Her eyes were veiled, but one could guess what lay behind them (and one must—one must tread the right measure). “Yes.”
“You are still angry with me.”
He ran across the room and seized her in his arms, so she let her dark head slide down against his neck. “What can I say?” kissing her ear and the side of her neck (yet at the same time feeling a revulsion almost physical, and all the time the thought of that other was at the back of his mind, not coming forward because he dared not let it).
A sudden tenseness was in her grip; she flung her head back and looked at him (out of eyes that spoke distrust). “Rodvard! What is wrong?”
“Nothing. We must hurry and go to supper or they will miss us.” A rivulet of perspiration coursed down his spine. She kissed him long and hard (with the doubt still there) and was gone.
Afterward it was the tall Vyana who went to walk with them. Leece took his hand; all gay, but casting glances that seemed to show an unasked question in her mind (so that Rodvard wondered whether she might not have some part of the Blue Star’s gift). He said to Vyana; “Tell me something. If you were in the Myonessae, how could I come to see you?”
Her face fell sober. “I am not a Myonessan yet. But if I were, it would not be easy unless you became at least a learner. The Myonessans have no contacts with the outer world save those they make themselves.”
“A strange rule,” he said, not daring to push the matter further lest he betray his thought.
Now Leece spoke, trying to justify the regimen under which the girls lived, but Vyana, being so near to the sisterhood, was doubtful, and Rodvard heard both of them with only part of his mind, considering what he must do. There was no question but he must do it, ah, no; the expelled of the Myonessae, he knew well, were shut away in gloomy prisons for “instruction”, it might be for years. The couvertine Lolau was—
“—do you not think so, Rodvard?” said Leece’s voice.