My companion laughed as it fell--not with her lips, that only opening slightly for a breathing which it seemed no haste could quicken, nor with her eyes, to my knowing, for it was too dark to see them, though they must have been alight with the joy of unfamiliar action, but with her mind, through which the laughter and its cause were conveyed together, and by which means mirth, though amid a crowd of others, could be private to those who shared it. Our thought was single that we should go back to our first station beneath the door, where we supposed we should be safe from the arrows. She rose lightly--another shaft striking the place where she had lain, as she left it--and slowly and stiffly, from my long vigil, I followed her. She was becoming used to the frequent evidences of the imperfections of my physical existence, but this exhibition stirred her to a fresh wonder. “Didn’t it know,” she asked, “that you wanted to get up quickly? Is it insubordinate, or entirely stupid?” I defended it as I could, “I think it does its best for me, in its own way. I have used it very hardly of late, and it needs repair; within a few minutes, when it understands that it must work again, it will be ready. Did it never protest, I should use it beyond its capacity, and soon destroy it. But perhaps if you had come to my world, you would have found your own body less perfectly adapted to more strange conditions than you find here.” She answered frankly, “It is likely enough. Though I should at least know what was happening. You seem to me to live in yours like a stranger, without control or confidence, and not knowing what goes on within it. “But I agree with you the more easily because I am already feeling the need of the water in which I most naturally live, and I am also conscious of the loss of the energy I have given you, which, in about two months from now, should it continue at the same rate, would exhaust me entirely.” As this thought reached me, we were moving down the centre of the hall, she in front, because she was confident that her will could turn a shaft if it were coming directly at her. Suddenly I saw her bulk more broadly in the dim light, and was sharply startled, till her thought assisted my eyes to explain it. She had lifted and shaken loose her fur, which was of a surprising length, and then drawn it down again more closely than ever, so that its surface was as smooth and shining as a serpent’s skin. I had an impulse to lay my hand on the glossy back, but dare not break the barrier of her physical difference and aloofness. It was as though an unapproachable virginity surrounded her. I vaguely realised the power by which she could control the fiercest creatures of the deep, and how they felt as they cowered before her.