Page:Guy Boothby - The Beautiful White Devil.djvu/220

 very far away from Cavendish Square; they were flying across the seas to an island, where lived a woman whom I had come to love better than all the world. Closing my eyes, I seemed to see the yacht lying in the little harbour under the palm clad hills; I went ashore, threaded my way through the tangled mass of jungle, and passed up the path to the bungalow on the hillside. There I found Alie moving about her rooms with all her old queenly grace; then like a flash the scene changed, and we were back on the yacht's deck in the typhoon. I saw the roaring seas racing down upon us, heard the wind whistling and shrieking through the straining cordage, noticed the broken bulwarks, and by my side, Alie in her oilskins, with her sou-wester drawn tight about her head, clinging to the rail with every atom of her strength. But all that was past and over, and now for twelve months—nay, to be exact, eleven,—I was to be the staid, respectable London householder I had been before I visited the East. After that—but there, what was to happen after that, who could tell?

After a while the termination of my pipe brought my reverie to an end, so I took up a file of papers from the table and fell to scanning the last few numbers. Suddenly a headline caught my eye and rivetted my attention. It was a clipping from a Hong Kong paper, and read as follows:

"After a silence of something like four months the Beautiful White Devil has again done us the honour of appearing in Eastern waters. On this occasion,