into half-heard oblivion. Nothing out of that world entered upon the roadway.
As they advanced the sweltering heat abated in the steady breeze that was blowing down the road. There was a faint perfume upon it, sweet and light and utterly alien to the fetor of the reeking swamps which bordered their way. The scented gusts of it fanned their hot faces gently.
Smith was glancing over her shoulder at regular intervals, and a pucker of uneasiness drew her brows together.
'If we don't have trouble with that crew of ours before we're through,' she said, 'I'll buy you a case of segir.'
'It 's a bet,' agreed Yarola cheerfully, turning up to Smith her sidelong cat-eyes as insouciantly savage as the ravening jungle around them. 'Though they were a pretty tough trio, at that.'
''They may have the idea they can leave us here and collect our share of the money back home,' said Smith. 'Or once we get the girls they may want to dump us and take them on alone. And if they haven't thought of anything yet, they will.'
'Up to no good, the whole bunch of 'em,' grinned Yarola. 'They—they—'
Her voice faltered and faded into silence. There was a sound upon the breeze. Smith had stopped dead-still, her ears straining to recapture the echo of that murmur which had come blowing toward them on the breeze. Such a sound as that might have come drifting over the walls of Paradise.
In the silence as they stood with caught breath it came again—a lilt of the loveliest, most exquisitely elusive laughter. From very far away it came floating to their ears, the lovely ghost of a man's laughing. There was in it a caress of kissing sweetness. It brushed over Smith's nerves like the brush of lingering fingers and died away into throbbing silence that seemed reluctant to let the exquisite sound of it fade into echoes and cease.
The two women faced each other in rapt bewilderment. Finally Yarola found.his voice.
'Sirens!' she breathed. 'They don't have to sing if they can laugh like that! Come on!'
At a swifter pace they went on up the road. The breeze blew fragrantly against their faces. After a while its perfumed breath carried to their ears another faint, far-away echo of that heavenly laughter, sweeter than honey, drifting on the wind in fading cadences that died away by imperceptible degrees until they could no longer be sure if it was the lovely laughter they heard or the quickened beating of their own hearts.
Yet before them the road stretched emptily, very still in the green twilight under the low-arching trees. There seemed to be a sort of haze here, so that though the road ran straight the green dimness veiled what lay ahead and they walked in a queer silence along the roadway through ravening jungles whose sights and sounds might almost have been on another world for all the heed they paid them. Their ears were straining for a repetition of that low and lovely laughter, and the expectation if it gripped them in an unheeding spell which wiped out all other things but its own delicious echoes.
When they first became aware of a pale glimmer in the twilight greenness ahead, neither could have told. But somehow they were not surprised that a boy was pacing slowly down the roadway toward them, half veiled in the jungle dimness under the trees.
To Smith he was a figure walking straight out of a dream. Even at that distance his beauty had a still enchantment that swallowed up all her wondering in a strange and magical peace. Beauty flowed along the long, curved lines of his body, alternately cloaked and revealed by the drifting garment of his hair, and the slow, swinging grace of his as he walked was a potent enchantment that gripped her helpless in its spell.
Then another glimmer in the dimness caught her eyes away from the bewitchment that approached, and in bewilderment she saw that another boy was pacing forward under the low-hanging trees, his hair swinging about his in slow drifts that veiled and unveiled the loveliness of a body as exquisite as the first. That first was nearer now, so that she could see the enchantment of his face, pale golden and lovelier than a dream with its subtly molded smoothness and delicately tilted planes of cheek-bone and cheek smoothing deliciously upward into a broad, low forehead when the richly colored hair sprang back in tendrils like licking flames. There was a subtly Slavic tilting to those honey-colored features, hinted in the breadth of the cheeks and the sweet straightness with which their planes slanted downward to a mouth colored like hot embers, curving now in a smile that promised-—heaven.
He was very near. She could see the peach-like bloom upon his pale gold limbs and the very throb of the pulse beating in his round throat, and the veiled eyes sought hers. But behind his that second boy was nearing, every whit as lovely as the first, and his beauty drew her gaze magnetlike to its own delicate flow and ripple of enchantment. And beyond her—yes, anothers was coming, and beyond his a fourth; and in the green twilight behind these first, pale blurs bespoke the presence of yet more.
And they were identical. Smith's bewildered eyes flew from face to face, seeking and finding what her brain could, still not quite believe. Feature by feature, curve by curve, they were identical. Five, six, seven honey-colored bodies, half veiled in richly tinted hair, swayed toward her. Seven, eight, nine exquisite faces smiled their pomise of ecstasy. Dizzy and incredulous, she felt a hand grip her shoulder. Yard's voice, bemused, half whispered, murmured,
'Is this paradise—or are we both mad?'
The sound of it brought Smith out of her tranced bewitchment. She shook her head sharply, like a woman half awake and striving for clarity, and said,
'Do they all look alike to you?'
'Every one. Exquisite—exquisite—did you ever see such satin-black hair?'
'Black—black?' Smith muttered that over stupidly, wondering what was so wrong with the word. When realization broke upon her at last, the shock of it was strong enough to jerk her eyes away from the enchantment before her and turn them sharply around to the little Venusian's rapt face.
Its stainless clarity was set in a mask of almost holy wonder. Even the wisdom and weariness and savagery of its black eyes was lost in the glamor of what they gazed on. Her voice murmured, almost to itself,
'And white—so white—like lilies, aren 't they?—blacker and whiter than—'
'Are you crazy?' Smith's voice broke harshly upon the . Venusian's rapture. That trance-like mask broke before the impact of her exclamation. Like a woman awaking from a dream, Yarola turned blinking to her friend.
'Crazy? Why—why—aren't we both? How else could we be seeing a sight like this?'
'One of us is,' said Smith grimly. 'I'm looking at red-haired girls colored like—peaches.'
Yarola blinked again. Her eyes sought the bevy of bewildering loveliness in the roadway. She said,
'It's you, then. They've got black hair, every one of them, shiny and smooth and black as so many lengths of satin, and nothing in creation is whiter than their bodies.'
Smith's pale eyes turned again to the road. Again they met honey-pale curves and planes of velvet flesh half veiled in hair like drifting flames. She shook her head once more, dazedly.
The girls hovered before her in the green dimness, moving with little restive steps back and forth on the hardbeaten road, their feet like the drift of flower-petals for lightness, their hair rippling away from the smoothly swelling curves of their bodies and furling about them again in ceaseless motion. They turned lingering eyes to the two women, but they did not speak.
Then down the wind again came drifting the far echo of that exquisite, lilting laugh. The sweetness of it made the very breeze brush lighter against their faces. It was a caress and a promise and a summoning almost irresistible, floating past them and drifting away into the distance in low, far-off cadences that lingered in their ears long after its audible music had ceased.
The sound of it woke Smith out of her daze, and she turned to the nearest boy, blurting, 'Who are you?'
Among the flutering throng a little shiver of excitement ran. Lovely, identical faces turned to her from all over the whole group, and the one addressed smiled bewilderingly.
'I am Yv
alo,' he said in a voice smoother than silk, pitched to caress the ear and ripple along the very nerve fibers with a slow and soothing sweetness. And he had spoken in English! It was long since Smith had heard her mother tongue. The sound of it plucked at some hidden heart-string with intolerable poignancy, the home language spoken in a voice of enchanted sweetness. For a moment she could not speak.
The silence broke to Yarola's low whistle of surprise.
'I know now we're crazy,' she murmured. 'No other way to explain his speaking in High Venusian. Why, he can't ever have—'
'High Venusian!' exclaimed Smith, startled out of her moment of silence. 'He spoke English!'
They stared at each other, wild suspicions rising in their eyes. In desperation Smith turned and hurled the question again at another of the lovely throng, waiting breathless for his answer to be sure her ears had not deceived her.
'Yvalo—I am Yvalo,' he answered in just that silken voice with which the first had answered. It was English unmistakably, and sweet with memories'of home.
Behind his among the bevy of curved, peach-colored bodies and veils of richly tinted hair other full red lips moved and other velvety voices murmured, 'Yvalo, Yvalo, I am Yvalo,' like dying echoes drifting from mouth to mouth until the last syllable of the strange and lovely name faded into silence.
Across the stunned quiet that fell as their