rimeval sigh that breathed the breath of
life into all things. And that sigh thrilled through the empty spaces
of the illimitable: it breathed the breath of promise over the frozen
hills of the outside planets where the night-frost had lasted without
beginning: and the waters of ten thousand nameless oceans, girding
nameless planets, were stirred, trembling into their depth. It crossed
the illimitable spaces where the herding aerolites swirl forever
through space in the wake of careering world, and all their whistling
wings answered to it. It reverberated through the grey wastes of
vacuity, and crossed the dark oceans of the Outside, even to the black
shores of the eternal night beyond.

"And hardly had echo of that breath died away in the hollow of the
heavens and the empty wombs of a million barren worlds, when the light
brightened again, and drawing in upon itself became definite and took
form, and therefrom, at the moment of primitive conception, there
came--"

And just then, as she had read so far as that, when all my faculties
were aching to know what came next--whether this were but the idle
scribbling of a vacuous fool, or something else--there rose the sound
of soft flutes and tinkling bells in the corridors, as seneschals
wandered piping round the palace to call folk to meals, a smell of
roast meat and grilling fish as that procession lifted the curtains
between the halls, and--

"Dinner!" shouted my sweet Martian, slapping the covers of The Secret
of the Gods together and pushing the stately tome headlong from the
table. "Dinner! 'Tis worth a hundred thousand planets to the hungry!"

Nothing I could say would keep her, and, scarcely knowing whether to
laugh or to be angry at so unseemly an interruption, but both being
purposeless I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily
refusing Heru's invitation to luncheon in the corridor (Navy rations
had not fitted my stomach for these constant debauches of gossamer
food), strolled into the town again in no very pleasant frame of mind.

CHAPTER VII

It was only at moments like these I had any time to reflect on my
circumstances or that giddy chance which had shot me into space in this
fashion, and, frankly, the opportunities, when they did come, brought
such an extraordinary depressing train of thought, I by no means
invited them. Even with the time available the occasion was always
awry for such reflection. These dainty triflers made sulking a