“Death!” she answered.. and the solemn word seemed to toll slowly through the still air like a knell.

He stood bewildered and dismayed.  Death!  What could she mean?  What in the name of all her beautiful, delicate, glowing youth, had she to do with death?  Gazing at her in mute wonder, he saw her stoop and gather one flower from the clusters growing thickly around her—­she held it shieldwise against her breast, where it shone like a large white jewel, and regarded him with sweet, wistful eyes full of a mournful longing.

“Death lies between us, my Beloved!” she continued—­“One line of shadow ... only one little line!  But thou mayest not pass it, save when God commands,—­and I—­I cannot!  For I know naught of death, . . save that it is a heavy dreamless sleep allotted to over-wearied mortals, wherein they gain brief rest ’twixt many lives,—­lives that, like recurring dawns, rouse them anew to labor.  How often hast thou slept thus, my Theos, and forgotten me!”

She paused, ... and Alwyn met her clear, steadfast looks with a swift glance of something like defiance.  For as she spoke, his previous idea concerning her came back upon him with redoubled force.  He was keenly conscious of the vehement fever of love into which her presence had thrown him,—­but all the same he was unable to dispossess himself of the notion that she was a pupil and an accomplice of Heliobas, thoroughly trained and practiced in his mysterious doctrine, and that therefore she most probably had some magnetic power in herself that at her pleasure not only attracted him to her, but also held him thus motionless at a distance, from her.

She talked, of course, in an indefinite mystic way either to intimidate or convince him ... but, . . and he smiled a little.. in any case it only rested with himself to unmask this graceful pretender to angelic honors!  And while he thought thus, her soft tones trembled on the silence again, ... he listened as a dreaming mariner might listen to the fancied singing of the sea-fairies.

“Through long bright aeons of endless glory,” she said—­“I have waited and prayed for thee!  I have pleaded thy cause before the blinding splendors of God’s Throne, I have sung the songs of thy native paradise, but thou, grown dull of hearing, hast caught but the echo of the music!  Life after life hast thou lived, and given no thought to me—­yet I remember and am faithful!  Heaven is not all Heaven to me without thee, my Beloved, . . and now in this time of thy last probation, . . now, if thou lovest me indeed ...”

“Love thee?” suddenly exclaimed Theos, half beside himself with the strange passion of yearning her words awakened in him—­“Love thee, Edris?—­Aye! ... as the gods loved when earth was young! ... with the fullness of the heart and the vigor of glad life even so I love thee!  What sayest thou of Heaven? ...  Heaven is here—­here on this bridal field of Ardath, o’er-canopied