Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/33

 the seat beside her. But disquiet had again taken possession of him.

"Am I so terrible?" she asked, with her hand still on his arm. Her voice was low and quiet; her half-smiling lips were parted a little, giving a touch of languid abandon to her otherwise intent and earnest face. And here was the very thing he had been so restlessly in search of; but now that it was before him, within his grasp, he was wordlessly afraid of it.

"N—no, you're not terrible," he jerkily reassured her, as though the words had to be paid out like links of a rusted cable.

"You're not afraid of me?" she inquired, with a disarming soft intimacy of tone that sent the blood once more rioting through his veins. He did not answer. He merely gazed at her in in articulate and tingling wonder.

"You're not, are you?" she persisted, stooping forward and turning her body about in the cab seat so that her face was directly before him, within a foot of his own.

"No," he managed to say.

He noticed that she almost closed her eyes.

"Then kiss me," he heard her low voice murmuring, with her parted red lips lifting and creeping audaciously up to his, her hand already on his shoulder.

He drew back, white and stunned. It was