"Perhaps you are mistaken there," said Gazen, assuming a more serious air. "In any case I for one shall miss you. In fact, to speak plainly, I shall feel aggrieved--hurt. You and I are old friends, and when you asked me to join you in this expedition I was moved by friendship as well as interest. Certainly, I never dreamed that you would desert the ship. I thought it was understood that we should sink or swim together. If you leave us I shan't answer for the consequences. I appreciate the dilemma in which you are placed, but surely friendship has a prior if a weaker claim than love-passion. Surely you owe some allegiance to Carmichael and myself." "What would you have me do?" "Only to carry out the original plan of the voyage. Promise me that you will stick to the ship. Afterwards you can return to Venus and do as you please. Stanley, you know, made his greatest journey into Africa between his engagement and his marriage." "Very well, I promise." With an agitated mind I repaired to the tryst next evening and waited for Alumion. How should I break the news to her, and how would she receive it? The cool airs of the water, and the glorious pageant of the sunset calmed my troubled spirit. All day the serene and beamy azure of the heavens had been plumed with snowy cloudlets of graceful and capricious form, which, as the sun sank to the horizon, were tinged with fleeting glows resembling the iris of a dove's neck, or the hues of a dying dolphin. The great luminary himself was lost in a golden glamour, and a single bright star shone palely through a rosy mist, which covered all the southern sky, like a diamond seen through a bridal veil of gauze. That lone star was the earth. Strange to say, I felt a kind of yearning towards it, a yearning as of home-sickness, and it seemed to reproach me for having thought of forsaking it. I wondered what my friends were doing now within that blaze; perhaps they were looking at Venus and speculating on what I was about. How delighted I should be to see them again, and show them my incomparable wife--but could I ever take her there? Whilst I was musing, the low sweet voice of Alumion thrilled me to the marrow. I turned and saw her. She was dressed to-night in a filmy vesture of opalescent or pearly white, partly diaphanous, and having a deep fringe of gold. There was a pink blush on her cheek and a sparkle of girlish love in her celestial eyes. Never had she seemed more ravishingly beautiful. "Beauty too rare for use, for earth too dear." "You were gazing on the star. You did not hear my coming," she said with a little feminine pout. "I was thinking of you, darling." She smiled again. "Is it not a lovely star?" she said. "We call it the star of Love--the star of the Blest." "It is my home." "Your home!" she exclaimed with a look of surprise and wonderment. "You have heard that I come from another world." "Yes, but I did not know it was a star. And is that beautiful star your home?"