“Yes,” laughed the girl merrily. “The weather this afternoon is perfect for a stunt.”
Then, after the young man had gone to the exhaust, unscrewed the silencer and placed the secret part in his pocket, the pair walked across to the tea-room and there sat tête-à-tête upon the verandah gossiping.
Beryl Gaselee was, perhaps, the best-known flying-woman in the United Kingdom. There were others, but none so expert nor so daring. She would fly when the pylon pilots—as the ornate gentlemen of the aerodromes are called—shook their heads and refused to go up.
Soft-featured, with pretty, fair and rather fluffy hair, and quite devoid of that curious hardness of feature which usually distinguishes the female athlete, her age was twenty-three, her figure slightly petite and quite slim. Indeed, many airmen who knew her were amazed that such a frail-looking little person could manage such a big, powerful machine as Ronnie Pryor’s “Hornet”—the ’bus which was the last word in battleplanes both for rapid rising and for speed.
The way in which she manipulated the joy-stick often, indeed, astonished Ronnie himself. But her confidence in herself, and in the stability of the machine, was so complete that such a thing as possible disaster never occurred to her.
As she sat at the tea-table, her cheeks fresh and reddened by the cutting wind at such an altitude, a wisp of fair hair straying across her face, and her big, wide-open blue eyes aglow with the pleasure of living, she presented a charming figure of that feminine type that is so purely English. They were truly an interesting pair, a fact which had apparently become impressed upon a middle-aged air-mechanic in brown overalls who, in passing the verandah upon which they were seated, looked up and cast a furtive glance at them.
Both were far too absorbed in each other to notice the man’s unusual interest, or the expression of suppressed excitement upon his grimy face, as he watched them with covert glance. Had they seen it, they might possibly have been curious as to the real reason. As it was, they remained in blissful ignorance, happy in each other’s confidence and love.
“Just the weather for another Zepp raid to-night,” Ronnie was remarking. “No moon to speak of, wind just right for them, and a high barometer.”
“That’s why you’re going to Harbury this evening, in readiness to go up, I suppose?” she asked.
“Yes.”