ir from America that morning
rushed down out of the sky.

At first it was a little oblong, faint and blue amidst the distant
fleecy clouds; and then it grew swiftly large and white, and larger and
whiter, until they could see the separate tiers of sails, each hundreds
of feet wide, and the lank body they supported, and at last even the
swinging seats of the passengers in a dotted row. Although it was
falling it seemed to them to be rushing up the sky, and over the
roof-spaces of the city below its shadow leapt towards them. They heard
the whistling rush of the air about it and its yelling siren, shrill and
swelling, to warn those who were on its landing-stage of its arrival.
And abruptly the note fell down a couple of octaves, and it had passed,
and the sky was clear and void, and she could turn her sweet eyes again
to Denton at her side.

Their silence ended; and Denton, speaking in a little language of broken
English that was, they fancied, their private possession--though lovers
have used such little languages since the world began--told her how they
too would leap into the air one morning out of all the obstacles and
difficulties about them, and fly to a sunlit city of delight he knew of
in Japan, half-way about the world.

She loved the dream, but she feared the leap; and she put him off with
"Some day, dearest one, some day," to all his pleading that it might be
soon; and at last came a shrilling of whistles, and it was time for him
to go back to his duties on the stage. They parted--as lovers have been
wont to part for thousands of years. She walked down a passage to a
lift, and so came to one of the streets of that latter-day London, all
glazed in with glass from the weather, and with incessant moving
platforms that went to all parts of the city. And by one of these she
returned to her apartments in the Hotel for Women where she lived, the
apartments that were in telephonic communication with all the best
lecturers in the world. But the sunlight of the flying stage was in her
heart, and the wisdom of all the best lecturers in the world seemed
folly in that light.

She spent the middle part of the day in the gymnasium, and took her
midday meal with two other girls and their common chaperone--for it was
still the custom to have a chaperone in the case of motherless girls of
the more prosperous classes. The chaperone had a visitor that day, a man
in green and yellow, with a white face and vivid eyes, who talked