“But must you wear yourself out to do it, dear? Is it—is it quite safe for you to go on when you’re so tired? Can’t you ease off, just a little?”
“Really, I don’t mind. I’m tired, maybe, but aside from that I feel great. And winter’s coming. Lots of rest then. In the meantime, every outsider I take up top, Jennie, is going to head straight away from this post and ‘tell the world.’ Fly ’em sweet and often and land ’em safe. They never forget it! Keep at it everlastingly. That’s the only way. Till the last crash!”
“Billy! You’ve said that twice tonight. Please—please don’t!”
“Don’t what, Jennie?”
“That gruesome phrase about the last crash! Please—I don’t like it, Billy. It—it makes me think!” She shuddered.
Cobb was startled. He peered at her. They were sitting on the screen-inclosed veranda. Inside the house, where Colonel Brent was reading, a table lamp stood by a window and its shaded light, shining through ruffled chintz curtains, illumined Jennie’s profile with a soft glow. The subdued radiance was just sufficient for Billy to apprehend the fleeting contraction that swept her wistful features like a black gust. Just sufficient, but more than enough to show him the thing which then and there unsettled and reversed the entire philosophy he had lived by until that moment.
For the thing he had seen on Jennie’s face in that swift flash of revelation was more than distaste, concern, or anxiety. It was stark fear!
“Jennie!” he cried. “What⸺”
She bit her lip and looked away. The secret was out; the secret she had been trying to hide even from herself. She was afraid—terribly afraid—of the air. And she had spent her short life disdaining folk who were guilty of that same weakness!
But that was before she had met Billy. Then the air and the folk and the things of the air had been her chief interest. It had seemed to her natural and right that the air should be served with tribute of limb and of life, if need be. For that was the creed in which she had lived, under the tutelage of her father. Now she had a new creed, a new religion. The air had become a secondary faith. Billy Cobb was all that really mattered to her. He obscured all the old horizons she had known.