No more words came. The message ended. Not a motion or sound succeeded this wonderful trans-abysmal dispatch.
Well, here, at last, was the long expected, impossible, amazing reality. When I had deciphered the last word, when I had it borne fully in upon me, the significance of it all, I turned to the one natural effort to answer this Martian communication. I sent out from the battery of our transmitter the longest wave of magnetic oscillation I could emit. The message was simple: "Have received all. Await more. Transmission perfect."
CHAPTER IV.
Again for weeks I watched the station. My assistants relieved me, and amongst them was now included Miss Dodan. It was only a few days after the Dodans found me at the register, absorbed in receiving my father's message, that Miss Dodan called. She ran toward me at the open door of the station, her face fixed in an anxious expression of half-alarmed expectation.
"Did you really, Mr. Dodd, hear anything? Is it true that something came from your father. Oh, tell me, can it be possible?"
I took her clasped hands in my own, looked into her face and told her everything. She was the first visitor to the station since the day of the marvellous experience. My assistants had promised secrecy, which I reinforced effectively by doubling their salaries. I felt I ought not to have revealed this thing to Miss Dodan, and when in the first impulse of confidence everything so unwittingly passed my lips, I took her arm in mine and walked out upon the broad plateau toward the opposite end where our smaller experimenting station had been built.
"Miss Dodan," I said, "I am going to ask a great favor of you."
"Yes," she answered, half musingly, for the tremendous fact I had related had half robbed her of her consciousness of passing things.
"I want you solemnly for the present to promise me not to reveal the strange thing I have told you. It would hardly be believed. No, I am sure it would be laughed at, and I would become in the eyes of everyone a foolish, impossible dreamer. This would give me a deep sorrow. My father's name would be dragged into the mire of this common ridicule. You revered my father."
I bent more closely over her, I felt her breath upon my cheeks, her eyes seemed fixed in mine, and then I did what I had never done before, I kissed the lips of a woman and it was also the lips of the woman I loved. There was no resistance, no withdrawal; a tremor—was it pleasure?—seemed to disturb her for a moment and again I kissed her. This time with a quiet effort toward release she separated herself from me, and while I still held her hands, our walk stopped and we faced each other, just where looking westward the spires, and flocking houses of Christ Church came fully in view.