"You've heard that the ghost has been seen?" asked Clavering, a little excitedly. She shook her head incredulously.
"Oh, but it's quite true. Miss Nellie Rider saw it from her bedroom window and so did her sister. Sir Gordon Snagg is another. He declares it was a man in a flying machine. I shouldn't wonder if he were right."
Kavanagh was of this opinion.
"There are fools in the world who will do anything," he said. "Some idiot out of Hanwell may have brought his aeroplane here to scare the natives; and jolly well he's succeeded. I hope he may break his neck, that's all. He deserves to, that's sure."
He thought that the "little widow" would agree with him as a matter of course, and her answer rather astonished him.
"Then you think that pioneers are very wicked people?" she remarked; "you have no sympathy with them, Mr. Kavanagh?"
"Oh, I won't say that—good for science and all that sort of thing. What I mean is, let's keep the mountains anyway. We don't want ginger-beer bottles on our heads up here—do we now? I'm sure Mr. Clavering agrees to that."
The parson dissented altogether.
"I think it would be a brave thing to fly here," he said quietly, "a very brave thing. And I hope the day when we cannot admire courage is distant. If there had been no pioneers in the world, I should not be travelling through the Simplon Tunnel to Bellagio in three weeks' time, and you would not be smoking that excellent tobacco. If there is an aeroplane at Andana, it must be owned by one of the men who is about to fly for the great prize offered by the English daily paper. I hope he will win it."
"But you wouldn't go up in one yourself?" Kavanagh insisted.