He stopped, his embarrassment heightening with his color as he realized how any attempt at explanation merely made an already awkward situation worse. It suddenly mattered to him terribly that Rima should have watched that impulsive episode between himself and the Emperor's daughter. He had no right, he knew, to think of Rima as other than a girl who had befriended him on an alien world ... but somehow he already did. At first sight of her, a new meaning had entered into his life. It did not soothe him that Rima turned away his explanation with a laughing shrug. "Oh, but do not misunderstand me, Dirk Morris. It does not concern _me_ in the least how you amuse yourself in your lighter moments. And your other exploits were, I must acknowledge, thrilling to watch ... in a somewhat different way." Dirk said miserably, "Please! It was an impulse ... one I regretted immediately. The Princess Lenore means nothing to me ... nothing. I shall never lay eyes on her again in my life...." V In that one statement, Morris was mistaken. He made it in all good faith, but its truth was a matter over which he was not to have full control. Two weeks passed. Two weeks filled with excitement and adventure. Two weeks during which Dirk Morris made good his pledge to the assembled brothers of the Group, now safely in hiding. During that fortnight the Galactic Ghost ... as soon he became known to the whispering citizenry of Earth ... struck again, again, and yet again at the wide-flung forces of Black Garroway. Some of these blows were of a minor nature: the theft of hoarded gold, and the subsequent reappearance, as if by magic, of that gold where starving folk could lay eager hands on it; the mysterious disappearance of the Emperor's armored unicar scant moments before Garroway was to make an impressive "personal appearance" before the populace of the capital city; the inexplicable vanishment of a secret formula wherewith the Overlord's military experts hoped to subdue the gallant little guerrilla army which still held a salient against Garroway's might on the planetoid Iris. Other occurrences were more violent ... the kind that not even a ruthlessly controlled press can keep from public knowledge. The shocking demolition of the Overlord's strongest Asiatic fortress at Chuen-tzwan, keypoint from which his troops dominated all of what had once been Southern China. At six-fifteen in an evening, according to testimony given by the commanding officer at the subsequent investigation, from out of nowhere had appeared a placard, advising the entire garrison to withdraw immediately from the fortress, advising its component members, moreover, to rebel against Garroway. This ultimatum had teeth in it. Midnight was set as the deadline for obedience.