PAGE
The Cost of Wings[ 1]
A Faded Romance[ 11]
An Indian Baby[ 41]
Yvonne[ 52]
The Delusion of Mrs. Donohoe[ 70]
Ponsonby and the Pantheress[ 92]
A Fat Girl’s Love Story[ 104]
In the Fourth Dimension[ 116]
The Gewgaw[ 122]
The Night of Power[ 134]
The Man Who Could Manage Women [ 145]
Obsessed[ 155]
A Vanished Hand[ 164]
An Ordeal by Fire[ 179]
How the Mistress Came Home[ 198]
The Motor-Burglar[ 212]
The Lost Room[ 219]
Father to the Man[ 226]
The Fly and the Spider[ 235]
For Valor![ 243]
Mellicent[ 248]
The Collapse of the Ideal[ 263]
The Hand That Failed[ 272]
His Silhouette[ 280]
A Nocturne[ 292]
The Last Expedition[ 298]

THE COST OF WINGS

SHELDRICK, returning, refreshed and exhilarated, from a spin with a friend who had brought down a racing car of forty horse-power and an enthusiasm to match, found his wife sitting in the same chair, in the same attitude, as it seemed to him, in which he had left her, in the bare, dull sitting-room of their quarters at the Pavilion Hotel, on the edge of Greymouth Links, from which starting point Sheldrick, in fulfillment of his recent engagement with the Aero Club of France, had arranged to take wing for Cherbourg, wind and weather permitting, on the morrow.

It would be difficult exceedingly to imagine Caruso as an engineer or a bank manager, or in any capacity other than that of operatic star. It would be equally difficult to picture Shackleton as a side-splitting antic and quip-monger, or Pélissier in the rôle of the dauntless explorer. Sheldrick, the most recent idol of the flying world, was the type-ideal of the aviator.

Mathematician, engineer, meteorologist, and athlete, his tall, lightly built but muscular frame carried the head of an eagle. The wide forehead, sloping to the temples, the piercing prominently set eyes, the salient nose, and the wide, firm, deep-cut mouth characterizing the long-winged birds of powerful flight, were Sheldrick’s. His, too, the long, supple neck, the curiously deceptive shoulder slope that disguises depth of chest while his long arms looked as though, were they clothed with feathers, they might cleave the air; and his feet gripped the ground through the thin, soft boots he always wore, as the eagle’s talons grip the rock.

Perhaps he was not unaware of the suggested resemblance. He had certainly christened his recently completed monoplane “Aquila,� and had piloted her to victory in two minor events at the Moncaster Spring Flying Meeting in April of that year, and at the Nismes Concours des Aviateurs of three weeks before had carried off the Grand Prix of 25,000 francs for the longest flight under favorable weather conditions. And at the Club dinner following the presentation of the prizes, Sheldrick, flushed with conquest and congratulations, had given that pledge whereby the soul of the woman who yet loved him was wrung to torture anew.

“After all that I have borne,� Mrs. Sheldrick had said to herself, sitting in her hideous red moreen-covered chair by the green Venetian-blinded window of the staring hotel sitting-room—“after three years of agony, silently, patiently endured—after all his promises, I am still upon the rack.�

She looked rather like it as she sat by the window, the center one of three that gave a view across the gray-green links, and the gray-brown beach of smooth, sliding pebbles that gave place to the gray-white, throbbing water of the English Channel. And the white, drawn face that masked her frenzy of anguish, and the dark-gray, haunted eyes through which her suffering spirit looked, greeted her husband as he burst into the room, fresh from his banquet of speed and clean, salt, buoyant air, and sympathetic, enthusiastic companionship, like an unexpected douche of ice water.

“Haven’t you been out?�

Sheldrick uttered the words recorded, upon a pause implying the swallowing of others less neutrally amiable. And his face, which had already clouded, darkened sullenly as his wife replied: “I have traveled some distance since you left here with your friend.�