long the
corridors to drive its hearers mad. There were tales of such haunters in
some of Mars' older ruins. The hair prickled faintly at the back of his
neck as he laid a hand on the butt of his force-gun and commenced a
cautious prowl toward the source of the muffled noise.

Presently he caught a flash of white, luminous in the gloom of these
ruined walls, and went forward with soundless steps, eyes narrowed in
the effort to make out what manner of creature this might be that wept
alone in time-forgotten ruins. It was a woman. Or it had the dim
outlines of a woman, huddled against an angle of fallen walls and veiled
in a fabulous shower of long dark hair. But there was something
uncannily odd about her. He could not focus his pale stare upon her
outlines. She was scarcely more than a luminous blot of whiteness in the
gloom, shimmering with a look of unreality which the sound of her sobs
denied.

* * * * *

Before he could make up his mind just what to do, something must have
warned the weeping girl that she was no longer alone, for the sound of
her tears checked suddenly and she lifted her head, turning to him a
face no more distinguishable than her body's outlines. He made no effort
to resolve the blurred features into visibility, for out of that
luminous mask burned two eyes that caught his with an almost perceptible
impact and gripped them in a stare from which he could not have turned
if he would.

They were the most amazing eyes he had ever met, colored like moonstone,
milkily translucent, so that they looked almost blind. And that magnetic
stare held him motionless. In the instant that she gripped him with that
fixed, moonstone look he felt oddly as if a tangible bond were taut
between them.

Then she spoke, and he wondered if his mind, after all, had begun to
give way in the haunted loneliness of dead Illar; for though the words
she spoke fell upon his ears in a gibberish of meaningless sounds, yet
in his brain a message formed with a clarity that far transcended the
halting communication of words. And her milkily colored eyes bored into
his with a fierce intensity.

"I'm lost--I'm lost----" wailed the voice in his brain.

A rush of sudden tears brimmed the compelling eyes, veiling their
brilliance. And he was free again with that clouding of the moonstone
surfaces. Her voice wailed, but the words were meaningless and no
knowledge formed in his brain to match them. Stiffl