perfection. Merely ornamental glass upon Osnome, Dunark knew
that they were priceless upon Earth, and had acted accordingly. To this
great wealth of known gems, he had added a rich and varied assortment of
the rare and strange jewels peculiar to his own world, the faidon alone
being omitted from the collection. DuQuesne's habitual calmness of mind
almost deserted him as he classified the contents of the bag.

The radium alone was worth millions of dollars, and the scientist in him
exulted that at last his brother scientists should have ample supplies
of that priceless metal with which to work, even while he was rejoicing
in the price he would exact for it. He took out the familiar jewels,
estimating their value as he counted them--a staggering total. The bag
was still half full of the strange gems, some of them glowing like
miniature lamps in the dark depths, and he made no effort to appraise
them. He knew that once any competent jeweler had compared their cold,
hard, scintillating beauty with that of any Earthly gems, he could
demand his own price.

"At last," he breathed to himself, "I will be what I have always longed
to be--a money power. Now I can cut loose from that gang of crooks and
go my own way."

He replaced the gems and the tube of radium in the bag, which he stowed
away in one of his capacious pockets, and made his way to the galley.

* * * * *

The return voyage through space was uneventful, the Skylark constantly
maintaining the same velocity with which she had started out. Several
times, as the days wore on, she came within the zone of attraction of
various gigantic suns, but the pilot had learned his lesson. He kept a
vigilant eye upon the bar, and at the first sign of a deviation from the
perpendicular he steered away, far from the source of the attraction.
Not content with these precautions, the man at the board would, from
time to time, shut off the power, to make sure that the space-car was
not falling toward a body directly in its line of flight.

When half the distance had been covered, the bar was reversed, the
travelers holding an impromptu ceremony as the great vessel spun around
its center through an angle of one hundred and eighty degrees. A few
days later the observers began to recognize some of the fixed stars in
familiar constellations and knew that the yellowish-white star directly
in their line of flight was the sun of their own solar system. After a