her, as it did the
eager crowd, with delight and yearning aspiration. She sighed again....

"It's a pretty sight, isn't it?" a familiar voice observed close behind
her. With a start Milly turned and perceived, on the step below,--Edgar
Duncan. His long face had an eager, wistful expression, also, caused
perhaps by the aerial phenomenon above, as much as by the sight of his
lost love; but the expression took Milly back immediately to the little
front room on Acacia Street, when Duncan had stood before her to receive
his blow.

"There!" Duncan exclaimed quickly, before Milly could collect an
appropriate remark. "He's coming down!" Speechless they both craned
their heads backwards to follow the aeroplane. The airman, tired of his
lofty wandering, or having done the day's stunt required of him, had
begun to descend and shot rapidly towards the spectators out of the sky.
As he came nearer the earth, he executed the reckless corkscrew
man[oe]uvre: the great winged machine seemed to be rushing, tumbling in
a perpendicular line just above the heads of the gazing crowd. There was
an agonized murmur, a prolonged,--"Ah!" It gave Milly delicious thrills
up and down her body. When the airman took another leap towards earth,
her heart stopped beating altogether. With only a few hundred feet
between him and the earth the airman turned his planes and began
circling in slow curves over the adjacent strip of park, as if he were
judiciously selecting the best spot for alighting.

"It doesn't take 'em long to come down!" Duncan remarked, and Milly,
with a swift mental comparison of the aeroplane flight and her own
little fate, replied,--

"It never takes long to come down, does it?"

She looked more closely now at her former lover. Apparently his blow had
not seriously damaged him. His figure was fuller and his face tanned to
a healthier color than she remembered. He seemed to be in good spirits,
and not perceptibly older than he was ten years before. They descended
the steps with the moving throng and strolled slowly up the crowded
boulevard, watching the distant flights and talking.

Edgar Duncan, she learned, had not spent the ten years nursing a wounded
heart. He had doubled the acreage of his ranch, he told her, and thanks
to the fatherly government at Washington, which had trebled the duty on
foreign lemons, he was doing very well indeed. The big yellow balls
among the glossy leaves were fast becoming golden balls. He was now o