e queen--or king--to reign alone. A
consort is chosen. Is it not so here? Has thou not, among thy nobles,
some one thou hast destined--"

I stopped, feeling that if she dismissed me in anger and never spoke to
me again the punishment would be just.

But she wasn't angry. A lovely tide of color stained her cheeks. Her
lips parted, and she turned her head. For a long time she said nothing.
Then she faced me, with a light in her eyes that sent the blood racing
in my veins.

"I have not yet chosen," she murmured. "Mayhap soon I shall tell thee
why."

She rose and hurried back toward the palace. But at the door she
paused--and smiled at me in a way that had nothing whatever to do with
queenship.

* * * * *

As the time sped by the three of us settled into the routine of the city
as though we had never known of anything else.

The Professor spent most of his time down by the sea chamber where the
food was dragged in by the intelligent servant-fish.

He was in a zoologist's paradise. Not a creature that came in there had
ever been catalogued before. He wrote reams of notes on the parchment
paper used by the citizens in recording their transactions. Particularly
was he interested in the vast, lowly mound-fish.

One time, when I happened to be with him, the receding waters of the
chamber disclosed the body of one of the odd herdsmen of these deep sea
flocks. Then the Professor's elation knew no bounds. We hurried forward
to look at it.

"It is a typical fish," puzzled the Professor when we had cut the body
out of its usurped armor. "Cold blooded, adapted to the chill and
pressure of the deeps. There are the gills I observed before ... yet it
looks very human."

It surely did. There were the jointed arms, and the rudimentary hands.
Its forehead was domed; and the brain, when dissected, proved much
larger than the brain of a true fish. Also its bones were not those of a
mammal, but the cartilagenous bones of a fish. It was not quite six feet
long; just fitted the horny shell.

"But its intelligence!" fretted the Professor, glorying in his inability
to classify this marvelous specimen. "No fish could ever attain such
mental development. Evolution working backward from human to reptile and
then fish--or a new freak of evolution whereby a fish on a short cut
toward becoming human?" He sighed and gave it up. But more reams of
notes were written.

"Why do you take them?" I asked. "No one