wered sadly enough. "Anyhow I believe
you are right, Bickley, and that Bastin will not be troubled to marry
us."

"You don't mean," broke in Bastin with a horrified air, "that you
propose to dispense--"

"No, Bastin, I don't mean that. What I mean is that it comes upon me
that something will prevent this marriage. Sacrifice, perhaps, though in
what shape I do not know. And now good night. I am tired."

That night in the chill dead hour before the dawn Oro came again. I
woke up to see him seated by my bed, majestic, and, as it seemed to me,
lambent, though this may have been my imagination.

"You take strange liberties with my daughter, Barbarian, or she
takes strange liberties with you, it does not matter which," he said,
regarding me with his calm and terrible eyes.

"Why do you presume to call me Barbarian?" I asked, avoiding the main
issue.

"For this reason, Humphrey. All men are the same. They have the same
organs, the same instincts, the same desires, which in essence are
but two, food and rebirth that Nature commands; though it is true that
millions of years before I was born, as I have learned from the records
of the Sons of Wisdom, it was said that they were half ape. Yet being
the same there is between them a whole sea of difference, since some
have knowledge and others none, or little. Those who have none or
little, among whom you must be numbered, are Barbarians. Those who
have much, among whom my daughter and I are the sole survivors, are the
Instructed."

"There are nearly two thousand millions of living people in this world,"
I said, "and you name all of them Barbarians?"

"All, Humphrey, excepting, of course, myself and my daughter who are
not known to be alive. You think that you have learned much, whereas in
truth you are most ignorant. The commonest of the outer nations, when I
destroyed them, knew more than your wisest know today."

"You are mistaken, Oro; since then we have learned something of the
soul."

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "that interests me and perhaps it is true. Also, if
true it is very important, as I have told you before--or was it Bastin?
If a man has a soul, he lives, whereas even we Sons of Wisdom die, and
in Death what is the use of Wisdom? Because you can believe, you have
souls and are therefore, perhaps, heirs to life, foolish and ignorant as
you are today. Therefore I admit you and Bastin to be my equals, though
Bickley, who like myself believes nothing, is but a commo