Undoubtedly--this particular July evening--young Carter drowsed off into complete unconsciousness, with his long lanky figure sprawled in the chair. He was awakened by a faint vague sound so abnormal to the somnolent little garden that at once it snapped him into alertness. It sounded like a faint cry--a little gasp of human fear. He sat up, startled, but the sound was gone. There seemed nothing here but the patches of moonlight and the dim outlines of the garden.... Then Carter sucked in his breath and tensed, with his hands gripping the sides of his canvas chair. There was a girl standing off there between the sundial and the distant hedge--a girl smaller than Alice, with the moonlight shining on the pale fabric of her dress that hung from her shoulders to above her knees. A gray-blue cord crossed to divide her breasts, encircled her slim waist and hung with tassels down one side to her knees. He saw her face, with hair streaming down to frame it--a face that stared at him with terror. "Well," he murmured. "Good Heavens, where did you come from?" He jumped to his feet. Again she gave the little cry of fear, and like a faun darted backward until the hedge stopped her. She had come into a brighter patch of moonlight now, and the sight made him gasp. Her short tasseled robe was torn and soiled. Her bare legs were scratched and splotched with blood that had dried. On her feet, buskins tied with thongs about her ankles were ragged, dirty and bloodstained. Her whole aspect suggested an arduous, perhaps desperate journey. Thoughts are instant things. For that moment he stared, transfixed; and like a trapped little animal she gazed back at him. He saw that she was young, fifteen or sixteen perhaps. A girl in a fancy dress costume, who had run a long way and was cowering here in terror. But then he saw her pale-gold hair, almost silvery in the moonlight; the flesh of her neck and arms and face, queerly seeming to glow, as though opalescent--saw her face of exquisite, but very strange beauty. Oriental? He knew it was not that. And all his sudden thoughts of rationality were stricken from him with the startled idea that this girl could belong to no race that had ever been known on Earth. Idiotic thought! But he could not thrust it away. He was advancing upon her now. "Who the devil are you?" he demanded. "How did you get in here? What's happened to you?" She was trembling as a faun might stand its ground and tremble, so that now he was beside her, with her face at his shoulder as she stared up at him. Then she was murmuring something, in a language of soft limpid syllables. A language of Earth? Certainly it didn't seem so. She was breathing hard; her whole aspect showed exhaustion. "You're all in," he murmured. "Good Heavens, you look as though you'd walked from California and climbed half a dozen mountains."