CHAPTER XIV
THE PYRRHIC VICTOR
A wave of something that was vaguely disheartening, that was almost nauseating, swept through McKinnon. It left him momentarily dazed, as men are dazed with that forlornest sickness which follows a seismic upheaval. He felt as though the deck under his feet had opened and let him down into the depths of a chilling sea. Insidiously and almost unwittingly he had grown to believe that this unbefriended and lonely woman was in some way very close to him. Little by little he had come to accept the hope that they might draw even closer together, that the exigencies of warfare might make their paths identical.
But as he stood listening to Ganley's thundered declaration there swept through him the impression of being engulfed and suffocated in fogs of duplicity, of being entangled in endless webs of lies and intrigues and counter-intrigues. He felt suddenly oppressed and disturbed by a
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