e woman
at home--and, Lenox, thank God and you, that I wasn't!"

Then there was another interlude, and at the end of it Redgrave said:

"Wait till we've finished our honeymoon in space, and come back to
earth. You won't want any coronets then, although you'll have one, for
all the lands of earth won't hold another woman like yourself--your own
sweet self! Of course it doesn't now, but--there, you know what I mean.
You'll have been to other worlds, you'll have made the round trip of the
Solar System, so to say, and----"

"And I think, dear, that is about promise of wonders enough, and of
other things too--no, you are really quite too exacting. I thought you
brought me here to show me some of the wonders that this marvellous ship
of yours can work."

"Then just one more and I'll show you. Now you stand up there on that
step so that you can see all round, and watch with all your eyes,
because you are going to see something that no woman ever saw before."

CHAPTER IV

Above a tiny little writing-desk fixed to the wall of the conning-tower
there was a square mahogany board with six white buttons in pairs. On
one side of the board hung a telephone and on the other a speaking-tube.
To the right hand opposite where Zaidie stood were two nickel-plated
wheels and behind each of them a white disc, one marked off into 360
degrees, and the other into 100 with subdivisions of tens. Overhead hung
an ordinary tell-tale compass, and compactly placed on other parts of
the wall were barometers, thermometers, barographs, and, in fact,
practically every instrument that the most exacting of aeronauts or
Space-explorers could have asked for.

"You see, Zaidie, this is what one might call the cerebral chamber of
the _Astronef_, and, granted that my engines worked all right, I could
make her do anything I wanted without moving out of here, but as a rule,
of course, Murgatroyd is in the engine-room. If he wasn't the most
whole-souled Wesleyan that Yorkshire ever produced, I believe he'd
become an idolater and worship the _Astronef's_ engines."

"And who is Murgatroyd, please?"

"In the first place he is what I might call an hereditary retainer of
the House of Redgrave. His ancestors have served mine for the last seven
hundred years. When my ancestors were burglar-barons, his were
men-at-arms. When we went on the Crusades they went too; when we raised
a regiment for the King against the Parliament they were naturally the
first