She returned his kiss and said quite steadily: "Well, at any rate, I'm with you, and it won't last long, will it?" "Not very long now, I'm afraid," he said between his clenched teeth. And then he pulled her close to him again, and together they looked down into the storm-tossed hell towards which they were falling at the rate of nearly a hundred miles a minute. Almost the next moment they felt a little jerk beneath their feet--a jerk upwards; and Redgrave shook himself out of the half stupor into which he was falling and said: "Hullo, what's that? I believe we're stopping--yes, we are--and we're beginning to rise, too. Look, dear, the clouds are coming down upon us--fast too! I wonder what sort of miracle that is. Ay, what's the matter, little woman?" Zaidie's head had dropped heavily on his shoulder. A glance showed him that she had fainted. He could do nothing more in the conning-tower, so he picked her up and carried her towards the companion-way, past his three guests, who were standing in the middle of the upper deck round a table on which lay a large sheet of paper. He took her below and laid her on her bed, and in a few minutes he had brought her to and told her that it was all right. Then he gave her a drink of brandy-and-water and went back to the upper deck. As he reached the top of the stairway one of the astronomers came towards him with a sheet of paper in his hand, smiling gravely, and pointing to a sketch upon it. He took the paper under one of the electric lights and looked at it. The sketch was a plan of the Jovian System. There were some signs written along one side, which he did not understand, but he divined that they were calculations. Still, there was no mistaking the diagram. There was a circle representing the huge bulk of Jupiter; there were four smaller circles at varying distances in a nearly straight line from it, and between the nearest of these and the planet was the figure of the _Astronef_, with an arrow pointing upwards. "Ah, I see!" he said, forgetting for a moment that the other did not understand him, "that was the miracle! The four satellites came into line with us just as the pull of Jupiter was getting too much for our engines, and their combined pull just turned the scale. Well, thank God for that, sir, for in a few minutes more we should have been cinders!" The astronomer smiled again as he took the paper back. Meanwhile the _Astronef_ was rushing upward like a meteor through the clouds. In ten minutes the limits of the Jovian atmosphere were passed. Stars and suns and planets blazed out of the black vault of Space, and the great disc of the World that Is to Be once more covered the floor of Space beneath them--an ocean of cloud, covering continents of lava and seas of flame, the scene of the natal throes of a world which some day will be.