Gradually they drew off from the fire, settled themselves to rest, fell into the splendid sleep that followed their long out-of-doors days.

In the middle of the night, Billy Fairfax came out of a dream to the knowledge that somebody was shaking him gently, firmly, furtively.  “Don’t move!” Honey Smith’s voice whispered; “keep quiet till I wake the others.”

It was a still and moon-lighted world.  Billy Fairfax lay quiet, his wide-open eyes fixed on the luminous sky.  The sense of drowse was being brushed out of his brain as though by a mighty whirlwind, and in its place came a vague sensation of confusion, of excitement, of a miraculous abnormality.  He heard Honey Smith crawl slowly from man to man, heard him whisper his adjuration once, twice, three times.  “Now,” Honey called finally.

The men looked seawards.  Then, simultaneously they leaped to their feet.

The semi-tropical moon was at its full.  Huge, white, embossed, cut out, it did not shine — it glared from the sky.  It made a melted moonstone of the atmosphere.  It faded the few clouds to a sapphire-gray, just touched here and there with the chalky dot of a star.  It slashed a silver trail across a sea jet-black except where the waves rimmed it with snow.  Up in the white enchantment, but not far above them, the strange air-creatures were flying.  They were not birds; they were winged women!

Darting, diving, glancing, curving, wheeling, they interwove in what seemed the premeditated figures of an aerial dance.  If they were conscious of the group of men on the beach, they did not show it; they seemed entirely absorbed in their flying.  Their wings, like enormous scimitars, caught the moonlight, flashed it back.  For an interval, they played close in a group inextricably intertwined, a revolving ball of vivid color.  Then, as if seized by a common impulse, they stretched, hand in hand, in a line across the sky-drifted.  The moonlight flooded them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between.  Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light.  One moment the whole figure would flare into a splendid blaze, as if an inner mechanism had suddenly turned on all the electricity; the next, the blaze died down to the fairy glisten given by the moonlight.

As if by one impulse, they began finally to fly upward.  Higher and higher they rose, still hand in hand.  Detail of color and movement vanished.  The connotation of the sexed creature, of the human thing, evaporated.  One instant, relaxed, they seemed tiny galleons, all sails set, that floated lazily, the sport of an aerial sea; another, supple and sinuous, they seemed monstrous fish whose fins triumphantly clove the air, monarchs of that aerial sea.