that dappled them with shadow. The moss yielded underfoot as softly as thick-piled carpets. Unseen beasts slunk by them now and then, so that the tail of Smith's eyes was continually catching the—almost—hint of humanity in the lines of their bodies, the set of a head upon bestial shoulders, the clarity of urgent eyes. But she did not really see them.
Sweetly—intolerably sweetly and softly, laughter rang through the woods. Smith's head flung up like a startled mare's. It was a stronger laughter now, from near, very near among the leaves. It seemed to her that the voice indeed must come from some lovely, ardent houri leaning over the wall of Paradise—that she had come a long way in search of his and now trembled on the very brink of her journey's end. The low and lovely sound echoed through the trees, ringing down the green twilight aisles, shivering the leaves together. It was everywhere at once, a little world of music superimposed upon the world of matter, enclosing everything within its scope in a magical spell that left no room for any other thing but its lovely presence. And its command rang through Smith's mind with the sharpness of a sword in her flesh, calling, calling unbearably through the woods.
Then they came out of the trees into a little space of mossy clearing in whose center a small white temple rose. Somehow Yarola was there too—and somehow they were alone. Those exquisite girls had melted like smoke into oblivion. The two women stood quite still, their eyes dazed as they stared. This building was the only one they had seen whose columns still stood upright, and only here could they tell that the architecture of those fallen walls whose ruins had dotted the wooded glades had been one at variance to anything on any world they knew. But upon the mystery of that they had no desire to dwell. For the man those slim columns housed drove every other thought out of their dazzled minds.
He stood in the center of the tiny temple. He was pale golden, half veiled in the long cloak of his curls. And if the siren girls had been lovely, then here stood loveliness incarnate. Those girls had worn his form and face. Here was that same exquisitely molded body, colored like honey, half revealed among the drifts of hair that clung to it like tendrils of bright flames. But those bewildering girls had been mere echoes of the beauty that faced them now .Smith stared with a kindling of colorless eyes.
Here was Lilith—here was Helen—here was Circe—here before her stood all the beauty of all the legends of mankind; here on this marble floor, facing them gravely, with unsmiling eyes. For the first time she looked into the eyes that lighted that sweet, tilt-planed face, and her very soul gasped from the sudden plunge into their poignant blueness. It was not a vivid blue, not a blazing one, but its intensity far transcended anything she had words to name. Inlhat blueness a woman's soul could sink for ever, reaching no bottom, stirred by no tides, drowned and steeped through and through with an infinity of absolute light.
When the blue, blue gaze released her she gasped once, like a drowning woman, and then stared with new amazement upon a reality whose truth had escaped her until this moment. That instant of submerged ecstasy in the blue deeps of his eyes must have opened a door in her brain to new knowledge, for she saw as she stared a very strange quality in the loveliness she faced.
Tangible beauty dwelt here, an indwelling thing that could root itself in human flesh and clothe a body in loveliness as with a garment. Here was more than fleshly beauty, more than symmetry of face and body. A quality like a flame glowed all but visibly—no, more than visibly—along the peach-bloomy lines and smoothly swelling curve of him,' giving a glory to the high tilt of his chest and the long, subtly curved thigh and the exquisite line of shoulder gliding down into fuller beauty half veiled in drifting hair.
In that dazed, revealing moment his loveliness shimmered before her, too intensely for her human senses to perceive save as a dazzle of intolerable beauty before her half-comprehending eyes. She flung up her hands to shut the glory out and stood for a moment with hidden eyes in a self-imposed darkness through which beauty blazed with an intensity that transcended the visible and beat unbearably on every fiber of her being until she stood bathed in light that permeated the ultimate atoms of her soul.
Then the blaze died. She lowered shaking hands and saw that lovely, pale-gold face melting slowly into a smile of such heavenly promise that for an instant her senses failed her again and the world spun dizzily around a focus of honey-pale features breaking into arcs and softly shadowed curves, as the velvety mouth curled slowly into a smile.
'All strangers are very welcome here,' crooned a voice like a vibration of sheerest silk, sweeter than honey, caressing as the brush of a kissing mouth. And he had spoken in the purest of earthly English. Smith found her voice.
'Who—who are you?' she asked in a queer gasp, as if her very breath were stopped by the magic she faced.
Before he could answer, Yarola's voice broke in, a little unsteady with sudden, savage anger.
'Can't you answer in the language you're addressed in?' she demanded in a violent undertone. 'The least you could do is ask his name in High Venusian. How do you know he speaks English?'
Quite speechless, Smith turned a blank gray gaze upon her companion. She saw the blaze of hot Venusian temper fade like mist from Yarola 's black eyes as she turned to the glory in the temple. And in the lovely, liquid cadences of her native tongue, that brims so exquisitely with hyperbole'and symbolism, she said.
'Oh, lovely and night-dark sir, what name is laid upon you to tell how whiter than sea-foam is your loveliness?'
For a moment, listening to the beauty of phrase and sound that dwells in the High Venusian tongue, Smith doubted her own ears. For though he had spoken in English, yet the loveliness of Yarola's speech seemed infinitely more suited to have fallen from the lyric curving of his velvet-red mouth. Such lips, she thought, could never utter less than pure music, and English is not a musical tongue.
But explain Yarola's visual illusion she could not, for her own steel-pale eyes were steadfast upon richly colored hair and pale gold flesh, and no stretch of imagination could transform them into the black and snow-whiteness her companion claimed to see.
A hint of mirth crept into the smile that curled 'Up the softness of his mouth as Yarola spoke. He answered them both in one speech that to Smith was pure English, though she guessed that it fell upon Yarola's ears in the music of High Venusian cadences.
'I am Beauty,' he told them serenely. 'I am incarnate Beauty. But Yvalo is my name. Let there be no quarrel between you, for each woman hears me in the tongue her heart speaks, and sees me in the image which spells beauty to her own soul. For I am all women's desire incarnate in one being, and there is no beauty but Me.'
'But—those others?'
'I am the only dweller here—but you have known the shadows of myself, leading you through devious ways into the presence of Yvalo. Had you not gazed first upon these reflections of my beauty, its fullness which you see now would have blinded and destroyed you utterly. And later, perhaps, you shall see me even more clearly. . . .
'But no, Yvalo alone dwells here. Save for yourselves there is in this park of mine no living creature. Everything is illusion but myself. And am I not enough? Can you desire anything more of life or death than you gaze on now?'
The query trembled into a music-ridden silence, and they knew that they could not. The heaven-sweet murmur of that voice was speaking sheerest magic, and in the sound of it neither of them was capable of any emotion but worship of the loveliness they faced. It beat out in waves like heat from that incarnate perfection, wrapping them about so that nothing in the universe had existence but Yvalo.
Before the glory that blazed in their faces Smith felt adoration pouring out of her as blood gushes from a severed artery. Like life-blood it poured, and like life-blood draining it left her queerly weaker and weaker, as if some essential part of her were gushing away in great floods of intensest worship.
But somewhere, down under the lowest depths of Smith's subconsciousness, a faint disquiet was stirring. She fought it, for it broke the mirror surfaces
of her tranced adoration, but she could not subdue it, and by degrees that unease struggled up through layer upon layer of rapt enchantment until it burst through into her conscious mind and the little quiver of it ran disturbingly through the exquisite calm of her trance. It was not an articulate disquiet, but it was somehow bound up with the scarcely seen beasts she had glimpsed—or had she glimpsed?—in the wood. That, and the memory of an old Earth legend which try as she would she could not quite exorcise: the legend of a lovely woman—and women turned into beasts. ... She could not grasp it, but the elusive memory pricked at her with little pinpoint goads, crying danger so insistently that with infinite reluctance her mind took up the business of thinking once more.
Yvalo sensed it. He sensed the lessening in that lifeblood gush of rapt adoration poured out upon his loveliness. His fathomless eyes turned upon her in a blaze of transcendent blueness, and the woods reeled about her at the impact of their light. But somewhere in Smith, under the ultimate layer of conscious thought, under the last quiver of instinct and reflex and animal cravings, lay a bedrock of savage strength
which no power she had ever met could wholly overcome, not even this—not even Yvalo.