shut once more, almost noiselessly--so much caution was being used. But Cynthia, though she was right in her facts, had never been so mistaken in her conclusions. The scroll which Harry Rames had pushed beneath his papers was simply a chart of the Antarctic seas; whereon lines distinguished one from the other by the manner of their tracing recorded the journeys of successive explorers and marked each one's "farthest South." He stood for a little while after Cynthia had left him on the same spot half-way between his chart and her position at the door. Then he turned back to his writing-table and spread out the map once more. The call of the unknown places was loud in his ears that night. "Come back! Come back!" Six weeks ago it had been the merest whisper--flashed to the wireless poles on the roof of the Admiralty and heard by him one afternoon, a message very small and clear amidst the clatter of Parliament Street. But the whisper had gathered volume and vehemence, until the map before him seemed a mouth shouting it, and the room throbbed with it as though the walls would burst asunder. "Come back! Come back!" It seemed to him that the command was not to be denied or must ring in his ears forever; and that arena of the House of Commons, where man fought with man, became a trivial place of meanness and intrigue compared with the vast battle-ground in the South, where one fought in a grandeur of silence with the careless, stubborn elements of a wild and unknown world. He bent over his map and across it, as across the table of a camera obscura he saw moving, in miniature and brilliantly defined, the ships of the men who had sailed to the South. James Cook's two vessels, the _Resolution_ and the _Adventure_, crossed the Antarctic circle as it seemed underneath his eyes--the first, of all the ships that were ever built, to sail upon these waters. Bellingshausen of Kronstadt came next and dropped his anchor under the shelter of Peter I Island and gave to it its name. He was followed by the whaling captains, each choosing his own line, great navigators inspired by a great and spirited firm. Weddell and Biscoe in their brigs. Balleny in his schooner. The later ships of the scientific expeditions under D'Urville of France and Wilkes of Chesapeake Bay moved southward in the track of the whaling captains, and close upon their heels James Ross from England with the _Erebus_ and the _Terror_ burst for the first time in the history of the world through the ice-pack into the open sea beyond and sailed from west to east along the great ice-barrier. There were other lines where the _Challenger_ had sailed, and the official expeditions; and there was yet another, the longest of all the lines upon the chart, a line stretching out to a harbor never visited before, and against that line in tiny letters was printed "Rames." He followed the course of his ship from his first harbor in the Antarctic continent with the wooden cross high on a hill