Then he went to the lower saloon, where Zaidie was busy with her usual morning tidy-up.

Now that the mystery was explained there was no reason to keep her in the dark.

Indeed, he had given her his word that he would conceal from her no danger, however great, that might threaten them when he had once assured himself of its existence.
She listened to him in silence and without a sign of fear beyond a little lifting of the eyelids and a little fading of the colour in her cheeks.
"And if we can't resist this force," she said, when he had finished, "it will drag us millions--perhaps millions of millions--of miles away from our own system into outer space, and we shall either fall on the surface of this dead sun and be reduced to a puff of lighted gas in an instant, or some other body will pull us away from it, and then another away from that, and so on, and we shall wander among the stars for ever and ever until the end of time!" "If the first happens, darling, we shall die--together--without knowing it.

It's the second that I'm most afraid of.

The _Astronef_ may go on wandering among the stars for ever--but we have only water enough for three weeks more.