Brick-top for myself. You
keep off the grass. See!"

"All right," Ralph answered. "Katherine for yours, Petruchio. The golden
blonde for mine!" He smiled for the first time in days. In fact, at
sight of the flying-girls he had begun to beam with fatuous good nature.

"Two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-top" said Honey Smith, summing
them up practically. "One of those brunettes, the brown one, must be a
Kanaka. The other's prettier--she looks like a Spanish woman. There's
something rather taking about the plain one, though. Pretty snappy--if
anybody should fly up in a biplane and ask you!"

"It's curious," Frank Merrill said with his most academic manner, "it
has not yet occurred to me to consider those young women from the point
of view of their physical pulchritude. I'm interested only in their
ability to fly. The one with the silver-white wings, the one Billy calls
the 'quiet one,' flies better than any of the others, The dark one on
the end, the one who looks like a Spaniard, flies least well. It is
rather disturbing, but I can think of them only as birds. I have to keep
recalling to myself that they're women. I can't realize it."

"Well, don't worry," Ralph Addington said with the contemptuous accent
with which latterly he answered all Frank Merrill's remarks. "You will."

The others laughed, but Frank turned on them a look of severe reproof.

"Oh, hell!" Honey Smith exclaimed in a regretful tone; "they're beating
it again. I say, girls," he called at the top of his lungs, "don't go!
Stay a little longer and we'll buy you a dinner and a taxicab."

Apparently the flying-girls realized that he was addressing them. For
a hair's breadth of a second they paused. Then, with a speed that had
a suggestion of panic in it, they flew out to sea. And again a flood of
girl-laughter fell in bubbles upon them.

"They distrust muh!" Honey commented. But he smiled with the indolent
amusement of the man who has always held the master-hand with women.

"Must have come from the east, this time," he said as they filed soberly
back to camp. "But where in thunder do they start from?"

They had, of course, discussed this question as they had discussed a
hundred other obvious ones. "I'm wondering now," Frank Merrill answered,
"if there are islands both to the east and the west. But, after all, I'm
more interested to know if there are any more of these winged women, and
if there are any males."

Again they talked far into the