The girl looked up with a steady frank courage and unaffected readiness I had not expected.

“I owe you much, Clasfempta, and still more perhaps to Eveena.  My life is not so precious that I should not be ready to give it at need for either of you; and if I should lose Eunane, I would prefer not to live to remember my loss.”

The last words reminded me that to her who spoke death meant annihilation; a fact which has deprived the men of her race of nearly every vestige of the calm courage now displayed by this young girl, indebted as little as any human being could be to the insensible influences of home affection, or the direct moral teaching which is sometimes supposed to be a sufficient substitute.  I led her at once into her friend’s chamber, and a single glance satisfied me that my apprehensions were but too well-founded.  Remaining long enough to assure the sufferer that the displeasure I had affected had wholly passed away, and to suggest the only measures of relief rather than of remedy that occurred to me, I endeavoured for a few moments to collect my thoughts and recover the control of my nerves in solitude.  In my own chamber Eveena would assuredly have sought me, and I chose therefore one of those as yet unoccupied.  It did not take long to convince me that no ordinary resources at my command, no medical experience of my own, no professional science existing among a race who probably never knew the disease in question, and had not for ages known anything like it, could avail me.  My later studies in the occult science of Eastern schools had not furnished me with any antidote in which I believed on Earth, and if they had, it was not here available.  Despair rather than hope suggested an appeal to those which the analogous secrets of the Starlight might afford.  Anxiety, agitation, personal interest so powerful as now disturbed me, are generally fatal to the exercise of the powers recently placed at my command; so recently that, but for Terrestrial experience, I should hardly have known how to use them.  But the arts which assist in and facilitate that tremendous all-absorbing concentration of will on which the exertion of those powers depends, are far more fully developed in the Zveltic science than in its Earthly analogues.  A desperate effort, aided by those arts, at last controlled my thoughts, and turned them from the sick-room to that distant chamber in which I had so lately stood.

* * * * *

I seemed to stand beside her, and at once to be aware that my thought was visible to the closed eyes.  From lips paler than ever, words—­so generally resembling those I had previously heard that some readers may think them the mere recollection thereof—­appeared to reach my sense or my mind as from a great distance, spoken in a tone of mingled pity, promise, and reproof:—­