"Excellent! Though it would not be an affection so pure, since it is well known that the grass cat considers a man's toes a great delicacy and always eats them first, even before the eyes. Listen well. Here is what you must do in four weeks' time, for if all goes well, or all goes ill, we set sail on the Week of the Oak, the Day of the Sky, the Hour of the Lark, a most propitious time...." 5 To Green, the next three weeks seemed to have shifted to low gear, they crept by so slowly. Yet they should have raced by quickly enough, so full of schemes and plots were they. He had to advise Miran on the many technical details involved in building tanks for the fish. He had to keep the Duchess happy, an increasingly difficult job because it was impossible to pretend a one-hundred-per-cent absorption in her while his mind desperately looked for flaws in his plans, found oh, so many, and then as anxiously sought ways of repairing them. Nevertheless he knew it was vital that he not displease or bore her. Prison would forever ruin his chances. Worst of all, Amra was getting suspicious. "You're trying to conceal something from me," she told Green. "You ought to know better. I can tell when a man is deceiving me. There's something about the voice, the eyes, the way he makes love, though you've been doing very little of that. What are you plotting?" "I assure you it's simply that I'm very tired," he said sharply. "All I want is some peace and quiet, a little rest and a little privacy now and then." "Don't try to tell me that's all!" She cocked her head to one side and squinted at him, managing somehow even in this grotesque attitude to look ravishingly beautiful. Suddenly she said, "You wouldn't be thinking of running away, would you?" For a second he became pale. Damn the woman anyway! "Don't be ridiculous," he said, trying hard to keep his voice from cracking. "I'm too much aware of the penalties if I were caught. Besides, why should I want to run away? You are the most desirable woman I've ever known. (This was the truth.) Though you're not the easiest one in the world to live with. (A master understatement.) I would have gotten no place without you. (True; but he couldn't spend the rest of his life on this barbarous world.) And it is unthinkable that I would want to leave you." (Inexpressible, yes, but not unthinkable. He couldn't take her with him, for the simple reason that even if she would go she would never fit in his life on Earth. She'd be absolutely unhappy. Moreover, she'd not go anyway, because she'd refuse to abandon her children and would try to take them along, thus wrecking all his escape plans. He might just as well hire a brass band and march behind it out of the city and onto the windroller in the light of high noon.)