It was after one of my rare and delightful afternoons with Aelios, that the supreme event occurred. We had been strolling together about the city, and had gone for a moment’s rest into the “Temple of the Stars,” that majestic edifice in which Rawson and I had been trapped so long before. Seated on a stone bench in the darkness, we gazed awe-stricken at the spectacle above us--the whole glittering panorama of the night-skies, almost as I had beheld them so many times on earth. And as I peered up at the image of those heavens I could hardly hope to see again, a sad and reminiscent mood came over me; I could fancy myself once more on earth, and was wistful for all that earth contained; I missed the friends I had known, the sparkle of the sunshine, the magnificence of white-throated mountains: I longed for the bluster and cannonade of tempests, the icy tingling of the snow, the splashing and foamy turbulence of the ocean. And Aelios, although she had never known these things and could scarcely imagine what they meant, was strangely responsive to my mood, and seemed even to feel my melancholy. She asked me gently about the world I had left, and how it felt to wander among the great cities of the earth, and how it felt to hear the purling of mountain brooklets or to sit on a grassy knoll with the great sun blazing in the blue above. And, remembering all that I had seen and heard before my captivity in Atlantis, I described to Aelios what my life had been, and told of my adventures and wanderings, my happy childhood and youth and early manhood; and I drew upon my imagination for gorgeous pictures of the upper world, and painted the home I had lost as little less than a Paradise. “Ah, now I see why you’ve joined the Emergence Party,” Aelios remarked, her face glowing dimly in the near-starlight, and her eyes soft with a kindly luster. “Of course, you must sometimes wish yourself back among all those wonderful scenes you left.” “Sometimes, indeed, I am sorry,” said I, in low tones and reminiscently. “Sometimes I almost wish to be again in my native land. But there are other times when I am glad, very glad to be here, and when I would not go back to my own country if I could--not if you offered me the whole world.” “And when is that?” asked Aelios. “When you are in the beautiful buildings here, or look at the exquisite statuary?” “Yes, sometimes then,” I replied. “But not only then. There are other exquisite things that make me wish to stay.” “Yes, I can understand,” she declared, apparently still innocent of the trend of my remarks. “The paintings, for example, or the colonnades, or----” “No, not only that,” I interrupted. “There is something more personal, more human--something that--” Here I hesitated, hardly able to proceed, for I realized that I was approaching an embarrassing climax. “You mean then, that you like the people here?” she volunteered, still with perfect candor.