"Beautiful."

"And I fell in love with her?"

"You had all the symptoms. But why do you insist on talking on such a disagreeable subject? Come, let's go and find Proctor."

"Wait. One question more. Have you seen Avis?"

"Yes."

"Who is she?"

"I believe she is a friend of the family merely."

"Does she live here?"

"She is staying here for the present."

"Is she beautiful, too?"

"I shall leave you to be your own judge of that when you see her. Now, not another question."

"Well," I said, as we started to find some of the others, "if the Mona of your imagination gives you as much pleasure as Avis has given me before I have seen her, I do not wonder that you cherish her memory."

This conversation left me still more anxious to see Avis, and I looked for her return every moment, but the morning pa.s.sed and finally the day wore to its close without bringing us together. I did not like to make my strong desire known by asking after her, and, besides, I began to have a slight suspicion that there was some design in keeping us from meeting.

When it was time to retire that night I took the doctor to my room, and I think it was a surprise to both of us when we fell to talking about Mona again. At my request the doctor related at considerable length our experience on the moon, as he remembered it, and set Mona out in most attractive style. I let him go on, without laughing at him as I had formerly done, and the longer he talked the more serious and thoughtful I became. As he told the details of our daily life, recalling many of Mona's words and actions, a new thought flashed through my mind--the thought that possibly the doctor was right after all. At that instant, when my interest was most intense, once more the distant echoes of that happy song fell upon my ear.

That was the magic influence needed for my restoration. At once, and all at once, down fell the walls that had so unhappily obscured my mental vision, and left my memory clear as day. I jumped from my seat, seized the doctor's hand, and exclaimed:

"I see it all now, old fellow. You were right and I was the crazy one."

"Good, I rejoice with you."

With that voice coming nearer and pouring its melody upon us, we could not say more at the time. I threw myself into a chair, let my head fall back, and closed my eyes to enjoy it. The doctor, feeling it to be better to let me think it out by myself, stole away and left me alone.

Alone, but not lonesome, for was not Mona with me? I could see her every look and motion, and experienced with a great throb of the heart that my love had only strengthened with my period of forgetfulness. I remembered her last words, that very likely we would never see her again. But why should not she be saved as easily as we were? What if she were even now afloat in the ocean? But perhaps some one had rescued her. Could she be in Mars and singing for other ears than mine? Singing! Why, who is singing now, right here in this very house? Can it be possible? How stupid I have been. Perhaps I can see her now.

I jumped up and rushed from the room, but was no sooner outside my door than the voice began to die again, and in a moment the last notes had floated away. I could not determine from which direction the song had come and had no clew to guide me toward the singer. It was very late and all the house was quiet. Unable to pursue my quest, I reentered my room, but it was hours before I could compose my mind sufficiently to sleep.

The possible joy that awaited me in the morning, the dreadful fear that I should be disappointed, the violent beating of my heart at every thought of Mona, and my anxiety lest she might even now be exposed to danger somewhere, all combined to keep me excited and restless the whole night long. As I lay tossing and thinking, my most serious doubt was occasioned by the reflection that people of such exalted morals would not deceive me by declaring that this singer's name was Avis if it were not true. But then I thought further that the doctor had given Mona the name by which we knew her, and that Fronda would have just as much right to give her a new name. Perhaps her real name after all was Avis.

When the welcome morning came I found the doctor and gave him a hearty grasp to show him that there had been no lapse in my mental condition, but I asked him to say nothing to Thorwald just at present about my recovery. Then we hurried down to the reception room and, early as it was, found most of the household already there. After looking eagerly around and seeing only those whom I had previously met, I inquired, with as little apparent concern as possible:

"Hasn't Avis appeared? I thought she was an early riser."

To which Fronda quickly replied:

"Oh, Avis was up half an hour ago, and asked me to excuse her to the company, saying she was going to spend the morning with a friend she met yesterday."

This was a hard blow for me, and it was with difficulty that I restrained my impatience, but I was a little consoled with the idea that the morning only was to be consumed by this visit, and that we might look for a return by noon.

After breakfast, when Proctor had gone to the observatory and Fronda and her daughters were showing Zenith about the house, the doctor begged Thorwald to resume the talk begun on board the ship, which had been interrupted by the discovery of land. As Thorwald expressed a willingness to comply, the doctor continued:

"You were trying to convince me of the probability of life in other worlds besides the earth and Mars, and in your attempt to show a likeness between the earth and other parts of the universe, you were speaking on the interesting subject of meteorites."

"I remember," answered Thorwald, "I was just asking you what theory you of the earth hold on that important topic."

CHAPTER XVI

AN UNLIKELY STORY

"If the doctor," I said, "will pardon me, I will say, in relation to the origin of meteorites, that our scientific men have held from time to time many different theories. Some have believed that they are aggregations of metallic vapors which, meeting in the atmosphere, solidify there and fall, just as watery vapors solidify and come down in the form of hailstones. Others have held that they are thrown out from the center of the earth by volcanic action; and others still that they all came from the moon when her volcanoes were active. These latter theories imply that the meteorites in immense quant.i.ties are revolving around the earth, and that occasionally they become entangled in her atmosphere and fall to the surface.

"And now, Thorwald, I am tempted to repay all your great kindness to us with an act of ingrat.i.tude, nothing less than the relation of a story."

This rather foolhardy speech of mine made the doctor wince, and I am not sure but he began to fear that my mind was weakening in a new direction.

But I had my own excuse for my action, which I felt that I could explain to him at some future time. The fact is, I was so disturbed in my mind about Mona and was antic.i.p.ating so much from meeting the so called Avis, that I thought I could never sit still all the morning and listen to a dry scientific discussion. It seemed to me that I could stand it better if I could do part of the talking myself, and so I took advantage of the subject before us to propose relating an extravagant tale that I once had heard.

In contrast with the doctor's frowns, Thorwald showed a lively appreciation and insisted that I should be heard.

"Not another word from me," he said, "till we have had the story."

With such encouragement, it was easy for me to proceed.

"I fear you will be disappointed," I said, "for what I have rashly called a story is only a fancy founded on the idea that the meteorites were at some time shot out of the volcanoes of the moon. I had it from a friend of mine, whose mind is evidently more open to the notion of life in other worlds than is that of my companion here. As the story was written long before the moon came down to visit the people of the earth in their own home, the writer did not have the advantage of the discoveries made by the doctor and myself, and it is well for me that the doctor's friend, Mona, is not here to disprove any of my statements.

"On account of the smaller volume of the moon, the attraction of gravitation on its surface is only one-quarter that of the earth, and it is estimated that, if a projectile were hurled from the moon with two or three times the velocity of a cannon ball, it would pa.s.s entirely beyond her attraction and be drawn to the earth, reaching it at the rate of some seven miles a second.

"Now we all know--this is the way the story runs--that the moon was once inhabited by a highly intelligent race. They tell us it is a cold, dead world now, not at all fit for inhabitants. But that is because its day is pa.s.sed. Being so much smaller than the earth it cooled off quicker, and its life-bearing period long since found its end. Men have often speculated on the idea that our race will one day fail and the time come when the last generation shall pa.s.s away and leave the earth a bare and ugly thing, to continue yet longer its lonely, weary journey around a failing sun. That day the moon has seen. That direful fate the race of moon men have experienced. Some poor being, the last of his kind, was left sole monarch of a dying world, and with the moon all before him where to choose, chose rather to die with the rest and leave his world to cold and darkness.

"From our own experience we do not know how high a state of civilization can be reached by giving a race all the time that is needed. But we know that before the inhabitants of the moon pa.s.sed off the stage they had attained to the highest possible degree of intelligence. They began existence at a very low plane, developed gradually through long periods of time--there has never been any haste in these matters--and when they had reached their maturity as a race of intellectual and moral beings, primitive man was just beginning on the vast undertaking of subduing the earth, a task not yet accomplished.

"The incident I propose to relate occurred in antediluvian times, when there were giants in the earth who lived a thousand years. Then matter reigned, not mind. It was the age of brawn. Everything material existed on a gigantic scale, and man's architectural works, rude in design but well adapted for shelter and protection, were proportioned to his own stature and rivaled the everlasting hills in size and solidity. And they needed something substantial for protection, for war was their business and their pa.s.s time. They lived for nothing but to fight. It was brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, tribe against tribe; and the man who could not fight, and fight hard, had no excuse for living. War was not an art, but a natural outburst of brutal instincts. A giant glories in his strength and cultivates it as naturally as a bird its song. But it is pleasant to consider the fact that as man's mental and moral qualities have developed his body has become smaller. As the necessity for that immense physical strength gradually pa.s.sed away, nature, abhorring such unnecessary waste of material, applied to us her inexorable laws whereby a thing or a state of things no longer useful slowly fades away, and our bodies accommodated themselves to new conditions.

"But in those early times men needed great physical strength and long life to bring the world into subjection, and until that was done they could give little attention to the cultivation of the finer qualities of their incipient manhood. They were handicapped by the fact that the lower animals had had the earth to themselves a few million years, more or less, and no puny race could ever have driven them to the wall.

"At length, when the conflict was well nigh over, with victory in sight, men had abandoned the struggle and were using all their fierce strength in fighting each other. This had been going on so long and with such deadly results that it seemed as if the race must be exterminated unless some superior power could step in from the outside and prevent it.

"We can easily understand that there was no such thing as science then.

Men considered the sun, for example, only as a very useful thing which brought them light with which they could see their foe, and the moon as a mysterious object sent to make the night a little less dark. Sun and moon and shining stars were all set in the sky for them, and went through their wonderful and complicated movements solely for their amus.e.m.e.nt.

"But what was the real condition of things on the moon at that time? Why, there was a race of people there of such intelligence and scientific attainments that they were seeing plainly enough everything that was taking place on the earth. This will not appear very strange when we consider our remarkable success in scanning the surface of the moon at the present day, and remember that the inhabitants of the moon were then nearing the close of their history, and so at the height of their civilization.

"Yes, they had watched the coming of man upon the stage with the deepest interest--with a neighborly interest, in fact--seeing in him the promise of a companion race and one worthy of the magnificent globe which they could see was so much larger than their own. Their powerful instruments enabled them to see objects on the earth as distinctly as we now see through our telescopes the features of a landscape a few miles distant.