Qu’est-ce que tu veux que je te dise? I might have paid more heavily for the mad intoxication of that last flight.  In a month or two I shall be again aloft.

I have often maintained that sooner or later a moment of emotion, of sheer joy in the struggle and risk, will cause the soberest pilot to throw discretion to the winds.  It was so in this case.

Parbleu! I leap, I dive, I twist in figures of eight, I fight my way by inches against the wind, and, turning, I shoot back upon its current with the speed of a projectile.  I am shaken and buffeted until I gasp for breath.  I swerve, I dance, I caracole—­I pirouette on a wing tip, catching my side slips on the rudder as one plays cup and ball.  I dangle myself at the end of a single wire on the brink of eternity, crying defiance to the winds! C’etait de la folie—­the madness of battle.  Far below me I could see an occasional spectator running like a rabbit, grotesquely waving his arms.

“Oh, yes, he is doubtless clever, this Power,” I cry in my pride.  “But he is, after all, nothing but a buzzard.  It is I, Lacroix, who am alone veritable king of the air!”

Coquin de sort! I do not know exactly when the wire controlling the right aileron parted.  I became aware merely that that side of the machine canted downward and refused to rise again in response to the lever.  Like a flash, I thrust forward the elevator, hoping to reach the earth by a glide.  But I arrived by a quicker maneuver—­a whirling gust, a tourbillon of the most terrific, hurled the biplane sidelong to destruction.

The man who has been accustomed to face death meets it at last with a gentle sneer on his lip, as one who is vanquished by an enemy whom he knows to be in reality his inferior.

“So here he is at last, then, this Death,” I said to myself.  “Well, let us see what he will do!”

And in that instant the graceful biplane crashed into splinters, and I lay pinned in the wreckage beneath a shroud of torn white canvas.  In the black casquette, later, they discovered a hole two inches wide, torn by the jagged edge of a broken stay.

I found them at my bedside when I awoke some days later, my Mademoiselle Warren and Monsieur Power.  They leaned together, arm in arm, upon the rail at the foot, and the lovely face of my dear pupil was radiant with sympathy and happiness.

“Ha!  What is it that it is, then?” I demand.

“Mr. Power won,” said Miss Warren.

The young broker smiled with all his teeth.

“But he was unfairly abetted by a certain Monsieur Lacroix,” went on Miss Warren.  “That was a terrible practical joke you played on me with the black casquette, you know.  They carried us away in the same auto, and they tell me that I looked as lifeless as you.”

“And now I have lost my pupil!” I exclaimed ruefully.

“Dear Monsieur Lacroix, I had no choice,” she responded, and moved to the bedside and held my hand.  “I cannot oppose the wishes of all the people I love.  Besides, it is a fair bargain.  We have promised each other, Mr. Power and I, never to fly again.”