of all known science. I shrank from the inevitable disbelief, perhaps
ridicule--nay, perhaps even the graver suspicion that had caused me to
seal my lips while on the ship. Why I myself could only half believe!
How then could I hope to convince others?

And as for the third question--I could not take men into the range of
such a peril without first warning them of what they might encounter;
and if I did warn them--

It was checkmate! If it also was cowardice--well, I have atoned for
it. But I do not hold it so; my conscience is clear.

That fortnight and the greater part of another passed before the ship
I awaited steamed into port. By that time, between my straining
anxiety to be after Throckmartin, the despairing thought that every
moment of delay might be vital to him and his, and my intensely eager
desire to know whether that shining, glorious horror on the moon path
did exist or had been hallucination, I was worn almost to the edge of
madness.

At last the condensers were in my hands. It was more than a week
later, however, before I could secure passage back to Port Moresby and
it was another week still before I started north on the Suwarna, a
swift little sloop with a fifty-horsepower auxiliary, heading straight
for Ponape and the Nan-Matal.

We sighted the Brunhilda some five hundred miles south of the
Carolines. The wind had fallen soon after Papua had dropped astern.
The Suwarna's ability to make her twelve knots an hour without it had
made me very fully forgive her for not being as fragrant as the Javan