Motherless, Arturo had found in Polly almost a mother. Dr. Plantet was by nature intolerant of human failings, or so at least it always seemed to me. He did not understand his son, and to Polly went, if not his greatest love, certainly all the understanding comradeship of their daily life. But Polly understood her brother. The essential, womanly softness of the girl’s nature showed at its best with Arturo. Only a year older in age, she was vastly older in maturity. She was at once, to him, a sister and a mother; and a buffer between him and his father. A little diplomat, Polly knew when to lead, rather than drive. No one could drive Dr. Plantet; nor Arturo either, for that matter--it was almost the only quality which he and his father had in common. Yet they loved each other deeply, of that I am sure. Polly led us from the Portland landing stage, down the spider incline of moving pedestrian lanes to the lower stage where the private vehicles were stalled. Our luggage had preceded us in the chutes. “We’ve been worried, Jeff. A hundred times father regretted letting Arturo go.” “Well, I went,” said Arturo. “Yes, boy dear--you went. It was foolhardy; Jeff’s directors should never have taken the chance.” We climbed into the small plane which Polly had brought; the guards shot us off. It was 1 A.M. of the night of July 15-16. A warm, flawless night of brilliant stars, with the last quarter moon not yet risen. We darted up from the clanking Portland terminal like a humming wasp, and headed northeast along the coast. I went back to Polly’s last remark. “There seemed no danger, Polly; we saw nothing unusual. Except--” I glanced at Arturo. “I’ll tell her,” he said. He told her. Simply, unemotionally--with so queer a lack of emotion that it seemed a mask. She made no comment. She, too, seemed abnormally restrained. And upon us all presently descended a silence; to me, an oppression--a sense of fear. Yet it was not exactly that either; rather the feeling of something strange crowding about us, something unknown. These queer world events; this impending something--unnatural, uncanny--crowding us now, making us silent as though we feared to hear the voicing of our own thoughts. There were millions of people in the world these days who laughed and scoffed and thought it a jest that the tides were wrong, and vessels were disappearing; and who would have said, had we told them we had seen a girl’s face within a globe floating in the ocean depths, that we were drunk, or dreaming that Homer had come to life again with modern trimmings. But there were others, I am sure, millions of them, who felt uneasy, with panic hovering at hand. Like the presage of a fearsome, unseen storm below the horizon, there was something in the air all over the world. Crowding at us--something very strange, perhaps diabolical.