Aronson and his crew, choosing between a swaying shore and a heaving sea bottom, had left the _Felix_ and made camp among the rocks inland, where, instead of the antarctic rigors of climate to be expected in that latitude, they were oppressed by almost torrid heat, the result of their volcanic surroundings. Very glad were all of them to feel the decks of the steel cruiser beneath their heels; and would have been willing to chance the seas with depleted coal-bunkers to hurry their departure from a place where, as the Swedish ship's master said, "the Almighty had put them in dry dock, and they hadn't been able to figure out whether He was going to spill a new sea or build an island." Leaving the sturdy old _Felix_ mewed up to be the prey of what chance or providence rules the ordering of volcanoes, the cruiser struck out for the north and America. * * * * * On a blustering March morning, Captain James Scoland sat in the reception hall of an ancient homestead in Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, and told his story to a sad-eyed young woman, a young woman who did not weep, but whose tightened lips and wistful gaze told of a grief that tears could not soften or relieve. By cable and by wireless from South American shores, days before, had come speeding on electric wings the tidings of the failure of the Sardanian relief expedition. All America had been thrilled with sorrow and pity at the news, sorrow for the famous scientist who had lost his life on his chosen path, and for the equally famous son of the wildernesses, Polaris Janess, who had trodden that path to death with him; pity for the unknown nation that had been crushed out by inexorable nature, and pity most of all for the gray-eyed girl who sat alone in her Boston mansion, grieving for a hero-lover lost. The captain finished his tale. "And so there was nothing to do but to come back," he said; "and I have come. And, Rose, is there nothing I can say that will bring back to your eyes the light I used to know there?" Rose Emer did not answer him. She sat looking at the wall, seeing through it and beyond it. Many a thousand miles away her fancy pictured clearly a great plain of ice and rocks and snows, storm-swept by shrieking tempests. She saw a dismantled sledge half covered by the drifting white, and beside it a lowly mound, the monument above all the hopes and joy of her young life. She shuddered, and a little bitter cry of desolation burst from her lips. At her feet a great gray dog raised himself on his forefeet, rested his shaggy head upon her knees and whined uneasily.