no doubt that we will soon be able to establish radio communication with Mars, and with my leisure, money and the required taste for science, I feel that I am admirably fitted to make it come true."

And from that day he was changed, secretive. He refused to tell me what he had discovered. Again and again I begged him to explain and always it was the same vague answer, the same shake of the head, and tightened lips.

It all seemed fantastic and visionary then, Henry's theories about Mars and interstellar communication, but when unusual things began to happen and our peaceful and ordered living was suddenly and violently disturbed, I realized, as never before, that visions often come to reality in an unbelievable way.

At the time we were thrown into such turmoil, and the dread spotlight of publicity centered upon us, our family consisted of Henry and myself, both bachelors; Jane, our spinster sister, and Patricia Royce Preston--Pat for short--a very fascinating young person, who had come to live with us at the tender age of fourteen, after the shocking death of her parents, our youngish sister, Virginia Royce Preston, and her husband, Allston, who were killed in an air-liner crash near Paris.

There is something strangely lovable about a young girl in the process of growing up. The advent of Pat meant, of course, less privacy and the trampling down of staid personal habits and family customs which we held virtually sacred. The fact that we were old and queer and our household drab and rather grotesque, in comparison to the modernistic and rather barbaric splendor of our more fashionable friends, scarcely troubled her. Nothing seemed to matter but that this bright-eyed, brown-haired girl should concentrate all her love and devotion on a trio of old fossils. A warm affection grew between us and our pretty niece. As she blossomed into young womanhood our lives became centered in her. She was now eighteen.Although we were born rich, and received a huge income from the heritage of vast and various real estate holdings on Manhattan Island, both Henry and myself, strangely enough, had never splurged, and never married. I am sure the thought of matrimony never entered Jane's mind. Our natural emotions seemed to be stirred and exalted only by the importance of our family name and our wealth. Romantically, we were strangely neutral, as though, in the pursuit of riches, the family stock had been sort of washed out.

After our college days, Henry and I grew into old-fashioned, mellow bachelorhood, aloof from the world and very 

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