CHAPTER XVIII
EAST IS WEST
I
That journey homeward!
The backlash of a typhoon blown up from the China Sea made rough sailing the first two days of the voyage. Passengers kept to their staterooms. But the third evening Madelaine dressed for dinner.
She had a dinner gown in her trunk which had reposed in the Tokio Y. W. C. A. during her absence in Siberia. When she joined Nathan in the passageway after her toilet was complete, the man failed to recognize her for an instant. She actually had to speak to him as she approached. Then a thrill shot through him at sight of her loveliness that burned to the roots of his hair.
She was a sensation as she preceded her lover through the crowded saloon a moment later.
“’Sst! Get onto the peach!” Nathan overheard a little undersized Hebrew whisper swiftly to a fellow diner as he and Madelaine passed one of the door tables.
They walked afterward on the upper deck in the mellow starlit darkness, a light scarf about the girl’s bare shoulders. Those stars hung very luminous and close again. But now they were merely watchwords, hung over the sea.
Off by the tarpaulined lifeboats in the shadows cast by the massive ventilators, the two finally leaned over the rail. The moon was coming up. It came up while they stayed there.
The man’s arm stole around the girl’s waist. He drew her close. And she sighed contentedly in that embrace and relaxed against him.