ss all that they saw and learnt during that day of
wonders, and all night Natasha could hardly sleep for waking dreams
of universal empire, and a world at peace equitably ruled by a power
that had no need of aggression, because all the realms of earth and
air belonged to those who wielded it.

When at last she did go to sleep, it was to dream again, and this
time of herself, the Angel of the Revolution, sharing the aerial
throne of the world-empire with the man who had made revolutions
impossible by striking the sword from the hand of the tyrants of
earth for ever.

CHAPTER XVI.

A WOOING IN MID AIR.

After breakfast on the Friday morning, Natasha and Arnold were
standing in the bows of the _Ariel_, admiring the magnificent
panorama that lay stretched out five thousand feet below them.

The air-ship had by this time covered a little over 2000 miles of her
voyage, and was now speeding smoothly and swiftly along over the
south-western shore of the Red Sea, a few miles southward of the
sixteenth parallel of latitude. Eastward the bright blue waves of the
sea were flashing behind them in the cloudless morning sun; the high
mountains of the African coast rose to right and left and in front of
them; and through the breaks in the chain they could see the huge
masses of Abyssinia to the southward, and the vast plains that
stretched away westward across the Blue and White Niles, away to the
confines of the Libyan Desert.

"What a glorious world!" exclaimed Natasha, after gazing for many
silent minutes with entranced eyes over the limitless landscape. "And
to think that, after all, all this is but a little corner of it!"

"It is yours, Natasha, if you will have it," replied Arnold quietly,
yet with a note in his voice that warned her that the moment which
she had expected and yet dreaded, had already come. There was no use
in avoiding the inevitable for a time. It would be better if they
understood each other at once; and so she looked round at him with
eyebrows elevated in well-simulated surprise, and said--

"Mine! What do you mean, my friend?"

There was an almost imperceptible emphasis on the last word that
brought the blood to Arnold's cheek, and he answered, with a ring in
his voice that gave unmistakable evidence of the effort that he was
making to restrain the passion that inspired his words--

"I mean just what I say. All the kingdoms of the world, and the glory
of them, from pole to pole, and from e