Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/32

 "How could I?" he succeeded in stammering out.

"Won't you stay and try?" she murmured, pregnantly.

The prospect did not exactly appal him. It merely puzzled him now as something beyond the reach of his delimited imagination. The curl hadn't been taken out of Romance, after all, he told himself. He could see the brooding spirit of her, incarnate before his very eyes, coifed and gowned like a goddess. But the very radiance of the vision made him doubly afraid of her.

"I'm afraid I'll have to get back," was his hesitating rejoinder.

"Back where?"

"To my ship," he faltered.

"But you mustn't!" she murmured, with a solicitous hand on his still tingling arm.

"I've got to get back," he persisted, reaching and fumbling for the door.

"But not yet—not here," she begged him.

"I must," he declared, trying to stand on his feet under the cramping cab-hood, and tugging at the door-handle.

"Only listen to me for a moment," the woman was saying, almost pleadingly.

He allowed her to draw him gently back into