Wandesforde, with his wife, had been following the race in a car. His arm was still in a sling, and his looks had not been improved by a blow which had knocked his front teeth crooked. He was patiently mincing up his bun with knife and fork; bite into it he could not.
"Well, dash it all, if a race is run on a Friday you have to fly it on a Friday, don't you?" he said, annoyed. "I wouldn't have let you in if I could possibly have held the joy-stick. I'm not superstitious about the days of the week myself."
"No, you've had smashes on every one of the seven, haven't you?"
Bearing this with an effort, Wandesforde gave up his bun as a bad job and consoled himself with a cigar. "I suppose now you'll go back to Dent-de-lion and take on Miss O'Connor?" he asked, by way of changing the subject.
"Teach her to commit suicide expensively," said the morose Denis. "She'll never make a pilot; anybiddy can see that. Women haven't it in them. Any old thing that's idiotic they'll do—start without fillin' up the tank, as soon as not!"
The sting of this speech was that Wandesforde, not being always as careful as his partner deemed desirable, had recently made this very omission himself, and paid for it by crashing a friend's favorite bus. The silence was broken by a small subdued sound of amusement from Mrs. Wandesforde, which consoled her husband in proportion as it annoyed Denis. He scowled at her through his eyeglass, and then, muttering something about the monoplane, stalked out of the room.
"Lord!" said Wandesforde, getting up and squaring his broad shoulders against the mantelpiece with an audible sigh of relief, "he's in a pretty rank temper, what? I hoped he hadn't heard about Wyatt's Avro. Never knew him so cut up about a smash before!"
His wife, a piece of silvery transparent loveliness, shook her fair head. "Not the smash," she pronounced, oracular. "Miss O'Connor!"
Meanwhile Dorothea had established herself in a furnished cottage at Bredon, with an old governess as companion-chaperon. Miss Byrd had been living in an alms-house on ten shillings a week, when her half-forgotten pupil sought her out. It should be noted in passing that if Dorothea pursued her enemies with vengeance, she also pursued her friends with gratitude. More than this; she could be generous even to her enemies. Against her lawyer's advice, she had insisted on making her uncle an allowance. "I'm not going to be a pig, because he was!" she said. Vengeance and revenge are, in fact, very different, as different as the lion and the hyena. But this is by the way; and indeed at this time Dorothea's vengeance had dropped out of sight. Just as she flung herself on Gardiner, so she had now attacked Denis, without definite plan, on the opportunist theory that something would turn up; and something had, but not what she expected. Her own youth lifted its head. She had come to exploit the aeroplanes for her vengeance; and lo and behold! she forgot her vengeance in the aeroplanes.
Denis had adapted the 1911 model for use as a school machine, and Dorothea began in the usual way by "rolling"—i.e., taxi-ing on the ground. Most pupils "break wood" during this process, for an aeroplane will run any way but straight, preferring to curl round like a puppy after its own tail. But Dorothea had by nature that automatic sixth sense of machinery which most people acquire only by practice. She would have learned to fly in a week, representing some three or four hours actually in the air, if Denis had given her full time; but he would not. Three days out of the six he kept sacred to his work. On the remaining three Dorothea and her car appeared at Dent-de-lion whenever the weather was favorable, and often when it wasn't. There were many rough days that September.