“As we were made companions in this enterprise, it seemed that it was right to do so. But it is a law of our kind that, as no creatures in all the oceans will dare to harm us, so we do not interfere between them. Were we to withhold their prey from them, I cannot say that our immunity would continue. It is a thing so fundamental that from the beginning I have never known it attempted. We cannot be as one of themselves, and above them also. It comes to me again, as I have thought before, that you are like a seed of death to the world I know, and the end is beyond my dreaming.” I answered, “I owe you the debt of my life, and I cannot tell at how great a risk you have saved it. But I do not wish you to do things for me of which the consequences may be beyond our understanding. “I thought to show you that I could cross the lake unaided, and I have only made my weakness more evident. I think it may be right that I should go alone in future; for when you called upon me first not to fear, I am aware that I failed you, and I suppose it was from that that the danger became so imminent.” She answered, “That is true; and by my code it may be right to say that you failed me, where it was beyond the power of your body (which is truly contemptible) to do otherwise. But I have thought, and see that by your own code I failed you for my pleasure only, for which I have no excuse of weakness to offer. I do not think another man would have left you, as I did. You think I showed courage because I interposed to save you, at some risk to myself. “Whether there were risk I do not know; nor how great it may have been; but I think you showed a greater courage, being what you are, to go forward alone, and that, not to save my life, but to give me a needless pleasure, against which you might have protested reasonably. “But we have still a long way to go before evening, and we shall do well to face the remainder of the journey, the difficulties of which we cannot tell till we meet them.” While we conversed in this way, I had been observing the scene around me. We had landed upon the edge of a forest of a more varied luxuriance than that in which we had rested upon the higher land two nights before. Here, as elsewhere, I saw no sign of grass, nor of any similar straight-bladed growth, but the ground was covered by mosses, very deep and soft, and close-creeping herbage of other kinds in many shades of green and yellow. The trees were of many beautiful and unfamiliar forms, some of great size and height, but not too crowded to show their contours, nor the sky between them. Their foliage was of shades that varied from the palest yellow to the deepest gold, with infrequent hints of red, and there was one broad-spreading bush which was entirely of a beetroot crimson.