The sight below seemed full of awe and terror. Presently, a sudden gust of wind changed the direction of the smoke column and brought a volley of sparks over the Bladud.
"Hard a-port!" cried Mr. Jardine, "we'll get out of this."
In a moment they had veered away from the scene of the conflagration, and were crossing first the river, then Cannon Street, almost at full speed. The fans were set to work, and they rose to a greater altitude to avoid all risk of colliding with church towers and steeples. A dark, domed mass took shape a hundred feet away, and over it the great cross of St. Paul's loomed for an instant into view; a train with faces showing against the lighted windows, crawled across the railway bridge at the foot of Ludgate Hill; and far away in the West the gleam of another fire lighted up the sky with a sudden threatening glare.
From below there now arose the piteous bellowing of cattle. They were passing over the huge markets in Smithfield, and the shouts of the drovers blended with the noise made by the doomed and harried beasts, whose flesh was to feed London on the morrow. Soon another long row of lights revealed Southampton Row, running straight, as it seemed, from Kingsway to Euston. The station clock showed that it was nearly ten. They swept over the quiet West Central squares, over the Euston Road and Regent's Park, and so onward and away, until the huddled dwellings of the capital gave place to suburbs, dark roads, and silent fields.
Linton, through the later sights and sounds of the night, was conscious of being in a sort of dream; and in the dream the girl by his side was the principal, nay, the only figure save his own. The end of a light scarf that was round her neck blew across his face; the sway of the Bladud brought her arm against his own, and each slight contact seemed to thrill him. Once or twice he glanced at her face, almost inquiringly; for now he had the oddest feeling that she was no stranger; that in reality they knew each other and had only met again; that in the past, somehow, somewhere he knew not when, there had been a kinship or a tie between them. From the first moment of their meeting she had interested and attracted him. Of that he was well aware. But not until they sat side by side in this aerial journey had the impression of which he was now conscious crept into his mind or memory. What could it mean? That strange exhilaration of the upper air, the quickening of imagination, wrought by their rapid travelling high above the solid earth and all its limitations, perhaps might account in some degree for the puzzling feeling that possessed him. He glanced at her again; their eyes met, and in hers he read, or fancied that he read, a telepathic answer to his thoughts.
Suddenly he found himself repeating, as if with better understanding, lines that always lingered in his memory:
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar."
"How odd," murmured the girl in a wondering voice, "the very lines that I was thinking of," and in low tones she finished the quotation:
"O joy, that in our embers
Is something that doth live;
That nature yet remembers,
What was so fugitive!"