"I do not hate you," she replied, "but you must not speak of love to the daughter of a jong. We may be together for a long time, and you must remember that I may not listen to love from the lips of any man. Our very speaking together is a sin, but circumstances have made it impossible to do otherwise. "Before I was stolen from the house of the jong no man had ever addressed me other than the members of my own family, except a few loyal and privileged members of my father's household, and until I should be twenty it were a sin in me and a crime in any man who should disregard this ancient law of the royal families of Amtor." "You forget," I reminded her, "that one man did address you in the house of your father." "An impudent knave," she said, "who should have died for his temerity." "Yet you did not inform on me." "Which made me equally guilty with you," she replied, flushing. "It is a shameful secret that will abide with me until my death." "A glorious memory that will always sustain my hope," I told her. "A false hope that you would do well to kill," she said, and then, "Why did you remind me of that day?" she demanded. "When I think of it, I hate you; and I do not want to hate you." "That is something," I suggested. "Your effrontery and your hope feed on meager fare." "Which reminds me that it might be well for me to see if I can find something in the way of food for our bodies, too." "There may be game in that forest," she suggested, indicating the wood toward which we had been moving. "We'll have a look," I said, "and then turn back and search for the elusive sea." * * * * * A Venusan forest is a gorgeous sight. The foliage itself is rather pale--orchid, heliotrope and violet predominate--but the boles of the trees are gorgeous. They are of brilliant colors and often so glossy as to give the impression of having been lacquered. The wood we were approaching was of the smaller varieties of trees, ranging in height from two hundred to three hundred feet, and in diameter from twenty to thirty feet. There were none of the colossi of the island of Vepaja that reared their heads upward five thousand feet to penetrate the eternal inner cloud envelope of the planet. The interior of the forest was illuminated by the mysterious Venusan ground glow, so that, unlike an earthly forest of similar magnitude upon a cloudy day, it was far from dark or gloomy. Yet there was something sinister about it. I cannot explain just what, nor why it should have been. "I do not like this place," said Duare, with a little shudder; "there is no sight of animal, no sound of bird." "Perhaps we frightened them away," I suggested. "I do not think so; it is more likely that there is something else in the forest that has frightened them." I shrugged. "Nevertheless, we must have food," I reminded her, and I continued on into the forbidding, and at the same time gorgeous, wood that reminded me of a beautiful but wicked woman.