"But—they’re gone! ... And—and the aëroplane...." Margot gasped out the words in amazed discomfiture, sending her eyes after a dwindling shape beating down the sky to the southward, and straining her ears to catch the last of the tractor’s whirring song.
"Nearly at Issy, I should calculate—travelling at eighty miles an hour. Impossible now to catch up with her in time to see her do the last stunt. Can choose my own pace for going, anyhow," said the motor-cyclist ruefully. "Nothing left to do but take the Bird over and fly her back to the Drancy hangar."
He tried to laugh, but his wrung face gave the lie to the plucky pretence of indifference. He went on, still doggedly mopping away at his bleeding chin:
"I was lucky in getting a hearing on this side of the Channel. The bigwigs at Whitehall simply referred me to the Superintendent of the Royal Aircraft Factory at Frayborough, and as I’d tried him twice already, I knew what _he’d_ got to say. The Commander of the Central School of Military Aviation was a brick—I’ll say that for him. He sent a French flying officer to look me up at Hendon, who got me in touch with the Inventions Bureau of their _Service Aëronautique_.... Well! the big test’s over by this time. I shall know my fate in a week or two—or possibly in a year?"
The horrified cry broke from Margot. Franky yelled:
"By the Great Brass Hat! ... You’re the inventor! The whole thing was your show!"
"Yes, I’m the inventor," the tanned young man in the dusty overalls answered rather contemptuously: "What did you take me for? ... A French medical student having a joy-ride, or a _commis voyageur_?"
"Can’t say. Never thought! ... Fact is—my wife had frightened me horribly. When your machine bore down on her—posted right in the middle of the gravel—I was scared stiff—give you my honour!—you might have sunk a brace of Dreadnoughts in the palms of my hands!"
Franky made this absurd statement with so sincere an air, and clinched it so effectually by displaying a lovely silk-cambric handkerchief in a state of soppy limpness, that the abrased inventor nearly laughed.
But his thick, silvery, fair eyebrows settled into a straight line across his tanned forehead. He said with a directness that seemed to belong to his lean, keen, hatchet-faced type: