Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/280

 labour, but the intriguing claims of the body had dethroned her volition.

And now, as he gazed down at her flower-like and tranquil face, he dreaded to waken her. He felt touched, as he watched the quiet throb of the pulse in her blue-veined temple where the dark and heavily massed brown hair had fallen back, with a sense of mystery before the ancient miracle of sleep. He wondered where her escaped spirit had gone to; it seemed nothing more than the quiescent shell of her, the empty husk of her, that he stood and watched. A wayward sense of loneliness, of desertion, crept over him, and he turned about, not ungratefully, to listen to the familiar swish of deck-hose and thump of holy-stone as the early awakened deck-crew washed down the decks. It was commonplace enough, that swish of sea-water and thump of mumbling workers. But at the moment there was something wordlessly companionable in it to the listening McKinnon. It reminded him that the every-day trivialities, the orderly actualities that sustain the machinery of life, must always go on, no matter how close may brood the spirit of outer tragedy. It reminded him, too, that it was morning, and that the hour of his ultimate trial had arrived. He swung his door open, and looked out along the deck. He beheld a windless sea, and a