t colliding with aught around or any shock to those within, just
as Orlando had promised; and the world was henceforth his! Hail to
Orlando Brotherson!

Oswald could hardly restrain his mad joy and enthusiasm. Bounding to the
door separating him from this conqueror of almost invincible forces, he
pounded it with impatient fist.

"Let me in!" he cried. "You've done the trick, Orlando, you've done the
trick."

"Yes, I have satisfied myself," came back in studied self-control
from the other side of the door; and with a quick turning of the lock,
Orlando stood before them.

They never forgot him as he looked at that moment. He was drenched,
battered, palpitating with excitement; but the majesty of success was in
his eye and in the bearing of his incomparable figure.

As Oswald bounded towards him, he reached out his hand, but his glance
was for Doris.

"Yes," he went on, in tones of suppressed elation, "there's no flaw in
my triumph. I have done all that I set out to do. Now--"

Why did he stop and look hurriedly back into the hangar? He had
remembered Sweetwater. Sweetwater, who at that moment was stepping
carefully from his seat in some remote portion of the car. The triumph
was not complete. He had meant--

But there his thought stopped. Nothing of evil, nothing even of regret
should mar his great hour. He was a conqueror, and it was for him now to
reap the joy of conquest.

XXXVIII. NIGHT

Three days had passed, and Orlando Brotherson sat in his room at
the hotel before a table laden with telegrams, letters and marked
newspapers. The news of his achievement had gone abroad, and Derby was,
for the moment, the centre of interest for two continents.

His success was an established fact. The second trial which he had made
with his car, this time with the whole town gathered together in
the streets as witnesses, had proved not only the reliability of its
mechanism, but the great advantages which it possessed for a direct
flight to any given point. Already he saw Fortune beckoning to him in
the shape of an unconditional offer of money from a first-class source;
and better still,--for he was a man of untiring energy and boundless
resource--that opportunity for new and enlarged effort which comes with
the recognition of one's exceptional powers.

All this was his and more. A sweeter hope, a more enduring joy had
followed hard upon gratified ambition. Doris had smiled on him;--Doris!
She had caught the co