Now a witch\'s prayer is pretty apt to find its way to the God to which it is directed, especially when it is a white witch with black hair doing the praying, and not a black witch with white hair, as is so often the case.

Mother Mors, watching the small black-and-white-striped prayer winging its way across the deeps of night, reached out her hand and gathered it in to her whirling bosom, full of the milk of eternal kindness and soft with the vibrant softness of darkness itself, and read it there with the inner eyes of her heart.

That prayer contained some startling and incomplete information, and the mention of the passing of her enemy Diana whom she had tried to entrap herself for so long, brought Mors abruptly out of her sleep and sent her swiftly arrowing down upon the little valley where the golden pole now lit the whole sky.

The mystery and awesome power and majestic primal vitality of her silhouetted against and merged with the golden glory of the primal pole as the vast body of Mors merged and condensed and settled and came into human form there within the great banquet hall of Eos\' palace on the disk.

Now as the body of the great Goddess of the night came into solidity before Eos, her laughter rang out, rich and ringing and with low, dark under-tones. Eos looked up from the great stack of ancient alchemic formulae where she sought the solution to the incredible quandary of too many lovers. For too-much-of-a-good-thing she could not find any reference in the books, for they were all designed to give only information on how to get rid of too-much-of-a-bad-thing.

Rosy to the tips of her fingers with embarrassment, Eos rose to her feet, her glory dimmed by the majesty of Mors\' dark beauty, her height dwarfed by the tall, mysterious strength of Mors\' indestructible figure, a figure such as must have caused the ancient artists deepest despair to depict in the least of its intense and vital and overwhelmingly sublime symmetry.

Mors\' laughter made Eos blush till rosy was not the word for her.

"My dear Eos, can this be you? I would hardly have expected it of you, who have always been to me the personification of so many virtues...."

"Oh, Mother Mors, I am glad to see you, in spite of this state of affairs—you can help me. You must know what has happened?"

"I can guess, but you had better explain from the beginning. Only a woman could know what to do here, it seems." Mors glanced around at the thousand and some virile males.

"You know the Pole is responsible for bringing them here, and one by one Diana turned them into stone as soon as my lonely heart turned to them for affection."

"It\'s a good story, but no one but me will ever believe it."

Eos only looked pitifully at Mors, and Mors took her to her dark, soft heart, and the vast strength of her poured into the vibrant soul of Eos, mingled there with that golden energy that made her what she was.

"Whatever I do is going to break their hearts—you know what this place does to men. I cannot love them all, but I do, and I cannot send them away empty-handed. You know what it means to them! It is really all that cruel Diana\'s fault!

"For ridding me of her I owe you a debt, and though you are but a child to my ages of life, I will help you avoid ruining the lives of all these fine men whom you have loved. Suppose I take them away with me, all but one, and give them back their own time and place before they found their way here—give them the will to want that life before they knew you, would that comfort you?"

"Only one?" murmured Eos, then blushed as she looked out over the thousand-and-odd faces that stared at her accusingly.

"Only one, and you must choose him carefully from among them all."

"That will take some thought," said Eos, her face full of indecision. "I loved each of them dearly."

Mors\' face grew a little stern at that, and quickly Eos went on:

"I\'ll attend to it directly, Mother Mors."

"I have a little errand to attend to over at Feronia\'s, I will be back in a few beats of Druga\'s stricken heart. You could at least have kept your body hidden from him, out of respect for Feronia! I have not much patience with your dilemma. After all, there are other places to live, you know."

"But not for me, Mors. It f............