onger
the following morning; and after breakfast, he sprang suddenly into the
air. "Look!" he cried to Dolly.

And before her, above the meadow, he went through his flying repertory.
He cut clashing diagonals through the air; he rose and fell in
undulations like music; he shot about, gleaming white against the blue
sky; and finally he came down to her from the very zenith of the dome in
a sizzing straight line which opened, almost at her feet, in a white
explosion of suddenly extended wings.

"You baby!" said Dolly, as once more he stood before her, panting
slightly, and his eyes dilated; "you baby!" she said, indulgently.

Charles-Norton, shifting his position to one foot, scratched his head.
Somehow, this was not quite what he had expected. He had thought Dolly
more changed about this flying business; and here she seemed--well, not
so very much changed. Within him he felt something vaguely bristle. It
was still bristling there the next morning, and gave to his voice a
certain brusqueness when, kissing Dolly on the forehead after breakfast,
he said: "Well, so long, Dolly!"

"So long," he said; and Dolly, from her seat on the sward, saw him leap
from her and wing away in powerful flight. He made straight for the
crest; she saw him, flitting up there, a little white confetti in the
eddy of a breeze. Rising, falling, darting capriciously, he gradually
slid off down the range, and was gone.

Dolly rose. The meadow suddenly had become very quiet. A tree,
sap-bursting, cracked resoundingly; the sound went through her like a
sliver. She stood there, poised as if for flight, feeling upon her from
every tree, rock and bush, the hostile eyes of peering things; and she
was mighty glad when Nicodemus came running to her resonantly across the
clearing, demanding a pancake.

Somehow, Charles-Norton did not enjoy his flight as much as he had
expected. He bore with him a vague uneasiness which no amount of speeding
could quite lose. He could feel, all the time, Dolly away down there
alone in the deserted meadow. He returned much earlier than usual.

Dolly was cooking by the fire in the clearing, and she greeted him
cheerfully, without the slightest sign of reproach. After a while,
though, he noted upon her right cheek a little smudge. It was shaped like
a miniature comet; it was, rather, like the slight sediment left upon a
window-pane by a drop of rain. Charles-Norton, determinedly, refused to
see it. But it was there all the