mother than her Earth father, water was almost her natural element, since her blood did not need the replenishment of oxygen so quickly as ours, so that for ten minutes or more she need not breathe.

I learned only fragmentary details of all this that Midge Peters had to tell, there in the boat as we headed for the island. Surely I must admit that the weirdness of it startled me, and for just a moment perhaps, it vaguely occurred to me that here was some trickster, or a mentality unbalanced. But to look at her, was to know that certainly here was no Earth girl!

I had to believe her. But I must admit, I gave little thought, there in the boat, to any menace to her world, or to the ironic fact that she had brought to Earth the treasured secret of spaceflight and already had lost it so that she was marooned here. Here was the amazing, beautiful little creature herself in the boat beside me, and what she was saying of Venus dwindled into insignificance with the stirring of my pulses as I stared at her. Slim little body, hardly matured, but fashioned with almost a normal earthly beauty. Yet there was a strangeness that made her different. The flush of pink coral to her flesh; her shimmering robe with moonbeams rippling on it like moonrays on green rippled water; her long tawny tresses, drying now in the wind.

But most of all, I think, the strangeness was in her eyes. The sea was there in the green depths of her eyes. Eyes that mirrored the soul of a strange girlhood; eyes that had seen things strange to me, reflecting now the thoughts, emotions of another world.

"You look at me so queerly," she said suddenly. "Why is that?"

"Well you—you—" Suddenly it was hard to say anything of my conflicting thoughts. "You—well, why wouldn't I be startled? A little sea nymph. You should have been named Nereid."

Again her laugh rippled.

"Nereid? Why yes, my father calls me that, though my mother named me Midge. That was when she learned English. So I am not like Earth-girls? My father has said it many times. But you—"

Her gaze at me was earnest, direct. "You do not look queer to me," she added. "You look much in the fashion of my father, grown younger."

Surely I have given only a vague picture indeed of that half hour in the boat with Nereid as the puttering little outboard motor drove us to the island where Jack Allen would be waiting for me. Half an hour, 

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