"Perhaps you blamed me too." His hand tightened on hers as though he were silently praying for her denial.
Rhine lifted her other hand and put its palm against his cheek. "James," she said softly, "I did not see nor did I hear, but I know that whoever it was it was not the man who is here tonight."
He smiled quietly. "I keep forgetting the quality of mind that I am up against," he said.
"Mind?"
"Mind—or mentality," he said. "You see, Rhine, parallel evolution is impossible. So is the idea of brain transplantation. Hence the only way in which your race can invade ours is by mental replacement, invasion, control—or by wiping the other brain clean and clear and taking over. This leaves you an alien mind in a human body."
She laughed faintly. "I've often told you that you nor anybody else would ever get evidence to prove that I am not a very human person," she said softly. Her hand upon his cheek moved slightly and then slid around to the back of his head. She drew it forward and met his lips with hers.
For but a brief instant he resisted. Then he yielded as her lips parted beneath his invitingly. His arms went around her and he cradled her close to him and he knew with sweet completeness that, alien mind or not, there was no question nor doubt about her responding to him.
Minutes later she leaned back in his arms and chuckled at him. He grunted a wordless demand to explain.
"Why," she said, still chuckling, "you'd have a terrible time explaining to any one of a hundred billion human beings that I am utterly alien and that this friendship of ours is strictly platonic and developed out of a desire for mutual desire for protection against our respective races."
Carroll looked around. The streak of moonlight had moved. It was now casting a pale golden light on an easy chair. Draped across the easy chair back was a pale green negligee almost as intangible and diaphanous as the moonlight. Carroll blushed and remembered where he was—and also why he had come.