Begun half in fun, the pretty widow’s advance towards the physician had grown a little out of her own entire control, and she found herself in some danger of being hoist by her own petard. Easy enough she found it to handle the man—she had handled men from her cradle—but she found her own wild heart not quite so manageable.

Helen half expected Angela to make the proposal which Latham, the girl felt sure, never would. She was sure that Angela was in deadly earnest now, and she was confident that in love, as in frolic, Angela would stick at nothing.

And Angela was in deadly earnest now—the deadliest. But she had no intention of proposing to Horace. She knew a trick worth ten of that.

Wah-No-Tee still stood to Mrs. Hilary for friend, philosopher and guide, but, believed in as staunchly as ever, she was sought rather less frequently, and on the affair-Latham the disembodied spirit, who was also “quite a lady,” was consulted not at all. For the subjugation of the physician Angela Hilary besought no sibyl, bought no love-philter.

She lived, when in London, in a tiny private hotel, just off Bond Street, and as expensive as it was small. In her sitting-room there Latham and she were lounging close to the log-heaped fire one dark December day, exploiting an afternoon tea transatlantically heterogeneous.

“You know, I don’t approve of this at all,” the medico said, shaking his head at hot muffins heavy with butter and whipped cream, his hand hovering undecidedly over toasted marshmallows and a saline liaison of popcorn and peanuts. “We deserve to be very ill, both of us—and my country is at war, and the Morning Post says——”

“Food-shortage! Eat less bread!” Angela gurgled, burying her white teeth in a very red peach. “Well, there’s no bread here, not a crust. And the children in the East End and badly wounded Tommies might not thrive on this fare of mine.”

“They might not,” the physician said cordially. “Yes, please, I will have two lumps and cream: my constitution requires it.”

As she poured his tea, all her rings flashing in the fire-flicker, her face, usually so white, just flushed with rose from the flecks of the flames, he fell to watching her silently.

“Talk!” she commanded.

He smiled, and said nothing.

“Oh, a penny, then, for your thoughts, Mr. Man, if you want to be bribed.”

“I wonder if I dare.”

“Be bribed? What nonsense.”

“It takes a great deal of courage sometimes. But that was not what I meant.”

“What did you mean?—if you meant anything.”

“Oh! yes—I meant.”

“What? Hurry up!”

“I meant that I wondered if I dared tell you my thoughts—what I was thinking just then.”

“H’m,” was all the help she vouchsafed him.

“Will you be angry?”

“Very like—how can I tell?”

“Shall I plunge, and find out?”

“As you like. But I don’t mind making it six-pence.”

“The fee nerves me. I was wishing I knew, and could ask without impertinence, something about your first marriage.”

“My first marriage indeed!” she cried indignantly. “How often are you pleased to imagine I have been married? I’ve only been married once, I’d have you know.”

Latham flushed hotly, and she tilted back in her chair and laughed at him openly. Then the dimpling face—her dimples were delightful—sobered, and she leaned towards the fire—brooding—her hands clasped on her knees, her foot on the fender. “I’ll tell you, then, as well as I can—why not? John was quite unlike any man you’ve known. You don’t grow such men in England. It isn’t the type. He was big, and blond and reckless—‘all wool and a yard wide.’ I loved my husband very dearly. We American women usually do. We can, you know, for we don’t often marry for any other reason. Why should we? Mr. Hilary was a lawyer—a great criminal pleader. He saved more murderers than any other one man at the Illinois bar. He was a Westerner—every bit of him. His crying was wonderful, and oh! how he bullied his juries. He made them obey him. He made every one obey him.”

“You?” Latham interjected.

“Me! Good gracious, man, American women don’t obey. Me! I wouldn’t obey Georgie Washington come to life and richer than Rothschild. Obey!” Only an American voice could express such contempt, and no British pen convey it. “But the juries obeyed him all right—as a rule! Those were good days in Chicago. There’s no place like Chicago.”

“So I’ve heard,” Latham admitted.

“But they didn’t last long. An uncle of John’s died out in California, and left us ever so many millions.”

“I say—that was sporting!”

“What was?”

“Leaving his money to you as well as to his nephew.”

“Land’s sake, but you English are funny! Of course Ira Hilary did nothing of the sort. I don’t suppose he’d ever heard of me—though he might if he read the Chicago papers; a dress or two of mine were usually in on Sunday—or something I’d done. But I dare say he didn’t even know if John had a wife. He’d gone to the Pacific coast when he was a boy, before John was born—and he’d never been back East, or even written, till he wrote he was dead. It’s like that in America. Our men are busy.”

“I see,” Latham asserted.

“No, you don’t. No one could who hadn’t lived there. Throw another log on.”

Latham did, and she continued, half chatting to him, half musing: “My! how it all comes back, talking about it. Well, he left us all that money, left it to me as much as if he’d said so, and very much more than he left it to John. That’s another way we have in America that you couldn’t understand if you tried; so I wouldn’t try, if I were you.”

“I won’t,” her guest said meekly. “Go on, please. I am interested.”

“Well, Uncle Ira died, and I made John retire.”

“Retire?”

“Give up the bar. And we traveled. I love to travel, I always have. And now we could afford to go anywhere and do everything. Of course I’d always had money, heaps and heaps. Papa was rich, and he left me everything. Oh! Richard Bransby wasn’t the only pebble on that beach. Gracious! we run to such fathers in America. But, of course, we’d had to live on John’s money.”

“Why?”

“Why?” she blazed at him. “Why? Why, because my money wasn’t his. He hadn’t earned it. John Hilary never had so much as a cigar out of my money. He dressed shockingly. I had to burn half the ties he bought. And his hats! But he supported me, I didn’t support him. American men don’t sponge on their wives. They wouldn’t do it. And if they would, we wouldn’t let them—not we American women. I say, Dr. Latham, you’ve a lot to learn about America—all Englishmen have.”

“Go on. Teach me some more. I like learning.”

“There’s not much more to tell. We were not together long, John and I. It was like a story my father used to tease me with, when he was tired and I teased him to tell me stories. ‘I’ll tell you a story about Jack A’Manory, and now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another about Jack and his brother, and now my story’s done.’ I was eighteen, nearly, when I was married. It was four years after that that John said good-by to his murderers and absconders. Just a year after he died in Hong Kong—cholera. That teased me some.” The pretty lips were quivering and Latham saw a tear pearl on the long lashes.

After a pause he said gently, “Will you ever give any one else his place, do you think?”

“John’s place? Never. No one could.” She did not add that there were other places that a man—the right man—might make in her heart, and that she was lonely. But the thought was clear in her mind, and it glanced through Latham’s.

“How long is it—since you were in Hong Kong?” he ventured presently.

Angela Hilary dimpled and laughed. “I’ll be twenty-eight next week.”

“And I was forty-seven last week.” And then he added earnestly, “Thank you for telling me.”

“Oh, I was glad to.” Neither referred to her confidence about her age, or thought that the other did.

At that moment “Mr. Pryde” was announced. Angela welcomed him effusively, brewed him fresh tea and plied him with molasses candy and hot ginger-bread.

Latham watched her; it was always pleasant to watch this woman, especially when plying some womanly craft, as now, but he spoke to Stephen. “I am glad to have this chance of offering you my congratulations, Pryde.”

Stephen raised a puzzled eyebrow. “Your congratulations?”

“I hear that since you have become the head of the house of Bransby you have done great things.”

“Oh,” Stephen said non-committally.

“They tell me that you are the big man in the Aeroplane World, and that you are going to grow bigger. Perhaps success means nothing to you, but——”

“Success means everything to me, to every man worth his salt. The people who say it doesn’t are liars.”

“So, after all, you were right and Bransby was wrong.”

“Yes, I was right, and Uncle Dick was wrong. But as for my rising to great heights—well—after all, it is the house of Bransby that will reap the benefit. It was very trusting of Uncle Dick to leave me the management of the business, but Helen is the house of Bransby.”

“But surely she won’t interfere with your management,” said Latham.

And Angela cried, “Oh no, she must never do that.”

“No—she must never do that,” Pryde said, more to himself than to them, stirring his tea musingly and gazing wistfully, stubbornly into the fire. He looked up and caught Mrs. Hilary’s eye, and spoke to them both, and more lightly. “I dare say I shall find a way to persuade her to let me go on as I have.”

Their hostess sprang up with a cry. Latham just saved her cup, and an almonded eclair tumbled into the fire—past all saving. “Oh! it is lovely, perfectly lovely!”

“What?” the men both asked.

“To fly like a bird. I used to dream I was flying when I was a child. It was perfectly sweet. I used to dream it, too, sometimes when I first came out and went to Germans (cotillions, you call ’em) and things every night—oh!”

“Perhaps that came from your dancing,” Pryde said gallantly. Angela danced well.

“More probably it was the midnight supper she’d eaten,” laughed Latham, pointing a rueful professional finger at the tea-table.

“Perhaps it was both,” the hostess said cheerfully. “And my, it was beautiful. But oh, we never had supper at midnight. No fear! Two or three was nearer the hour. But such good suppers. You don’t know how to eat over here,” she added sadly. “For one thing, you simply don’t know how to cook a lobster—not one of you.”

“How should a lobster be cooked?” Pryde said lazily.

“Hot—hot—hot. Or it’s good in a mayonnaise. But who ever saw a mayonnaise in London? No one.”

“I am not greatly surprised that you dreamed at some height, if you regularly supped off lobster, Mrs. Hilary, at three in the morning, either frappÉ or sizzling hot,” Latham told her.

“And champagne with it,” Stephen ventured.

“Never! I detest champagne with shellfish.”

“Stout?” Pryde quizzed.

Angela made a face.

“What, then, was the beverage? If one is permitted to ask,” Stephen persisted meekly.

“Cream—when I could get it. I do love cream.”

The physician groaned. “I wonder,” he said severely, “that instead of dreaming of flying you did not in reality fly.”

She giggled, and helped herself to a macaroon, still standing on the hearthrug, facing them. “Oh, I knew a lovely poem once—we all had to learn it by heart at school—probably you did too?”

“I think it highly improbable,” Latham protested.

“I am positive I did not,” Pryde asserted.

“Not learn to recite ‘Darius Green and His Flying Machine’! My, you do neglect your children in this country. You poor things! I wonder if I can remember it and say it to you.”

She clasped her hands behind her back and faced them with dancing eyes. “‘Darius Green and His Flying Machine,’” she declaimed solemnly. And very solemnly, but with now and then a punctuation point of giggle, she recited in its entirety the absurd classic which has played no inconspicuous part in the transatlantic curriculum. Her beautiful Creole voice, now pathetic and velvet, now lifted as the wing of a bird in flight, her face dimpling till even Stephen was bewitched, and Latham could have kissed it, and might have been tempted to essay the enterprise had only they been alone. Richard Bransby, whose fond fancy had compared the women of his love each to some distinct flower, might have thought her like some rich magnolia of her own South as she swayed and postured in the gleaming firelight. But perhaps all beautiful women are rather flower-like.

She ended the performance with a shiver and sigh of elation. “Oh, isn’t it a love of a poem? Have some more tea.”

Stephen came to see Mrs. Hilary not infrequently. She liked him genuinely, and her liking soothed and helped him. He was terribly restless often. Never once had he repented. He had loved Hugh, and loved him still. He would have given a great deal to have known where he was, and to have helped him. He would have given far more to know that the brother would never come back—come back to thwart him of Helen—perhaps to expose him of crime. He loved Hugh and he mourned him; but two things to him were paramount: to make Helen his wife, and to be an “Air-King.” One goal was in sight, the other he could not, and would not, relinquish. And to gain these two great desires, soul-desires both, he would hesitate at nothing, regret nothing, and least of all their cost to any other, no matter how dear to him that other, no matter how terrible that cost.

Latham left a few moments after the tragic descent of Darius into the barnyard mud. Angela Hilary went to the door to speed her parting guest, and gave him her hand, her right hand, of course. Latham dropped it rather abruptly and took her left hand in his. “How many rings do you own?” he demanded.

“Dozens. I’ve not counted them for years. There’s a list somewhere.”

“You need two more,” he said softly—and went.