just between his eyes, his huge frame shrank together and collapsed in a
heap on the deck.

"Oh, I've killed him! God forgive me, killed a man!" she whispered, as
her hand fell to her side, and the revolver dropped from her fingers.
"But, Lenox, do you really think it was a man?"

"That thing a man!" he replied between his clenched teeth. "He wanted
you, and spoke English of a sort, so there was something human about
him, but anyhow he's better dead. Here, Andrew, open that door again and
help me to heave this thing overboard. Then I think we'd better be off
before we have the rest of the fleet with their poison guns round us.
Zaidie, I think you'd better go to your room for the present. Take a nip
of cognac and then lie down, and mind you keep the door tight shut.
There's no telling what these animals might do if they had a chance, and
just now it's my business and Andrew's to see that they don't."

Though she would much rather have remained on deck to see anything more
that might happen, she saw that he was really in earnest, and so like a
wise wife who commands by obeying, she obeyed, and went below.

Then the dead body of the Martian was tumbled out of the side door. The
windows through which the guns had been fired were hermetically closed,
and a few minutes later the _Astronef_ vanished from the surface of
Mars, to remain a memory and a marvel to the dwindling generations of
the worn-out world which is as this may be in the far-off days that are
to come.

CHAPTER XII

"How very different Venus looks now to what it does from the earth,"
said Zaidie, a couple of mornings later, by earth-time, as she took her
eye away from the telescope through which she had been examining an
enormous golden crescent which spanned the dark vault of Space ahead of
and slightly below the _Astronef_.

"Yes," replied Redgrave, "she looks----"

"How do you know that she is a she?" said Zaidie, getting up and laying
a hand on his shoulder as he sat at his own telescope. "Of course I know
what you mean, that according to our own ideas on earth, it is the
planet or the world which has been supposed for ages to, as it were,
shine upon the lovers of earth with the light reflected from
the--the--well, I suppose you know what I mean."

"Seeing that you are the most perfect terrestrial incarnation of the
said goddess that I have seen yet," he replied, slipping his arm round
her waist and pulling her down on to his knees, "I don