“I am keeping you from what you should be doing again. John may need you. You mustn’t humor me any longer. Come back—this evening—if⸺”
Billy’s heart leaped violently and he started up.
“‘If!’” he cried. “‘If!’ If what? Jennie!”
“If the doctor will let you, dear,” she concluded. But that was not what had trembled on her tongue. She had caught herself just in time. What she had barely missed saying was: “If I am still here.”
His alarm passed. The merciful deceit worked. He bent and kissed her and went out to join Norris. He promised himself confidently to look in again that evening, if only to say good night.
He had not heard her yearning whisper as he passed the threshold: “Good-by, Billy. Good-by—oh, my dear!”
VIII.
The last reporter had asked the last question. The last photographer had snapped the last shutter. And the XT-6 was turning her tail to the farewell group at the hangar and her nose to the line. She crawled painfully across the field, snorting protests from time to time when Norris jabbed the throttles to keep up the headway. A squad of sweating mechanics trotted about her like so many solicitous tugs escorting a liner down the bay.
There was no wind to help her off the ground. The day was passing in a bath of stagnant heat. Stripped though the big gray ship was of everything but the barest necessities—she was not even carrying radio —yet she was so heavily laden with fuel that there was some small doubt if she could clear the field. A little wind to blow her up would have been a welcome circumstance. But the only movement in the air was the dancing of the heat waves.
Norris was confident he could coax her off. There was a fair mile-and-a-quarter stretch available for the take-off, with no obstacles higher than a man’s head for another quarter mile beyond. If the wind-speed gauge played true he could drop the tail when the needle read seventy and trust to the god of aviators to yank her wheels off the grass. Once in the air it would be a question of what the cellars of Panama could provide for a celebration. Norris was not concerned with anything that lay along the two-thousand-odd miles between the boundaries of Langstrom and the hangars of Cristobal.