Sovereign, and duty the law of an unerring and unescapable
Lawgiver. Alone among a race of utterly egotistical cowards, he had
the courage of a soldier, and the principles, or at least the
instincts, worthy of a Child of the Star. With him alone could I have
felt a moment's security from savage attempts to extort by terror or
by torture the secret I refused to sell; and I believe that his
generous abstinence from such an attempt was as exasperating as it was
incomprehensible to his advisers, and chiefly contributed to involve
him in the vengeance which baffled greed and humbled personal pride
had leagued to wreak upon myself, as on those with whose welfare and
safety my own were inextricably intertwined. It was a fortunate, if
not a providential, combination of circumstances that compelled the
enemies of the Star, primarily on my account, to interweave with their
scheme of murderous persecution and private revenge an equally
ruthless and atrocious treason against the throne and person of their
Monarch.

My audience had detained me longer than I had expected, and the
evening mist had fairly closed in before I returned. Entering, not as
usual through the grounds and the peristyle, but by the vestibule and
my own chamber, and hidden by my half-open window, I overheard an
exceedingly characteristic discussion on the incident of the morning.

"Serve her right!" Leenoo was saying. "That she should for once get
the worst of it, and be disbelieved to sharpen the sting!"

"How do you know?" asked Enva. "I don't feel so sure we have heard the
last of it."

"Eveena did not seem to have liked her half-hour," answered Leenoo
spitefully. "Besides, if he did not disbelieve her story, he would
have let her prove it."

"Is that your reliance?" broke in Eunane. "Then you are swinging on a
rotten branch. I would not believe my ears if, for all that all of us
could invent against her, I heard him so much as ask Eveena, 'Are you
speaking the truth?'"

"It is very uneven measure," muttered Enva.

"Uneven!" cried Eunane. "Now, I think _I_ have the best right to be
jealous of her place; and it does sting me that, when he takes me for
his companion out of doors, or makes most of me at home, it is so
plain that he is taking trouble, as if he grudged a soft word or a
kiss to another as something stolen from her. But he deals evenly,
after all. If he were less tender of her we should have to draw our
zones tighter. But he won't give us th