. We shook hands as though we had
not seen each other for years. We could not have been more surprised
and delighted if we had met on another planet after long and hopeless
wanderings in space.

While I superintended the replenishing of my fuel and oil tanks he
walked excitedly up and down in front of the hangars. He was an
odd-looking sight in his flying clothes, with a pair of Meyrowitz
goggles set back on his head, like another set of eyes, gazing at the
sky with an air of wide astonishment. He paid no attention to my
critical comments, but started thinking aloud as soon as I rejoined
him.

"It was lonely! Yes, by Jove! that was it. A glorious thing, one's
isolation up there; but it was too profound to be pleasant. A relief
to get down again, to hear people talk, to feel the solid earth under
one's feet. How did it impress you?"

This was like Drew. I felt ashamed of the lightness of my own
thoughts, but I had to tell him of my speculations upon after-the-war
developments in aviation: nurses flying Voisins, with the cars filled
with babies; old men having after-dinner naps in twenty-three-metre
Nieuports, fitted, for safety, with Sperry gyroscopes; family parties
taking comfortable outings in gigantic biplanes of the R-6 type;
mothers, as of old, gazing apprehensively at speed-dials, cautioning
fathers about "driving too fast," and all of the rest.

Drew looked at me reprovingly, to be sure, but he felt the need, just
as I did, of an outlet to his feelings, and so he turned to this kind
of comic relief with the most delightful reluctance. He quickly lost
his reserve, and in the imaginative spree which followed we went far
beyond the last outposts of absurdity. We laughed over our own wit
until our faces were tired. However, I will not be explicit about our
folly. It might not be so amusing from a critical point of view.

After our papers have been viseed at the office of the commandant, we
hurried back to our machines, eager to be away again. We were to make
our second landing at R----. It was about seventy kilometres distant
and almost due north. The mere name of the town was an invitation.
Somewhere, in one of the novels of William J. Locke, may be found this
bit of dialogue:--

"But, master," said I, "there is, after all, color in words. Don't you
remember how delighted you were with the name of a little town we
passed through on the way to Orleans? R----? You were haunted by it
and said it was like the pu