swift glance of something like defiance. For as she spoke, his
previous idea concerning her came back upon him with redoubled
force. He was keenly conscious of the vehement fever of love into
which her presence had thrown him,--but all the same he was unable
to dispossess himself of the notion that she was a pupil and an
accomplice of Heliobas, thoroughly trained and practiced in his
mysterious doctrine, and that therefore she most probably had some
magnetic power in herself that at her pleasure not only attracted
him TO her, but also held him thus motionless at a distance, FROM
her.

She talked, of course, in an indefinite mystic way either to
intimidate or convince him ... but, . . and he smiled a little.. in
any case it only rested with himself to unmask this graceful
pretender to angelic honors! And while he thought thus, her soft
tones trembled on the silence again, ... he listened as a dreaming
mariner might listen to the fancied singing of the sea-fairies.

"Through long bright aeons of endless glory," she said--"I have
waited and prayed for thee! I have pleaded thy cause before the
blinding splendors of God's Throne, I have sung the songs of thy
native paradise, but thou, grown dull of hearing, hast caught but
the echo of the music! Life after life hast thou lived, and given
no thought to me--yet I remember and am faithful! Heaven is not
all Heaven to me without thee, my Beloved, . . and now in this time
of thy last probation, . . now, if thou lovest me indeed ..."

"Love thee?" suddenly exclaimed Theos, half beside himself with
the strange passion of yearning her words awakened in him--"Love
thee, Edris?--Aye! ... as the gods loved when earth was young! ...