The list slipped from his grasp and joined the surgeon's rejected sleeping powder on the floor. Lanyard lay with a face that mirrored pain more real than that which racked his head, blindly studying the play of rainbow gleams upon the painted ceiling.
Seven months lost beyond recall . . .
And Eve?
XVI
Within the hour thought flagged for sheer weariness of beating to no purpose against that wall of oblivion whose featureless façade sequestered seven mortal months of forfeit yesterdays, nerves grew weary of the zooming wind, incessant slap and slash of broken water streaming down the side, the tuneless crooning of the engines: Lanyard slept.
A noise of light knuckles on the door awakened him when the afternoon was old and wind and sea had both abated, as the muting of their deep diapason affirmed and that horizontal beam of rusty light which bored in through the port to flail with slow and steady strokes the dusk whose blue it strengthened.
Without waiting to receive permission, Liane Delorme turned the knob and entered.
Most adept of actresses, she carried herself now with an air of delicate audacity that would have graced a virtuous lady of a sudden turned so venturesome as to call on a man in his lodgings alone. Almost anybody else it would surely have taken in, even Lanyard found himself for a moment at loss to account for this revolutionary innovation, a change of rôle made the more confounding by the fact that Liane had gone to the length of dressing it with garments of a semi-negligée sort whose circumspection, though they were dainty and costly enough to delight any woman, was hardly akin to the spirit that sported them.
But one glimpse of Lanyard's eyes, one flash of their reclaimed intelligence, made plain the poverty of objective artifice as an aid to Liane's intentions. It indeed did more, it struck pale glints of panic from her own eyes, or something very like that emotion in the sight of one who knew as yet no reason why it should discountenance the woman to find him, whom she had sought of her own accord, awake and in his proper mind.