Rondah; or, thirty-three years in a star

CHAPTER XV.
GOLD AND GLITTER.

The meteorite was stopped in the clouds of the sky. The angel-man, bronze, strong and glorious once more, flew down with Rondah and Regan, and they stood upon the raised steps of the great Cathedral, where all the assembled multitudes could see them.

For months previous to the departure Father Renaudin had been calculating and preparing for this return, for the ceremonial of the marriage and coronation of Rondah.

Sheets of yellow gold, spun fine and hanging heavy, glistened on the columns and were spread upon the floors, falling in rich masses to the foot of the long flight of steps.

As Rondah stood looking, a flock of bird women flew from one of the spires above and draped her in a veil and trailing robe of gold.

With much state, Father Renaudin, accompanied by a troop of elf men, alike in copying the red of his attire, and decked with glass and gold until they could scarcely trudge for their burden, came to meet her. Father Renaudin, no older than when he left Earth, with all the mark of earth care gone, years gone from his face, came to speak blessing, in which he even faltered. He feared for an instant that Regan had again brought to the star the wrong woman.

For that Rondah whom he had known stood no more before him. This gold-draped woman had beauty more fair than Earth gave, had wondrous eyes, glowing like stars. In her perfect face there was the chiseled beauty of an angel’s dream, not an earthly dream.

But still, like Regan, he knew it was Rondah, the same Rondah.

The lengthy marriage rite was first—stately, religious, slow. Even with its words Rondah kept thinking: “Am I here, or do I dream to waken to the old, lonely misery?”

With the benediction there swooped down her subjects by thousands to kiss her robe or her hand, or to caress her gold-red hair with one soft touch.

How kindly clear rang out their song of words, “Our queen! the Earth-woman, Rondah!”

“I could never dream all this,” the queen was thinking to herself, “I could never dream all this! I don’t know enough!”

There was a feast—flowers, fruit, shade and multitudes. Then there was the short hour’s rest between noon and sunset. At sunset were to begin the magnificent entertainments which the bird people had arranged in accordance with Father Renaudin’s design.

To a most lovely day was added the magnificence of a most perfect star sunset, of itself a wonder to the woman of Earth, the sea sweeping a phosphorescent sheet of reflection and the land bathed in brilliance which was blinding. The Earth moon rose and the bird people flew in hosts into the sky; there they flashed lamps and swung streamers of gorgeous colors, forming into groups of circles stars, lines and crescents, to make moving, brilliant gems in the sky.

Last of all they swept in one mass, chaos of light and color, for a single moment. Then clear, motionless save for the slight shimmer of the many wings, in the sky was one mighty crown of flame.

They flew down on the shores of an artificial lake of large dimensions, where they lighted lamps of various colors. Upon an island in this lake they stood in statuesque groups, until from water to the white temple built on the summit it was a wall of beauty.

One ethereal bird woman just touched the spire of the temple with her foot; her white veiling robes made her like a goddess. She held in each hand a lamp, and she shook from the same hands two great, misty flags of softest golden web.

In a second’s time the same flags, like fiery sheen, flew from every hand upon the rock, a pyramid of golden glory and gorgeous light.

Then the lamps were replaced by crescents and stars of colored light, until there was nothing to be seen of the bird people; like a scintillating jewel the rock glowed.

A cloud of whiteness, they swept into the distant forest as a flame, bursting from the lower part of the isle, wrapped the whole in fire from water to temple top, a great torch from which the glow fell upon the white stone and glass-paneled palace which Regan had built for Rondah’s home—Rondah’s home like the remembered homes of Earth.

In all this it was only the fairy-like women who had sailed and shone. Now there came hundreds of men, dark-robed, copying Regan’s taste in dress, aware that there was a splendor of color to lighten to glory any darkness in the splotches of radiance on their cloaking wings.

They bore a slight wicker car, cushioned with crimson and covered with pendants of glass. They carried Regan and Rondah, seated in this car, above the summit of the loftiest peak.

Over a vast surface Rondah looked upon moving black wings, hiding all else. She was awed with the exhibition of their immense strength, as she saw it thus exhibited in one huge, moving mass.

“I can see nothing but a carpet of wings,” she whispered to Regan; “but, if they would rise, I could see the whole star.”

In a few moments they did so. They swept in a canopy above the car, and like a little ball the star slept beneath them. In the midnight whiteness of the Earth moon and its satellite there lay its islanded seas, its banding continent, the fiery south, the arctic north, the gray moonlit forests, the white moonlit mountains, the mist-pale vales, silver streams, diamond lakes.

“Earth was not so fair,” said Rondah. “Then Earth was ponderous; no man could own all Earth; it was beyond one man in its expanse of endless miles. This, our world, Regan, is within human comprehension, within the grasp of one man’s mind, under the sway of one man’s sceptre.”

“You appreciate the kingdom,” said Regan.

He had feared a little that Rondah, with her tastes moulded by custom of Earth’s poverty, would not understand what an achievement was the successful reaching and the continued ruling of the star.

She knew it all.

Rondah’s pleased laugh, like the joyous laugh of a careless child, rang out in her delight, as she contemplated it, and the murmur of the bird men’s whisper of admiration sounded like the sudden wakening of a breeze in the trees, for the bird women did not laugh.

And Regan did not think that Isabella had ever laughed when the people heard her.

“What is that light like a star, that one bright spot in the sea?”

“That is the Sun Island. The angel-man lives there.”

“Have you not been there?”

“No. Father Renaudin spent years of the last winter there, but he is silent about them.”

“We will go there.”

“There is a wall in the air.”

“Not for us. All the star is ours!”

“Gregg Dempster and I shared the star.”

“We can sail around the island.”

“Not on these seas. Everything sinks.”

“The bird people will carry us there.”

“They dare not go; like Father Renaudin they are forbidden. There is a mystery on the island.”

“I can go there, Regan.”

“Of all the stars why do you single out that island, Rondah? Is there no other place so interesting?” asked Regan.

They were descending. The island sank from view. Rondah little thought where and how she should see it next, as she slowly answered:

“No, it is not so much more interesting, but something seems to tell me that I must go there!”

“So has something whispered to me all the years,” answered Regan, “and I have never found means to go!”

In the centre of a wide expanse of tableland, walled at a distance by mountain chains, stood the great stone palace which Regan had built for their home.

It was founded on a rise of solid rock, which had been surrounded by three wide terraces, rising each twenty feet above the other. In width these terraces were one hundred feet.

At the foot of the terrace, on the south side, was a great lake, artificially formed, from whence the earth used in the terraces had been removed.

Upon the lower terrace was set a forest of the silver fringe trees; these drooped over the stone sides and made graceful shades in the still lake. Along the edges of the terrace were set colossal glass vases, which were draped with veils of dark green satiny leaves and wealth of rose-hued blossoms. In the second terrace were only crimson leaved trees, and a row of giant white statues stood along the wall, thrown into brilliant relief by the color behind them.

The third terrace had only the deep purple velvet of the pansy tree. Above this rose, pure white, the columns of the many-pillared palace, which, about its roof, was decorated with glass panels and numerous light-spired minarets. At one side rose a glass tower with a dome overlaid with solid gold.

Regan would have been glad to have built a vast golden-domed roof for it all, but he must remember the instability of his star; he must build for earthquake, cyclone, flood and snow.

Within this palace were suits of great cool rooms, some furnished and decorated, some left for Rondah to furnish as suited her best. Above all these, upon the walled, flat roof, was a lake of water, wherein was an artificial glass island, upon which was a golden temple; from this place Rondah could see the whole vale. At the north was the restless, smoky sea; at the east the rows of manufactories on the distant hills, their tall chimneys smoking ceaselessly; at the south the great silvery lake with its surrounding parks, and, beyond, the houses of the city; at the west the mountains and their forests, with the western sunsets.

How miraculous the change! From a small house in a hamlet in an earthly wilderness to the capitol of another world; from nothingness to supreme power; from loneliness to happiness!

“I wonder,” whispered Rondah, “shall we be always so happy, Regan and I? These bird people are always so, but I doubt if men and women of our Earth leave, except by death, their misery inherited. Perhaps, perhaps,” mused Rondah. “But it seems more reasonable to me that trouble will come to us here!”

Ah, Rondah!

Blindly she groped after the great law, of which she had one mental glimpse. She could not understand it, but with the unfailing intuition of a woman she felt its presence. People of Earth, wherever they live, must know sorrow.

All glorious and serene the star sailed now, aglow with endless radiance and sunny warmth. Its path was toward the sun.

Regan dreaded the winter and its dangers. Ahead was storm, cold, earthquake, Jupiter.

The elf men, the new race, had begun to be insubordinate; they were as fond of demolishing as were the bird men of building. They often, from mere caprice, tore down magnificent structures when they were left unprotected.

“But nothing is too much trouble to endure now that you are here, Rondah!” Regan said. “Until you came the star was dark!”

“And Earth was dark! It is not the sun which lightens human hearts!” answered Rondah.

The great storm when the star turned, the accompanying disaster, the horror of convulsion, the sunless years—these were troubles which Regan wished he could avert. With Rondah he often wondered whether they might not spend the winter in the Sun Island.

In dreamy luxury the months and years passed on. Rondah was happy and took no note of time; it was for cycles, no need to measure it by hours, no death ahead. Regan was busy with great schemes. With the ideas of his mammoth earth built upon the little star turned into realities, the planet became a paradise of beauty.

Deputations were sent around the length of the continent to found cities on the broad inland plains and have dwellings prepared for the time when there should be no more winter. These colonists knew that the winter sleep would separate them entirely from each other, but they cared nothing for that. It was no more than that two forests were miles apart. Their somnolence was with the whole star, a part of it. The bird people, now engrossed with and ambitious for Regan’s plan of improvement and commerce, coined gold into beautiful, shiny, clinking money, and were sorry that they must leave the pleasant occupation and desist from their architectural amusements until Jupiter dawned. They had no other dread of their winter sleep.

Among other experiments, they set several thousand small and crowded pods into a new and fertile field. They saw that the withering or uprooting of one of these destroyed its vitality, and the backwardness meant a thirty-three years’ sleep for its occupant.

One thought would not leave Rondah—to reach the Sun Island. The bird people refused to go there. According to her designs and instructions were constructed several various locomotives of a kind intended first to sail in the air and later to crawl in the sea. But none of them were successfully used. The channel at one point was almost bridged by a lava ledge, but not entirely so, and the water was boiling in the strait.

Summer passed. The star turned. Tumult of earthquake, flood and tornado was all over the land for days as before. But the surface was now much more stable; the houses were constructed with reference to these things; they were in the centre of the continental plains, not directly on the shore. There was no great damage done.

The planet receded from the sun into the colder distance; the autumn haze settled for years upon its peaked hills; the leaves changed hue for all that long time; the sea grew cold and steely; the sun faded and diminished.

“How will you endure the long winter?” said Regan to Rondah.

“I do not mind the darkness.”

“You do not know what it is yet!”

Ah, Regan, not from seas and their snows, not from darkness and its despair comes the danger which is so great that even now you feel the horror of it upon your heart! Look otherwhere than at the purpling sky; look away from the barren and desolate mountains. It is not there, it is not there!

Rondah was walking in the noonday light through the paths beside the lake. The wind soughed through the leafless boughs above her; the light had the color of a partial eclipse; the leaves rustled as she walked among them; they recalled the rustling leaves of that oak-shadowed path which was on Earth. Rondah wondered if it were there yet.

Lifting her eyes, she saw a dark form moving swiftly across the cliffs upon the very summit of a distant mountain.

She wondered at first who it was. Then she remembered it could be only Regan. How very fast he was moving over the difficult path. How he could have reached that distance and elevation in the short time since she left him Rondah could not think.

She turned in the path; when she came again where she could see the cliffs, he was not there.

When she entered the palace, Regan was reading in the library. A new supply of the works of the bird people had just been sent in from the printing establishment and Regan was delighted with some of the productions.

“Look at these books, Rondah. Here is one in particular which is remarkable.”

He placed the book in Rondah’s hand.

“How long,” said Rondah, “have you been back?”

“I have not been out to-day!”

Rondah opened the book slowly, thinking, but, when she had thought, the red and gold volume fell from her nerveless hands; she sank upon a couch before the hearth and looked at the floor.

“Were not you on the cliff?”

“I? Certainly not!”

“Some one was there—a man! I thought it was you!”

“A man or a bird man?”

“A man!” replied Rondah.

This was his danger; Regan knew now. There was everything to fear from another man—insurrection of the elf men, helplessness of sleep, horror of war, confusion of conflicting power. An enemy! Powerful, else he would never be able to endure the star! Wily, else he had never been able to reach the star! He could see those hideous troops of traitorous elf men, roused to any pitch of enthusiasm by a few human words, ranging in red lines over the cold snow like streaks of human blood! Oh! all misfortune he foresaw in that moment’s realization, but he foresaw nothing like the true one!

No death, no death, no death on the star! If his enemy were there, he was there forever!

“Possibly it was Father Renaudin. I will see him.”

Regan’s voice sounded strangely.

“What can he do, Regan?—the man!”

“I cannot tell.”

They found Father Renaudin, meditating in the blue, silver and crimson radiance of his own great rooms. He was in possession of a large wing, where the rooms had been given up entirely to his use.

When he looked up and saw them, he smiled with the pleasure of an indulgent and idolizing parent, who contemplates a couple of beautiful children.

Regan wore always the half-Greek costume, tunic and cloak, which he had adopted upon coming to the star. He had a suit of dark green, the sleeves gold-slashed, the belts and clasps of gold and gems. His shoes were yellow leather, tied with long, gold-decked strings wound about scarlet hose.

Rondah wore a long, loose robe of rose color, belted with a bow of gemmed stars. A wide collar of gems was on her shoulders, and a gemmed coronet held the braided bands of her shining hair. Her arms were hidden under a network of jewels, which covered a close, long sleeve of rose color.

“How beautiful, young and strong they are!” thought Father Renaudin.

He wondered that Rondah found never-ceasing delight in the lonely pomp and splendor of her position, wondered that the careless adoration of the bird people as well pleased her as if it were the thoughtful allegiance of humanity.

He noticed Regan’s face, pallid and stern, that old fury in his eyes once more.

He sprang to his feet. Better than any other human being Father Renaudin knew the depths of slumbering, chained depravity in Regan’s soul, knew his destructive power when his rage was kindled, his heartlessness unlimited when he chose to become a tyrant.

Always he was fearing that, for some aggravating cause, Regan would destroy the people, if not the star, before the time of Jupiter’s reign began.

“Father Renaudin—Father Renaudin!”

No more words than these could he speak; leaning against one of the pillars, he waited to control himself.

“Was it for the presence of the other man?” Rondah thought. “It must be, but why was he so disturbed?” Then she said aloud: “I saw a man walking on the cliffs; was it you, Father Renaudin? Oh, was it not you?”

With a cry, Father Renaudin started to his feet, speechless; he shook his head at them, looking with terrified gaze from an ashen, livid face. Then he clasped his hands to his eyes.

“Not this, oh, God, not this! Not Rondah, not Rondah, who has no strength!”

His utterance was slow and stifled; he fell senseless upon the floor.

Cold yet from horror, Regan raised him to the couch and, fearing the words of his return to consciousness, he sent Rondah into another apartment.

When, after some time, Father Renaudin recovered, he looked where she had stood, and, finding her gone, said to Regan:

“Never, never leave her! Watch! A doom is upon her! Oh, there are no prayers of mine, or deeds of yours which can avert it! Only do not leave her! To reveal more I am forbidden!”

If it had not been that it was impossible, Regan would have killed him for those last words; but he knew it could not be done. Smothering his futile anger, he turned his dreadful eyes away, with curses of mad rage in his heart because his teacher was so fanatically given to mysteries and silence; he asked quietly:

“Was it Gregg Dempster who stood on the cliff?”

“No! Gregg Dempster has been removed to another sphere, years removed! His influence, too, is gone! We must hope for no further help from him! As humanity fights, we must fight out our own fate! No! It was not Gregg Dempster who stood on the cliff!”

“If there be safety for Rondah anywhere, it is on that island! I must find means to reach it!”

This was Regan’s final decision, the only salvation which he could imagine.

Before the bird people slept he ordered the construction of a small, strong stone house, with two great cellars stored with fuel, food and oil. This was built as near the island as possible. The glow of brightness made continual day around it, but warmth hardly penetrated the impassable wall in the air.

It was months before this was done; a faint twilight was the only day on the star; the breezes were cold and dry; the sea was partly frozen, many of the ravines snow-leveled.

Hundreds of the bird people were already asleep. The winter’s fate might depend on a day’s time. Regan went to the house by the Sun Island to see if it were ready. Father Renaudin remained to protect Rondah. The doors were fastened and the windows chained, and the shutters had been almost all permanently locked for the winter. A few windows of triple glass were left uncovered for light.

After Regan had gone, there came upon the terrace a strange, the same one whom Rondah had seen upon the cliffs, a grand and majestic man; his golden hair fell in curls about his shoulders; his face was like tinted alabaster, his eyes superb in beauty and brilliancy; his powerful, tall form was wrapped in a singular cloak of emerald and gold sheen.

At the foot of the porch steps he stood in the snow, where the heavy winds swept rifts of white upon his mantle, and waited for the woman of Earth to ask him to enter. With the dignity of a monarch, the beauty of a god and the elegance of manner achieved only in the grandest of earthly courts, he stood waiting.

Rondah listened while he explained that he had come at Regan’s command to carry her to the Sun Island.

“This day only the wall in the air is removed. The bird people are asleep. I can take you there quickly!”

“Come in,” said Rondah, “come in and give me time to think! I ought not to go; I should stay where Regan left me.”

“That is what he said you would say, and this note he sent.”

Rondah read it—Regan’s writing:

“My Darling: Do not delay; to-day only we can reach the island. This friend can bring you very swiftly in his car. I wait upon the shore until you come. I shall return if you are too late. It all depends upon you! Come instantly or all is lost!

“I will see Father Renaudin,” said Rondah.

She returned a moment later, pale and troubled.

“Father Renaudin is asleep!”

“Then we must return for him. I am sorry to inconvenience you, but by sunset the wall will close! Then you will be shut outside!”

“Father Renaudin?”

“We will leave him here for this trip. It is too late to take him.”

Rondah could not think. “Come instantly!” “Come instantly!” “All is lost!”

What if Regan had sent for her? How angry he would be when her slowness had prevented the use of this one opportunity!

Wrapping heavy cloaks about her, Rondah left the palace, carefully closing its door. They were almost alone in its great rooms; almost all the bird people were asleep.

She took a seat in the singular sailed car beside the stranger. They flew like a cloud through the air. As they neared the Sun Island the glare of it made everything visible for miles around. Once Rondah thought she saw Regan and some bird men returning through the snow, but the stranger threw the white-winged sails on that side the car and she was not sure; he told her that it was a rift in the snow where a volcano’s heat kept the black rock visible.

“You will soon see Regan now!” he said. “Look beside the island at the edge of the continent!”

Still Rondah did not see him.

“It is the blinding glare,” said her companion. “I know where he is. I can see him!”

The pale sun was blinking. The day was closing. Swift, very swift, the car sank.

“There is the house Regan built. There is a flying bird man. They are not asleep. You have told me falsely! Regan is not here!” cried Rondah.

But it was too late. The car sank into the white brilliance. The dark surface of the star was lost to view. Rondah was upon the Sun Island, even in her suspense and apprehension to be astounded at its glory!

As she stepped from the car, Rondah heard a chill, queer laugh. She glanced at the stranger. Was it he? He stood beside the car and was looking at her with a singular expression, half triumph, half intense apprehension.

As Rondah, looking at him, began to realize that he had brought her to the island and left Regan outside, the man touched the car. Its sails expanded. It flew away; striking the wall in the air, it fell a mass of cloth and fragments.

“It has returned—the wall,” said the man, composedly.

“Where is Regan? He is not here!”

“He waits outside the wall, I suppose! We were a little late!”

“Go after him!”

“I cannot go!”

Rondah fled toward the sea, only to be stopped by the invisible barrier. She ran aimlessly and helplessly about, sobbing and shrieking until she was worn out. Then she sank upon a bank and looked about her. Tossing her red hair from her face, she struck her gemmed coronet and it fell upon the rocks, where it looked like a piece of brass on the jewel-like surface of the Sun Island.

The amazing splendor almost blinded Rondah’s weeping eyes. The cliffs were of garnet and of yellow amber. They rose out of sight in the serene, changeless radiance. The canopy of clouds above the island was one sheen of rainbow hue.

The rock surface of the Sun Island was of the dazzling color and radiance of most brilliant polished sea shell. Spots of pink, blue, green and shades of emerald, gold, bronze, carmine and rose, chocolate-brown, dull yellow and purple—all these hues were so mingled as to produce an exquisite harmony.

In the deep ravines of the great riven cliffs there were forests of silver-bodied trees, whose leaves seemed metallic. They shone like diamonds and tinkled like glass. The shadow of their foliage was a pinkish hue, and the grass of the valleys was like the white waxen petals of the tuberose.

Beds of roses and lilies were in large banks and on mountain sides; there were other jewel-like blooms everywhere. The rivulets of liquid pearl flowed ’neath banks shadowed by silken reeds, which swayed like stray moonlight lost in the fields.

In the air was a musical thrill, which made a continual chord of harmony around her.

The stranger seemed gone. At least, he was nowhere to be seen.

Under the shadow of the magnificent trees Rondah sat to rest, and there was nothing in the whole heavenly sight which could even calm her grief. The island was beautiful, but Regan was not there!

The music of air and trees was supremely ethereal, but she was miserable because she could not hear Regan’s voice!

“Regan! Regan!” she called. “He laughed—that strange man—he laughed! I am certain! I do not believe he thought he could bring Regan here. I do not believe that Regan ever trusted him. I was so foolish as that!”

And along the paths where never woman had trod before, Rondah ran and searched, seeing nothing of the beauty, only searching for Regan.

She overlooked a valley which surpassed all dreams of beauty; beside the lakes was set a fairy-like palace built from the amber rocks, its decorations being only pillars of pale blue pearl.

Into this place she went, searching. No one was there. Upon the floors were draperies of soft gray and yellow of a queer, silky fabric. On the shelves were piled huge books, bound in the silver of the trees, written on leaves of pearl.

After turning the leaves a little, Rondah threw herself down upon the piles of gray cloth and sobbed herself to sleep, for she knew it was night outside and that Regan had returned to the fireless palace to find her gone. He was even then searching for her all through the winter snow.

She did not think that he could find her. She did not think that he would try to come to the island. A woman’s fortitude Rondah had not. She had only a child’s strength to endure her grief.

She woke to the same serene stillness, the same superb beauty, the same song in the air. She climbed to the tops of the garnet cliffs. Wild and terrible her voice rang over the island: “Regan! Regan! Regan! Regan!”

And in the day’s hours, when even outside the island all troubles were easier to bear, Rondah sat beside the books, which were so carefully stored, and, considering her strange fate, she said more calmly:

“I have made a mistake, but there is no death! I shall return to Regan after a time. He will fall into the winter’s sleep, but it will be spring soon!” and she turned the leaves of one of the books.

Glancing, she saw bewildering words; reading, she saw deep and awful meaning. Interested, she began to peruse the books, the books which Gregg Dempster had left for her. Nothing seemed omitted from their chronicles back into ages of a primeval chaos, which made “In the beginning” seem near by, back to the great cause of all causes, on through the series of destinies of human souls from where they started to Earth, from Earth to the eternal seas of ages, from realm to realm, from plane to plane, from power to power! All clear! All perfect! Mystery which troubled her all gone! Rondah read on and on.

“Possibly I was sent here to learn,” she said. “These books are wonderful!”

She laved her tear-stained face in the liquid pearl, braided her wind-blown hair into its smooth tresses, found her coronet and replaced it. Day and night passed outside the island; she consoled herself in the study of the strange, bewildering books, and read on, read on.

“It will be spring by and by,” she said, “it will be spring by and by!” and the strong peace of the Sun Island calmed her grief; her tears were dried, her heartache charmed into quiet, her loneliness was forgotten. In the pinkish shades by pearly streams, under diamond trees and ’neath a rainbow sky, she almost forgot Regan!

Regan returned to the palace as the darkness was deepening. The lamps in the great hall were unlit. Probably the bird women were asleep, but he knew it was not that. Into the silent rooms he hastened.

Not there! No fire! No light! He ran to Father Renaudin’s apartments. There lay Father Renaudin asleep!

“Awake! awake!”

With a groan of agony Regan called to him. With a curse of rage he shook him, shrieking at the senseless form:

“Awake! awake! you sleeping traitor, and tell me where is the wife whom I left with you!”

As well trouble the dead!

Gone, gone, gone!

Regan rushed through the corridor with a flaming torch, heedlessly stumbling on the sleepers lying wherever they had fallen, heedless of the fact that the cold was chilling the fireless palace.

“Rondah, come back! Rondah, come back!”

He repeated that call from the verandas; possibly she had not gone far; she might hear. He lighted a great lamp in the glass tower. She would perhaps see the lamp and return.

A white note lay on the floor. He seized it. “Good-bye” was written on it.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!” Not for him those words!

He held the letters far from him and looked at them. “Good-bye!”

Rondah’s writing. Rondah’s paper, with the crown in the corner. She had written on it “Good-bye!”

Staggering to a chair, Regan sat before the ash-covered hearth and crushed the white ghost of love in his powerful hand. The cold was creeping all around him; he noted it not; a worse chill was on his heart. He was fighting against human suspicion with the remembrance of human love!

There it was to condemn her. “Good-bye!”

In his heart was untold misery, but in his long life he had gained in many things more than human wisdom.

“It looks like treachery! It looks like desertion!” he admitted; “but in thirty-three hopeless years on Earth she did not forget me! Can she forget in a day here! A doom—that was what Father Renaudin called it. It could not be averted. It was to fall on Rondah; this has fallen on me!”

“Good-bye! Good-bye!”

But where would she go? That other man, the one who walked on the cliffs! Regan had never seen him; but Father Renaudin had seen him and had reported to Regan his wonderful, God-like beauty.

“The Sun Island! Perhaps she is there!”

Regan rushed into the night; darkness was there; he could see nothing, but he cared for nothing. The winds cut like a keen knife, but a knife more cruel had cut his heart.

“Good-bye! Good-bye!”

The winds howled those words. They would say nothing else.

“Rondah, Rondah,” he whispered to the night, “it would have been better not to have written it—‘Good-bye!’”

He saw the blaze of light of the Sun Island; he climbed the cliffs to his own stone house. The bird people looked like corpses in the gray light. He drank a stimulating liquid. He lighted the firewood which he had ordered so carefully piled to make a great, cheerful blaze for Rondah.

He sat beside this blaze and waited for the whitening of darkness, which was day.

If the sleep had not been almost death, they would have wakened to mourn with him, those tender-hearted, sympathetic bird people. As it was, they moved not while the awful sobs sounded in the drear house.

But why did Regan read, and again read, those cruel words, “Good-bye?”

When day came he strengthened himself with food and went out to see if there was not a frozen bridge to the isle. No; only a place where over the shallows of lava there were formed little, shifting, flake-like spots of ice.

Then Regan brought the great sledges and for three days he ceased not to throw cargoes of snow into the sea where the waves were so shallow. Not pausing for night, as if to save a lost soul, he worked for three terrible days, and he had almost bridged the short way.

One sledgeful fell. It struck on the invisible wall and rolled into the waves.

“I will not be stopped!” shrieked Regan.

With all his power he struck the wall; he threw himself against it, he cast ice at it.

He went back to the house, took another drink of the stimulant, returned with a heavy sledgehammer which three bird men could not swing. With this he struck the wall, that wall which could not be seen. The concussion knocked the hammer from his hand; the shock threw Regan into the snow.

The wall remained.

Like Rondah, he called the name of the one whom he loved. A new horror came upon him—he was going to sleep!

“My God, not this!” he cried when he saw it was sleep and not weariness. “My God, not this and Rondah still lost! Mercy! mercy!”

He dashed ice-cold water on his face. He deluged his head and hands with snow. He again roused himself with draughts of the powerful stimulant and rushed back to the wall. He was sure that she was there.

“Oh, death of years,” he cried, “stand back until I find her, or come forever!”

Of all the star’s promise Regan neither remembered nor thought. That with it they must live he had forgot. Only for time to find her!

Half-asleep, he struggled over the narrow, icy trails to that wall only to fall in the snow beside it.

Do you not hear it, Rondah? So near, can tinkle of diamond leaves and hum of musical air drown that horrid call, as Regan, beating the wall in despair, helplessly fighting off the sleep which comes with the force of the star itself, a force as resistless as that of tempest or earthquake, falls with that paper clutched in his hand, the paper with “Good-bye” written on it?