"What is it? You are not going back?" she asked, but keeping her voice perfectly steady.
"No. I am going forward." He laughed with a strange tenseness in his tone. "I cannot tell you much about it. It is forbidden. 'Even the night hath ears.'"
"Oh! An air attack?" she whispered.
"In force. Several squadrons. Before daybreak. I—I wished to see you—to speak to you. If I should not return at once, you'll—you'll tell Captain Dexter to attend to my papers. He'll understand. I've fixed things for the kiddies——"
"Oh! Yes," she said. Her voice was suddenly hoarse and dry. She drew back further into the shadow.
"Good-by, Miss Melnotte—Belinda."
"Good-by, Mr. Sanderson."
He turned away rather abruptly and trudged back along the road toward the town.
She stood long at the casement—long after he was out of sight, and her thoughts were bitter. She had let him go from her without a tender word—without a whisper to console him. She fought down sternly the desire to call him back—to slip into her cape and run after him along the dark and lonely road.
He would go into the air at dawn on a mission that seemed to her mind almost sure to have a fatal ending. How often he faced death in his daily flights she did not know. But evidently Frank Sanderson considered this present venture as threatening more than usual peril, or he would not have come so far for a last glimpse of her.