"Sorry?" There was keen anxiety in the face that was illuminated by the petrol-flare they were passing. "You're not—married—or going to be?" he asked.
"Neither!"
"Thank God!" said Sherbrand simply and sincerely. "Now I'll go on! My rank bad luck gives me a kind of right. This morning I got up solid in the conviction that you and I were meant for one another; that we should somehow be brought together; that the French Government would make it possible for me to marry you by buying my hawk-hoverer—for with only the two hundred a year my uncle left me, and the two hundred my Instructorship here brings me—how could I possibly have the nerve to ask you to be my wife? And—" He caught his breath, "And everything I'd dreamed came real. The test succeeded! I dived down out of my sky to find You! Miracle of miracles. And not twenty minutes later—I found myself nearly, if not quite—a ruined man. For if my invention has been swiped off to Germany, France will never buy, for money—what her neighbour gets for nought!"
"I understand. My poor Flying Man, you've been plucked of some of your wing-feathers!"
"I don't care, if you'll wait for me until they grow again!"
How grim a day had been followed by this night of wonder! Woven of the shining stuff of dreams it seemed, then and for long years after, to Patrine. Their intimacy grew and ripened like a magic beanstalk in the light of the red moon and the fierce blue petrol-flares. She said with a catch in her breath—like Sherbrand's:
"You must be serious!"
"I never was more so!"
She amended:
"We must be sensible! Oh! but this has been a close-packed day!"