And then the climb into largeness. To Frannie it seemed unending; but though they were only an hour or two ahead of Martt in starting, they were several hours ahead when they reached the giant world. Frannie and Leela were near to exhaustion, even though they had ridden most of the way. Rokk had not paused to sleep. It was day when they reached the desolate land of the Arcs. Then a tomblike night; then blood-red day again. Rokk rode now with Frannie and Leela beside him, and the woman Mobah behind. Rokk was jubilant. He talked swiftly to Leela. At intervals, Leela translated. "He says he is glad to have us. He is taking us to his house--his mound, he calls it. He says, very soon there is something important happening up here. He is going to take us--show us it--happening." Leela shuddered. "What is going to happen?" Frannie demanded. "I don't know. Something--sinister, horrible. You saw his face when he told me?" Frannie had seen it, indeed, but she was striving to master her fear. There was something queerly sinister, inhuman, about Rokk. And his smile had a leer to it. Shining in his dark eyes, which often were fixed thoughtfully on Leela, there was a look Frannie could not fail to understand. The woman, Mobah, had noticed it. Once, over her broad expressionless face a torrent of passion had swept. Hate? Jealousy? It flashed at Leela--and at Frannie--and was instantly gone. Frannie said now, "Ask him what he wants of us. Why did he ever go down into our world?" Leela listened to Rokk's smiling explanation. The man's voice was soft, caressing. Leela went white. "He says, Frannie--he says his world here is very harsh--not good to live in. There is very little food--he says that he and some other men--his followers--are planning to descend into my world and conquer it. Kill all its men--Frannie, don't you understand?--kill, just the men of my world----" There was a silence. Then Leela added, with a frightened hush to her voice, "Up here all is bleak and terrible. The women are all like this woman behind us--unbeautiful----" Rokk was riding faster now, and soon, as they ascended a rise of ground, his home came into view. It lay on a falling slope, with paths trodden in the snow about it--a bulging mound built of pressed blocks of the gray-black snow. It rose above the surface perhaps ten feet--an oblong mound twenty feet wide and five times as long, like the grave of some giant buried there, with a small upright chimney at its farther end for a headstone. A few rectangles of white marked its doors and windows as though one might care to stand on the ground and gaze down at the coffin entombed within. Near by, two other mounds lay like the graves of children, with beaten paths connecting them. Rokk's home was set alone in the midst of this snowy waste! Frannie's heart was cold with apprehension. What was to be her fate--and Leela's--within? * * * * *