"I hadn't time to be frightened. I—was thinking of something else! The fright came afterward, when I saw you—when you left me on the railing." She spoke a little constrainedly, and went on quickly: "I really am a desperate coward about some things. I should never dare to go up on an aëroplane, for instance, as Patsy tells me you do almost every day. She says the Japanese call you the 'Honorable Fly-Man'."
"There's no foreign theater in Tokyo, and no winter Opera," he said lightly. "We have to amuse one another, and the Glider is by way of contributing my share of the entertainment. It is certainly an uplifting performance." He smiled, but she shook her head.
"Ah," she said, "I know! I was at Fort Logan last summer the day Lieutenant Whitney was killed. I saw it."
The smile had faded and her eyes had just the look he had so often fancied lay in those eyes he had been used to gaze at across the burning driftwood—his "Lady of the Many-Colored Fires." He caught himself longing to know that they would mist and soften if he too should some day come to grief in such sudden fashion. They were wholly wonderful eyes! He had noted them even in the instant when he had snatched her from the piazza—from the danger into which his cavalier singing had called her.
"How brazen you must have thought it!" he exclaimed. "My impromptu solo, I mean. I hardly know how I came to do it. I suppose it was the moonlight (it does make people idiotic sometimes, you know, in the tropics!) and then what you played—that dear old song! I used to sing it years ago. It reminded me—"
"Yes—?"
"Of the last evening at college. It was a night like this, though not so lovely. I sang it then—my last college solo."
"Your last?" She was leaning toward him, her lips parted, her eyes bright on his face.
"Yes," he said. "I left town the next day."
Her eyes fell. She turned half away, and put a hand to her cheek. "Oh," she said vaguely. "Of course."