Front matter (continued 4)

She was trying to speak, but I talked fast against it. "You've always wanted to live in the country, haven't you? So does Lea. We're going to buy—Alan and I are—two little homes—near each other, understand—out in the country somewhere in our world of 1945. Where there will be trees and flowers—and the beautiful sky over us."

"Edward, I'd rather you went away. You understand? It's wonderful of you—your plans and all that."

"Nanette, you're talking nonsense!"

"All right. Perhaps I am. They say my hair can be made to grow long again very quickly, Edward." Her voice was trying to be jocular. "That will help, won't it? And yesterday a surgeon was here from Great London. A specialist in plastic surgery—"

The nurse called: "Better go now, Mr. Williams. Not tire her."

There were more days of waiting.

We had long since heard, through Nanette's nurse, her brief account of those last moments in Turber's aero. She had been for a time alone in the control room with Bluntnose and Jonas. They were waiting for Turber. Jonas had fallen into a panic of fear; he sat huddled and chattering, dominated by the Indian who, with stolid indifference to the city tumbling around them, was waiting for the master.

Nanette had stood in the aero doorway. Her mind was groping with a plan. Bluntnose came and pulled her back. He stood in the doorway and shouted welcome to the arriving Turber and the woman Josefa.

Nanette knew that the control room was filled with a blinding glare of light reflected from our white beam so near at hand outside. She heard Jonas scream something about the glare; she could feel it—almost see it. And she could hear, outside the aero, a pandemonium of sound.

She knew every detail of the corridor and the control room. She ran past the huddled Jonas. In a moment Turber would enter, and the aero would flash away and escape. Nanette ran for the instrument table which held the controls. She knew it was close by a window; she knew that the window was open and that it was some six or eight feet above the ground.

Desperate plan! Just a chance to wreck the aero and still to save her own life. She had no knowledge of the controls' operation. She leaped for the table. Her fingers tore at the delicate wires—her clenched little fists smashed the fragile vacuum globes.

She felt the aero sway crazily; she felt it flash as she flung her body through the window. She fell into the black emptiness of insensibility—

The aero had lurched a few seconds into the future, and with every law of Nature transgressed by its derelict flight it had stopped and crashed into ruins.

Nanette's body, hurtling through the air, must have been just within the aero's influence. Inconceivable shock to her! A fall through Space of a few feet. But the impulse from the lurching Time-vehicle had thrown her—as she fell those few feet—into the third day forward.

But it was over now. She lived; these surgeons with their science were giving her back to me.

We waited through those hours; the operation was successful. Her face was—restored.

And so I find myself now with little more to record. We are back now in the world of 1945. We went with Lea while she took leave of her grandfather; and she left him to follow her destiny with Alan. But San would not come. He took us to our own Time-world and left us. He said, forever.

No one saw us as we slipped from the tower into Central Park that last time. A few days only since we had left. It was in the night; and no one was there to see the phantom tower as it came, paused solid for a moment, and then vanished.

Or if we were seen, what of it? No one would believe it; the newspapers would not bother to print it again.

The world here moves quietly along.

Not far from New York City—now in 1945, as I write—there are two little houses, twins upon a small farm. Alan Tremont and his wife live in one of them; and the other is Nanette's home and mine. No one around here is very interested in us. Nanette says that the neighbors sometimes speculate upon Mrs. Tremont's nationality. Some of the women have called her a Scandinavian; they say she looks like one—or talks like one, I forget which. But there is a Swedish woman in the village who is convinced that Lea Tremont is a fair-haired, blue-eyed native girl of the South Sea Islands. The Swedish woman has never been to the South Sea Islands, but she is convinced of it nevertheless.

Once—only last week—Nanette found Lea dancing in the shadowed moonlight of our apple orchard. Dancing for Alan. Her robe of blue fabric—her golden hair flying. Shadow girl! Her fairy figure weaving in and out of the shadows.

But you can't explain to the farmer's wife down the road that Mrs. Tremont is a shadow girl!

THE END