“I don’t know that I can,” I replied. “I’m off back to town tomorrow.” I said this with a glance to Sylvia which found her quite unmoved.
“Are you, really?” she said. “What, on a Sunday?” Her eyebrows went up in mocking admiration for my courage.
Confound it! I remembered suddenly that tomorrow was Sunday. I can put up with any reasonable amount of hardship, but the prospect of a Sunday train on a South Coast railway!
“Kamerad!” I surrendered. “I go back on Monday.”
“Good!” said Toby. “The tender conscience of the local municipality does not permit them to allow me to earn my living on the Sabbath. Tomorrow is a dies non. We’ll spend the morning tinkering about the machine together. It’ll be like old times, before we went up for a jolly old scrap with the Hun-bird. She’s worth looking at, too—built for a radius of a thousand miles and a ceiling of over twenty thousand feet.”
“Really!” I said, with a touch old-time professional interest. “But what on earth do you want a machine like that for? She’s surely scarcely suitable for giving donkey-rides up and down a beach?”
“She does all right,” replied Toby. “And I like to feel that I’ve got something with power to it. That I could if I wanted to—” His curious restless eyes lost expression, as though the soul behind them no longer saw me, contemplated something remote.
“Could what?” I challenged him.
He came back to perception of my presence.