“Let me in!” he cried.  “You’ve done the trick, Orlando, you’ve done the trick.”

“Yes, I have satisfied myself,” came back in studied self-control from the other side of the door; and with a quick turning of the lock, Orlando stood before them.

They never forgot him as he looked at that moment.  He was drenched, battered, palpitating with excitement; but the majesty of success was in his eye and in the bearing of his incomparable figure.

As Oswald bounded towards him, he reached out his hand, but his glance was for Doris.

“Yes,” he went on, in tones of suppressed elation, “there’s no flaw in my triumph.  I have done all that I set out to do.  Now—­”

Why did he stop and look hurriedly back into the hangar?  He had remembered Sweetwater.  Sweetwater, who at that moment was stepping carefully from his seat in some remote portion of the car.  The triumph was not complete.  He had meant—­

But there his thought stopped.  Nothing of evil, nothing even of regret should mar his great hour.  He was a conqueror, and it was for him now to reap the joy of conquest.

XXXVIII

NIGHT

Three days had passed, and Orlando Brotherson sat in his room at the hotel before a table laden with telegrams, letters and marked newspapers.  The news of his achievement had gone abroad, and Derby was, for the moment, the centre of interest for two continents.

His success was an established fact.  The second trial which he had made with his car, this time with the whole town gathered together in the streets as witnesses, had proved not only the reliability of its mechanism, but the great advantages which it possessed for a direct flight to any given point.  Already he saw Fortune beckoning to him in the shape of an unconditional offer of money from a first-class source; and better still,—­for he was a man of untiring energy and boundless resource—­that opportunity for new and enlarged effort which comes with the recognition of one’s exceptional powers.

All this was his and more.  A sweeter hope, a more enduring joy had followed hard upon gratified ambition.  Doris had smiled on him; —­Doris!  She had caught the contagion of the universal enthusiasm and had given him her first ungrudging token of approval.  It had altered his whole outlook on life in an instant, for there was an eagerness in this demonstration which proclaimed the relieved heart.  She no longer trusted either appearances or her dream.  He had succeeded in conquering her doubts by the very force of his personality, and the shadow which had hitherto darkened their intercourse had melted quite away.  She was ready to take his word now and Oswald’s, after which the rest must follow.  Love does not lag far behind an ardent admiration.

Fame!  Fortune!  Love!  What more could a man desire?  What more could this man, with his strenuous past and an unlimited capacity for an enlarged future, ask from fate than this.  Yet, as he bends over his letters, fingering some, but reading none beyond a line or two, he betrays but a passing elation, and hardly lifts his head when a burst of loud acclaim comes ringing up to his window from some ardent passer-by:  “Hurrah for Brotherson!  He has put our town on the map!”