Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/127

 a current eating under a sand-bank. It made sacrifice on her behalf seem a burden to be almost gladly borne.

"Only promise me that you'll wait!" she pleaded. His career had been one of much contention; but never before had he been compelled to fight against what seemed his own self-interest. He felt, in doing so, that he was being thrust and involved in entanglements which should have been evaded as mere side issues. He even marvelled at his sheer lack of resentment against capitulation so indeterminate and yet so complete.

"Promise me!" she whispered. He wanted to beg for time, to think things out, but her troubled face was bewilderingly close to his, and the memory that he was not innocent of the anxiety weighing upon her made him more and more miserable.

"I promise," he answered. The clasp of her hand sent a second inapposite tingle of joy through his body.

"You will wait?" she insisted, as though doubly to impress on each of them some future course of action. "You will say nothing until I have done what I promise?"

"There's nothing I can say or do," he replied, still demanding of himself if it could be right to put her to such a test.