all things. And that sigh thrilled through the empty spaces of the
illimitable: it breathed the breath of promise over the frozen hills of
the outside planets where the night-frost had lasted without beginning:
and the waters of ten thousand nameless oceans, girding nameless planets,
were stirred, trembling into their depth. It crossed the illimitable
spaces where the herding aerolites swirl forever through space in the
wake of careering world, and all their whistling wings answered to it.
It reverberated through the grey wastes of vacuity, and crossed the
dark oceans of the Outside, even to the black shores of the eternal
night beyond.

"And hardly had echo of that breath died away in the hollow of the
heavens and the empty wombs of a million barren worlds, when the light
brightened again, and drawing in upon itself became definite and took
form, and therefrom, at the moment of primitive conception, there came--"

And just then, as she had read so far as that, when all my faculties were
aching to know what came next--whether this were but the idle scribbling
of a vacuous fool, or something else--there rose the sound of soft flutes
and tinkling bells in the corridors, as seneschals wandered piping round
the palace to call folk to meals, a smell of roast meat and grilling
fish as that procession lifted the curtains between the halls, and--

"Dinner!" shouted my sweet Martian, slapping the covers of The Secret of
the Gods together and pushing the stately tome headlong from the table.
"Dinner! 'Tis worth a hundred thousand planets to the hungry!"

Nothing I could say would keep her, and, scarcely knowing whether to laugh
or to be angry at so unseemly an interruption, but both being purposeless
I dug my hands into my pockets, and somewhat sulkily refusing Heru's