n chemist and
doctor of disease."

"Then you bow to Faith, Oro?"

"Yes, and I think that my god Fate also bows to Faith. Perhaps, indeed,
Faith shapes Fate, not Fate, Faith. But whence comes that faith which
even I with all my learning cannot command? Why is it denied to me and
given to you and Bastin?"

"Because as Bastin would tell you, it is a gift, though one that is
never granted to the proud and self-sufficient. Become humble as a
child, Oro, and perchance you too may acquire faith."

"And how shall I become humble?"

"By putting away all dreams of power and its exercise, if such you have,
and in repentance walking quietly to the Gates of Death," I replied.

"For you, Humphrey, who have little or none of these things, that may be
easy. But for me who have much, if not all, it is otherwise. You ask me
to abandon the certain for the uncertain, the known for the unknown,
and from a half-god communing with the stars, to become an earthworm
crawling in mud and lifting blind eyes towards the darkness of
everlasting night."

"A god who must die is no god, half or whole, Oro; the earthworm that
lives on is greater than he."

"Mayhap. Yet while I endure I will be as a god, so that when night
comes, if come it must, I shall have played my part and left my mark
upon this little world of ours. Have done!" he added with a burst of
impatience. "What will you of my daughter?"

"What man has always willed of woman--herself, body and soul."

"Her soul perchance is yours, if she has one, but her body is mine to
give or withhold. Yet it can be bought at a price," he added slowly.

"So she told me, Oro."

"I can guess what she told you. Did I not watch you yonder by the
lake when you gave her a ring graved with the signs of Life and
Everlastingness? The question is, will you pay the price?"

"Not so; the question is--what is the price?"

"This; to enter my service and henceforth do my will--without debate or
cavil."

"For what reward, Oro?"

"Yva and the dominion of the earth while you shall live, neither more
nor less."

"And what is your will?"

"That you shall learn in due course. On the second night from this I
command the three of you to wait upon me at sundown in the buried halls
of Nyo. Till then you see no more of Yva, for I do not trust her. She,
too, has powers, though as yet she does not use them, and perchance
she would forget her oaths, and following some new star of love, for a
little while vani