LITMIR.BIZ

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received from a woman before—a glance in which he seemed instinctively to read at once love and hate, frank admiration and equally undisguised defiance. Their eyes held each other for a moment of mutual fascination which neither could resist, and then the dark-fringed lids fell over hers, and a faint flush rose to her cheeks as she replied to his words of salutation—

      “Surely the pleasure will rather be on our side, with travelling companions from the other world! For my own part, I seem to remind myself somewhat of one of the daughters of men whom the Sons of the Gods”—

      She stopped short in the middle of her daring speech, and looked up at him again as much as to say—

      “So much for the present. Let the Fates finish it!” and then, appearing to correct herself, she went on, with a half-saucy, half-deprecating smile on her dangerously-mobile lips—

      “You know what I mean; not exactly that, but something of the sort.”

      “More true, I fancy, of the daughter of men than of the supposed Sons of the Gods,” retorted Alan, with a laugh, half startled by her words, and wholly charmed by the indescribable fascination of the way in which she said them; “for the daughters of men were so fair that the Sons of the Gods lost heaven itself for their sakes.”

      “Even so!” said Olga, looking him full in the eyes, and at that moment the signal sounded for them to take their places in the cars.

      A couple of minutes after they had taken their seats, the train drew out of the station with an imperceptible, gliding motion, so smooth and frictionless that it seemed rather as though the people standing on the platform were sliding backwards than that the train was moving forward. The speed increased rapidly, but so evenly that, almost before they were well aware of it, the passengers were flying over the snow-covered landscape, under the bright, heatless sun and pale, steel-blue sky of a perfect winter’s morning, at a hundred miles an hour, the speed ever increasing as they sped onward.

      The line followed the general direction of the present route to Dover, which was reached in about half an hour. Without pausing for a moment in its rapid flight, the express swept out from the land over the Channel Bridge, which spanned the Straits from Dover to Calais at a height of 200 feet above the water.

      Travelling at a speed of three miles a minute, seven minutes sufficed for the express to leap, as it were, from land to land. As they swept along in mid-air over the waves, Olga pointed down to them and said to Alan, who was sitting in the armchair next her own—

      “Imagine the time when people had to take a couple of hours getting across here in a little, dirty, smoky steamboat, mingling their sorrows and their sea-sickness in one common misery! I really think this Channel Bridge is worthy even of your admiration. Come now, you have not admired anything yet”—

      “Pardon me,” said Alan, with a look and a laugh that set Serge’s teeth gritting against each other, and brought the ready blood to Olga’s cheeks; “on the contrary, I have been absorbed in admiration ever since we started.”

      “But not apparently of our engineering triumphs,” replied Olga frankly, taking the compliment to herself, and seeming in no way displeased with it. “It would seem that the polite art of flattery is studied to some purpose in Aeria.”

      “There you are quite wrong,” returned Alan, still speaking in the same half-jocular, half-serious vein. “Before all things, we Aerians are taught to tell the absolute truth under all circumstances, no matter whether it pleases or offends; so, you see, what is usually known as flattery could hardly be one of our arts, since, as often as not, it is a lie told in the guise of truth, for the sake of serving some hidden and perhaps dishonest end.”

      The blow so unconsciously delivered struck straight home, and the flush died from Olga’s cheek, leaving her for the moment so white that her companion anxiously asked if she was unwell.

      “No,” she said, recovering her self-possession under the impulse of sudden anger at the weakness she had betrayed. “It is nothing. This is the first time for a year or so that I have travelled by one of these very fast trains, and the speed made me a little giddy just for the instant. I am quite well, really, so please go on.

      “You know, that wonderful fairyland of yours is a subject of everlasting interest and curiosity to us poor outsiders who are denied a glimpse of its glories, and it is so very rarely that one of us enjoys the privilege that is mine just now, that I hope you will indulge my feminine curiosity as far as your good nature is able to temper your reserve.”

      As she uttered her request, Alan’s smiling face suddenly became grave almost to sternness. The laughing light died out of his eyes, and she saw them darken in a fashion that at once convinced her that she had begun by making a serious mistake.

      He looked up at her, with a shadow in his eyes and a slight frown on his brow. He spoke slowly and steadily, but with a manifest reluctance which he seemed to take little or no trouble to conceal.

      “I am sorry that you have asked me to talk on what is a forbidden subject to every Aerian, save when he is speaking with one of his own nation. I see you have been looking at these two golden wings on the band round my head. I will tell you what they mean, and then you will understand why I cannot say all that I know you would like me to say.

      “They are to us what the toga virilis was to the Romans of old, the insignia of manhood and responsibility. When a youth of Aeria reaches the age of twenty he is entitled to wear these wings as a sign that he is invested with all the rights and duties of a citizen of the nation which has conquered and commands the Empire of the Air.

      “One of these duties is, that in all the more serious relations of life he shall remain apart from all the peoples of the world save his own, and shall say nothing that will do anything to lift the veil which it has pleased our forefathers in their wisdom to draw round the realm of Aeria. Before we assume the citizenship of which these wings are the symbol we never visit the outside world save to make air voyages, for the purpose of learning the physical facts of the earth’s shape and the geography of land and sea.

      “Immediately after we have assumed it we do as Alexis and I are now doing—travel for a year or so through the different countries of the outside world, in order to get our knowledge of men and things as they exist beyond the limits of our own country.

      “The fact that we do so,—under a pledge solemnly and publicly given, of never revealing anything which could lead even to a possibility of other peoples of the earth overtaking us in the progress which we have made in the arts and sciences,—is my excuse for refusing to tell you what your very natural curiosity has asked.”

      Olga saw instantly that she had struck a false note, and was not slow to make good her mistake. She laid her hand upon his arm, with that pretty gesture which Serge knew so well, and watched now with much bitter feelings, and said, in a tone that betrayed no trace of the consuming passion within her—

      “Forgive me! Of course, you will see that I did not know I was trenching on forbidden grounds. I can well understand why such secrets as yours must be, should be kept. You have been masters of the world for more than a century, and even now, although you have formally abdicated the throne of the world, it would be absurd to deny that you still hold the destinies of humanity in your hands.

      “The secrets which guard so tremendous a power as that may well be religiously kept and held more sacred than anything else on earth. Still, you have mistaken me if you thought I asked for any of these. All I really wanted was, that you should tell me something that would give me just a glimpse of what human life is like in that enchanted land of yours”—

      Alan laid his hands upon hers, which was still resting upon his arm, and interrupted her even more earnestly than before.

      “Even that I cannot tell you. With us, the man who gives a pledge and breaks it, even in the spirit though not in the letter, is not considered worthy to live, and therefore I must be silent.”

      Instead of answering with her lips, Olga turned her hand palm upwards, and clasped his with a pressure which he returned before he very well knew what he was doing; and while the

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