He lifted the switch and we listened. Our passengers on the lower deck
at once, but not less than five at a time, explained themselves to
Vincent. They had been taken from the bosom of their families, stripped
of their possessions, given food without finger-bowls, and cast into
captivity in a noisome dungeon.

'But look here,' said Arnott aghast; 'they're saying what isn't true. My
lower deck isn't noisome, and I saw to the finger-bowls myself.'

'My people talk like that sometimes in Little Russia,' said Dragomiroff.
'We reason with them. We never kill. No!'

'But it's not true,' Arnott insisted. 'What can you do with people who
don't tell facts? They're mad!'

'Hsh!' said Pirolo, his hand to his ear. 'It is such a little time since
all the Planet told lies.'

We heard Vincent silkily sympathetic. Would they, he asked, repeat their
assertions in public--before a vast public? Only let Vincent give them a
chance, and the Planet, they vowed, should ring with their wrongs. Their
aim in life--two women and a man explained it together--was to reform
the world. Oddly enough, this also had been Vincent's life-dream. He
offered them an arena in which to explain, and by their living example
to raise the Planet to loftier levels. He was eloquent on the moral
uplift of a simple, old-world life presented in its entirety to a
deboshed civilisation.

Could they--would they--for three months certain, devote themselves
under his auspices, as missionaries, to the elevation of mankind at a