"Lucky fellow!" Jocelyn Thew sighed. "You are getting now what a few years ago one had to defy the law for—real, thrilling sensations. It's a life for men, yours."
The young man's hand shook a little as he raised his glass. He looked towards Jocelyn Thew almost appealingly.
"It's a splendid life," he assented, talking rapidly and with the air of one who wishes to stifle conversation. "I had hard work to get my wings, but I guess I'm all right now. The engine part of it never gave me any trouble, but I suffered from a kind of sickness the first few times I went up. It's a gorgeous sensation, flying. The worst of it is we never know when those cunning Germans aren't coming out with something fresh. They stung us up last week with a dozen planes of an entirely new pattern, two hundred and fifty horse-power engines on a small frame. Gee, they gave some of our elderly machines a touching up, I can tell you!"
"So you fly over the German lines most days, eh?" Jocelyn Thew ruminated.
"We dropped a few thousand copies of the President's speech last Monday," the young man told them. "That ought to give them something to think about. They only know just what they are told. The last batch of prisoners that were brought in firmly believed that one of their armies had landed in England and that London was on the point of falling."
"All war," Jocelyn Thew said didactically, "is carried on under a cloud of misconception."
The young man stretched himself out. He had dined well and his courage was returning. He asked a question which up till then he had felt inclined to shirk.
"What licks me," he declared suddenly, "is finding you two over here. What ever brought you across, Katharine?"
There was a brief silence. Katharine seemed uncertain how to answer. It was
Jocelyn Thew who took up the challenge.
"A little over a fortnight ago," he explained, "I called upon your sister in New York. I begged her to perform a certain service for me. She consented. The execution of that service brought her across from New York on board the City of Boston."