Did I see a shadow of pain flit across the flickering eyes? Wondering,
I glanced at Lakla's face and there was a dawn of foreboding and
bewilderment. For a little she held her listening attitude; then the
gaze of the Three left her; focused upon the O'Keefe.

"Thus speak the Silent Ones--through Lakla, their handmaiden," the
golden voice was like low trumpet notes. "At the threshold of doom is
that world of yours above. Yea, even the doom, Goodwin, that ye
dreamed and the shadow of which, looking into your mind they see, say
the Three. For not upon earth and never upon earth can man find means
to destroy the Shining One."

She listened again--and the foreboding deepened to an amazed fear.

"They say, the Silent Ones," she went on, "that they know not whether
even they have power to destroy. Energies we know nothing of entered
into its shaping and are part of it; and still other energies it has
gathered to itself"--she paused; a shadow of puzzlement crept into her
voice "and other energies still, forces that ye _do_ know and symbolize
by certain names--hatred and pride and lust and many others which are
forces real as that hidden in the _Keth_; and among them--fear, which
weakens all those others--" Again she paused.

"But within it is nothing of that greatest of all, that which can make
powerless all the evil others, that which we call--love," she ended
softly.

"I'd like to be the one to put a little more _fear_ in the beast,"
whispered Larry to me, grimly in our own English. The three weird