"I told them . . . . cure . . . . Maybe it is . . . . maybe not . . ." gasped Bowen. He shuddered and lay still. Roberts held a dead man in his arms.
Nevertheless he stalked on to the place where the two Chinese had been left. Then he relinquished his burden. Porterfield gave over to him the eight-paneled jar which represented the whole of their achievement.
"On the way back each of us will eat a dozen of these eggs." stated Roberts. "Bowen may be wrong. but I believe what he said. Those old emperors knew. . . . "
At the camp Porterfied collapsed, sobbing. The full horror of what he had experienced had begun to seep down to his consciousness. Roberts cared for him.
"Then I take it you won't be with me—when I go back?"
Porterfield roused himself. "Go back?" he cried. "I would not go back for all the wealth of the Indies! You don’t mean to say . . . .?"
"I do," answered Roberts grimly. "Within six months. Men may live or die, but history must be written. The Yengi may not have smashed all of those forty jars . . . ."
BURNED and scarred by the hot breath of passion and the deep wounds of life, the mother took the newborn girl child, Leonore, to her breast for the first time. She trembled with joy and pain at the touch of the greedy little lips.
Presently the woman and the child at her breast slept. The mother dreamed that out of a black sky a silver fairy appeared in a cloud of light.
"One wish, one wish only, for the newborn," the fairy offered.
The mother, clutching the child closer to her, trembled and choked, and it seemed that she would not be able to answer. Finally words came, as if involuntarily:
"That she may not feel, that she may not suffer, that passion, love that scorches and does not warm, may never touch her!"
The fairy smiled a faint, far smile and inscribed a circle with her star-tipped wand.
"It is well." said she.
The cloud of light faded into a black sky. The child stirred, and the mother awoke, her heart aching, she knew not why.
LEONORE, the woman, was tall, pale and exceptionally beautiful. She gazed out of clear, gray eyes that had lost the wonder of childhood without ever gaining the warmth of womanhood.
She passed through life as one in a dream. She saw much, she understood much, but when, in those intense moments that sometimes come, the quick tears of sympathy and love
