Utilitarianism has extinguished in Mars the use of compliment and circumlocution; and until I concluded, their looks of mild perplexity showed that neither Zulve nor her husband caught my purpose.  I fancied—­for, not daring to look them in the face, I had turned my downcast glance on Eveena—­that she had perhaps somewhat sooner divined the object of my thoughts.  However, a silence of surprise—­was it of reluctance?—­followed, and then Zulve bent over her daughter and looked into her half-averted face, while Esmo answered—­

“What you should ask I promised to give; what you have asked I give, in so far as it is mine to give, in willing fulfilment of my pledge.  But, of course, what I can give is but my free permission to my daughter to answer for herself.  You will be, I hope, within a few days at furthest, one of those in whose possession alone a woman of my house could be safe or content; and, free by the law of the land to follow her own wish, she is freed by her father’s voice from the rule which the usage of ten thousand years imposes on the daughters of our brotherhood.”

Zulve then looked up, for Eveena had hidden her face in her mother’s robe, and said—­

“If my child will not speak for herself I must speak for her, and in my own name and in hers I fulfil her father’s promise.  And now let my husband tell his story, for nothing can solemnise more appropriately the betrothal of a daughter of the Star, than her admission to the knowledge of the Order whose privileges are her heritage.”

“At the time,” Esmo began, “when material science had gained a decided ascendant, and enforced the recognition of its methods as the only ones whereby certain knowledge and legitimate belief could be attained, those who clung most earnestly to convictions not acquired or favoured by scientific logic were sorely dismayed.  They were confounded, not so much by the yet informal but irrevocable majority-vote against them, as by an instinctive misgiving that Science was right; and by irrepressible doubts whether that which would not bear the application of scientific method could in any sense be true or trustworthy knowledge.  At the same time, to apply a scientific method to the cherished beliefs threatened only to dissolve them.  Fortunately for them and their successors, there was living at that time one of the most remarkable and original thinkers whom our race has produced.  From him came the suggestions that gave impulse to our learning and birth to our Order.  ’The reasonings, the processes of Science,’ he affirmed,’are beyond challenge.  Their trustworthiness depends not on their subject-matter, but on their own character; not on their relation to outward Nature, but on their conformity to the laws of thought.  Their upholders are right in affirming that what will not ultimately bear the test of their application cannot be knowledge, and probably—­for the practical purposes of human life we may say certainly—­cannot