She looked at him sharply. His face was lamblike in its innocence, but his eyes were twinkling.
"That will do, Captain Whiteley. You have said quite enough."
The telltale colour deepened in her face, and her mother, who was talking to Carteret nearby, heard and saw, closed her lips tightly, and sniffed.
The little party of white-clad players were still on the lawn when the Hailoong moved down the river, zigzagged her way through the field of mines, and once well beyond the bar steamed straight out over the motionless sea in the path of red-gold light from the setting sun. It seemed the breaking of the one link between them and the outside world. In the soft stillness of that evening in the Orient, London with its mud and smoke, its roar of traffic, its drab colours and familiar, unromantic life, seemed so far away that it might have belonged to another world.
Strange to say, it was not of London that Miss MacAllister was thinking. Again and again she surprised herself thinking of the big, fair-haired Canadian doctor. She tried to picture to herself his surroundings amid the sick and suffering, the men torn with shot and shell. She could not help contrasting them with the peaceful environment of the consul's tennis party, where men had been enjoying themselves in the company of the ladies, and incidentally emptying long glasses of whiskey and soda or sipping tea.
She recalled the looks of the man himself, his clean-cut features, straightforward gaze, his good-humour even when she was badgering him, and the hearty, boyish laugh when he and McLeod were plotting some mischief together. Involuntarily she contrasted him with the cynical discontent, the weary air and self-pity of the man with whom she had talked that afternoon. If Sinclair could have known her conclusions, he would have been well content.
XVI
SERGEANT WHATISNAME
But Sinclair did not know. Perhaps at that moment he was not thinking much about her. He was just entering on his long night's work among the wounded. Every power of mind was concentrated on the problem of those pain-racked human beings and how to relieve their sufferings.
And yet ever and anon, when he had finished an operation and his mind relaxed as his hands almost mechanically followed the familiar process of bandaging, a picture floated before his eyes. It was only a transparency, through which he could see every line of the brown limb or body he was binding up with care But it was as clear to him as though it had been done on canvas by the brush of a painter. It was the picture of a proudly-carried head, with a crown of brown hair, a beautiful oval face with rich colour, dark violet eyes dancing with fun, and full red lips parted in a teasing laugh, which made the hot blood tingle in his face at the very memory of it.