"Thank God for the peace. Goodbye for the present. We shall convey the joint compliments of John Bull and Uncle Sam to the peoples of the planets when we find them. _Au revoir!_" The message was answered by the blaze of the concentrated searchlights from land and sea all directed on the _Astronef_. For a moment her shining shape glittered like a speck of diamond in the midst of the luminous haze far up in the sky, and then it vanished for many an anxious day from mortal sight. A few moments later Zaidie pointed over the stern and said: "Look, there's the moon! Just fancy--our first stopping place! Well, it doesn't look so very far off at present." Redgrave turned and saw the pale yellow crescent of the new moon swimming high above the eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean. "It almost looks as if we could steer straight to it right over the water--only, of course, it wouldn't wait there for us," she went on. "Oh, it'll be there when we want it, never fear," he laughed, "and, after all, it's only a mere matter of about two hundred and forty thousand miles away, and what's that in a trip that will cover hundreds of millions? It will just be a sort of jumping-off place into Space for us." "Still, I shouldn't like to miss seeing it," she said. "I want to see what there is on that other side which nobody has ever seen yet, and settle that question about air and water. Won't it just be heavenly to be able to come back and tell them all about it at home? But just fancy me talking stuff like this when we are going, perhaps, to solve some of the hidden mysteries of Creation, and, may be, look upon things that human eyes were never meant to see," she went on, with a sudden change in her voice. He felt a little shiver in the arm that was resting upon his, and his hand went down and caught hers. "Well, we shall see a good many marvels, and, perhaps, miracles, before we come back, but why should there be anything in Creation that the eyes of created beings should not look upon? Anyhow, there's one thing we shall do I hope, we shall solve once and for all the great problem of the worlds. "Look, for instance," he went on, turning round and pointing to the west, "there is Venus following the sun. In a few days I hope you and I will be standing on her surface, perhaps trying to talk by signs with her inhabitants, and taking photographs of her scenery. There's Mars too, that little red one up yonder. Before we come back we shall have settled a good many problems about him, too. We shall have navigated the rings of Saturn, and perhaps graphed them from his surface. We shall have crossed the bands of Jupiter, and found out whether they are clouds or not; perhaps we shall have landed on one of his moons and taken a voyage round him.