Everybody seemed to be in a conspiracy to push me into Martin’s arms—­Alma above all others.  Being a woman she read my secret, and I could see from the first that she wished to justify her own conduct in relation to my husband by putting me into the same position with Martin.

“Seen Mr. Conrad to-day?” she would ask.

“Not to-day,” I would answer.

“Really?  And you such old friends!  And staying in the same hotel, too!”

When she saw that I was struggling hard she reminded my husband of his intention of asking Martin to dinner, and thereupon a night was fixed and a party invited.

Martin came, and I was only too happy to meet him in company, though the pain and humiliation of the contrast between him and my husband and his friends, and the difference of the atmosphere in which he lived from that to which I thought I was doomed for ever, was almost more than I could bear.

I think they must have felt it themselves, for though their usual conversation was of horses and dogs and race-meetings, I noticed they were silent while Martin in his rugged, racy poetic way (for all explorers are poets) talked of the beauty of the great Polar night, the cloudless Polar day, the midnight calm and the moonlight on the glaciers, which was the loveliest, weirdest, most desolate, yet most entrancing light the world could show.

“I wonder you don’t think of going back to the Antarctic, if it’s so fascinating,” said Alma.

“I do.  Bet your life I do,” said Martin, and then he told them what he had told me on the launch, but more fully and even more rapturously—­the story of his great scheme for saving life and otherwise benefiting humanity.

For hundreds of years man, prompted merely by the love of adventure, the praise of achievement, and the desire to know the globe he lived on, had been shouldering his way to the hitherto inviolable regions of the Poles; but now the time had come to turn his knowledge to account.

“How?” said my husband.

“By putting himself into such a position,” said Martin, “that he will be able to predict, six, eight, ten days ahead, the weather of a vast part of the navigable and habitable world—­by establishing installations of wireless telegraphy as near as possible to the long ice-barrier about the Pole from which ice-floes and icebergs and blizzards come, so that we can say in ten minutes from the side of Mount Erebus to half the southern hemisphere, ‘Look out.  It’s coming down,’ and thus save millions of lives from shipwreck, and hundreds of millions of money.”

“Splendid, by Jove!” said Mr. Eastcliff.

“Yes, ripping, by jingo!” said Mr. Vivian.

“A ridiculous dream!” muttered my husband, but not until Martin had gone, and then Alma, seeing that I was all aglow, said: 

“What a lovely man!  I wonder you don’t see more of him, Mary, my love.  He’ll be going to the ends of the earth soon, and then you’ll be sorry you missed the chance.”