“Perhaps you’ll attain it. Only keep your elevator-flaps well lifted!”
He threw back the yoke with a laugh. In bending toward her he had permitted the machine to gain the level once more. The great bird slanted upward at an abrupt angle, and poised, quivering.
“You are brave!” she cried. Her level eyes dared him, her lips provoked and promised. He closed his eyes for a moment, made giddy by her radiance and by the blaze of the untempered sun on the aluminium hood just beyond her. The reflection surrounded her with an aura like white flames.
Instinctively he eased off the dangerous lift of the wings; he had no need to look at the needle of the level-indicator to know that the machine was threatening to slide backward into the abyss.
“Why do you shut your eyes, height-seeker?” she demanded. “Are you afraid? What does the barograph read now?”
“Sixteen thousand three hundred,” he said shortly. “A record, I believe; but what of it? No, I’m not afraid,” he added, stiffening his neck and fixing his bloodshot gaze on her untroubled eyes and dangerous lips; “I’m not even afraid of you. It’s you who’d better be afraid of me. Do you know we were ready to drop backward a minute ago?”
“I felt it. It was superb. We must have gained two hundred feet in that one tremendous lift. And yet I think—you were afraid.”
The blood rushed into his face; flames leaped up in his eyes.
“Perhaps I can prove I wasn’t by letting go the controls and coming over there to you. We’d be together for as long as it took us to drop three miles, anyway. Shall I?”
“Oh, brave words—and true! I believe you would. Now you are a demigod by the look on your mouth and eyes; you are man no longer! So, Spirit, send us upward once more till we poise over the abyss! Height and the spirit of adventure! Throw back the yoke with a laugh, as you did before.”