Miko was coming back. He stopped this time. "Your brother would see you, Anita. He sent me to bring you to his room."
The glance he shot me had a touch of insolence. I stood up and he towered a head over me.
Anita said, "Oh yes. I'll come."
I bowed. "I will see you again, Miss Prince. I thank you for a pleasant half-hour."
The Martian led her away. Her little figure was like a child with a giant. It seemed, as they passed the length of the deck, with me staring after them, that he took her arm roughly. And that she shrank from him in fear.
And they did not go inside. As though to show me that he had merely taken her from me, he stopped at a distant deck window and stood talking to her. Once he picked her up as one would pick up a child to show it some distant object through the window.
Was Anita afraid of this Martian's wooing? Yet was held to him by some power he might have over her brother? The vagrant thought struck me.
VIII
The rest of that afternoon and evening were a blank confusion to me. Anita's words, the touch of my hand on her arm, that vast realm of what might be for us, like the glimpse of a magic land of happiness which I had seen in her eyes, and perhaps she had seen in mine—all this surged within me.