“Very well, I promise.”

With an agitated mind I repaired to the tryst next evening and waited for Alumion.  How should I break the news to her, and how would she receive it?

The cool airs of the water, and the glorious pageant of the sunset calmed my troubled spirit.  All day the serene and beamy azure of the heavens had been plumed with snowy cloudlets of graceful and capricious form, which, as the sun sank to the horizon, were tinged with fleeting glows resembling the iris of a dove’s neck, or the hues of a dying dolphin.  The great luminary himself was lost in a golden glamour, and a single bright star shone palely through a rosy mist, which covered all the southern sky, like a diamond seen through a bridal veil of gauze.

That lone star was the earth.

Strange to say, I felt a kind of yearning towards it, a yearning as of home-sickness, and it seemed to reproach me for having thought of forsaking it.  I wondered what my friends were doing now within that blaze; perhaps they were looking at Venus and speculating on what I was about.  How delighted I should be to see them again, and show them my incomparable wife—­but could I ever take her there?

Whilst I was musing, the low sweet voice of Alumion thrilled me to the marrow.  I turned and saw her.  She was dressed to-night in a filmy vesture of opalescent or pearly white, partly diaphanous, and having a deep fringe of gold.  There was a pink blush on her cheek and a sparkle of girlish love in her celestial eyes.  Never had she seemed more ravishingly beautiful.

    “Beauty too rare for use, for earth too dear.”

“You were gazing on the star.  You did not hear my coming,” she said with a little feminine pout.

“I was thinking of you, darling.”

She smiled again.

“Is it not a lovely star?” she said.  “We call it the star of Love—­the star of the Blest.”

“It is my home.”

“Your home!” she exclaimed with a look of surprise and wonderment.

“You have heard that I come from another world.”

“Yes, but I did not know it was a star.  And is that beautiful star your home?”

“Yes, beloved; and I am sorry to say I must return there soon again.”

“And I will go!  You will take me with you to that fair world!”

I thought of all the crime and folly, the deceit, violence, and wretchedness lurking behind that pure and peaceful ray.  Alas! how could I tell her the truth and destroy her illusions.  She was innocent as a child, and an instinct warned me to keep the knowledge of evil from her, while a contrary spirit urged me to speak.

“You might not find it so fair as it looks from here.”

“I am sure it cannot be an evil world since you come from it.  To us it is a sacred star.”

“If the inhabitants could see it as I do now, perhaps the sight would make them lead better lives—­would shame them into being worthier of their dwelling-place.”