new position he had as guardedly fallen back and held his own. It
had been a strange and silent campaign, and all along it had filled
Frank with a sense of stalking and counter-stalking. Now they were
plunging into the naked and primordial conflict of man against woman,
without reservations and without indirections--and it left her with a
vague fear of some impending helplessness and isolation. She had a
sudden prompting to delay or evade that final step, to temporize and
wait for some yet undefined reinforcements.

"And you realize what it means?" he repeated.

"Yes," she said in her soft contralto. A feeling of revulsion that was
almost nausea was consuming her. This, then, she told herself, was the
bitter and humiliating price she must pay for her tainted triumph.

"And would you accept and agree to the conditions--the only
conditions?" he demanded, in a voice now hatefully tremulous with some
rising and controlling emotion. She had the feeling, as she listened,
that she was a naked slave girl, being jested over and bidden for on
the auction block of some barbaric king. She felt that it was time to
end the mockery; she no longer even pitied him.

"Listen!" she suddenly cried, "they are beginning to send the wireless!"

They listened side by side, to the brisk kick and spurt and crackle of
the fluid spark leaping between the two brass knobs in the little
operating-room just above where they sat. They could hear it
distinctly, above the drone of the wind and the throb of the engines
and the quiet evening noises of the orderly ship--spitting and
cluttering out into space. To the impatient man it was nothing more
than the ripple of unintelligent and unrelated sounds.

To the wide-eyed and listening woman it was a decorous and coherent
march of dots and dashes, carrying with it thought and meaning and
system. And as each word fluttered off on its restless Hertzian wings,
like a flock of hurrying carrier-pigeons through the night, the woman
listened and translated and read, word by word.

"Then we go it together--you and I--for all it's worth!" Keenan was
saying, with his face near hers and his hand on her motionless arm.

"Listen," she said sharply. "It--it sounds like a bag of lightning
getting loose, doesn't it?"

For the message which was leaping from the lonely and dipping ship to
the receiving wires at the Highland Heights Station was one that she
intended to read, word by word.

It was a simple