“Why?” he asked with forced carelessness.  “Your reasons?  They’re more interesting than your prophecy.”

“Because you have the will to be,” she said without emphasis, in the impersonal revelations of thought.  “You want power.  You have ambition.”

He looked the picture of it, with his square jaw, his well-moulded head set close to the shoulders on a sturdy neck, his even teeth showing as his lips parted in an unconscious smile.

“Marta, Marta!  She is—­is so explosive,” Mrs. Galland remarked apologetically to the colonel.

“I asked for her reasons.  I brought it on myself—­and it is not a bad compliment,” he replied.  Indeed, he had never received one so thrilling.

His smile, a smile well pleased with itself, remained as Mrs. Galland began to talk of other things, and its lingering satisfaction disappeared only with Marta’s cry at sight of the speck in the sky over the Brown range.  She was out on the lawn before the others had risen from their seats.

“An aeroplane!  Hurry!” she called.

This was a summons that aroused even Mrs. Galland’s serenity to haste.  For the first time they were seeing the new wonder in all the fascination of novelty to us moderns, who soon make our new wonders commonplace and clamor impatiently for others.

“He flies!  A man flies!” Marta exclaimed.  “Look at that—­coming straight for your tower, baron!  You’d better pull up the drawbridge and go on your knees in the chapel, for devils are abroad!”

How fast the speck grew!  How it spread to the entranced vision!  It became a thing of still, soaring wings with a human atom in its centre, Captain Arthur Lanstron, already called a fool for his rashness by a group of Brown officers on the aviation grounds beyond the Brown range.

Naturally, the business of war, watching for every invention that might serve its ends, was the first patron of flight.  Lanstron, pupil of a pioneer aviator, had been warned by him and by the chief of staff of the Browns, who was looking on, to keep in a circle close to the ground.  But he was doing so well that he thought he would try rising a little higher.  When the levers responded with the ease of a bird’s wings, temptation became inspiration and inspiration urged on temptation.  He had gone mad with the ecstasy of his sensation, there between heaven and earth.  Five seconds of this was worth five thousand years of any other form of life.

The summits of the range shot under him, unfolding a variegated rug of landscape.  He dipped the planes slightly, intending to follow the range’s descent and again they answered to his desire.  He saw himself the eyes of an army, the scout of the empyrean.  If a body of troops were to march along the pass road they would be as visible as a cloud in the sky.  Yes, here was revolution in detecting the enemy’s plans!  He had become momentarily unconscious of the swiftness of his progress, thanks to its hypnotic facility.  He was in the danger which too active a brain may bring to a critical and delicate mechanical task.  The tower loomed before him as suddenly as if it had been shot up out of the earth.  He must turn, and quickly, to avoid disaster; he must turn, or he would be across the white posts in the enemy’s country.