glance of coquetry. "And if you swim like my father, without much trouble I could drown you. You think so?"

"No argument on that," I said. Queerly I seemed to feel, just for that instant, almost a vague resentment. Resentment of a man at the superior prowess of a woman. Instinctive, of course.

She seemed to understand it, and she laughed again. "Our young men of Venus are like that," she said, "for they, too, cannot swim very well." And instantly her face clouded. "That, too, is part of the trouble of my world—the men who would have their mates kept from the water so that the man may be in everything the master. Our virgins do not like that."

She clung to my hand as we went up the palmetto-lined path to the camp. And suddenly she seemed frightened. An aura of sudden menace was here. I, too, could feel it. Allen had started supper. The things were out; food was in the frying pan, burning now in a charred mass over the campfire flames.

"Kent—something wrong—"

We stood tense. Like animals abruptly scenting danger, yet having no least idea what it was, or from whence it could come.... And abruptly in the silence, the murmuring little radio here changed from music to a newscaster's flash.

"Nereid listen—news of you—" I murmured.

Something had been seen, late this afternoon, dropping swiftly from the sky—something, a meteorite?—the few eyewitnesses differed in trying to describe it. "Mysterious missile drops into the Gulf ten miles off lonely Palmetto Key." The newscaster drew on his imagination, conjecturing what the round shining thing could have been, which two fishing boats had reported seeing coming hurtling down from the afternoon sky, dropping into the glassy Gulf.

I smiled at Nereid as for a moment we stood listening. Her little falling space-cylinder already was causing comment. I could envisage the incredulous amazement of the authorities at Tampa when I took her there, told them who she was. The world would ring with it. Blaring newscasters: "Stranded Venus girl! Marooned on Earth! Venus inhabited! Venus threatened with bloody revolution! Appeals to Earth for help! Daughter of two worlds brings secret of spaceflight to Earth, and loses it on her arrival!"

And some would try to be humorous: "Girl from Venus brings gift of spaceflight secret, and loses it before she can give it to us! Isn't that what you would 

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