“A pretended interest in one’s escort is more gracious than none at all.” As from a distance, she heard Satan’s reproach. Recalling her thoughts, she concentrated on what he was saying. “How they hate me, yet how much more they fear me, my fiends! Certainly I have the advantage over rulers of Earth in needing no secret service protectorate. Unfortunately for my subjects, I am immortal. They know that they cannot kill the Master Mind, that mine is the only spirit in Gehenna to which achievement is possible. That fact I prove to them hourly through their sufferings. They call me The Destroyer, yet am I their one great hope of salvation.” The boast puzzled Dolores. “The Destroyer a saviour?” He showed surprise at her surprise. “You don’t like me, my dear shade, or you’d show a more credulous interest in my small confidences about myself.” “I _am_ interested, really.” “Although you don’t like me? Never mind. I could make you do so--could make you love me if I chose. But I don’t wish to _make_ you. Hell knows I’ve got my pride!” He gave up to an attack of his lonely chortles. Evidently he had “amused” himself again. Next moment he seized the point of his Vandyke and straightened his countenance to excessive length. “Get behind me, ignoble impulse of pique! Mine other cheek, turn thou for a blow!” Lowering his face to hers, he added, most unexpectedly: “I don’t mind admitting that you make it hard for me to be mean. Except that I have a reputation for meanness which I must deserve--Anyhow, it’s your turn to tell me something nice.” “But--why--” stammered Dolores. “I don’t understand----” “Oh, yes you do. Something nice that you think about me.” Despite what she knew of him, the girl-shade was caught by something of his own amusement at himself. “I think,” she offered, “that at times you seem a very good deal of a human being.” Clamping the plane’s “joy stick” between his knees, His Majesty threw up both hands toward the glory of his imitation sky. “As bad as that?” he exclaimed. She could see, through his affected horror, that he was complimented. “For the smallest of favors, even though forced, I thank you,” he said with an appearance of sincerity. “That, my child, is what I’d like best to seem to be--just a long-lasting man.” “_My child!_” The unctuousness of his two words of address, emphasized by his smug contemplation of her face, made Dolores turn away with a new uneasy wonder. Some one on Earth had called her “my child” with that same accent and gaze. _Who?_ Her distraction irritated him. “Don’t sit there looking like a magazine cover. Your profile is odiously seraphic. If I’d seen it first, I’d not have given you a second thought.... That’s better.... When I compare that asking look in your eyes with the dear little wrinkles around your mouth--those _dear_ little wrinkles----”