A sudden freak, perhaps a private bet, had induced the deceased officer, Captain Count von Herrnung of the Prussian Field Flying Service, son of a distinguished official of the German Imperial Foreign Office, and hero of the two days' flight from Hanover to Paris in the previous April,—to essay the crossing to Germany at a late hour, and in the face of a threatening gale. Another paragraph recorded how the wreck of the monoplane, "Bird of War" (wrongly described as "the property of Fanshaw's Flying School"), "had been found by a passenger-steamer of the Hamburg Line, bound for Newcastle, floating derelict in the North Sea."
A telephone-call followed the ring that had heralded the stroke of Fate's scimitar on that thick bull-neck of Saxham's. He answered it through the roaring in his ears of the North Sea waters that had drowned the boy.
"Are you there?" came in the voice of the friend so toughly tried, so faithfully trusted. "You have heard the report? Your voice tells me you have! Hope, man!—hope!—against everything go on hoping!"
The thick slow answer came stumbling over the wire:
"Have I—grounds for hope?"
Came the prompt reply:
"I say yes! Dare to despair, when you hear that from me!"
"God bless you, General!"
"Have you—you have not told her?"
Saxham answered, steadying his twitching lips: