Again he smiled at Jane. "Tolla is her name. She is here in our camp where our army is now, starting for New York. You will meet her presently. She loves me very much, so she says. She wants some day to lead my harem. I took her with me into the Unknown--into that place you call Bermuda. I have been there off and on for nearly a year of your Earth time, making my plans for what now is at last coming to pass." "So that's how you learned our language?" I said. "Yes. It came easy to me and Tolla. That--and we were taught by two girls whom a year ago I took from Bermuda and brought in here." "And what became of them?" Jane put in quietly. "Oh--why, I gave them away," he replied calmly. "A prince whose favor I desired, wanted them and I gave them to him. Your Earth girls are well liked by the men of my world. Their fame has already spread." * * * * * He added contemplatively, "I often have thought how strange it is that your great world and mine should lie right here together--the one invisible to the other. Two or three minutes of time--we have just made the transition. Yet what a void!" "The scientists of your past civilization," I said, "strange that they did not learn to cross it." "Do you know that they did not?" he demanded. "Perhaps with secret visitations--" It brought to us a new flood of ideas. We had thought, up there in St. Georges, that this Tako was a ghost. How could one say but that all or most manifestations of the occult were not something like this. The history of our Earth abounds with superstition. Ghosts--things unexplained. How can one tell but that all occultism is merely unknown science? Doubtless it is. I can fancy now that in the centuries of the past many scientists of this realm of the Fourth Dimension ventured forth a little way toward our world. And seeing them, we called them ghosts. What an intrepid explorer was this Tako! An enterprising scoundrel, fired with a lust for power. He told us now, chuckling with the triumph of it, how carefully he had studied our world. Appearing there, timidly at first, then with his growing knowledge of English, boldly living in Hamilton. His fame in his own world, among his fellow rulers, rapidly grew. The few Earth girls he produced were eagerly seized. The fame of their beauty spread. The desire, the competition for them became keen. And Tako gradually conceived his great plan. A hundred or more of the overlords, each with his hundred retainers, were banded together for the enterprise under Tako's leadership. An army was organized; weapons and equipment were assembled.