There was a much more incredible
explanation of her presence, but he was not to know it for a few minutes
yet.

"Come along," he said, taking the clutching hands gently from his
shoulders. "I'll lead you to the well."

She sighed in a deep gust of relief and dropped her compelling eyes from
his, murmuring in that strange, gabbling tongue what must have been
thanks. He took her by the hand and turned toward the ruined archway of
the door.

Against his fingers her flesh was cool and firm. To the touch she was
tangible, but even thus near, his eyes refused to focus upon the cloudy
opacity of her body, the dark blur of her streaming hair. Nothing but
those burning, blinded eyes were strong enough to pierce the veil that
parted them.

She stumbled along at his side over the rough floor of the temple,
saying nothing more, panting with eagerness to return to her
incomprehensible "tree." How much of that eagerness was assumed Smith
still could not be quite sure. When they reached the door he halted her
for a moment, scanning the sky for danger. Apparently the ships had
finished with this quarter of the city, for he could see two or three of
them half a mile away, hovering low over Illar's northern section. He
could risk it without much peril. He led the girl cautiously out into
the sun-hot court.

* * * * *

She could not have known by sight that they neared the well, but when
they were within twenty paces of it she flung up her blurred head
suddenly and tugged at his hand. It was she who led him that last
stretch which parted the two from the well. In the sun the shadow
tracery of the grille's symbolic pattern lay vividly outlined on the
ground. The girl gave a little gasp of delight. She dropped his hand and
ran forward three short steps, and plunged into the very center of that
shadowy pattern on the ground. And what happened then was too incredible
to believe.

The pattern ran over her like a garment, curving to the curve of her
body in the way all shadows do. But as she stood there striped and laced
with the darkness of it, there came a queer shifting in the lines of
black tracery, a subtle, inexplicable movement to one side. And with
that motion she vanished. It was exactly as if that shifting had moved
her out of one world into another. Stupidly Smith stared at the spot
from which she had disappeared.

Then several things happened almost simultaneously. The zoom of a plane
brok