with that deliberate appreciation of age which holds to the happiness in
hand. To-morrow it might rain; to-day it is pleasant. She was getting
old. Serenely she made the most of to-day.

The gardener did not look up when she reached his side. She watched his
fingers firmly pressing the moist earth around the bulbs that he had
sunk in their new beds. There were only three more to set out, and her
inclination, in keeping with her leisureliness, was to wait on the
completion of his task before speaking. Again she let her glance wander
away to the distances. It was arrested and held this time by two groups
of far-away points in the sky along the frontier, in the same bright
light of that other afternoon when Captain Arthur Lanstron had made his
first night over the range.

"Look!" she cried. "Look, look!" she repeated, a girlish excitement
rippling her placidity.

Aeroplanes and dirigibles had become a familiar sight. They were always
going and coming and manoeuvring, the Browns over their territory and
the Grays over theirs. But here was something new: two squadrons of
dirigibles and planes in company, one on either side of the white posts.
For the fraction of a second the dirigibles seemed prisms and the planes
still-winged dragon-flies hung on a blue wall. With the next fraction
the prisms were seen to be growing and the stretch of the plane wings
broadening.

"They are racing--ours against theirs!" exclaimed Mrs. Galland. "Look,
look!"

Still the gardener bent to his work, unconcerned.