She sat down dazedly. Presently she was roused to her surroundings by Larry’s “Oh, Pen!” from below.
When she came down to the dining-room, Larry’s clear young eyes looked at her keenly.
“Not down to earth yet, Pen? I know how you feel. First time I made the sky route, I went off by myself for a day.”
“Larry, I can’t talk about it yet. I will tell you now why I joined you. I thought I would like to go to France—with you. I thought I might be useful some way, but now—”
“We won’t think of plans now. We’ll talk it all over in the morning when I am back. You’ll be safe here. Nat would as lief shoot Hebby or anyone else who trailed you. Supper’s on the table, so come on.”
Throughout the meal Larry did most of the talking, Pen scarcely responding. Then he was off, steering in great circles toward town, Pen watching with the quickening of pulse and a renewal of the elation she had felt when taking the air. When he was but a mere speck in the sky, she went up to her little room.
“You’ll never look quite so high or so wonderful to me again,” she thought, as she looked out on the hills. “It’s because I’ve looked down on you, I suppose—the law of contrast. I learned a great deal up there—in the vapors. I put out my feelers, something I never did before. I see I’ve always faked my sensations. But my wings are pin feathers as yet. I have to look at everything from a new angle of vision. All my life I’ve been longing for thrills—real thrills, my own thrills; not other peoples. I had a few little shivers when I was riding to Top Hill that morning; a few more last night—but my first true thrill of rapture came when I was challenging the sky, an argonaut.”
It was a hard struggle for Pen to adjust her new self that she had found up in the high altitudes where all the tepid, petty things of life had dropped from her—where she had found the famous fleece, the truth. In the vastness of that uncharted land, like a flash in the dark something had leaped at her. Her dream of a dream had come true. She had learned the great human miracle, the meaning of a love that had the strength to renounce. A god-made love, sweet and strong, conceived on earth, but brought forth on high where the call of destiny had sounded with clarion clearness. She knew now what she had missed; that he was not of the world of miniature men who exact and never return.
She was roused from her visions of the new and radiant world which had been opened unto her by a knock at her door.
“Yes,” she answered vaguely.