Eos led him into a great feasting chamber, and Druga saw there a great host of men sitting, as to a feast, side by side.

Each one of them was of solid black stone. The fact struck Druga\'s mind with a terrible impact. With a face like thunder he said:

"So it was you who turned my Feronia to stone, to drag me here to you by your spells, and then when you tire of me to turn me likewise into stone?"

The woman recoiled from his murderous rage, crying out in a shocked voice, a voice of virtue unjustly accused:

"Surely you don\'t think that I had anything to do with this? These men are the curse an enemy has put upon me; and every creature that I ever loved she has turned into stone soon or late and left me here alone forever. There is no cruelty like the cruelty of Diana Triformis."

The rage passed slowly from Druga, and left him weak and glad that his hands had not found their way to that glorious throat, as they had seemed about to do. For here was a woman who had suffered the same loss as he.

"Eos, we must take thought together, for it seems we have a common enemy. My own Feronia, a woman such as was only created by the Gods once in all Time, was turned into similar black stone before my eyes not long ago. We have a common enemy, and we must find a remedy for this curse she puts upon us. Else I will go through life as you have gone, with everything pleasant removed from it."

The artful eyes of Eos softened, and that mystery living in their depths lightened, her arms became soft pillars of the temple of her beauty as she lowered herself into the big chair at the head of that gloomy feasting board of death. Druga picked up the big body of one of the stone figures, carried it lightly to the side of the hall, and set it there on a bench. Then he took the vacant place at the board beside the queen of the palace of the dead.

Druga related to Eos all the events that had transpired since the lopping off of Dionaea\'s head. She surmised, as did he, that this deed was the one that had led Diana to turn the spell of the black stone loose upon Druga as upon Eos.

"There must be found a way of turning the spells of this Goddess into harmless attempts," said Druga. "We cannot sit here and wait for her cruelty to work us greater harm. What can we do?"

"I have had long long years to plan a revenge upon her, but nothing I have been able to do has had any effect," Eos said.

The desire that Druga could no more help than he could help breathing, looking upon the pole of all desire that shone its energies through the flesh of Eos, now spoke, and Druga said with a tongue that was thick:

"Then, Eos, the very next time that Diana happens to think of you, I too will become stone, and if we are to have joy of each other, we had better have it soon, before I become as these others you have loved."

Eos looked at him sadly, her lips glistening with an unearthly dew and her eyes shining like chained lightnings.

"It was that thought that betrayed me every time, Druga. Each of those men said much those same words to me when he learned the fate that awaited him, and for each of them my heart turned to water and we spent our time in dalliance instead of spending our energies trying to overcome the work of my enemy.

"For each of them I tried to give all there was of pleasure while they yet had breath, as one tries to give water to a man about to die of fever. I was only that much more hurt by their death—for such giving of the self opens one to the deepest pangs of parting.

"That is the agony Diana designed for me, and she has done this to me since that time I brought a young man to her island that was sacred to her only. This time, Druga, there will be none of that for us; we will try some other medicine than love for each other against this evil. Work, we will try!"

"There speaks my dead Feronia," murmured Druga, sadly. And for thought of her he forgot to feel the denial of his desire for the body of this woman, a body filled with the energies of the whole Universal Pole of female magnetism. That he should lose that glory was nothing beside the pang he felt at thought of Feronia; and the wise Eos smiled to note that this man had not forgotten his love even in the face of her infinite attraction.

"If we went back to Feronia\'s home, might it not be that her work would give you some inkling of how Diana might be overcome?" Druga was thoughtful.

"I can only try," Eos answered him. "We will go there. I will examine her work and her notes, and you will show me her laboratories that I have heard of even here. Together, we might get an answer."

Eos got up from the board, and went to a small chamber at the edge of the disk. There her hands sent the disk slanting upward into the sky. As they left the center of the pole of animal magnetism, Eos\' body and face changed subtly. Druga was released from the power of the pole\'s attraction, and whether that was a good thing or not he could not say, except that every atom of his body wanted to return there to that place and remain.

"How is it, Eos, that the pole does not repel your female nature as it attracts the male? Would it not repel an ordinary woman so that she could not approach it?"

"In that you are wrong, Druga. The nature of this life-energy is not the same as ordinary iron magnetism. Like poles do not repel, but are unaffected. It is in fact only invigorating to me, making me stronger. So it would be if you were at the other end of the universe. At the male pole you would be vastly invigorated, not repelled. Do you understand?"

"It is only sad that the poles lie at opposite ends of the universe," murmured Druga, looking askance at Eos.

"Whatever might you be thinking, Druga? If such power arced between man and woman they would be consumed!"

"But what a death, what a death," murmured Druga. Her sudden laughter rang through the hall of death incongruously, and at the sound they fell silent again and did not speak for thinking of the corpses waiting there for what would never come.

"How many men has Diana and her friends killed through the years? Enough to populate a couple of planets, I should say?"

"Diana? With her bow and arrows alone she used to account for a good many; and later, as she learned more evil arts, there was no record kept. She has been a most evil goddess, yet men worship her."

"Why? A goddess that kills a man for seeing her is a fiend! And her maidens may not see a man, either. It is a strange life she leads, for a true woman. She must be other than female."

"That could be, Druga," murmured Eos.

The morning sun glittered from the streams and from the little glass foot-bridge that shimmered magically across and up in a great arc to the door in the side of the cliff. Eos sighed at the beauty.

"This wife of yours was a housekeeper, I note, with an eye for art."

"Her art and her work were always first, Eos. She was an uncommon hard woman to get used to, but she made a man of me."

"That I can see," agreed Eos, and Druga looked at her twice to know what she meant. "You owe everything to Feronia, according to you, and nothing to yourself."

"Very little, Goddess. But I do not exaggerate, she was...."

"Well, never mind it now. I grow weary of Feronia this and Feronia that. I will judge for myself whether she understood you or no."

"She was extremely understanding," said Druga.

Days passed, and much hard work, Eos studying the 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 the............