ow a miracle! I am alive, and have you
once again! No other ever shall take you from me...."

Druga picked up the axe that lay disregarded on the floor.

"That may be what you wish, stranger, and though you are no enemy, if it
is Eos you desire, you shall have her only over my dead body! Arm
yourself, and prepare to die!"

The stranger eyed Druga scornfully. With a sudden gliding motion, he had
passed from Eos' arms and seized the sword from the floor, was driving
with it for Druga's throat. Druga got the axe in the way of the sword,
but an axe, whatever antiquarians may say, was never the best tool
against a smart swordsman; and this man knew his way with the weapon.

He drove Druga to the wall with swift darting movements of the blade,
and Druga had no time to swing the unwieldy axe, but had to keep
parrying the thrusts with the axe-haft, holding it between his hands
like a quarterstaff. In moments his life blood would have been spilled
on the floor had not Eos cried out:

"Hold, you brawling idiots, I am for neither of you! What do you think I
have gone through all this for, to have you two whom I love kill each
other? Now put up the weapons before I loose my own natural lightning
and send you both into that doom you can only guess at!"

* * * * *

Druga peered at Eos, startled, and the reanimated statue pressed the
blade to his throat, but Eos struck it up with her hand as he turned to
peer at her too, and then Eos opened both her eyes quite wide upon them
so that a weakness came upon them both, sending them to their knees in
strange thralldom to the energies within her. So leaving them, Eos
walked out of the chamber and to the great hall.

After a time, when their reeling senses returned, the two men followed
the foot-steps that still sparkled where she had stepped, like
flickering motes of golden dust outlining her prints upon the
floor--followed the steps like men out of their wits, half staggering.

As they entered the hall, Eos was repeating the procedure so recently
gone through by Diana, preparing a great cauldron of the fluid she had
used to bring life again to the stone bodies. They leaned weakly against
the wall, watching her as she poured the boiling, steaming liquid over
one after another of the statues. The first figure so bathed was the
body of Feronia.

She came out of the stony trance like a fury, blazing one indignant
glance toward Eos, then turned the torre