She stared at me with eyes that seemed to see nothing; and then a look of recognition came into them, and a twitching smile upon her lips. She put her arms out and came unsteadily toward me. She threw her right arm back. I caught her hand as it swung downward, and the dagger’s razor edge grazed my shoulder.

The next moment she was fighting like a trapped panther. I could not have imagined that such strength and fierceness existed in any woman. She twisted her wrists out of my grasp time and again, and we wrestled for the dagger till the blood from my slashed fingers fouled my priest’s robe. Each of the stabbing blows she dealt so wildly would have driven the dagger in to the hilt.

I grappled with her, caught her right arm at last, and forced it upward, but we swayed to and fro for nearly a minute before I mastered her. Even then she had one last surprise in store, for, when she saw that she was beaten, she drew her dagger hand quickly backward, and I seized the point of the blade within an inch of her breast. I forced her fingers open brutally, and the steel fell to the floor. Then she wrested herself away, and crouched in the corner, watching me, motionless, but still ready to leap. Her gasping breaths were the only sound in the room.

“Elizabeth!” I cried. “I am not here to harm you. Look at me; listen to me!”

Her eyes were fixed on my face in terror that precluded speech. How she watched me! Only once did her glance waver, and that was toward the dagger on the floor. I kicked it backward with my heel.

“Elizabeth, listen to me!” I implored her. “I did not know that you were here, and I do not know how you came here. I want to help you. I want to take you home to David!”

“Ah!” she said, shuddering. “This is what you whites call a romance in the style of the first century B.C., a fashionable pastime, to dress yourselves as blues or grays and worm your way into the homes of your prospective victims, in order to study them, and see whether they suit your taste and are worth adding to your collection. I have read of that in the Council factory novels. But there was never any romance in it to me. So I appeared to suit you, after my father had taken you into his home so trustingly? You deceived him; but you never deceived me.”

I saw her glance turn to the dagger again.

“Elizabeth, you are talking nonsense,” I said, with an affectation of brusqueness. “Let us sit down in the next room, and I propose a compact. You shall take the dagger, provided you do not attempt to harm yourself with it till you have heard me. Is that agreed?”

She scrutinized me for half a minute. Then she nodded. I preceded her into the library with an affectation of indifference which I was far from feeling, for I heard her stoop to pick the dagger up, and wondered each instant whether I was about to feel the point between my shoulders. However, my faith appeared to inspire her with a measure of confidence, for she followed me into the middle room and consented to sit down.

But when I faced her, toying with the blade and all aquiver with the reaction from the terrific nerve-tension, I could hardly find words to utter. Whatever purpose Lembken might have in using me, I had the full measure of his mind. He had thought that my three weeks spent in David’s house had inspired me with a passion for the girl; and he had brought her here, to leave her helpless in my power, a lure to bind me to his interests beyond the possibility of double-dealing.

Before I could begin, Elizabeth collapsed. She began to weep without restraint. I could only wait till she grew more composed. I stared out through the window, looking down toward the Airscouts’ Fortress, whose roof rose perhaps twenty feet beneath me.

I saw the sentry with the swan badge, pacing below. Above him was the luminous wall of the fortress, and over it, floating in the air, was a host of ghostly shapes, airplanes encased in their phosphorescent glow armor, which, as I watched them, rose one by one into the air, circled, and flitted noiselessly away toward the south, like bubbles blown by children.

It could not have been late, for curfew had not come into operation, and London was ablaze with the solar light; but the crowds had gone home and everything was quite still. As I withdrew from the window Elizabeth rose and came timidly toward me.

“Arnold, have I done you a wrong?” she whispered.

“You misunderstood me,” I answered. “But you could not have thought otherwise. If we understand each other now we can help each other—isn’t that so?”

She seized me by both arms and gazed into my face with an imploring, pitiful appeal that wrung my heart.

“Then I thank God,” she said, “for that impulse which held me from self-destruction. Arnold, do you remember that promise I made to you one day? I remembered it; I remembered it, and it was that alone which stayed my hand this afternoon, when the emissary from Lembken came, and there was only the one barred door between us, and I stood behind it, with the knife at my breast. Then I resolved to keep my promise to you, and to let them bring me here, and—to kill Lembken—but it was you! When you disappeared from the Strangers’ House this morning we feared for your safety. We thought you had been seized or lured away. Then my father was summoned on some pretext back to the Strangers’ Bureau, and the airscout came—Lembken’s man. I thought I was for Lembken—”

She broke off, and I took her hands in mine.

“Elizabeth,” I said, “my dear, I do not understand anything of what you tell me. How could they bring you here against your will?”

She looked at me in amazement.

“No, I see you do not understand,” she answered. “And yet you are dressed as a priest. I cannot tell you now. But the airscout who had been sent for me was sorry when he saw that I was not willing, like most women. He took the knife from me, but afterward he let me keep it; he was kind and promised to carry the news to Jones, our friend. The airscouts are disloyal to Lembken, and hate his cruelty, but he dared not disobey. We went by scoutplane from the roof, and Lembken’s women took me and clothed me in this dress of palms, and carried me here, laughing at me. They did not find the knife. I hid that; I meant to serve the Province and the world by killing Lembken. But then I saw you, Arnold, and—and—”

She burst into a new storm of weeping. I drew her to me and placed her head on my shoulder. I felt a cold, burning fire of resolution in my heart which never disappeared. Something, some spiritual door was opened in me. I became part of the wretchedness of the world and suffered its sorrows; pleasure seemed the worst part of life then. I think, too, I loved Esther the better because of that compassion.

When at last Elizabeth raised her head I was struck by the transformation in her appearance. It seemed the reflection of my own determination. I had put forth my will and conquered, and her own seemed one with mine.

“I am going to save you, Elizabeth,” I said. “You are not destined for this earthly hell.”

“Arnold, are you yourself in danger here?” she asked.

“Only of hell-fire,” I answered.

“You must save yourself and not think of me,” she said.

I bade her sit down, and went back to the entrance of the little house. I had half expected that the door would have been locked, but it stood open, having become unhasped, and the sickly odor of the pervading perfume clung to the warm, stale air. I crossed the close to the gate that led into the garden of palms, and stood there in hesitation.

The solar lights had been turned off, and all was dark, except for varicolored lanterns twinkling among the trees. Yet I was aware of souls peopling that darkness. I heard the tinkle of stringed instruments; I had the sense of hidden beings in the undergrowth. If hell can wear the mask of beauty, surely it did that night.

I crossed the lawn and began to skirt the graveled path that extended before me, working my way toward the front of the Palace. The squat, white building glittered against the darkness. Nobody stirred at the entrance; there were no lights, but always I had the sense of something watching me.

At last I saw the crystal walls on the west side, and, beyond them, the phosphorescence of the glow buildings. I stood in hesitancy. On my right stood the thickets; on my left the crystal ended in a stone wall. There was no egress except through the Palace itself. Lembken left nothing to surprise.

As I turned I heard the rustle of stealthy footsteps near me. A red spark drew my eyes along the vista of the orange trees, whose perfumed flowers dispelled the cloying odor of the scented night. I saw a MÆnad’s face, framed in a leopard skin, peering at me above a bank of hibiscus. I thought I recognized the girl Amaranth; but it vanished with the dying of the spark, and subdued laughter followed it.

All that was evil in the world seemed to have its focus there. I felt it, breathed it, once more its psychic dominance oppressed me heavily. I saw with sudden intuition why, in a world less stable, witches were burned, how passionately the souls of simple men fought for their heritage of truth and law. This was the negation of life, of all that struggling life that aspired upward, and set its heel upon the serpent’s head. Old myths, made real in this new light, flashed into memory.

I hurried back to the close and fastened the gate behind me. The sweat was dripping from my forehead when I regained the safety of the little house. I burst from the first room into the second.

Elizabeth was not there.

I ran into the third room. She was not there, either. Terror gripped me. Had she been lured away during the few minutes of my absence? It seemed impossible. She would have died there.

Then my eyes fell on something that hung outside the window, dangling, as it seemed, from a fixed point above. It was a rope ladder, and moving outward. As I watched, I saw it begin to rise in a succession of short jerks.

I grasped it with my hands. It pulled me from the floor. I clung to it, striving to get my feet upon the rungs. It drew me to the level of the window, but I would not let go. It pulled me through the window-gap, and I swung far out above the Airscouts’ Fortress. Over me I saw the dark outlines of an unshielded scoutplane, high in the air.

I swung by my hands at the rope’s end, like the weight of a pendulum, making great transverse sweeps that carried me high above the bridge, from end to end of the fortress roof. I saw the courts revolve beneath me. I swept from the crystal wall out into nothingness, and London was a reeling dance of phosphorescent maze. Then the ladder began to descend. I felt the roof of the fortress touch my feet, wrenched my numbed hands away, and fell. A moment later the airplane dropped beside me as noiselessly as an alighting bird, and two men sprang from it and seized me.

One was the airscout Jones. He caught me by both arms and forced me backward. But the other leaped at my throat. It was David; and he would have strangled me, had not Jones pulled him away.

Then, to my vast relief, Elizabeth ran forward, interposing herself between us. “Arnold is not to blame!” she cried. “He tried to save me!”

David’s hands fell to his sides. The airscout caught me by the arms and pulled me toward an elevator entrance. He forced me into the cage, the others following, and we descended a few feet, emerging into a small, bare room with walls of unsquared stone.

Jones sent the elevator up and pulled the door of the shaft to.

“Now you can speak. You have five minutes to explain yourself,” he said. He pulled a Ray rod from his tunic and looked at David, who nodded.