A Honeymoon in Space Read Free Page B

unconditionally to his will, or committing suicide by starvation.
    They had not even the option of jumping out, for they did not know how to open the sliding doors; and even if they had done, what feminine nerves could have faced a leap into that awful gulf which lay below them, a two-thousand-foot dive through the clouds into the waters of the wintry Atlantic?
    They looked at each other in speechless, dazed amazement. Far away below them on the other side of the clouds the St. Louis was steaming eastward, and with her were going the last hopes of the coronet which was to be the matrimonial equivalent of Miss Zaidie’s beauty and Russell Rennick’s millions.
    They were no longer of the world. Its laws could no longer protect them. Anything might happen, and that anything depended absolutely on the will of the lord and master of the extraordinary vessel which, for the present, was their only world.
    â€œMy dearest Zaidie,” Mrs. Van Stuyler gasped, when she at length recovered the power of articulate speech, “what an entirely too awful thing this is! Why, it’s abduction and nothing less. Indeed it’s worse, for he’s taken us clean off the earth, and there’s no more chance of rescue than if he took us to one of those planets he said he could go to. If I didn’t feel a great responsibility for you, dear, I believe I should faint.”
    By this time Miss Zaidie had recovered a good deal of her usual composure. The excitement of the upward rush, and what was left of the momentary physical fear, had flushed her cheeks and lighted her eyes. Even Mrs. Van Stuyler thought her looking, if possible, more beautiful than she had done under the most favourable of terrestrial circumstances. There was a something else too, which she didn’t altogether like to see, a sort of resignation to her fate which, in a young lady situated as she was then, Mrs. Van Stuyler considered to be distinctly improper.
    â€œIt is rather startling, isn’t it?” she said, with hardly a trace of emotion in her voice; “but I have no doubt that everything will be all right in the end.”
    â€œEverything all right, my dear Zaidie! What on earth, or I might say under heaven, do you mean?”
    â€œI mean,” replied Zaidie even more composedly than before, and also with a little tightening of her lips, “that Lord Redgrave is the owner of this vessel, and that therefore it is quite impossible that anything out of the way could happen to us—I mean anything more out of the way than this wonderful jump from the sea to the sky has been, unless, of course, Lord Redgrave is going to take us for a voyage among the stars.”
    â€œZaidie Rennick!” said Mrs. Van Stuyler, bridling up into her most frigid dignity, “I am more than surprised to hear you talk in such a strain. Perfectly safe, indeed! Has it not struck you that we are absolutely at this man’s—this Lord Redgrave’s, mercy, that he can take us where he likes, and treat us just as he pleases?”
    â€œMy dear Mrs. Van,” replied Zaidie, dropping back into her familiar form of address, but speaking even more frigidly than her chaperon had done, “you seem to forget that, however extraordinary our situation may be just now, we are in the care of an English gentleman. Lord Redgrave was a friend of my father’s, the only man who believed in his ideals, the only man who realised them, the only man—”
    â€œThat you were ever in love with, eh?” said Mrs. Van Stuyler with a snap in her voice. “Is that so? Ah, I begin to see something now.”
    â€œAnd I think, if you possess your soul in patience, you will see something more before long,” snapped Miss Zaidie in reply. Then she stopped abruptly and the flush on her cheek deepened, for at that moment Lord Redgrave came up the companion way from the lower deck carrying a big silver tray with a coffee pot, three cups and