hine apparently had followed him.
Mechanically he started it up. The familiar whir of the engine brought
back to him the possibility of his being alive in the ordinary
acceptation of the term. It also suggested to him the practical
advisability of insisting that Malvina should put on his spare coat.
Malvina being five feet three, and the coat having been built for a man
of six feet one, the effect under ordinary circumstances would have
been comic. What finally convinced Commander Raffleton that Malvina
really was a fairy was that, in that coat, with the collar standing up
some six inches above her head, she looked more like one than ever.

Neither of them spoke. Somehow it did not seem to be needed. He
helped her to climb into her seat and tucked the coat about her feet.
She answered by the same smile with which she had first stretched out
her hand to him. It was just a smile of endless content, as if all her
troubles were now over. Commander Raffleton sincerely hoped they were.
A momentary flash of intelligence suggested to him that his were just
beginning.

Commander Raffleton's subconscious self it must have been that took
charge of the machine. He seems, keeping a few miles inland, to have
followed the line of the coast to a little south of the Hague
lighthouse. Thereabouts he remembers descending for the purpose of
replenishing his tank. Not having anticipated a passenger, he had
filled up before starting with a spare supply of petrol, an incident
that was fortunate. Malvina appears to have been interested in
watching what she probably regarded as some novel breed of dragon being
nourished from tins extricated from under her feet, but to have
accepted this, together with all other details of the flight, as in the
natural scheme of things. The monster refreshed, tugged, spurned the
ground, and rose again with a roar; and the creeping sea rushed down.

One has the notion that for Flight Commander Raffleton, as for the rest
of us, there lies in wait to test the heart of him the ugly and the
commonplace. So large a portion of the years will be for him a
business of mean hopes and fears, of sordid struggle, of low cares and
vulgar fret. But also one has the conviction that there will always
remain with him, to make life wonderful, the memory of that night when,
godlike, he rode upon the winds of heaven crowned with the glory of the
world's desire. Now and again he turned his head to look at her, and
s