We must have been somewhere about twenty thousand feet. My head seemed as though it would burst. I was breathing with difficulty. A little higher, and we should need oxygen. Toby’s face was of course hidden from me, but he sat steadily at his controls, apparently in no embarrassment. Probably he had recently been practicing flying to great heights—it would be his queer idea of amusing himself—and was more habituated to changes of atmospheric pressure. I looked at Sylvia. She was plainly much distressed—and more than distressed, frightened. I cannot describe the anguish which gripped me as I contemplated her. Whatever I had tried to pretend to myself down there on that distant earth in those six dreary months since my pride had been wounded, I knew now, with an atrocious vividness of realization, that I loved her. And I could do nothing—nothing—to save her, if that lunatic in front did not come to his senses! The imploring look she fixed upon me was exquisite torture. Speech was impossible in that deafening roar of the engine, but she made me understand—the bitter irony of it!—that it was in me she trusted. I took her hand, pressed it to my lips. If we were to die, she should at least know what I felt for her. And then—oh, miracle!—I felt my hand pulled toward her, taken to her lips. She met my eyes with a wan smile of unmistakable meaning.
And then, just as I was all dizzy with the shock of it, the roar of the engine ceased. There was a sudden silence that was awesome in its completeness. Our nose came down to slightly below the horizontal. Thank heaven, he was tired of the joke, was flattening out, was going to descend! We began, in fact, to circle in a wide, very slightly depressed, slanting curve. Toby twisted round from his seat, one hand still upon the controls. There was a grim little smile on his face as his eyes, curiously glittering, met mine.
“You get out!” he said curtly. His voice sounded strangely toneless, far off, in that rarefied upper atmosphere.
For a moment I had a spasm of alarm, but I could not believe he was serious. It was too fantastic, at twenty thousand feet in the air.
“Don’t be a silly ass, Toby! Take us down. The joke has gone far enough.” My own voice was thin in my ears.
He ignored my protest.
“This is where you get out!” he repeated stubbornly.
Was the man really mad? I thought it best to humor him, managed to force a little laugh.
“Thanks very much, but I’d rather go back with you,” I said.