And there was something stranger here than a violation of the artificial restraint of sex.  Slightly and seldom as the Golden Circle touches the lines defining personal or social morality—­carefully as the Founder has abstained from imposing an ethical code of his own, or attaching to his precepts any rule not directly derived from the fundamental tenets or necessary to the cohesion of the Order—­he had expressed in strong terms his dread and horror of narcotism; the use for pleasure’s sake, not to relieve pain or nervous excitement, of drugs which act, as he said, through the brain upon the soul.  His judgment, expressed with unusual directness and severity and enforced by experience, has become with his followers a tradition not less imperative than the most binding of their laws.  It was so held, above all, in that household in which Eveena and I had first learnt the “lore of the Starlight.”  Esmo, indeed, regarded not merely as an unscientific superstition, but as blasphemous folly, the rejection of any means of restoring health or relieving pain which Providence has placed within human reach.  But he abhorred the use for pleasure’s sake of poisons affirmed to reduce the activity and in the long-run to impair the energies of the mind, and weaken the moral sense and the will, more intensely than the strictest follower of the Arabian Prophet abhors the draughts which deprive man of the full use of the senses, intelligence, and conscience which Allah has bestowed, and degrade him below the brute, Esmo’s children, moreover, were not more strictly compelled to respect the letter than carefully instructed in the principle of every command for which he claimed their obedience.

But in such measure as Eveena’s distress became intelligible, the fault of which she accused herself became incredible.  I could not believe that she could be wilfully disloyal to me—­still less that she could have suddenly broken through the fixed ideas of her whole life, the principles engraved on her mind by education more stringently than the maxims of the Koran or the Levitical Law on the children of Ishmael or of Israel; and this while the impressive rites of Initiation, the imprecation at which I myself had shuddered, were fresh in her memory—­their impression infinitely deepened, moreover, by the awful mystery of that Vision of which even yet we were half afraid to speak to one another.  While I hesitated to reply, gathering up as well as I could the thread of these thoughts as they passed in a few seconds through my mind, my left hand touched an object hidden in my bride’s zone.  I drew out a tiny crystal phial three parts full, taken, as I saw, from the medicine-chest Esmo had carefully stocked and as carefully fastened.  As, holding this, I turned again to her, Eveena repeated:  “Punish, but don’t question me!”

“My own,” I said, “you are far more punished already than you deserve or I can bear to see.  How did you get this?”

Releasing her hands, she drew from the folds of her robe the electric keys, which, by a separate combination, would unlock each of my cases;—­without which it was impossible to open or force them.