“No, no, Alan, not that! not that!” she cried with a gesture of horror. “The world has done with fighting, for there is nothing left to fight about. We will go as friends with open hands to them, and the new life of the world shall be begun with the forgiveness of our enemies. Who are we that we should judge after the Voice of God has spoken?” In the end she had her way, and so it came to pass that soon after sunrise on the following day an air-ship, which a hundred skilled and willing hands had toiled all night in fitting together and equipping for her voyage, rose into the air above the ghastly wilderness that had once been Aeria, and winged her way towards the southern pole. Twenty hours later she sank down on to the ice that had already re-covered the rocks in front of the fissure in the side of Mount Terror, and as she did so a figure came forth out in the darkness into the half light of the polar morning. “Look! There she is!” said Alma in an awe-stricken whisper to Alan. “Alone in this awful place! Come, let us go to her.” As she spoke the gangway steps were lowered and she descended them first, followed by Alan, his father, Alexis, and Isma. Some strange influence held the others back as she advanced with outstretched hands and words of kindly greeting on her lips towards the piteous wreck of womanhood that slowly emerged from the gloom of the chasm. Olga Romanoff had survived the doom of the world, but the hand of a just vengeance had fallen heavily upon her. Her once splendid form was shrunken as though three score years had passed over her in as many hours. Her left side was half paralysed and her shaking limbs hung loosely as she tottered along. [Illustration: OLGA ROMANOFF HAD SURVIVED THE DOOM OF THE WORLD. _Page 374._] Her golden fillet and jewelled wings had been cast away, leaving bare the great livid scar that crossed her forehead; her white, drawn face was seamed with deep lines marked by agony and terror, and the thick masses of the once glorious hair that hung about her head and shoulders were streaked with grey and clotted with blood. The fire had died out of her eyes and the red from her shrivelled lips, and the weak broken voice in which she answered Alma’s greeting quavered like that of an old woman in her dotage. “I have been expecting you,” she said as Alma took her trembling hands in hers. “I thought you would come. You have come for Alan, haven’t you? He is yonder, but he is dead. I kept him alive as long as I could but he was wounded, and when the world was changed to hell for my sins the fire choked him. “I tried to die too, but it wouldn’t kill me. There was air enough for me and I wanted to give it to him to breathe but he wouldn’t take it. I suppose you have been dead and are an angel now like those others behind you. Come, I will take you to him. It is dark but I know the way.”