Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/24

 see nothing but a gentle yet determined abstraction.

"Y—yes," he stammered, vacuously, as though her statement had been a question. A faint tingle of something that was neither fear nor delight went needling up and down his back bone.

"I want to talk to you," the woman said, quite gravely. "I must talk to you—alone."

He knew that she had turned and joined him as he moved wonderingly forward, with his staring eyes still on her. Then the futility, the hopelessness, the impossibility of it all suddenly came home to him. He was conscious of a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Courage sank away from him, confidence sucked out of him, like water out of an unplugged bath-bowl.

If she had only stood before him less alluring, less Olympian in her loveliness, he might have been less bewildered. If she had been the Other Kind, openly and unequivocally, he might have grown less afraid of her.

But he felt and knew it was a mistake, a foolish and colossal mistake. A vague and slowly mounting fear took the place of his earlier astonishment. The city itself had already intimidated him. He remembered the engineer's opprobrious summing-up of its perils. There was something amiss, terribly amiss.