"No." In truth, I did not know what sort of answer it would be best to make. Whatever she must have read in my eyes, it stirred her to fury. Her fingers with the strength of a man in them, dug into my shoulders. Her gaze searched me.
"You think you love someone else? Is that it?"
That was horribly startling; but she did not mean it just that way. She amended, with caustic venom: "That little Anita Prince! You thought you loved her! Was that it?"
"No!"
But I hardly deceived her. "Sacred to her memory! Her ratlike little face, soft voice like a purring, sniveling cat! Is that what you're remembering, Gregg Haljan?"
I tried to laugh. "What nonsense!"
"Is it? Then why are you cold under my touch? Am I, a girl descended from the Martian flame-workers, impotent to awaken a man?"
A woman scorned! In all the universe there could be no more dangerous an enemy. An incredible venom shot from her eyes.
"That miserable mouselike creature! Well for her that my brother killed her."
It struck me cold. If Anita were unmasked, beyond all the menace of Miko's wooing, I knew that the venom of Moa's jealousy was a greater danger.