Like a piece of the sun it slept in snow. What was beyond its blazing walls no one knew. From this white brilliancy, when Jupiter had brought daylight, came forth Father Renaudin. Across the waste of snow he walked serenely, an unearthly rapture upon his face. Storms could not ruffle his crimson robe, nor was he touched by the chill breath of the wind which had wakened for Jupiter. “By and by,” he was saying, “I shall know all. I shall have passed beyond the reach of forgetfulness. I shall be troubled by no such paltry remnant as earthly remembrance. Somewhere and sometime I shall be freed from the clogs of this non-understandable machine, the human brain! This atom, borne apart from all the isles in the ocean of immensity, shall come one cycle nearer to the æon’s goal, the end of time!” Father Renaudin was not dismayed at the approach of the star to the great planet. The crash of worlds could not shake the faith of a man come from the Sun Island! And the days of Jupiter became more brilliant than ever with red light. CHAPTER IX. A TRIUMPH. Snows and seas began to melt, as at the heat of a giant torch; loosened snow fell in avalanches; wind and waves piled masses of ice in walls. The frozen soil under all these powers was crushed and cracked. The sky, where clouds had been frozen out, again filled with moisture. Gold-red burned the snow; the black peaks of lava for their darkness melted deep pits around them. The equatorial region swept clear of bonds; lava isles cooled upon snow fell where the sea washed out their foundations and splashed into the depths, where the ice alone floated. Among the ravines was a forest of stunted pods, which only bloomed for Jupiter. They had slept since the star met the planet at the same distance before. Now they crept out into the glare—imps, dwarfed and small winged, an inferior creation, unshuddering in the cold, blinking their first gaze at a burning ball, more astounded at their own existence than at the strange theatre whereon they stood, unfrightened in the snow, homeless. Regan awoke. It had been years since he slept, but he did not know it; he wandered out into the cold. At the same time Roy Lee woke. He glanced up at the torch still burning, wondered when the icicles melted, looked for Isabella and found her gone. Where was she? He went out to seek her with that same fear in his heart which had tortured him for months before he fell asleep—the dread that the unscrupulous Regan would rob him of the woman he loved. The fear had all the growth of months of desperation when he had hated and planned through a dark, horrible season, when he had thought and thought, and almost determined——