Free The Nymph and the Lamp by Thomas H Raddall

testify that the girls are lively enough. Some of them used to stay where I do and they made a frightful racket.”
    â€œThey probably make a frightful racket on the stage. I’d rather see a movie.”
    â€œAh! That makes it simple. What kind do you like?”
    â€œAnything except those Western things with a lot of chaps galloping about, shooting off pistols and never hitting anything. Like Marina in a nightmare.”
    Miss Jardine raised her brows. “Oh? I couldn’t imagine anything less like your island than a Western movie.”
    â€œYou’d be surprised. When you step off the beach at Marina on a summer’s day you might be in the heart of Arizona, or wherever they film those things. The biggest dunes are by the shore and they shut off the view of the sea in a good many places. You can hear the surf but for all you know it might be a thousand miles away. And there you are, riding a half-wild pony amongst the dunes, with nothing in sight but grass and sand, just like those movie chaps. We even use Western saddles and stirrups, brought all the way from the prairie. You can stick on the ponies better in the kind of going you find out there. In fact, all we lack is the fancy clothes and the pistols—and a villain after the girl, of course.”
    â€œAnd a girl?” Miss Jardine suggested.
    â€œOh no. We’ve got a girl. She’s only seventeen, the daughter of a man in charge of a small lifesaving station eight miles or so from us. She’s the belle of Marina. All the young chaps in the lifeboat crew are crazy about her.”
    â€œAnd surely the wireless operators?”
    â€œOh, MacGillivray rides down there quite a bit. He likes girls. I don’t know about Sargent, the new chap. But Skane—no. Skane dislikes women. If the Queen of Sheba landed on our island one fine afternoon in all her glory, Skane wouldn’t turn his head to give her a glance.”
    â€œAnd would you?” Her eyes were merry. She was trying to picture Carney with the Queen of Sheba, and the strange thing was that she could. He seemed to belong in some splendid and barbaric scene, where everything was a little bigger than life size, not like this restaurant, not even like Marina.
    â€œI’ve always thought it was a bit rude, staring at a lady,” Carney parried.
    â€œDon’t tell me that you’ve never turned to look at a pretty woman. A sailor!”
    He smiled broadly, revealing his square white teeth. “Oh, I’ve always liked women, you understand. When I was in my twenties and going to sea it was a pleasure to come in from a voyage and walk about admiring the girls, the way they moved, and the sound of their voices. They were marvelous. You wondered how men in cities could be so casual about them. But I never got any further than that. And I must say I’ve got along very well.”
    Miss Jardine laughed. “You stuck out your jaw when you said that! You know, you’re not a bit like the creature I expected. The operators always called you a ‘character’—meaning something queer, I supposed. But you’re not. You’re absolutely normal. The rest of us are characters, scrambling after hats and dollars—and seats at the movies. We’ll have to hurry to catch the show at the Orpheus. That’s the nearest.”
    Inside the theater, seated together in a warm gloom where the tinkling notes of a piano failed to drown the chatter of the machine, they fell into a mutual silence. The picture was a banal thing with an authentic hero, a patent villain, and a gesticulating young woman with a beautiful chalk-white face who ran about the screen and made a tiresome business of misunderstanding both of them. Miss Jardine was bored, but she was interested and amused to find that Carney was not. She watched him with sidelong glances for the better part of two hours, fanning her face gently with a handkerchief in the exhausted