rror as a fearful thought entered my mind. My
senses reeled, and a strange sensation swept over me, as of an awful
Presence in the car with me. "No, no," I muttered between clenched
teeth; "it cannot be! She surely realizes that it would be going to a
certain and terrible death!" And as I frantically wrenched at the valve
in an effort to get more speed, a strange hollow voice echoed through my
brain, laughing at my unutterable agony, and crying with fiendish glee,
"Your love has no thought of stopping; she hastens to her bridegroom,
Death!"

As hot irons scorching the living flesh, the words burned into my
brain, setting it on fire. It was the voice of Death--which voice no
living mortal can mistake--and I recognized it also as the fury of the
storm which was abroad when I departed from Earth, and the echo of the
stream's song of peace in the midst of danger. Had Death thus followed
me from the world in which he thrived to wreak this vengeance upon me,
by tempting my bride into his arms, believing that she hastened to her
love?

On, on we rushed into the region of the dreaded Pole. All signs of the
canal had disappeared, and before us lay only a vast uninhabitable field
of ice. I stood at the levers, frozen rigid with the intense cold, but
with my eyes ever on the flying object before me, while visions of my
beloved one, now so close to death, passed rapidly through my fevered
brain. As if Death had thus planned to torture me, before tearing my
loved one from my very arms, I seemed to stand impersonally apart and
watch two lovers--Zarlah and myself. Bending over her, I tried to
console her with a false hope--a story of impossible fulfillment. I
succeeded; and now I saw that I had laid the trap which Death had
placed in my hands to draw her toward him, and, with a cry of horror, I
tried to wrench my hand from the lever to which it was frozen, so that I
might shut such a scene from my sight--

I realized the meaning of it all now. Zarlah, unable to obtain the
repelling force necessary to carry her off Mars, was rushing toward the
Repelling Pole to be hurled off the planet, risking all in the hope of
being drawn to Earth, which was in opposition. It was a vain hope--alas,
I knew this too well. She was rushing to her death--a death that I had
lured her to, and my hands would be stained with the blood of my
beloved.

Desperately I wrenched at my frozen hands to free them from the metal to
which they adhered, with a wild