Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/89

 He noticed that she was wearing a gown of dark-blue pilot-cloth, and that she was younger than he had at first supposed. One of her hands had been thrown out to the door-jamb to steady her against the roll and pitch of the deck. The clear oval of her face—and it seemed more the mature and thoughtful face of a woman than the timid and hesitating face of a girl—was shadowed and softened by a crowning mass of brown hair. Her teeth, as she ventured her sober yet oddly conciliating smile, impressed him as being very white and regular, vaguely hinting at a bodily strength which the softness of her eyes, at a first glance, seemed to contradict. Yet these deep-lashed eyes were alert and alive with the fires of intelligence, and set wide apart under the low and thoughtful brow. They carried an inalienable sense of wisdom in their almost austere steadiness of outlook, McKinnon felt, as the woman still stood in the doorway, puckering her face a little at the strong light. Yet what most impressed him was the sense of ebullient vigour, of intrepid and Aprilian vitality, which brooded about her. She was by no means Amazonian in stature—she was even smaller than he had at first suspected—but she gave him the impression of being youthfully and buoyantly full-blooded.

Then she stepped boldly in across the high