There was little enough to see. The night was black. But across the crest of that great rock, the spot of light played incessantly.
“Fifteen miles out to sea,” she thought. “Seems strange. One does not feel that this house rested on land. It is more as if this were a ship’s cabin, the lighthouse our search light, the fog horn our signal, and we sail on and on into the night. We——”
She was awakened from this dream by an unfamiliar sound, thundering that was not waves beating a shore, that might have been the roar of the distant battle front.
A moment passed, and then she knew.
“A seaplane,” she thought suddenly. “And on such a night! Why, that can mean only one thing, a trans-Atlantic flyer!”
How her heart leaped at the thought! She recalled with a tremor the day she got news of “Lindy’s marvelous achievement.”
Such flyers had become fairly common now. Yet she had never seen one in his flight.
“If he comes near enough,” she said to herself, straining her eyes in a vain attempt to pierce the inky blackness of the night.
Then a new thought striking her all of a heap set her shuddering. “What if he does not realize he is near Monhegan? If he is flying low, he will crash.”
Involuntarily a little prayer went up for the lone navigator of the night air.