So beauteous did she look searching the darkness with great blind eyes and her rich flowing hair flowing from beneath her jewelled headdress, a diadem fashioned to resemble the Sun’s rays, that my breath failed me and my heart stood still.

“There stands she whom you seek,” muttered Larico in a mocking whisper, for here even he did not seem to dare to talk aloud.  “Go take her, you whom men call a god, but I call a drunken fool ready to risk all for a woman’s lips.  Go take her and ask the blessing upon your kisses of yonder dead king whose holy rest you break.”

“Be silent,” I whispered back and passed round the table till I came face to face with Quilla.  Then a strange dumbness fell upon me like a spell or dead Upanqui’s curse, so that I could not speak.

I stood there staring at those beautiful blind eyes and the blind eyes stared back at me.  Presently a look of understanding gathered on the face and Quilla spoke, or rather murmured to herself.

“Strange—­but I could have sworn!  Strange, but I seemed to feel!  Oh!  I slept in my vigils upon that dead old man who in life was so foolish and in death appears to have become so wise, and sleeping I dreamed.  I dreamed I heard a step I shall never hear again.  I dreamed one was near me whom I shall never touch again.  I will sleep once more, for in my darkness what are left to me save sleep and—­death?”

Then at last I found my tongue and said hoarsely,

“Love is left, Quilla, and—­life.”

She heard and straightened herself.  Her whole body seemed to become rigid as though with an agony of joy.  Her blind eyes flashed, her lips quivered.  She stretched out her hand, feeling at the darkness.  Her fingers touched my forehead, and thence she ran them swiftly over my face.

“It is—­dead or living—­it is——­” and she opened her arms.

Oh! was there ever anything more beautiful on the earth than this sight of the blind Quilla thus opening her arms to me there in the gorgeous house of death?

We clung and kissed.  Then I thrust her away, saying: 

“Come swiftly from this ill-omened place.  All is ready.  The Chancas wait.”

She slipped her hand into mine and I turned to lead her away.

Then it was that I heard a low, mocking laugh, Larico’s, I thought, heard also a sound of creeping footsteps around me.  I looked.  Out of the darkness that hid the doors of the chamber on the right appeared a giant form which I knew for that of Urco, and behind him others.  I looked to the left and there were more of them, while in front beyond the gold-laid board stood the traitor, Larico, laughing.

“You have the first fruits, but it seems that another will reap the harvest, Lord-from-the-Sea,” he jeered.

“Seize her,” cried Urco in his guttural voice, pointing to Quilla with his mace, “and brain that white thief.”