"You trust me that much?" the girl asked, dumfounded.
"Certainly," he replied without hesitation. "I know enough about you to know that you can keep your mouth shut."
Thus unromantically did Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman, acknowledge the first glimmerings of the dawning perception of a vast fact—that this nurse and he were two between whom there never would nor could exist any iota of doubt or of question.
Then they sat and talked. Not idly, as is the fashion of lovers, of the minutiae of their own romantic affairs, did these two converse, but cosmically, of the entire Universe and of the already existent conflict between the culture of Civilization and Boskonia.
They sat there, romantically enough to all outward seeming; their privacy assured by Kinnison's Lens and by his ever-watchful sense of perception. Time after time, completely unconsciously, that sense reached out to other couples who approached, to touch and to affect their minds so insidiously that they did not know that they were being steered away from the tree in whose black moon-shadow sat the Lensman and the nurse.
Finally the long conversation came to an end and Kinnison assisted his companion to her feet. His frame was straighter, his eyes held a new and brighter light.
"By the way, Kim," she asked idly as they strolled back toward the ballroom, "who is this Klono, by whom you were swearing a while ago? Another spaceman's god, like Noshabkeming, of the Valerians?"
"Something like him, only more so," he laughed. "A combination of Noshabkeming, some of the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans, all three of the Fates, and quite a few other things as well. I think, originally, from Corvina, but fairly widespread through certain sections of the Galaxy now. He's got so much stuff—teeth and horns, claws and whiskers, tail and everything—that he's much more satisfactory to swear by than any other space-god I know of."
"But why do men have to swear at all, Kim?" she queried, curiously. "It's so silly."