st expected it--late in the evening.

It had been damp and dull all day. A high fog was gradually melting out
of the air. Back of it a misty moon, more mature now, gleamed like a
flask of honey in a golden veil. A few stars glimmered, placid, pale,
and big. Suddenly between fog and earth--and they seemed to emerge
from the mist like dreams from sleep--appeared the five dazzling
girl-figures.

The fog had blurred the vividness of their plumage. The color no longer
throbbed from wing-sockets to wing-tips; light no longer pulsated there.
But great scintillating beads of fog-dew outlined the long curves of
the wings, accentuated the long curves of the body. Hair, brows, lashes
glittered as if threaded with diamonds. Their cheeks and lips actually
glowed, luscious as ripe fruit.

"My God!" groaned Pete Murphy; "how beautiful and inaccessible! But
women should be inaccessible," he ended with a sigh.

"Not so inaccessible as they were, though," Ralph Addington said. Again
the appearance of the women had transformed him physically and mentally.
He moved with the nervous activity of a man strung on wires. His brown
eyes showed yellow gleams like a cat's. "They're flying lower and slower
to-night."

It did seem as though the fog, light as it was, definitely impeded their
wings. It gave to their movements a little languor that had a plaintive
appealing quality. Perhaps they realized this themselves. In the midst
of their aerial evolutions suddenly--and apparently without cause--they
developed panic, turned seawards. Their audience, taken by surprise,
burst into shouts of remonstrance, ran after them. The clamor and the
motion seemed only to add to the girls' alarm. Their retreating speed
was almost frenzied.

"What the--what's frightened them?" Honey Smith asked. Honey's brows had
come together in an unaccustomed scowl. He bit his lips.

"Give it up," Billy Fairfax answered, and his tone boiled with
exasperation. "I hope they haven't been frightened away for good."

"I think every time it's the last," exclaimed Pete Murphy, "but they
keep coming back."

"Son," said Ralph Addington, and there was a perceptible element of
patronage in his tone, "I'll tell you the exact order of events. It
threw a scare into the girls to-night that they couldn't fly so well.
But in an hour's time, they'll be sore because they didn't put up a
good exhibition. Now, if I know anything at all about women--and maybe
I flatter myself, but I thin