st her. I have been unable to fight alone."

"If that is your will, do not fail to shield your beauty with that robe
you wear. For I cannot resist the power in your loveliness any more than
a straw in the wind!"

Eos closed the robe against his gaze, and like two people weighted down
with lead in every limb, they got up and went out of the darkened
chambers, and Druga closed the great doors and locked them. Silently,
not touching each other, they walked down the bridge of glass.

They entered the mansion on the disk, and Eos sent it sharply upward.
There was blood on her lower lip where she had bit it, and Druga's nails
had bitten into his palms.

Druga noted that the great golden glow in the sky had approached near to
the valley that Feronia had made her home, and he said:

"This pole of life seems to follow you about! Is there some relation
between you and it, so that you cannot be apart?"

Eos looked at him, smiling sadly, her eyes far-off with other thoughts.

"I have been taught, in the far past, that there was a Mother of Life, a
real woman, mighty and majestic beyond thinking, who lived there at the
pole and ordered life to be as it should be. That she is my ancestor,
and that there is some relation between the life energies and myself,
may be true, Druga. Whether the pole follows me, or whether coincidence
is governed by some magic so that we are never far apart, I know not.
Knowledge is a thing now lost from life, as we know it, Druga. We can
only guess at these truths, and never learn them surely."

"Now you are not telling me all you know, Eos."

"I would not tell you what I only guess, Druga. And I do not surely know
anything, any more. I have spent so much time brooding and alone."

"Forgive me, Eos. An eagle cannot fly with crows, and I will never again
put myself forward. When you have need of me, I will be here, and when
you need only your own thoughts, why then go apart; I will not seek you
out. I forget who and what you are, for my senses are strained beyond
endurance with the power of you."

"You are no crow, Druga. But in me is an adult mind, and you are as a
child, whom I must teach and raise up gradually to my estate. Every
parent grows impatient of ignorance in their offspring. One day, if time
keeps treading the self-same mill, we will be crushed together like
grapes and pressed clean. Until then, be my knight, and think not of me,
except with pity for the broken heart that beats insid