"Miss Saxham—knows, I suppose?"
A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:
"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she—likes me enough to overlook it. She—seems to think I should never fail in that way! I hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is—the sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"
"Well, you've chosen the—kind of career that is going to use up a good many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy—that is, going by looks, you know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as they brag they can"—his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the other's face—"then——"
"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!"
"Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so." There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And—by the Great Brass Hat!—now I come to think of it—the livin' image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand—his and my great-grandfather—goin' by the portrait in the gallery at Whins."
"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size. "Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances——"
"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than I had with No. I.!"
"You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with interest.
"Rather! Come and have a look at her one day."