Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/194

 water overhung by its circle of sky. Along the flat fringe of this sky were ranged low tiers of cumulus clouds. They seemed as fixed and orderly as the clouds on a painted stage-drop; they stood like floating flecks of cotton, making a circling amphitheatre of the lonely sea. And in the ever-shifting centre of this amphitheatre throbbed and pulsed the thing of flashing brass-work and bone-white decks, of sadly flapping awnings, of quiet men with watching and melancholy faces, of a world complete in it self. As the long afternoon waned and the sun dipped behind the orange-red sky-line and the light passed away, the orderly and sentinel lamps were hung out. Along the pitted side-plates writhed blurred lines of phosphorus. The sea became a circle of inky blackness furrowed by two ghostly lines of foam. The sky melted into a maze of velvet and lonely light-points. Along the shadowy hatches sat and crooned vaguely outlined groups of seamen, and from somewhere below decks rose the sound of string-music, mournful, outlandish, touched with mystery, as the lonely ship and the huddled lives she sheltered drifted farther and farther southward.

The outward sense of peace that brooded over the Laminian was not shared by certain of her passengers. Alicia Boynton, after a feverish