slackness of body and spirit that had come to me with the business
life. The shame of that cowardice spurred me none the less because it
was probably altogether my own secret. I felt that Cothope at any rate
might suspect. Well,--he shouldn't suspect again.

It is curious that I remember that shame and self accusation and its
consequences far more distinctly than I recall the weeks of vacillation
before I soared. For a time I went altogether without alcohol, I stopped
smoking altogether and ate very sparingly, and every day I did something
that called a little upon my nerves and muscles. I soared as frequently
as I could. I substituted a motor-bicycle for the London train and took
my chances in the southward traffic, and I even tried what thrills were
to be got upon a horse. But they put me on made horses, and I conceived
a perhaps unworthy contempt for the certitudes of equestrian exercise
in comparison with the adventures of mechanism. Also I walked along the
high wall at the back of Lady Grove garden, and at last brought myself
to stride the gap where the gate comes. If I didn't altogether get rid
of a certain giddy instinct by such exercises, at least I trained my
will until it didn't matter. And soon I no longer dreaded flight, but
was eager to go higher into the air, and I came to esteem soaring upon
a glider, that even over the deepest dip in the ground had barely forty
feet of fall beneath it, a mere mockery of what flight might be. I began
to dream of the keener freshness in the air high above the beechwoods,
and it was rather to satisfy that desire than as any legitimate
development of my proper work that presently I turned a part of my
energies and the bulk of my private income to the problem of the
navigable balloon.

II

I had gone far beyond that initial stage; I had had two smashes and a
broken rib which my aunt nursed with great energy, and was getting some
reputation in the aeronautic world when, suddenly, as though she had
never really left it, the Honourable Beatrice Normandy, dark-eyed, and
with the old disorderly wave of the hair from her brow, came back into
my life. She came riding down a grass path in the thickets below Lady
Grove, perched up on a huge black horse, and the old Earl of Carnaby
and Archie Garvell, her half-brother, were with her. My uncle had been
bothering me about the Crest Hill hot-water pipes, and we were returning
by a path transverse to theirs and came out upon them sudden