The Masquerader
A moment when beyond all thought of the nearby brigand—or the possibility of an eavesdropping ray trained now upon my little cubby—a moment while Anita and I held each other; and whispered those things which could mean nothing to the world, but which were all the world to us.
Then it was she whose wits brought us back from the shining fairyland of our love, into the sinister reality of the Planetara.
"Gregg, if they are listening—"
I pushed her away. This brave little masquerader! Not for my life, or for all the lives on the ship, would I consciously have endangered her.
"But the ore," I said aloud. "There was, in Grantline's message—See here, Prince."
Coniston was too far away on the deck to hear us. Anita went to my door again and waved at him reassuringly. I put my ear to the door opening, and listened at the space across the grid of the ventilator over my bunk. The hum of a vibration would have been audible at those two points. But there was nothing.
"It's all right," I whispered. "Anita—not you who was killed! I can hardly realize it now. Not you whom they buried yesterday morning."
We stood and whispered, and she clung to me—so small beside me. With the black robe thrown aside, it seemed that I could not miss the curves of her woman's figure. A dangerous game she was playing. Her hair had been cut short to the base of her neck, in the fashion of her dead brother. Her eyelashes had been clipped; the line of her brows altered. And now, in the light of my ray tube as it shone upon her earnest face, I could remark other changes. Glutz, the little beauty specialist, was in this secret. With plastic skill he had altered the set of her jaw with his wax—put masculinity there.
She was whispering: "It was—was poor George whom Miko shot."