“They’re frightened,” Billy Fairfax said.  “Keep quiet, boys.”

The men stopped running, stood stock-still.

Gradually the girls calmed, sank, took up the interweaving figures of their air-dance.  If at their first appearance they seemed creatures of the sea, this time they were as distinctively of the forest.  They looked like spirits of the trees over which they hovered.  Indeed, but for their wings they might have been dryads.  Wreaths of green encircled their heads and waists.  Long leafy streamers trailed from their shoulders.  Often in the course of their aerial play, they plunged down into the feathery tree-tops.

Once, the blonde with the blue wings sailed out of the group and balanced herself for a toppling second on a long, outstretching bough.

“Good Lord, what a picture!” Pete Murphy said.

As if she understood, she repeated her performance.  She cast a glance over her shoulder at them — unmistakably noting the effect.

“Hates herself, doesn’t she?” commented Honey Smith.  “They’re talking!” he added after an interval of silence.  “Some one of them is giving directions — I can tell by the tone of her voice.  Can’t make out which one it is though.  Thank God, they can talk!”

“It’s the quiet one — the blonde — the one with the white wings,” Billy Fairfax explained.  “She’s captain.  Some bean on her, too; she straightened them out a moment ago when they got so frightened.”

“I now officially file my claim,” said Ralph Addington, “to that peachy one — the golden blonde — the one with the blue wings, the one who tried to stand on the bough.  That girl’s a corker.  I can tell her kind of pirate craft as far as I see it.”

“Me for the thin one!” said Pete Murphy.  “She’s a pippin, if you please.  Quick as a cat!  Graceful as they make them.  And look at that mop of red hair!  Isn’t that a holocaust?  I bet she’s a shrew.”

You win, all right,” agreed Ralph Addington.  “I’d like nothing better than the job of taming her, too.”

“See here, Ralph,” bantered Pete, “I’ve copped Brick-top for myself.  You keep off the grass.  See!”

“All right,” Ralph answered.  “Katherine for yours, Petruchio.  The golden blonde for mine!” He smiled for the first time in days.  In fact, at sight of the flying-girls he had begun to beam with fatuous good nature.

Two blondes, two brunettes, and a red-top” said Honey Smith, summing them up practically.  “One of those brunettes, the brown one, must be a Kanaka.  The other’s prettier — she looks like a Spanish woman.  There’s something rather taking about the plain one, though.  Pretty snappy — if anybody should fly up in a biplane and ask you!”

“It’s curious,” Frank Merrill said with his most academic manner, “it has not yet occurred to me to consider those young women from the point of view of their physical pulchritude.  I’m interested only in their ability to fly.  The one with the silver-white wings, the one Billy calls the ‘quiet one,’ flies better than any of the others, The dark one on the end, the one who looks like a Spaniard, flies least well.  It is rather disturbing, but I can think of them only as birds.  I have to keep recalling to myself that they’re women.  I can’t realize it.”