Guard yourself from them with secrecy of your actions and a constant watchfulness. I can suggest no other ways. If I could come to you--if I could bring Hulda back to you--I would make the trip instead of sending this message. But we cannot, or at least I think it would not be advisable. I am needed here. Needed by this world--by all in it which stands for right and justice and adherence to the laws of the Almighty God who rules all of us of every world. And I think also that the welfare of our beloved earth can best be safeguarded by my remaining here for the present. I will come to the point, Peter. There is so much for me to set down beyond a mere letter to you with explanations which well may wait until later. I want you here, Peter! And--if they think it advisable to trust their lives to such an adventure--I want Dan and Frederick to come with you. Will you come? I ask you as though I were inviting you across one of our little oceans at home! Yet I--so much more fully than yourselves--realize what this is that I so casually ask! You are young--all three of you--and the spirit of adventure and recklessness runs high in healthy youth. I am playing upon it. I need not ask. I know you will come, if--as I pray may be the case--I have now provided you with the means-- My hand holding his written page was shaking. Freddie burst out, with a return of his old boyish enthusiasm, "I should say we would come. What a question!" I heard Dan murmur: "At last!" Within me was a surge of emotion. A thrill of exaltation, mingled perhaps with a thrill of fear at the unknown crowding now so close upon me. And the thought of Zetta, mentioned so briefly in these written words from across the void! Yet from every line her name leaped at me, sang soundlessly in my head. The image of her was never more clear in my memory--here in this very room where we had clasped hands and stood and swayed and wondered what Nature might be doing to us who, an instant before, had been strangers--an image of her seemed here now hovering in the shadows of the room corner behind the tense, bent figure of Dan. So clear that I almost felt something of her which had come with this letter; some unspoken longing of hers which she had sent to me as, perhaps in silence, she had watched father writing. I think there _was_ something. I felt it; and within me, my spirit was murmuring a welcome and an answer. "Go on," said Dan gruffly. "Read it, Peter." I shuffled the papers. "There isn't much more. He's evidently--" "He's sent us the materials--the mechanisms out of which to build a vehicle," exclaimed Freddie. "It's evident that--" Dan murmured. "Too late this time! Seventeen months--seventeen months more to wait--" I laughed; an intoxication was upon me at the thought of it. "Wait, nothing! We'll be busy, don't worry about that! If we can--Freddie, what the devil?"