of his right wing. A few inches
more and it would have been not merely the feathers, but the entire wing
itself.

He dropped to within three feet of the stones in the yard, and then,
borne aloft by the kind, rushing Wind of the South, he rose in a
tremendous sweep far over the tops of the high elms and out into the
heart of the night.

Only there was no governess's voice to guide him; and behind him, a
little lower down, a black pursuing figure with huge wings flapped
heavily as it followed with laborious flight through the darkness.

CHAPTER XVIII

HOME

But it was the sound of something crashing heavily through the top
branches of the elms that made the boy realise he was actually being
followed; and all his efforts became concentrated into the desire to put
as much distance as possible between himself and the horror of the Empty
House.

He heard the noise of big wings far beneath him, and his one idea was to
out-distance his pursuer and then come down again to earth and rest his
wings in the branches of a tree till he could devise some plan how to
find the governess. So at first he raced at full speed through the air,
taking no thought of direction.

When he looked down, all he could see was that something vague and
shadowy, shaking out a pair of enormous wings between him and the earth,
move along with him. Its path was parallel with his own, but apparently
it made no effort to rise up to his higher level. It thundered along far
beneath him, and instinctively he raised his head and steered more and
more upwards and away from the world.

The gap at the end of his right wing where the feathers had been torn
out seemed to make no difference in his power of flight or steering, and
he went tearing through the night at a pace he had never dared to try
before, and at a height he had never yet reached in any of the practice
flights. He soared higher even than he knew; and perhaps this was
fortunate, for the friction of the lower atmosphere might have heated
him to the point of igniting, and some watcher at one of earth's windows
might have suddenly seen a brilliant little meteor flash through the
night and vanish into dust.

At first the joy of escape was the only idea his mind seemed able to
grasp; he revelled in a passionate sense of freedom, and all his
energies poured themselves into one concentrated effort to fly faster,
faster, faster. But after a time, when the pursuer had been apparently
outflo