came rushing out upon us. The vast dome was dim, tenantless; its
curved walls that had cascaded Light shone now but faintly; the dais
was empty; its wall of moon-flame radiance gone.

A little time we stood, heads bent, reverent, our hearts filled with
gratitude and love--yes, and with pity for that strange trinity so
alien to us and yet so near; children even as we, though so unlike us,
of our same Mother Earth.

And what I wondered had been the secret of that promise they had wrung
from their handmaiden and from Larry. And whence, if what the Three
had said had been all true--whence had come their power to avert the
sacrifice at the very verge of its consummation?

"Love is stronger than all things!" had said Lakla.

Was it that they had needed, must have, the force which dwells within
love, within willing sacrifice, to strengthen their own power and to
enable them to destroy the evil, glorious Thing so long shielded by
their own love? Did the thought of sacrifice, the will toward
abnegation, have to be as strong as the eternals, unshaken by faintest
thrill of hope, before the Three could make of it their key to unlock
the Dweller's guard and strike through at its life?

Here was a mystery--a mystery indeed! Lakla softly closed the crimson
stone. The mystery of the red dwarf's appearance was explained when we
discovered a half-dozen of the water _coria_ moored in a small cove
not far from where the _Sekta_ flashed their heads of living bloom.
The dwarfs had borne the shallops with them, and from somewhere beyond
the cavern ledge had launched them unperceived; stealing up to the