"All x, little fellow--but it might be just as well if you didn't touch me. You see, I'm getting so rabid that I can't trust myself." "That's exactly what I want to talk to you about." A fiery blush burned through her deep tan, but her low, clear voice did not falter and her eyes held his unflinchingly. "I know you better than you know yourself, as I've said before. You are killing yourself, but it isn't the work, frightfully hard and disheartening as it is, that is doing it--it's your anxiety for me and the uncertainty of everything. You haven't been able to rest because you have been raging and fuming so at unavoidable conditions--you have been fighting _facts_. And it's all _so_ useless, Steve, between you and me--everything would check out on zero if we'd just come out into the open." The man's gaunt frame seemed to stiffen even more rigidly. "You've said altogether too much or else only half enough, Nadia. You know, of course, that I've loved you ever since I got really to know you--and that didn't take long. You know that I love you and you know how I love you--with the real love that a man can feel for only one woman and only once in his life; and you know exactly what we're up against. Now that _does_ tear it--wide open!" he finished bitterly. "No, it doesn't, at all," she replied, steadily. "Of course I know that you love me, and I glory in it; and since you don't seem to realize that I love you in exactly the same way, I'll tell you so. Love you! Good heavens, Steve, I never dreamed that such a man as you are really existed! But you're fighting too many things at once, and they're killing you. And they're mostly imaginary, at that. Can't you see that there's no need of uncertainty between you and me? That there is no need of you driving yourself to desperation on my account? Whatever must be is all x with me, Steve. If you can build everything you need, all well and good. We'll be engaged until then, and our love will be open and sweet. If worst comes to worst, so that we can neither communicate with Brandon and Westfall nor leave here under our own power--even that is nothing to kill ourselves about. And yes, I do know exactly what we are facing. I have been prepared for it ever since I first saw what a perfectly impossible thing you are attempting. You are trying to go from almost the Age of Bronze clear up to year-after-next in a month or two. Not one man in a million could have done as much in his lifetime as you have done in the last few weeks, and I do not see how even you, with what little you have to work with, can possibly build such things as power-plants, transmitters, and ultra-radio stations. But what of it? For the day that it becomes clear that we are to remain here indefinitely; that day we will marry each other here, before God. Look around at this beautiful country. Could there be a finer world upon which to found a new race? When we decided to cut loose from the