Tom Spencer drew in a deep breath, and his fingers clenched, then sprang open with a sudden gesture of horror, as he realized that those male heads, so tightly clinging lip to lip with the beautiful mist-women, were bodiless! The green-clad bodies, which had strained so tautly to thrust their heads up to that kiss of death, were now slowly slumping, settling downward, shriveling, turning brown, drifting away in the swirling mists which bathed the feet of the majestic women. The heads themselves had lost their realness. The skin had become wrinkled, leathery, deflated, flabby. The features were scarcely distinguishable. Then one by one, with a contemptuous gesture of satiation, the women flung away the sucked-dry rinds. And Tom Spencer, his gaze intent upon the expressions on the women’s faces, took no heed what became of the cast-off rinds. For a subtle change was taking place in those beautiful but cruel creatures. A certain matronly smugness coarsened their features, and they seemed less tall. Yes, they were visibly shrinking, shrinking and becoming squat and ugly, shrinking back into the mists which masked the muddy pool. All, all returning to the slime which had spawned them. All but one! Alone she stood, unmated, still towering slim and beautiful in the moonlight. And then Tom Spencer knew why he had waited, why he had not gone to any of the others. For, transcendently beautiful though they had all been, yet this sole survivor of that glorious company outshone them all. Erect she stood, her golden head thrown back, her arms stretched to each side and raised a little, so that the filmy pale green gauze of her gown hung from them like the wings of a luna moth. * * * * * Spencer gasped and rose from his chair. Forgotten were the warnings of Professor Gordon, as the young man moved steadily out off the terrace into the misty moonlight. Her lips parted, a smile of welcome overspread her cameo face, and then she spoke—a tinkly, silver, moonlit, rippling voice. “Have you been waiting long for me?” “All my life!” breathed Spencer. She laughed, a friendly, silvery laugh. Like a sleep-walker, Spencer continued to plod toward her. Six-feet one he was, a gridiron star, and yet this frail, slim wisp of a feminine creature towered inaccessibly above him in the mists of the pool. Spencer reached her. He clasped his arms around her waist, and stretched and stretched, every sinew of his athletic body taut with the effort. He raised his heels from the ground, and strained on tiptoe. A sigh breathed upward from his lips. “Kiss me! Kiss me!” he pleaded. “Kiss me, though I die.” But she stiffened, and held herself more aloof, and towered even more inaccessibly, while her beauty flamed out so intensely that it gripped Spencer’s heart with a stabbing pain.