Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/376

 would matter. But he knew, at last, that this was not true, that it mattered more than he dared admit.

"You mustn't do this," the girl was saying, reprovingly, as she drew closer beside him, so that her tinted parasol threw its shadow over his head.

"But it's so good to be out again," he said. "And they're giving Ulloa's Irregulars an ovation down there.”

"But you're not strong yet," she warned him, looking up into his face with anxious eyes.

"Strong!" he laughed. "Why, I feel like a shorthorn in from the range!"

"But that is a tropical sun you are standing in."

"It isn’t the sun that makes me feel so bad," he confessed. "It's being so far away from—from home, from—oh, from everything!"

There was a minute or two of silence as they stood gazing down over Guariqui.

"I know," she said at last, comprehendingly. He looked down at her, a little surprised at the humility in her voice. She had seemed a little aloof from him during the last few days; he had not been able to guess at the source of that aloofness. Guariqui and its official life, he felt, had flung a bar between them. It seemed to have drawn and shut her in as one of its own.