e laboratory notes of
Feronia, and Druga himself reading them over and trying to think of some
way he himself might strike back at their mutual enemy.

"Nothing that she has developed can be used directly against Diana
without her surviving to fight back. This would have been fatal to
Dionaea, but after all, as you have said--she is dead."

"She ought to be dead, I cut her head off!"

"That usually does the trick."

They decided to leave the laboratory the next morning, and that evening
Druga picked up the stone statue of his Feronia and carried it carefully
aboard the disk, placing her there--one woman among the thousand-odd
dead heroes of the long dead past. Druga sadly made a place for her at
the head of the board. He did not think of it, but Feronia now sat where
Eos herself had spent many a sad hour, sitting and gazing at her dead
lovers.

With the stone Feronia gone, the vast and multiplex-walled chambers of
mystery and magic assumed a new atmosphere, and Druga found himself
talking to Eos that night as if he was not a man whose heart was dead.

She sat in the place from which he had removed the black stone body of
Feronia, and Druga could not help but compare the glowing life of her
with the dead thing that had sat there.

The hammered sunlight of her hair made curls and waves of beauty about
the white shores of her shoulders. She had let the robe of insulative
blue drop from her, exposing the very heart of her beauty he had feared
to see when she was herself filled with the flow of the Pole of Life
Energy. And Druga wondered a little whether she were not still somehow
the center and pivot of the energy, for his senses reeled with looking,
and his will crumbled into forgotten ashes. He sank to the silken couch
beside her, and his eyes burned with flashing energies like meteors
plunging into the Northern lights.

Eos held her breath, and her eyes burned into his with greater and
greater force, for she had been dreaming and weeping and waiting there
at the Pole-of-all-Life for so many cold empty years--waiting for the
curse to be lifted so that she could begin to live again.

* * * * *

With the last shred of her own will Eos murmured: "Let us go into the
disk and leave at once for Armora, and think no more of each other or
surely we will sink into the raptures we desire and forget to fight.
Then I will awake and find you too turned into stone, and myself again
alone again