ly riser, met him near
the machine, and they went and had a look at it together.

It is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgency
of Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number he
seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went into the
shrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary Elkinghorn
there. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation with her old
school friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer had never met the
latter lady before, he joined them and walked beside them for some time.
There were several silences in spite of the Lady Mary's brilliance. The
situation was a difficult one, and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master
its difficulty. "He struck me," she said afterwards with a luminous
self-contradiction, "as a very unhappy person who had something to say,
and wanted before all things to be helped to say it. But how was one to
help him when one didn't know what it was?"

At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park were
crammed, there was an intermittent stream of equipages along the belt
which circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted over the
lawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park, in a series of
brilliantly attired knots, all making for the flying machine. Filmer
walked in a group of three with Banghurst, who was supremely and
conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle, the president of the
Aeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close behind with the Lady Mary
Elkinghorn, Georgina Hickle, and the Dean of Stays. Banghurst was large
and copious in speech, and such interstices as he left were filled in by
Hickle with complimentary remarks to Filmer. And Filmer walked between
them saying not a word except by way of unavoidable reply. Behind, Mrs.
Banghurst listened to the admirably suitable and shapely conversation of
the Dean with that fluttered attention to the ampler clergy ten years
of social ascent and ascendency had not cured in her; and the Lady
Mary watched, no doubt with an entire confidence in the world's
disillusionment, the drooping shoulders of the sort of man she had never
met before.

There was some cheering as the central party came into view of the
enclosures, but it was not very unanimous nor invigorating cheering.
They were within fifty yards of the apparatus when Filmer took a hasty
glance over his shoulder to measure the distance of the ladies behind