id not think it wise to ask him about Prince.

"Are you hungry, Haljan?" he demanded.

"Yes."

A steward came with a meal. The saturnine Hahn stood at my door with a
weapon upon me while I ate. They were taking no chances--and they were
wise not to.

The day passed. Day and night, all the same of aspect here in the starry
vault of Space. But with the ship's routine it was day.

And then another time of sleep. I slept, fitfully, worrying, trying to
plan. Within a few hours we would be nearing the asteroid.

The time of sleep was nearly passed. My chronometer marked five A. M. of
our original Earth starting time. The seal of my cubby door hissed. The
door slowly, opened.

Anita!

She stood there with her cloak around her. A distance away on the
shadowed deck-space Coniston was loitering.

"Anita!" I whispered it.

"Gregg, dear!"

She turned and gestured to the watching brigand. "I will not be long,
Coniston."

She came in and half closed the door upon us, leaving it open enough so
that we could make sure that Coniston did not advance.

I stepped back where he could not see us.

"Anita!"

She flung herself into my opened arms.

CHAPTER XV

_The Masquerader_

A moment when beyond all thought of the nearby brigand--or the
possibility of an eavesdropping ray trained now upon my little cubby--a
moment while Anita and I held each other; and whispered those things
which could mean nothing to the world, but which were all the world to
us.

Then it was she whose wits brought us back from the shining fairyland of
our love, into the sinister reality of the _Planetara_.

"Gregg, if they are listening--"

I pushed her away. This brave little masquerader! Not for my life, or
for all the lives on the ship, would I consciously have endangered her.

"But the ore," I said aloud. "There was, in Grantline's message--See
here, Prince."

Coniston was too far away on the deck to hear us. Anita went to my door
again and waved at him reassuringly. I put my ear to the door opening,
and listened at the space across the grid of the ventilator over my
bunk. The hum of a vibration would have been audible at those two
points. But there was nothing.

"It's all right," I whispered. "Anita--not you who was killed! I can
hardly realize it now. Not you whom they buried yesterday morning."

We stood and whispered, and she clung to me--so small beside me. With
the black robe thrown aside, it seemed that I could not m