d during the half-minute that he watched it
rose another degree. There was no mistaking such a warning as that. He
had brought two little liqueur glasses in his pocket from the saloon. He
divided the morphine between them, and filled them up with water.

"Not until the last moment, dear," said Zaidie, as he set one of them
before her. "We have no right to do it until then."

"Very well. When the mercury reaches a hundred and fifty. After that it
will go up ten and fifteen degrees at a jump, and we----"

"Yes, at a hundred and fifty," she replied, cutting short a speech she
dared not hear the end of. "I understand. It will be impossible to hope
any more."

Now, side by side, they stood and watched the thermometer.

Ninety-five--ninety-eight--a hundred and three--a hundred and
ten--eighteen--twenty-four--thirty-two--forty-one.

The silent minutes passed, and with each the silver thread--for them the
thread of life--grew, with strange contradiction, longer and longer, and
with every minute it grew more quickly.

A hundred and forty-six.

With his right arm Redgrave drew Zaidie still closer to him. He put out
his left hand and took up the little glass. She did the same.

"Goodbye, dear, till we have slept and wake again!"

"Goodbye, darling, God grant that we may!" But the agony of that last
farewell was more than Zaidie could bear. She looked away at the little
glass in her hand, a hand which even now did not tremble. Then she
raised her eyes again to take one last look at the glory of the stars,
and at the Fate Incarnate in Flame which lay beneath them. Then, even as
the end of the last minute came, a cry broke through her white,
half-parted lips:

"The Earth, the Earth--thank God, the Earth!"

With the hand that held the draught of Lethe--which in another moment
she would have swallowed--she caught at her husband's hand, pulled the
glass out of it, and then with a little sigh she dropped senseless on
the floor of the conning-tower. Redgrave looked for a moment in the
direction that her eyes had taken. A pale, silver-grey crescent, with a
little white spot near it, was rising out of the blackness beyond the
edge of the solar ocean of flame. Home was in sight at last, but would
they reach it--and how?

He picked her up and carried her to their room and laid her on the bed.
Then he went to the medicine chest again, this time for a very different
purpose.

An hour later, they were on the upper deck with thei