This we did, and I opened my mind to her at once in this manner, “There is much in what we have heard which must be clearer to you than it is to me, but it is evident that some larger issue of impending warfare has assisted your nation to adjust their differences with the Dwellers, and that you have no further need for concealment, or cause to continue our enterprise. On the contrary, your safety lies in a prompt and open return to your own people. “But my position is different. Your people have abandoned me to the Dwellers, and it appears that, if I fall into their hands, I shall lose my liberty at the least, and be exposed to death, or even torture, or the foulest outrage, as caprice, or self-interest, or curiosity may suggest. “For though you appear to regard the Dwellers as of superior mentality to myself, they do not demonstrate this by brutalities, such as it appears may have been fatal to my friends already, and which can only regard a being whom they know to have reached them from an earlier age, as something to be killed and eaten. In some parts of my own world there are savages so degraded in type that they will eat the decrepit members of their own race, or strangers who wander into their territory, but they are regarded as the lowest specimens of their kind. “In the experience of my own time it is not usual to find exceptional brutality such as this to be allied with any high level of intelligence, and it occurs to my mind that the Dwellers have not shown any conspicuous ability in discovering our movements, and that when I was actually captured by one of them, I escaped very easily. “So far am I from deciding to place myself in their power that I am resolved to outwit them. I suppose from what we have heard that one of my friends has already become a victim of their cruelty. The other I am resolved to rescue, if he be still living. After that, I hope to find some means of concealment and sustenance on the surface, to which I shall return, until the time come when I shall be able to rejoin the civilisation that you deride, but which offers a peace and security which I am never likely to find among the barbarous cruelties which you esteem so lightly.” My companion closed her mind from me when I had finished, but only for a short time, and then answered quietly. “I think I understand something of the feeling from which your thoughts had their origin, and at the injustice to myself and to my nation which you have implied I am not angered at all, but I think that our minds have never been so far apart since first I met you. “There was not a single thought which you showed me which was not either false or foolish, and it is easy to believe that you come of a species which devour each other, though there are few created things so base as to do this, in all the seas that I have known until I came in contact with you.”