hat Eos selected,
and even as the stone man stirred and quickened into life again, her
ethereal self whirled out of Eos and settled into the reanimated flesh
of the man.

When he arose to his feet and spoke, it was Diana herself who spoke and
not the man who had loved Eos long ago. What this desecration of her
past love meant to Eos we shall not know, for she hid it beneath
languishing glances and subtle swayings of her body, drawing Diana to
her, wrapping her arms about the reanimated being, and walking with the
new male Diana out of the room and so to her own chambers.

* * * * *

Druga, as Eos had foreseen, had been unable to contain his curiosity as
to what was going on, and had at last peered from the hallway where he
waited, just in time to see the purple swirl that was Diana settle into
and seem to reanimate the ancient long-dead stone image.

The emotions natural to a man rose in him. He was not sure just what he
was seeing, but jealousy rose in him like a flame, and his passion so
steadfastly controlled and so rewarded by the fickle Eos made this
jealousy into a terrible, red rage against her who had withheld herself
from him only to give herself to her worst enemy in the form of a man.

Druga, overcome with this jealous rage, strode out into the banquet hall
of dead men, took from the side of one of the dead men a great war-axe
of bronze, and hefting it in his hand as if it were a trembling feather
plume, strode after the two figures like the wrath of God.

As Eos reclined sensuously upon her couch in her sleeping chamber, and
Diana in the man's body stretched beside her, bending back Eos' head and
planting there a burning kiss, Druga entered, and standing over the pair
like an outraged husband, shouted in a voice he was unable to make
articulate.

"Of all contemptible females, you two are the most...."

So saying, and mouthing his disgust with a tongue that frothed with
rage, Druga seized the reanimated man with one hand by the shoulder and
flung him half across the room, whirling up the axe to send it through
him from curly head to gold-bossed sword belt.

Eos cried out in feigned fear and anguish, for she had expected this
development, and it was but one phase of the weapon-array she planned to
overcome the powers of Diana. For she knew Druga, and that he would be
able to act in no other way if he observed what was going on.

* * * * *