"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