So revolting was the idea of their mental servitude to such an enemy of the human race as they could not but believe Olga Romanoff to be, and so frightful were the consequences that must infallibly befall humanity in consequence of it, that their parents would rather have known them dead than living under such degrading circumstances. To the Aerians, far advanced as they were beyond the standards of the present day, both in religion and philosophy, the conception of death was one which included no terrors and no more regret than was natural and common to all humanity at parting with a kinsman or a friend.
As they were destined to prove, when face to face with a crisis unparalleled in the history of humanity, they regarded death merely as a natural and necessary transition from one state of existence to another, which would be higher or lower according to the preponderance of good or evil done in this life.
If, therefore, the parents and kinsmen of those who were now exiles and wanderers upon the ocean wastes could have chosen, they would infinitely rather have known that Alan and Alexis had shared the fate of their companions in the Norwegian snowdrift than they would have learnt that for six years they had been the slaves and playthings of a woman who, as they guessed from Alan’s letter, combined the ambition of a Semiramis with the vices of a Messalina, and who had used the skill and knowledge which they had acquired and inherited as Princes of the Air with the avowed purpose of subverting the dominion of Aeria, undoing all that their ancestors had done, and bringing back the evil era of strife, bloodshed, and political slavery.
So, too, with Alma. As she had told Isma, she would a thousand times rather have seen her lover dead than degraded to such base uses. Although she, like everyone else in Aeria, admitted that the strange circumstances absolved both Alan and Alexis from all moral blame and responsibility, she, in common with her own father and mother, and perhaps, also, with others not less intimately concerned, found it impossible to forget or ignore the taint of such an association, and to look upon it as a stain that might never be washed away.
Indeed, the only member of the family council who openly proclaimed her belief that the two exiles would, if ever they returned, come back to Aeria better and stronger men than those who had known no evil was Isma, who repeated, with all the winning eloquence at her command, all the arguments that she had used to Alma during their cruise together. Whether Alma and the others would ever come round to her view could of course only be proved by time, but it is nevertheless certain that when the family council at last separated the hearts of its members were less sore than they would have been had Alan and Alexis not possessed such an advocate as the girl who had so good a double reason for pleading their causes.
