very truth." And on the word the supple body of the woman went tense inside his arms. It struggled, it writhed. It struck its hands against his breast and pushed back her torso, straining, bending it against his restraining hold from the hips. Its face became convulsed, a panting, lip-parted, eye-wide mask of horror. With a final effort Naia tore herself free. Hot words poured from her mouth as she choked and gasped for breath. "Then--in the name of Zitu---what do you here--with that--that"--she lifted a naked arm and pointed--"with the wings of Azil--the looped cross of Ga--upon your breast?" "Is not Zud a man--and wears he not the cross at least--and comes he not among the Gayana at will?" stammered Croft, more disturbed than he cared to admit at her manner and words. And as he paused she blazed out in a fashion of almost scathing contempt. "A man, yes, is Zud--one in whom the flame of life burns low, who comes thither only when the work of him he serves demands it; who speaks, when he comes, naught but what to him seems truth." Croft instinctively flinched. Her allusion to what he felt she considered his own deceit in regard to himself flicked him despite his own knowledge of his own sincerity in all that he had done. The sensation which gripped him was due to no sense of guilt, but was more a poignant regret that she should have been led to consider him in any way false to the holiest emotions of his life. * * * * *