her my readers can understand the full difficulty and danger of
the situation. I know that no words of mine can convey the impression
graven into my own memory, never to be effaced or weakened while
consciousness remains. The strongest man on Earth could not have done
what I did; could not, lying half over the precipice, have swung a
girl of eighteen right out from underneath him, and to his own level.
But Eveena was of slighter, smaller frame than a healthy French girl
of twelve, while I retained the full strength of a man adapted to the
work of a world where every weight is twice as heavy as on Mars. What
I had practically to do was to lift not seven or eight stone of
European girlhood, not even the six Eveena might possibly have weighed
on Earth, but half that weight. And yet the position was such that all
the strength I had acquired through ten years of constant practice in
the field and in the chase, all the power of a frame in healthful
maturity, and of muscles whose force seemed doubled by the tension of
the nerves, hardly availed. When I recovered my own senses, and had
contrived to restore Eveena's, my unwilling assistant had disappeared.

It was an hour before Eveena seemed in a condition to be removed, and
perhaps I was not very urgent to hurry her away. I had done no more
than any man, the lowest and meanest on Earth, must have done under
the circumstances. I can scarcely enter into the feelings of the
fellow-man who, in my position, could have recognised a choice but
between saving and perishing with the helpless creature entrusted to
his charge. But hereditary disbelief in any power above the physical
forces of Nature, in any law higher than that of man's own making, has
rendered human nature in Mars something utterly different from,
perhaps, hardly intelligible to, the human nature of a planet forty
million miles nearer the Sun. Though brought up in an affectionate
home, Eveena shared the ideas of the world in which she was born; and
so far accepted its standards of opinion and action as natural if not
right, that the risk I had run, the effort I had made to save her,
seemed to her scarcely less extraordinary than it had appeared to the
Zampta. She rated its devotion and generosity as highly as he
appreciated its extravagance and folly; and if he counted me a madman,
she was disposed to elevate me into a hero or a demi-god. The tones
and looks of a maiden in such a temper, however perfect her maidenly
res