beyond the
limits of the Solar System, and so if you wish to be landed either in
Washington or New York it shall be done. You shall be put down within a
carriage drive of your own residence, or of Mr. Russell Rennick's. I
will myself see you to his door, and there we may say goodbye, and I
will take my trip through the Solar System alone."

There was another pause after this, a pause pregnant with the fate of
two lives. They looked at each other--Mrs. Van Stuyler at Zaidie, Zaidie
at Lord Redgrave, and he at Mrs. Van Stuyler again. It was a kind of
three-cornered duel of eyes, and the eyes said a good deal more than
common human speech could have done.

Then Lord Redgrave, in answer to the last glance from Zaidie's eyes,
said slowly and deliberately:

"I don't want to take any undue advantage, but I think I am justified in
making one condition. Of course I can take you beyond the limits of the
world that we know, and to other worlds that we know little or nothing
of. At least I could do so if I were not bound by law as strong as
gravitation itself; but now, as I said before, I just ask whether or not
my guests or, if you think it suits the circumstances better, my
prisoners, shall be released unconditionally wherever they choose to be
landed."

He paused for a moment and then, looking straight into Zaidie's eyes, he
added:

"The one condition I make is that the vote shall be unanimous."

"Under the circumstances, Lord Redgrave," said Mrs. Van Stuyler, rising
from her seat and walking towards him with all the dignity that would
have been hers in her own drawing-room, "there can only be one answer to
that. Your guests or your prisoners, as you choose to call them, must be
released unconditionally."

Lord Redgrave heard these words as a man might hear words in a dream.
Zaidie had risen too. They were looking into each other's eyes, and many
unspoken words were passing between them. There was a little silence,
and then, to Mrs. Van Stuyler's unutterable horror, Zaidie said, with
just the suspicion of a gasp in her voice:

"There's one dissentient. We are prisoners, and I guess I'd better
surrender at discretion."

The next moment her captor's arm was round her waist, and Mrs. Van
Stuyler, with her twitching fingers linked behind her back, and her nose
at an angle of sixty degrees, was staring away through the blue
immensity, dumbly wondering what on earth or under heaven was going to
happen next.

CHAPTE