s engine. At once I jumped up out of bed and ran to the
window.

The machine was raising itself lightly and easily from the ground. I
watched him wing his god-like way up through the still, soft air till he
was lost to view. Then, after a time, I saw him emerge again from those
immensities of space. He came down in one long majestic sweep, and
alighted in a field a little way away from the house, leaving the
aeroplane for his mechanics to fetch up presently.

"Hullo!" I greeted him. "Why didn't you tell me you were going up?"

As I spoke I heard plainly and distinctly, as plainly as ever I heard
anything in my life, that low, strange laugh, that I had heard before,
so silvery sweet and yet somehow so horrible.

"What's that?" I said, stopping short and staring blankly upwards, for,
absurd though it seems, that weird sound seemed to come floating down
from an infinite height above us.

"Not high enough," he muttered like a man in an ecstasy. "Not high
enough yet."

He walked away from me then without another word. When I entered the
cottage he was seated at the table sketching a woman's face--the same
face I had seen in that other sketch of his, spectral, unreal, and
lovely.

"What on earth----?" I began.

"Nothing on earth," he answered in a strange voice. Then he laughed and
jumped up, and tore his sketch across.

He seemed quite his old self again, chatty and pleasant, and with his
old passion for talking "shop." He launched into a long explanation of
some scheme he had in mind for securing automatic balancing.

I never told anyone about that strange, mocking laugh, in fact, I had
almost forgotten the incident altogether when something brought every
detail back to my memory. I had a letter from a person who signed
himself "George Barnes."

Barnes, it seemed, was the operator who had taken the pictures of that
last ascent, and as he understood I had been Mr. Thorpe's greatest
friend, he wanted to see me. Certain expressions in the letter aroused
my curiosity. I replied. He asked for an appointment at a time that was
not very convenient, and finally I arranged to call at his house one
evening.

It was one of those smart little six-room villas of which so many have
been put up in the London suburbs of late. Barnes was buying it on the
instalment system, and I quite won his heart by complimenting him on it.
But for that, I doubt if anything would have come of my visit, for he
was plainly nervous and ill at