A Hero for Leanda

you’d wish you hadn’t come. So would I. Far from being a help, you’d be a burden.”
    “I never have been seasick,” Leanda said, “although I’ve traveled by sea quite a lot. If I were, I should try not to be a burden. You mustn’t judge too much by appearances, you know—I’m actually very tough. In any case, you don’t have to make up your mind about me now. If we went to Mombasa together, you’d have plenty of time to get to know me before we started. You could always turn me down if I wasn’t any good.”
    Conway regarded her wonderingly. “Just exactly in what capacity would you plan to travel with me?”
    “I discussed that with Victor,” she said coolly. “We think it would be better if I came as your wife.”
    Conway grinned. “You mean you’re offering to marry me?”
    “Don’t be absurd.... I mean as your notional wife, that’s all.”
    “H’m!” Conway leaned back with his head on one side. “Well, in some ways it’s quite a notion!”
    “I’m serious, Mr. Conway, and I wish you would be. I don’t regard any part of this as a joke—I’m in deadly earnest. Surely you can see that the advantages of my coming with you would be enormous? If I were with you, as your wife, the authorities on Heureuse would have no suspicions at all. It would merely seem like a holiday trip. I don’t believe you could have a better cover.”
    Conway looked at her thoughtfully. “Yes, there may be something in that.... All the same, it staggers me that you’re willing to contemplate it. You don’t know me at all—I’m a complete stranger to you. Wouldn’t you be taking rather a chance—putting yourself completely in my hands, even to the extent of being a notional wife?”
    “To me,” Leanda said, “that aspect is not very important.”
    “It might be to me. Suppose I turned out to be the worst kind of wolf?”
    Leanda smiled. “It seems unlikely, since you choose to spend most of your time alone at sea. Besides, you would find me very uninteresting from that point of view. My mind is entirely occupied with other things.”
    “What other things?”
    “My country, above everything.”
    “A dedicated woman, eh?”
    “I suppose it sounds unnatural,” Leanda said, “but it’s true. In Spyros, where I grew up, we all think more of freedom than of anything else. Why should the English rule us? We are a proud people, Mr. Conway—we had a civilization in Spyros when the English were still living in caves. Yet they treat us as though we were aborigines. To be always subordinate and inferior in your own country— that is intolerable.”
    Conway nodded slowly. “All right—you put your country first. That still doesn’t equip you for a hard, dangerous mission.”
    “You talk as though I were a delicate little flower, Mr. Conway—as though I’d lived a very sheltered fife. I assure you nothing could be further from the truth. I spent three months in an English prison in Spyros—for distributing illegal literature. I have also been beaten up in the street by the police. But that was really nothing.... Two of my friends, two boys still in their teens, were hanged a year ago. And even that is not the worst. I have seen terrible things happen—things I wish I could forget.... So you see , I am not a little flower.”
    “Maybe it was a hasty judgment,” Conway said. He was silent for a moment. “What had your two friends done ?“
    “They threw bombs. They considered themselves at war.”
    “Have you thrown bombs?”
    “No. I’m against violence and terror. Its results are too horrible.”
    “I agree with you.... What was that particularly frightful thing I heard on the radio while I was at sea— a description of some village where three young men who wouldn’t join your movement were mutilated and killed, as a lesson to others. Perhaps that wasn’t true. I don’t know.”
    “It was true. It was in Meos. I wasn’t in Spyros then— I’d been forced to leave because the police wanted me again, and I was already working for Victor—but I know it was true. It was the most ghastly thing that has happened —almost unbelievable.... There has been so much killing and being killed, so much hate and misery. I can understand that, to some people, violence seems the only way. The English have been so stupid and smug and deaf to argument. But I’m sure it’s wrong. My friends who were hanged were brave, so brave, but I think they were wrong, too. I think that real freedom