Father went on gently, "We thought it best, your mother and I, not to tell you children. It would not have been fair to Dianne. There would come a time when you should know, of course--perhaps I should have told you before this--and I don't know, perhaps it was wrong of me to let you go back to that island. But I suppose that's foolish!" His voice drifted away with his thoughts. Nothing occurred to Drake and me to say; we sat dumbly staring at each other. Father rose presently and unlocked a drawer of his desk. "I brought this down to show you. There was nothing about the infant to give a clew to its identity. Just the baby lying there, clad in a single garment. This." He held out a tiny infant robe. Long-sleeved, and with a tiny hood. Strange-looking thing! Even as a lad of seventeen I was at once aware of its strangeness. A gossamer fabric like nothing I had ever seen before. A fabric golden as though its threads were pale spun gold. Or as though it might have been woven of fairy threads of golden hair--like Dianne's. "Just that robe," he said sadly. "What sort of material it is, no one can say." He took it from us gently and replaced it in the drawer. "And there was one other thing. You, Frank, spoke of Dianne being sensitive about the hair at her forehead. That little peak where the hair grew low, you remember? There was a scar on her forehead. Not exactly a scar--a queer crescent patch of skin. It seemed not white, but almost like the sheen of silver. It looked--well, something like a crescent moon. We hated publicity, your mother and I. We kept the finding of the baby reasonably quiet. We had a medical specialist examine the child. A normal girl baby, promising extreme beauty of body and feature. But the crescent-moon scar was an enigma--the doctor had never seen or heard of anything like it. "So we called the baby Dianne. Your mother named her that. The crescent, there on her forehead, was really very beautiful when one got used to it. But too unusual. Too--mysterious. And so we trained her hair to cover it up; and I--I taught her--well, perhaps I taught her to be ashamed of it. Or at least, never to mention it to any one--and so she was sensitive about it as though it were a secret blemish to her beauty." I need not detail that evening with father. But there was one thing he said that I never forgot. He said it half to himself, "Dianne was so abnormally beautiful, and that strange golden dress and the crescent silver scar--I have wondered so many times, all these years, wondered if she were just exactly human like the rest of us." He was sorry at once that he had said it, and he would never explain. This day that we lost Dianne was five years before the coming of the giants. CHAPTER I _The Coming of the Giants_