Page:Weird Tales Volume 10 Issue 03 (1927-09).djvu/121

 knees, nor could he rise again. Yet ever he kept, his eyes turned toward the sun. The sun in morning splendor beat upon him, dazzlingly beautiful but ruthless in its intensity. It burned out his eyes. It scorched his body to ashes. It crushed him beneath its glory. When he had borne pain to the uttermost, agony beyond words, the spark of his life flickered out.

All through the rose dawn he lay lifeless at the feet of the lovely girl. Softly she crooned threnodies of love to him. Until at last sunset came, the golden glow gave way to the purpling shadows of evening, then to the pungent blue of night. Gradually the lamps were lighted in the windows. A fragrant breeze cooled the air.

Abruptly the girl stopped singing. She stooped and kissed the cracked, broken lips of Hwei-Ti. He opened his eyes. As he gazed into hers, new strength came to him.

"Come," she whispered softly.

He rose to his feet. Together they sat once more beneath the magnolia tree. The garden had never before seemed more beautiful.

"You will never again have to leave the Blue City," she murmured. "Now we can be together until the very sun doth cool."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

And she replied, "Simply that you came into the Blue City with a material body. But now all that is material has been burned away. The spiritual only remains."

As she finished speaking she commenced once more to sing of old longings and young love. Hwei-Ti folded his hands. He was content. He was at peace.





ROFESSOR surveyed the young man through thick lenses. "Yes?" he said. The young man shifted from one foot to the other. "If you are the man who advertised"

"Ah, yes," murmured the professor. "I had almost forgotten that I should be expecting answers to my advertisement this evening. Please step in." He waved to a leather-covered armchair near the fireplace. "Make yourself comfortable, sir, while I finish the experiment with which I was engaged when you rang."

The young man crossed to the chair

and sank into its deep seat. He gazed around him, noting that the professor had gone into a kind of alcove fitted up as a laboratory, small, but complete. From time to time bright flashes of dazzling blue light came from the alcove, but the applicant for the strange position advertised by the professor sensed that the other was covertly watching him, and he evinced no curiosity concerning what was going on in the alcove.

After a short while the professor joined the young man, and stood beaming down upon him through those thick lenses. "You have reason to believe that you fulfil each 