I felt embarrassed by these ingenious questionings, and said, “Pardon me, but I think we are beginning to infringe upon Aph-Lin’s injunction.  This much only will I answer, and then, I implore you, ask no more.  I did once feel the preference you speak of; I did propose, and the Gy would willingly have accepted me, but her parents refused their consent.”

“Parents!  Do you mean seriously to tell me that parents can interfere with the choice of their daughters?”

“Indeed they can, and do very often.”

“I should not like to live in that country,” said the Gy simply; “but I hope you will never go back to it.”

I bowed my head in silence.  The Gy gently raised my face with her right hand, and looked into it tenderly.  “Stay with us,” she said; “stay with us, and be loved.”  What I might have answered, what dangers of becoming a cinder I might have encountered, I still trouble to think, when the light of the naphtha fountain was obscured by the shadow of wings; and Zee, flying though the open roof, alighted beside us.  She said not a word, but, taking my arm with her mighty hand, she drew me away, as a mother draws a naughty child, and led me through the apartments to one of the corridors, on which, by the mechanism they generally prefer to stairs, we ascended to my own room.  This gained, Zee breathed on my forehead, touched my breast with her staff, and I was instantly plunged into a profound sleep.

When I awoke some hours later, and heard the songs of the birds in the adjoining aviary, the remembrance of Taee’s sister, her gentle looks and caressing words, vividly returned to me; and so impossible is it for one born and reared in our upper world’s state of society to divest himself of ideas dictated by vanity and ambition, that I found myself instinctively building proud castles in the air.

“Tish though I be,” thus ran my meditations—­“Tish though I be, it is then clear that Zee is not the only Gy whom my appearance can captivate.  Evidently I am loved by A Princess, the first maiden of this land, the daughter of the absolute Monarch whose autocracy they so idly seek to disguise by the republican title of chief magistrate.  But for the sudden swoop of that horrible Zee, this Royal Lady would have formally proposed to me; and though it may be very well for Aph-Lin, who is only a subordinate minister, a mere Commissioner of Light, to threaten me with destruction if I accept his daughter’s hand, yet a Sovereign, whose word is law, could compel the community to abrogate any custom that forbids intermarriage with one of a strange race, and which in itself is a contradiction to their boasted equality of ranks.