rich
landscape in Sunday quiet appealed to his affections. He loved his
country and he loved Marta. It had been on such a day as this when there
would be no danger, that he had taken her for her first flight. The
glimpses, as they flew, of her profile, so alive and tense, were fresh
to his eye. How serious she had been! How vivid her impressions! How
tempestuous her ideas! He recalled their talk upon their return; all his
questions and her answers.

* * * * *

"Sublime and ridiculous!" she had begun in a summing up. "It is like
seeing the life of a family through a glass roof--the big, universal
family! Valleys seemed no larger than sauce-dishes on a table."

"What was the sublime thing?"

"Man's toil! The cumulative result of it, on every hand, in the common
aim for food, comfort, happiness, and progress! Little details of
difference disappeared. Towns, villages, houses were simply towns,
villages, houses of any country."

"And the supremely ridiculous thing?"

"A regiment of cavalry of the Grays and one of the Browns on the same
road! They appeared so self-important, as if the sky would fall or the
earth heave up to meet the sky if they got out of formation. I imagined
each man a metal figure that fitted astride a metal horse of the kind
that comes to children at Christmas time. They might better be engaged
in brass-ring-snatching contests at the merry-go-rounds of public fairs.
I wanted to brush them all over with a wave of the hand as you might the
battalions of the nursery floor. Just drilling and drilling in order to
slash at one another some day. Flight! flight! It makes one's mind as
big and broad as the world. Oh, what a wonderful talk I'll have for my
kids next Sunday!"

* * * * *

Now that Lanstron was the organizer of the aviation corps his own
flights were rare. Mostly they were made to La Tir. His visits to Marta
were his holidays? All the time that she was absent on her journey
around the world they had corresponded. Her letters, so revealing of
herself and her peculiar angles of observation, formed a bundle sacredly
preserved. Her mother's joking reference about her girlish resolution
not to marry a soldier often recurred to him. There, he sometimes
thought, was the real obstacle to his great desire.

He wished, this morning, that he were not Colonel Lanstron, but the
bridge-builder returning from his triumph after he had at last sp