"Just how is the Princess Naia?" I asked. Croft nodded. He seemed to find acceptance of my part in my question. "The Princess Naia is very much all right." And then I remembered what he had told me before he went to Palos for what I had thought a definite stay. And it struck me that it was rather odd to be speaking of the Palosian girl as one would of a neighbor next door, but I amended my reference to her none the less: "Or perhaps I should have asked for Mrs. Croft--you said that you expected to be married immediately upon your return to Palos." CHAPTER II EXPLANATIONS Croft frowned. "What one expects and what one meets are not always one and the same, friend Murray," he rejoined. "As a matter of fact, I returned to Palos after my conversation with you, to encounter a situation of which I had never thought." "You mean that it interfered with your marriage to the princess?" I exclaimed. He made a grimace. "I mean exactly that, both on the part of Naia herself and because of something else. You remember Zud, the high priest of Zitra, the imperial city of which I told you--who sponsored me with Tamhys before the Zollarian war. And you recall no doubt that I mentioned the fact that I left the body of Jasor of Nodhur, which I had made my own, in Zud's apartments in the pyramid of Zitra when I came back here for the last time, and that Naia was quartered during my absence in the rooms set apart for the Gayana--the Vestals of Ga the Virgin in the pyramid, too. Murray, when I got back there, fully expecting to take things up where I had left them, I found that Zud had proclaimed me the Mouthpiece of Zitu himself." "The Mouthpiece of Zitu!" I drew a chair close to the bed and sat down. The thing affected me oddly. I cast back in my mind for what Croft had told me concerning the religion of Tamarizia, which was the nation in whose affairs he had taken an active part on the distant star. Zitu was God in their belief. Ga was the woman--a virgin. Azil was her son--known as the Giver of Life. And if Croft had been proclaimed by the high priest of the central state of the empire, the head of the clerical college, as the Mouthpiece of Zitu I began to sense dimly the position in which he must have found himself on his return--just what it might have meant. If Zud had proclaimed Croft anything of the sort, it was just about the same as naming him the representative of the Divinity in the flesh--and from what Croft had told me of his claiming while in Tamarizia to do all that he did by the grace of Zitu---which was, of course, no more than the truth in a sense--I could see how his very words might have laid the foundation for the high priest's act.