waived
considerations of decency.

"I'd give a year of my life to have her alone again," he said slowly,
his hands clenched till the knuckles were white.

But he never did. She left our end of the country entirely, went up into
the fir-forest on the highest slopes, and stayed there. Before we left
he quite desperately longed to see her, but she would not come and he
could not go. They watched him like lynxes. (Do lynxes watch any better
than mousing cats, I wonder!)

Well--we had to get the flyer in order, and be sure there was enough
fuel left, though Terry said we could glide all right, down to that
lake, once we got started. We'd have gone gladly in a week's time, of
course, but there was a great to-do all over the country about
Ellador's leaving them. She had interviews with some of the leading
ethicists--wise women with still eyes, and with the best of the
teachers. There was a stir, a thrill, a deep excitement everywhere.

Our teaching about the rest of the world has given them all a sense
of isolation, of remoteness, of being a little outlying sample of a
country, overlooked and forgotten among the family of nations. We had
called it "the family of nations," and they liked the phrase immensely.

They were deeply aroused on the subject of evolution; indeed, the whole
field of natural science drew them irresistibly. Any number of them
would have risked everything to go to the strange unknown lands and
study; but we could take only one, and it had to be Ellador, naturally.

We planned greatly about coming back, about establishing a connecting
route by water; about penetrating those vast forests and civilizing--or
exterminating--the dangerous savages. That is, we men talked of that
last--not with the women. They had a definite aversion to killing
things.

But meanwhile there was high council being held among the wisest of them
all. The students and thinkers who had been gathering facts from us all
this time, collating and relating them, and making inferences, laid the
result of their labors before the council.

Little had we thought that our careful efforts at concealment had been
so easily seen through, with never a word to show us that they saw. They
had followed up words of ours on the science of optics, asked innocent
questions about glasses and the like, and were aware of the defective
eyesight so common among us.

With the lightest touch, different women asking different questions at
different times,