Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/232

222 gloaming above him, and after she had completed her housewifely duties, he sat up and motioned to her to come and sit down beside him.

"Don't you think we'd better be starting back now?" she asked.

"Back?" he smiled lazily up at her. "Back where? Didn't you know we were shipwrecked this morning, and that this is a deserted island? Oh, come, Becky," he broke off, "sit down a little while. There's going to be a moon later."

"Well," she agreed, and accepted the place he made ready for her beside him on his rough overcoat.

"Comfortable?" he asked gently, after a minute or two of silence.

"Oh, yes," she quavered. She had caught that indescribable change in his voice that stole so frequently into it of late, and—"I ought to go," she chided herself, "I ought to." But she didn't stir; just sat very still and silent, listening to the monotonous pound-pound-pound of the waves nearby, while the steadily gathering night, gradually, minute by minute, covered their hidden retreat by a soft velvety blackness—so thick, so dense, that it blotted out even the white froth of the surf breaking not fifteen feet away.

There was not even the usual glow of Chadwick Booth's cigarette, for he had tossed it away when Reba had come to sit beside him, and, loath to prick the dark by even so small a spark, he had not lit a second one. There was something elemental about the blackness, the booming of the invisible waves, and the feeling of remoteness, that would have taken hold of Reba even if she had been alone there.

After a tense half-hour, the moon—a huge,