It was an hour before Eveena seemed in a condition to be removed, and perhaps I was not very urgent to hurry her away.  I had done no more than any man, the lowest and meanest on Earth, must have done under the circumstances.  I can scarcely enter into the feelings of the fellow-man who, in my position, could have recognised a choice but between saving and perishing with the helpless creature entrusted to his charge.  But hereditary disbelief in any power above the physical forces of Nature, in any law higher than that of man’s own making, has rendered human nature in Mars something utterly different from, perhaps, hardly intelligible to, the human nature of a planet forty million miles nearer the Sun.  Though brought up in an affectionate home, Eveena shared the ideas of the world in which she was born; and so far accepted its standards of opinion and action as natural if not right, that the risk I had run, the effort I had made to save her, seemed to her scarcely less extraordinary than it had appeared to the Zampta.  She rated its devotion and generosity as highly as he appreciated its extravagance and folly; and if he counted me a madman, she was disposed to elevate me into a hero or a demi-god.  The tones and looks of a maiden in such a temper, however perfect her maidenly reserve, would, I fancy, be very agreeable to men older than I was, either in constitution or even in experience.  I doubt whether any man under fifty would have been more anxious than myself to cut short our period of repose, broken as it was, when I refused to listen to her tearful penitence and self-reproach, by occasional words and looks of gratitude and admiration.  I did, however, remember that it was expedient to refasten the window, and re-attach the seals, before departing.  At the end of the hour’s rest I allowed my charge and myself, I had recovered more or less completely the nervous force which had been for a while utterly exhausted, less by the effort than by the terror that preceded it.  I was neither surprised, nor perhaps as much grieved as I should have been, to find that Eveena could hardly walk; and felt to the full the value of those novel conditions which enabled me to carry her the more easily in my arms, though much oppressed even by so slight an effort in that thin air, to the place where we had left our carriage—­no inconsiderable distance by the path we had to pursue.  Before starting on our return I had, in despite of her most earnest entreaties, managed to recover her head-dress and veil, at a risk which, under other circumstances, I might not have cared to encounter.  But had she been seen without it on our return, the comments of the whole neighbourhood would have been such as might have disturbed even her father’s cool indifference.  We reached her home in safety, and with little notice, having, of course, drawn the canopy around us as completely as possible.  I was pleased to find that only her younger sister, to whose care I at once committed her, was there at present, the elders not having yet returned.  I took care to detach from the bird’s neck the tablet which had served its purpose so well.  The creature had found his way home within half-an-hour after I dismissed him, and had frightened Zevle [Stella] not a little; though the message, which a fatal result would have made sufficiently intelligible to Esmo, utterly escaped her comprehension.