If anybody could have pitied Aline more than she pitied herself, as she waded through the adventures of Mr. Quayle, it would have been Ashe Marson.  He had writhed as he wrote the words and she writhed as she read them.  The Honorable Freddie also writhed, but with tense excitement.

“What’s the matter?  Don’t stop!” he cried as Aline’s voice ceased.

“I’m getting hoarse, Freddie.”

Freddie hesitated.  The desire to remain on the trail with Gridley struggled with rudimentary politeness.

“How would it be—­Would you mind if I just took a look at the rest of it myself?  We could talk afterward, you know.  I shan’t be long.”

“Of course!  Do read if you want to.  But do you really like this sort of thing, Freddie?”

“Me?  Rather!  Why—­don’t you?”

“I don’t know.  It seems a little—­I don’t know.”

Freddie had become absorbed in his story.  Aline did not attempt further analysis of her attitude toward Mr. Quayle; she relapsed into silence.

It was a silence pregnant with thought.  For the first time in their relations, she was trying to visualize to herself exactly what marriage with this young man would mean.  Hitherto, it struck her, she had really seen so little of Freddie that she had scarcely had a chance of examining him.  In the crowded world outside he had always seemed a tolerable enough person.  To-day, somehow, he was different.  Everything was different to-day.

This, she took it, was a fair sample of what she might expect after marriage.  Marriage meant—­to come to essentials—­that two people were very often and for lengthy periods alone together, dependent on each other for mutual entertainment.  What exactly would it be like, being alone often and for lengthy periods with Freddie?  Well, it would, she assumed, be like this.

“It’s all right,” said Freddie without looking up.  “He did get out!  He had a bomb on him, and he threatened to drop it and blow the place to pieces unless the blighters let him go.  So they cheesed it.  I knew he had something up his sleeve.”

Like this!  Aline drew a deep breath.  It would be like this—­forever and ever and ever—­until she died.  She bent forward and stared at him.

“Freddie,” she said, “do you love me?” There was no reply.  “Freddie, do you love me?  Am I a part of you?  If you hadn’t me would it be like trying to go on living without breathing?”

The Honorable Freddie raised a flushed face and gazed at her with an absent eye.

“Eh?  What?” he said.  “Do I—­Oh; yes, rather!  I say, one of the blighters has just loosed a rattlesnake into Gridley Quayle’s bedroom through the transom!”

Aline rose from her seat and left the room softly.  The Honorable Freddie read on, unheeding.

* * *

Ashe Marson had not fallen far short of the truth in his estimate of the probable effect on Mr. Peters of the information that his precious scarab had once more been removed by alien hands and was now farther from his grasp than ever.  A drawback to success in life is that failure, when it does come, acquires an exaggerated importance.  Success had made Mr. Peters, in certain aspects of his character, a spoiled child.