less love. Did you not think of your lifelong vows
of celibacy and of the deep and tender joy of romantic love?"

Merga only replied by clasping her babe still closer to her breast and
bathing it with her tears.

"What excuse do you offer for your crime against yourself, your
religion and your fellow-priests?" demanded the high, priest of
Ardsolus.

"Your highness," said the youth, "we have, after due experience of our
vows, arrived at the conclusion that such vows are a violation of
nature. Everything here bids us love, but the artificial system under
which we have lived arbitrarily draws a line and says, thus far and no
further. Your system may suit disembodied spirits, if such exist, but
not beings of flesh and blood. It is an outrage on nature. We desire
to leave Egyplosis and return to the common ways of men. We may be
there unfortunate, but we will be free. This rarified atmosphere
stifles us."

The high priest was horrified. Never before had a twin-soul been so
sinful, so contumacious. It revealed a state of things too terrible to
contemplate! If such conduct became contagious, it meant the ruin of
Egyplosis.

I could detect, however, in the sight of the goddess a certain
sympathy for the prisoners which, perhaps, it would just then be very
impolitic for her to reveal. It was clear that beneath all this ideal
joy lay a slumbering volcano of passion that only awaited a favorable
moment for a fierce outbreak. The laws of this strange faith seemed
not to have contemplated that to avoid temptation is the only security
of moral strength, and that to seek temptation is to paralyze the
moral fibres of the soul. The high priest grew pale with excitement.

"Are you aware of the enormity of your offence?" said he to the
defiant youth. "For a moment of sinful delight you destroy your
interregnum of a hundred years of blessedness, and you, each of you,
have delivered a blow at earthly immortality. The success of our
religious system is proven by the fact that we have already lengthened
the life of our hierophants one hundred years, or twice the duration
of life in the outer world of Bilbimtesirol. This is the last of many
outbreaks of _malfeasance_ to vows made in deliberation, and a fresh
exhibition of treason in the sacred college of souls."

"I tell you this," said the youth in reply, "you are slumbering on the
edge of a volcano. There are thousands of twin-souls ready to cast off
this yoke. They only await a lea