It halted at length at a point where the narrow roadway widened somewhat and ran along an elevated embankment evidently constructed to raise the road above flood-level.
As the car came to rest, two leather-helmeted figures descended from the tiny cockpit in the body of it. One was a slim young fellow of twenty-five or twenty-six; the other, despite the clinging motor costume, showed feminine grace in every movement. It was a young girl, evidently in the early twenties.
The two set busily to work, and in a few minutes their strange car had undergone a wonderful transformation.
From each side shot out long twin telescopic rods. These, swiftly joined together by rapidly unrolled strips of fabric, soon resolved themselves into the wings of a tiny monoplane. From a cleverly hidden trap-door in the front of the car, appeared an extending shaft bearing a small propeller, whose twin blades, hinged so as to fold alongside the shaft when not in use, were quickly spread out and locked into position. A network of wire stays running from the wings to the fuselage of the car were speedily hooked up and drawn taut.
Then the two mysterious figures climbed again into the transformed car. There was a low, deep hum as the propellers began to revolve, the monoplane shot forward a few yards along the road, then lifted noiselessly, and, graceful and silent as a night-bird, vanished into the shrouding mist.
The adventures of the Gay Triangle had begun!
Dick Manton, lounging idly in the Assembly Hall of the little town of Fenways, in the centre of the Norfolk Broads, watched with eyes half critical and half amused the throng of dancers circling gaily to the strains of three violins and a tinkling piano which did duty for an orchestra when the youth of Fenways amused itself with a dance.
Dick was wholly and entirely a product of the war. The lithe, slim body, hatchet face, and keen, resolute eyes stamped him from head to foot with the unmistakable cachet of the airman. He smiled, as he watched the dancers, in acknowledgment of the gay greeting flung to him by a score of laughing girls who, with the joy of youth, were giving themselves unreservedly to the pleasures of the fox-trot.
Dick was a general favourite, and more than one pretty girl in the room would have been only too glad to arouse something more than a passing interest in the young airman, whose dare-devil exploits above the German lines in France had brought him the Flying Cross, whose brilliant career had been cut short by a bullet wound, received in a “dog-fight” above Bethune, which had rendered him unfit for the continual hardships of active service. He had been offered a “cushy” job in acknowledgment of his services. But Dick could not bear the idea of being “in the show” and yet not of it, and had accepted his discharge with what philosophy he could muster.