Hark! I am called; my little spirit, see, Sits in a foggy cloud, and stays for me.
Macbeth.
Sydney Wandesforde, Denis's partner, was a big, heavy-featured, heavily built man, whose appearance nobody could have called aristocratic. Plutocratic was more like it. There had been patent pills on the distaff side of his ancestry, and unfortunately he had taken after them, instead of after the belted earls of the paternal line. He had, however, the easy manners, the clean movements, the soft voice of his class, and if he was plain he looked able.
 
He had never got beyond surnames with Denis; which meant that he had never met the soft side of that pugnacious Irish tongue. Denis was Haus-engel, Strassteufel, a lamb to his friends, a lion abroad. There were moments when Wandesforde thought him the most irritating man on the face of the globe; but he bore with it, never coming to a quarrel, because he liked and valued his partner too much to let him go. At the time of their first meeting, Denis had spent every penny he possessed, and had nothing to put into the partnership except his brains, and an aeroplane which at that date (1907) couldn't be induced to quit the ground. Yet the agreement was drawn as between equals, and Wandesforde claimed not more but less control than in an ordinary partnership. Why? Because he was shrewd enough to see that Denis would never work as a subordinate; and because, as aforesaid, he valued his partner too much to give him any excuse for throwing up his work and going off in a huff of outraged independence, as he would have done on the least provocation—so sensitive is an [Pg 103]Ulsterman's pride! "Give him his head? Of course I do!" he said with half a laugh to his brother, who had expressed some mild surprise. "Eccentricities of genius, what? Oh yes, he is a genius, head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd; and a nice chap too, and abso-lutely straight. Can't help liking him. I admit he's a bit trying at times, but it's worth it. I'd rather work with him than with any man I know!"
 
Now Denis saw the position as clearly as his partner; he knew that he could do pretty much as he liked, that Wandesforde, though he paid the piper, would carefully refrain from calling the tune. Therefore, having a conscience, he felt bound to do of his own accord most of the things his partner wanted, but wouldn't ask. All which preamble leads us to the fact that Wandesforde, not gathering from his letter that Denis abhorred the idea of teaching Dorothea, wrote back warmly approving of the plan. He had taken up flying in the first instance to amuse himself; but times were hard, Dent-de-lion had been expensive, and why shouldn't he recoup himself, as others had done, by laying out an aerodrome and starting a flying school? The idea had been simmering in his head for some time, and he poured it all out as soon as Denis gave him an opening. Afterwards, when he saw how the land lay, he retracted; but he had shown his wishes so plainly that Denis, ready to gnash his teeth for rage, felt bound to sink his own feelings and accept Dorothea as a pupil. In the net he had laid privily was his own foot taken.
 
The lessons were deferred, however, until after the Birmingham race; in which Denis met the luck he had expected. Over the first part of the course he made better time than any of the other competitors. Between Polesworth and Walsall he had to come down, with valve trouble. He set it right, and went to restart the engine by "swinging the prop," while half-a-dozen laborers held on to the tail of the machine. Unfortunately they were so much surprised by the sudden pull that they let go; Denis had barely time to get out of the way of the murderous whizzing blades. Then[Pg 104] followed a wildly funny scene, the monoplane charging about the field with devilish energy, while Denis and his six penitent assistants pelted after it. In the end it butted its nose into the bank, broke the propeller, and put itself out of the race.
 
"I told you what would come of flyin' on a Friday," said Denis in self-righteous gloom to his partner, over one of those strange meals which pilots learn to eat in village pubs. No one should fly who isn't physically fit, so presumably their digestions are equal to the strain. This meal had begun with beer and bacon, and gone on to buns—three-days-old currant buns.
 
Wandesforde, with his wife, had been following the race in a car. His arm was still in a sling, and his looks had not been improved by a blow which had knocked his front teeth crooked. He was patiently mincing up his bun with knife and fork; bite into it he could not.
 
"Well, dash it all, if a race is run on a Friday you have to fly it on a Friday, don't you?" he said, annoyed. "I wouldn't have let you in if I could possibly have held the joy-stick. I'm not superstitious about the days of the week myself."
 
"No, you've had smashes on every one of the seven, haven't you?"
 
Bearing this with an effort, Wandesforde gave up his bun as a bad job and consoled himself with a cigar. "I suppose now you'll go back to Dent-de-lion and take on Miss O'Connor?" he asked, by way of changing the subject.
 
"Teach her to commit suicide expensively," said the morose Denis. "She'll never make a pilot; anybiddy can see that. Women haven't it in them. Any old thing that's idiotic they'll do—start without fillin' up the tank, as soon as not!"
 
The sting of this speech was that Wandesforde, not being always as careful as his partner deemed desirable, had recently made this very omission himself, and paid for it by crashing a friend's favorite bus. The silence was broken by a small subdued sound of amusement from Mrs. [Pg 105]Wandesforde, which consoled her husband in proportion as it annoyed Denis. He scowled at her through his eyeglass, and then, muttering something about the monoplane, stalked out of the room.
 
"Lord!" said Wandesforde, getting up and squaring his broad shoulders against the mantelpiece with an audible sigh of relief, "he's in a pretty rank temper, what? I hoped he hadn't heard about Wyatt's Avro. Never knew him so cut up about a smash before!"
 
His wife, a piece of silvery transparent loveliness, shook her fair head. "Not the smash," she pronounced, oracular. "Miss O'Connor!"
 
Meanwhile Dorothea had established herself in a furnished cottage at Bredon, with an old governess as companion-chaperon. Miss Byrd had been living in an alms-house on ten shillings a week, when her half-forgotten pupil sought her out. It should be noted in passing that if Dorothea pursued her enemies with vengeance, she also pursued her friends with gratitude. More than this; she could be generous even to her enemies. Against her lawyer's advice, she had insisted on making her uncle an allowance. "I'm not going to be a pig, because he was!" she said. Vengeance and revenge are, in fact, very different, as different as the lion and the hyena. But this is by the way; and indeed at this time Dorothea's vengeance had dropped out of sight. Just as she flung herself on Gardiner, so she had now attacked Denis, without definite plan, on the opportunist theory that something would turn up; and something had, but not what she expected. Her own youth lifted its head. She had come to exploit the aeroplanes for her vengeance; and lo and behold! she forgot her vengeance in the aeroplanes.
 
Denis had adapted the 1911 model for use as a school machine, and Dorothea began in the usual way by "rolling"—i.e., taxi-ing on the ground. Most pupils "break wood" during this process, for an aeroplane will run any way but straight, preferring to curl round like a puppy after its own tail. But Dorothea had by nature that automatic sixth sense[Pg 106] of machinery which most people acquire only by practice. She would have learned to fly in a week, representing some three or four hours actually in the air, if Denis had given her full time; but he would not. Three days out of the six he kept sacred to his work. On the remaining three Dorothea and her car appeared at Dent-de-lion whenever the weather was favorable, and often when it wasn't. There were many rough days that September.
 
At first Denis found her an unmitigated nuisance. It was bad enough to put up with her when it was calm; but on a day of storm and tempest, with a fifty-mile gale—then to be interrupted by rosy-hopeful youth clamoring for a lesson—it was intolerable! Nature had never designed Denis for a teacher. He would have crushed a stupid pupil. He was hard even on Dorothea, when she failed to know what he hadn't told her. But she was so eager, pliant, uncrushable, so ardently in earnest, so reverent in attention, so insinuating in meekness: in a word, she flattered him so sweetly that he began, unconsciously at first, yet surely, he began to enjoy teaching her.
 
Even if there had been no question of Trent, Dorothea and Harry Gardiner would never have made friends. They had nothing in common. She, a little materialist, living in her feelings, caring not a rap for the pleasures of the mind or fancy; he, a restless thinker, imaginative, uneven in grain, too close in sympathy with nature to be wholly civilized. That strain of wildness would keep him always solitary; but Dorothea, though she had never yet had a chance to find herself, was essentially a home woman. She wanted to adore, to be ruled by, to mother her man in the good old-fashioned way. All that would simply have bored Gardiner. To Denis, on the other hand, it was the ideal of married life.
 
They sat side by side, his hands over hers, guiding the aeroplane, and he forgot she was a woman. Not till then did her womanhood begin to make its impression. She had attracted Gardiner, the man of reason, through his senses, she attracted Denis, the man of instinct, through his reason. He liked the quick answer of her mind to his own.[Pg 107] Then one day she met with an accident; her hand was grazed by the propeller. Had it struck her full it would have shorn off her fingers in a moment, and even as it was she was badly bruised. Denis ordered her to see a doctor. Dorothea, pale but valiant, wanted to go on with her lesson.
 
"It's the first fine day we've had this week," she pleaded. "I shall never, never fly if I stop for every miserable little trifle!"
 
"I shouldn't think of lettin' you," said Denis, grim and peremptory. "You've broken one of the small bones, as likely as not."
 
"That I haven't!" retorted Dorothea, giving the hand a vigorous shake to emphasize her words. Denis seized her arm.
 
"Do not do that! Don't you feel pain?"
 
"Yes, of course I do, but I can't be bothered to think about it when I'm enjoying myself, can I?"
 
She stamped her foot, so absurdly enraged that Denis could not help laughing. Her unceremonious fortitude appealed to him, just as her pretended sensibil............