Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/88

 adapted itself to the thick-weather work—when a knock sounded on his cabin door.

"Come in!" he said, lifting off his earphones with a little sigh of mingled weariness and resignation. He suspected that his undisclosed caller was a junior officer, much given to garrulity. He began to dread the thought of being kept out of bed for another hour or two.

The door opened slowly and the look of frank annoyance as slowly faded from the operator's face, for standing there, confronting him, blinking in the strong glare of his electrics, was a young woman.

Her skirts, gathered up in one hand, and held high from the wet deck, showed in a sweeping cascade of white against the gloom behind them. On her head was a blue seagoing cap, swathed in a long, cream-coloured motor-veil. Behind her stood a stewardess, fat and untidy, carrying a cloak, with the outward and studious solicitude of a servile nature exalted by the consciousness of having been overtipped. She would have made an ideal figure, the operator felt, for the nurse of the Capulets.

McKinnon put down his 'phone and rose from his seat, still peering at the figure nearer him, the woman in the doorway. He looked at her closely, perhaps too closely, for he had not imagined any such woman aboard the Laminian.