but yourself will ever see
them."

* * * * *

He looked at me with professorial absent-mindedness.

"I take them for the fun of it, principally. But perhaps, sometime, we
may figure out a way of getting them up. My God! Wouldn't my learned
brother scientists be set in an uproar!"

He bent to his observations and dissections again, cursing now and then
at the distortion suffered by the specimens when they were released from
the deep sea pressure and swelled and burst in the atmospheric pressure
in the cave.

Stanley was engrossed in a different way. Since the moment he laid eyes
on her, he had belonged to the stately woman who had first nursed him
back to consciousness. Mayis was her name.

From shepherding the three of us around Zyobor and explaining its
marvels to us, she had taken to exclusive tutorship of Stanley. And
Stanley fairly ate it up.

"You, the notorious woman hater," I taunted him one time, "the wary
bachelor--to fall at last. And for a woman of another world--almost of
another planet! I'm amazed!"

"I don't know why you should be amazed," said he stiffly.

"You've been telling me ever since I was a kid that women were all
useless, all alike--"

"I find I was mistaken," he interrupted. "They aren't all alike. There's
only one Mayis. She is--different."

"What do you talk about all the time? You're with her constantly."

"I'm not with her any more than you're with the Queen," he shot back at
me. "What do you find to talk about?"

That shut me up. He went to look for Mayis; and I wandered to the royal
apartments in search of Aga.

* * * * *

In the first days of our friendship I had several times surprised in
Aga's eyes a curious expression, one that seemed compounded of despair,
horror and resignation.

I had seen that same expression in the eyes of the nobles of late, and
in the faces of all the people I encountered in the streets--who, I
mustn't forget to add here, never failed to treat me with a deference
that was as intoxicating as it was inexplicable.

It was as though some terrible fate hovered over the populace, some
dreadful doom about which nothing could be done. No one put into words
any fears that might confirm that impression; but continually I got the
idea that everybody there went about in a state of attempting to live
normally and happily while life was still left--before some awful,
wholesale death descende