right hand were tapping patiently on his sleeve.

If Perat should at this moment probe the prisoner's mind....

Evelyn, in turning to smile at Perat, knocked the bottle from the table to the floor, where it broke in a liquid tinkle. She put her hands to her mouth in contrite apology. The judge-provost frowned, and Perat eyed her curiously. The prisoner was seized with such a spasm of coughing that the provost, who had stood to pronounce sentence, paused in annoyance. The wracking ceased.

The provost picked up the Faeg lying before him.

"Have you anything to say before you die?" he asked coldly.

The ex-inquisitor stood and turned a triumphant face to him. "Excellency, you ask, where is the woman prisoner who escaped from me? Well, I can tell you...."

He clutched wildly at his throat, coughed horridly, and bent in Evelyn Kane's direction.

"She...."

His lips, which were rapidly growing purple, moved without saying anything intelligible, and he suddenly crashed over the chair and to the floor.

The prison physician leaped to him, stethoscope out. After a few minutes, he stood up, puzzled and frowning, in the midst of a strained silence. "Odd, very odd," he muttered.

"Did the prisoner faint?" asked the judge-provost incuriously, lowering the Faeg.

"The prisoner's lungs are filled with liquid, apparently the result of hyperactive adrenals," commented the baffled physician. "He's dead, and don't ask me to explain why."

Evelyn smothered a series of hacking coughs in her handkerchief as the court broke up in excited groups. From the corner of her eye she saw that Perat was studying her thoughtfully.

IV

Two weeks later, very late at "night", Perat lay stretched gloomily on his sleeping couch. On the other side of the room Evelyn was curled luxuriously on her own damasked lounge, her head propped high. She was scanning some of the miniature stereop reels that Perat had brought from his far-distant home planet.

"Those green trees and hedges ... so far away," she mused. "Do you ever think about seeing them again?"

"Of late, I've been thinking 

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