Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/199

 there crept through the younger man, as the second long and sultry day ended in a black and star-strewn evening, the feeling that he was friendless and alone, far from his own kind. With the coming of the calm and spacious tropical night there came to him a more compelling sense of his isolation. More keenly than ever he felt the barrier that his own dissimulation had built up between himself and Alicia Boynton. There was a barb of mockery, he felt, in the very manner in which he had been compelled to relinquish a friendship that had promised to mean so much to him. He tried to tell himself that a man must fight alone, in warfare such as that he was facing, that he must learn to accept his loneliness as a natural part of the game.

Then, of a sudden, his isolation seemed a thing of the past. For, looking up as he sat crouched before his tuner, he saw a figure standing at his open door. And it did not take a second glance to show him that this figure was the figure of the woman of whom he had been thinking. The moment he caught sight of her, in her low-throated gown of white linen, he felt the subjugating influence of her presence. His heart began to beat faster, even before she stepped in across his coppered door-sill. He felt grateful for her companionship, for her