y had been stripped from him.

"We're getting on," he whispered to Naida a moment later. "The best
thing for us is just to sit still now, and wait."

With the questions he wanted to ask Naida about her world becoming
insistent, he found himself, as a matter of fact, glad for the prospect
of further respite. As both of them rejoined the girls in the Duca's
prayer chamber, the first thing he did was to take from his tunic the
cylinder of gold which he had found in the canyon.

"What is this, Naida?" he asked, hoping to start talk that would make
all of them forget the Duca and politics, and at the same time help him
to learn much that he wished to know.

But a queer thing happened. Naida's reaction to the carven gold was as
unexpected as it was marked.

"_Oh!_" she cried in a voice which suddenly trembled with surprise, with
blank dismay. Somehow, the cylinder of gold brought to her face things
which not even the Serpent's head of the diamond had evoked.

* * * * *

The prospect of a long session of talk began to fade out in Kirby's
mind.

"But Naida, whatever is there about this fragment of gold to startle you
as it does?"

By this time all of the thirty-odd other girls had come flocking about
them, and all were staring at the cylinder as fascinatedly as Naida.

"Do you see what he has there?" Naida finally asked, ignoring Kirby in
her continued excitement.

"Do we _see_?" answered the girl she had addressed. "Naida, surely it is
the carving which was lost!"

Naida was quivering with feeling now.

"Do you realize what it means to our cause that it should have been
returned to us in this way?"

The girl to whom she had spoken, and the others, simply looked at her,
but in one face after another presently dawned awe and joy.

Kirby stood still, puzzled and interested, until at last Naida was
recovered enough to speak to him.

"Where did you get this thing which you call 'a fragment of gold'?" she
asked in a hushed voice.

"I found it," Kirby answered, "lying beside the skeleton of an
upper-world man, while I was ascending the canyon which brought me to
the Valley of the Geyser."

"And you do not know what the cylinder is? But no, of course you could
not."

"_What_ is it, Naida?"

* * * * *

Naida glanced at her friends, then laid her hand on Kirby's.

"Next to the great diamond, it is the most cherished possession of our
race. In som