“It’s about Lady Newland,” he finally said. And the solemnity of his face rather frightened me.
“She’s not dead?” I asked in a breath.
Peter shook his head from side to side.
“She’s been rather badly hurt,” he said, after several moments of silence. “Her plane was winged yesterday afternoon by a navy flier over San Diego Bay. She didn’t fall, but it was a forced landing and her machine had taken fire before they could get her out of her seat.”
“You mean she was burnt?” I cried, chilled by the horror of it.
And, inapposite as it seemed, my thoughts flashed back to that lithe and buoyant figure, and then to the picture of it charred and scorched and suffering.
“Only her face,” was Peter’s quiet and very deliberate reply.
“Only her face,” I repeated, not quite understanding him.
“The men from the North Bay field had her out a minute or two after she landed. But practically the whole plane was afire. Her heavy flying coat and gauntlets saved her body and hands. But her face was unprotected. She—”
“Do you mean she’ll be disfigured?” I asked, remembering the loveliness of that face with its red and wilful lips and its ever-changing tourmaline eyes.