“My God!” groaned Pete Murphy; “how beautiful and inaccessible!  But women should be inaccessible,” he ended with a sigh.

“Not so inaccessible as they were, though,”

Ralph Addington said.  Again the appearance of the women had transformed him physically and mentally.  He moved with the nervous activity of a man strung on wires.  His brown eyes showed yellow gleams like a cat’s.  “They’re flying lower and slower to-night.”

It did seem as though the fog, light as it was, definitely impeded their wings.  It gave to their movements a little languor that had a plaintive appealing quality.  Perhaps they realized this themselves.  In the midst of their aerial evolutions suddenly — and apparently without cause — they developed panic, turned seawards.  Their audience, taken by surprise, burst into shouts of remonstrance, ran after them.  The clamor and the motion seemed only to add to the girls’ alarm.  Their retreating speed was almost frenzied.

“What the — what’s frightened them?” Honey Smith asked.  Honey’s brows had come together in an unaccustomed scowl.  He bit his lips.

“Give it up,” Billy Fairfax answered, and his tone boiled with exasperation.  “I hope they haven’t been frightened away for good.”

“I think every time it’s the last,” exclaimed Pete Murphy, “but they keep coming back.”

“Son,” said Ralph Addington, and there was a perceptible element of patronage in his tone, “I’ll tell you the exact order of events.  It threw a scare into the girls to-night that they couldn’t fly so well.  But in an hour’s time, they’ll be sore because they didn’t put up a good exhibition.  Now, if I know anything at all about women — and maybe I flatter myself, but I think I know a lot — they’ll be back the first thing to-morrow to prove to us that their bad flying was not our effect on them but the weather’s.”

Whether Ralph’s theory was correct could not, of course, be ascertained.  But in the matter of prophecy, he was absolutely vindicated.  About half-way through the morning five black spots appeared in the west.  They grew gradually to bewildering shapes and colors, for the girls came dressed in gowns woven of brilliant flowers.  And the torrents of their beautiful hair floated loose.  This time they held themselves grouped close; they kept themselves aloof, high.  But again came the sinuous interplay of flower-clad bodies, the flashing evolution of rainbow wings, the dazzling interweaving of snowy arms and legs.  It held the men breathless.

“They’re like goldfish in a bowl,” Billy Fairfax said.  “I never saw such suppleness.  You wouldn’t think they had a bone in their systems.”

“I bet they’re as strong as tigers, though,” commented Addington.  “I wouldn’t want to handle more than one of them at once.”

“I think I could handle two,” remarked Frank Merrill.  He said this, not boastfully, but as one who states an interesting fact.  And he spoke as impersonally as though the girls were machines.