at had
happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst's household had guessed
something of what was going on in Filmer's mind.

All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held a man
should behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guests
for the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact--though to
conceal their perception of it altogether was impossible--that Banghurst
had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled by the deceased. The
public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed "like a party that has
been ducking a welsher," and there wasn't a soul in the train to London,
it seems, who hadn't known all along that flying was a quite impossible
thing for man. "But he might have tried it," said many, "after carrying
the thing so far."

In the evening, when he was comparatively alone, Banghurst broke down
and went on like a man of clay. I have been told he wept, which must
have made an imposing scene, and he certainly said Filmer had ruined
his life, and offered and sold the whole apparatus to MacAndrew for
half-a-crown. "I've been thinking--" said MacAndrew at the conclusion of
the bargain, and stopped.

The next morning the name of Filmer was, for the first time, less
conspicuous in the New Paper than in any other daily paper in the world.
The rest of the world's instructors, with varying emphasis, according to
their dignity and the degree of competition between themselves and the
New Paper, proclaimed the "Entire Failure of the New Flying Machine,"
and "Suicide of the Impostor." But in the district of North Surrey the
reception of the news was tempered by a perception of unusual aerial
phenomena.

Overnight Wilkinson and MacAndrew had fallen into violent argument on
the exact motives of their principal's rash act.

"The man was certainly a poor, cowardly body, but so far as his science
went he was NO impostor," said MacAndrew, "and I'm prepared to give that
proposition a very practical demonstration, Mr. Wilkinson, so soon as
we've got the place a little more to ourselves. For I've no faith in all
this publicity for experimental trials."

And to that end, while all the world was reading of the certain failure
of the new flying machine, MacAndrew was soaring and curvetting with
great amplitude and dignity over the Epsom and Wimbledon divisions;
and Banghurst, restored once more to hope and energy, and regardless of
public security and the Board of Trade, was pursuing