“ Saxham was strong as an oak-tree, but who can control a woman in the frenzy of hysteria, standing six feet tall in high-heeled No. 7 shoes? She wrestled and fought, and her tawdry hat of silver spangles tumbled off, and her superb hair shed its pins of tortoiseshell, and rolled, yellow-tawny as a South African torrent in flood-time, down over her heaving shoulders, over the supple back and writhing loins, reaching nearly to her knees. Then her strength went from her, and her tears came. She dropped into a chair Sherbrand had got her, and crumpled up there, crying bitterly. ”

“ A bitter spasm gripped the man by the throat, and slow tears, wrung from the depths of him by mortal anguish, splashed on the paper between his elbows and raised great blisters there. Truly, when the spark of Hope burns dimmest, when the grain of Faith is a thousand times smaller than the mustard-seed—when God seems most far away, He is nearest. We have learned this with other truths, in the War. Blood and tears mingle in the collyrium with which our eyes have been bathed, that we might see.
Saxham battled down his weakness, and rose up and went to duty. ”

“ Sick and dizzy, but secure, the boy hung in his straps as she lay over, and saw on his left hand a wing of the Bird rising and blotting out the heavens, while on his right hand the earth reared up so horribly that Bawne could only shut his eyes tight and hold on to the arms-straps of his seat, and gasp out a little prayer. Then the cockpit floor became more level, and the wind buffeted less. The roar of the tractor and the twanging drone of the wires made one's bones hum and tingle to the very ends of one's teeth and finger-tips. ”

“ And yet this altered face of his, marred by the broad, new-healed scar that traversed the left cheek and temple, and the cloudy look of suffering in the prominent grey-blue eyes, was dearer than ever to Patrine.
How bravely the ribbon of the Croix de Guerre and the purple, green, and silver of the Belgian Order showed against the war-stained khaki. What woman living would not glory in such a lover, welcome the sacred charge, rejoice to be his guide and minister! ... "Oh, my blind eagle, to sit mateless in the darkness shall not be your fate, God being good to me!" ”

“ The long months of misery—the horror of the War—had been a dreadful dream. She heard the long br'r' of the electric hall-bell under the impetuous insistent finger—the small scurry of his entrance, a squawk from the maid who answered night-calls—a whispered word or two, and the clumping of the heavy little brogues upon the stairs. Would he trip at the corner where he always stubbed his toe? she wondered—and she plainly heard him stumble. Then her hair stiffened upon her head, and a long shudder rippled through her. The little clumping brogues had stopped before Patrine's bedroom door. ”

“ Thank you, Sir Roland!" She added in a tone as tear-soaked as her handkerchief, while Saxham offered her her hat, and Sherbrand tendered tortoiseshell hairpins:
"I'm awfully afraid I have behaved like a fool!"
"Like a woman!" said the friendly voice even more crisply.
"Do you think women are fools?" she was beginning, when she caught his eye and broke off. For she had met Sir Roland's mother and she knew his young wife quite well, and her Aunt Lynette, the one living being whom she worshipped, was one of his closest friends. No! To this man women were sacred. ”

“ Death for one who so loved Life and the pleasant things of a commonplace existence.... A cricket-match, a day with the hounds, a funny revue, a game of polo, a break at billiards, a clinking run with the car, a fine cigar. Mess in camp after the hard day's march, long, cool drinks with bits of ice tinkling in the tumbler. That new, fierce pleasure tasted in his first experience of real fighting.... And oh! how much sweeter than these the scent of Margot's hair, the light of Margot's eyes, the clasp of her arms about his neck, the hope of fatherhood, never now to be realised.... ”

“ Ah! if the truth were told, not all of us find solace in the thought that in the niches of Heaven are safely stored our ancient idols. To Owen Saxham it was gall and verjuice to remember that for love of this woman, weak, vain, silly, spiteful, he, the man of intellect and knowledge, had gone down, quick, to the very verge of Hell.
Mildred was just eighteen when he had wooed and won her. She had been slight and willowy and pale, with round, surprised brown eyes, an indeterminate nose, and a little mouth of the rosebud kind. ”

“ Her bosom heaved, her eyes were misty jewels, and out of the wonderful silence about them came to her the low, sweet soughing of her long-lost Wind of Joy.
She moved to Sherbrand, kissed him full upon the mouth, and called him: "Alan!" And a great cry broke from him—a cry of wonder, triumph, and joy. As his arms swept out to enfold her she knew that she had conquered. She had not been deceived in reading love between the formal lines.
"Life has nothing more to give!" was Patrine's thought as his arms held her. ”

“ Those distant voices of guns had not ceased their sullen calling. In the rose-flushed south towards which the Taube faced as it hovered above the ruins of the village, black columns of vapour swelled and towered, and acrid flashes stabbed through the murkiness. One should be there, his manlier self said to him. Better to be a brave German bird dodging Death amongst the puffs of shrapnel, dropping devil-eggs on the British batteries, winning back the forfeited Cross and the lost Imperial favour, than to be here, hanging like a carrion-vulture over the maimed body of a dying man. ”

“ What honest man could bear to stoop over his wife's bedside and meet the eyes of the Enemy looking at him—from the face of a new-born child!
A rigor of horror seized upon her body and shook it. Her jaw dropped, her eyes closed as though they shrank and withered under their contracting lids. She slid from her seat and fell upon her knees helplessly. Her head sank forwards upon the hands that rose instinctively to hide her face. In the same instant Sherbrand's low voice speaking behind her turned the heart in her bosom to ice. ”

“ But before its wearer could reply, von Herrnung interposed:
"Naturally they are vicious—if they desire to please men. A dash of vice—that is the last touch to perfect an exquisite woman. It is the chilli in the mayonnaise, the garlic and citron in the ragoût, the perfume of the carnation, the patch of rouge that lends brilliance to the eye, the bite in the kiss! ..."
"The bite in the ... Great Snipe! what an expression!" thought Franky, whose attack of propriety had reached the acute stage. Patrine Saxham repeated slowly, and with brows that frowned a little:
"'The bite in the kiss'...." ”

“ All the world and his wife might be at Longchamps, but here were people enough and to spare. Luxurious people in costly automobiles or carriages drawn by shiny high-steppers. People in little public taxis, men and women on motor-bicycles and the human-power kind. People of all stamps and classes, clustered like bees outside the big, smelly, top-heavy auto-buses, soon to vanish from the Paris avenues and boulevards, with the red and yellow and green-flagged taxis, to play their part in the transport and nourishment of the Army of France. ”

“ Sherbrand began, a weight lifting with the hope that the news might not have to be broken:
"The Doctor knew. I had said to him, doggily: 'I'll give your pup a fighting chance to prove his Saxham breed.' It's a stark breed—hard as granite, supple as incandescent lava,—with a strain of Berserk madness, and a dash of Oriental fatalism. They can hate magnificently and forgive grandly, and love to the very verge of death." ”

“ Far above the ordinary stature of womanhood—you remember that Franky regarded her as a great galumphing creature—her head would yet have been much below the level of von Herrnung's, but for the height of the extraordinary diadem or turban that crowned her masses of dull cloudy-black hair. Folds of vivid emerald-green satin rose above a wide band of theatrical gilt tinsel, set with blazing stage rubies, and above the centre of the wearer's low, wide brow a fan-shaped panache of clipped white ospreys sprang, boldly challenging the eye. ”

“ All the while, ever since Patrine had entered the gates of Panshaw's, the song of the air-screw had not been absent from her ears. The tractor of the practice-engine roared fitfully, like a tiger being prodded in its den by a spiteful keeper's meat-fork. The propellers of the double-engined passenger-buses kept up a steady droning as Fanshaw's pilots followed the pointing arms of the red, white, and blue pylons marking the limits of the air-circuit, or were silent as the machines dropped to earth within the huge white circles where a giant T indicated "Land." ”

“ She could not forgive her mother for telling her those horrors, she, Mildred—seemed to forget whenever she was pleased. But Patrine had never forgotten. She would wake at night even now with the dry sobs shaking her.... To have been able to believe in that dead father as noble, chivalrous, good, would have been so sweet; she had shed big surreptitious tears in sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would have so loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the dear little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels, because Faith is so restful, si paisible.... ”

“ Where French police were posted at cross-roads and a working-party of British Engineers were mending the highway—filling up shell-pits, and the cunningly-concealed emplacements where a battery of French 75's had been in action a few months before, and the shrapnel-riddled houses of a small village yet harboured a few wizened Flemish peasants, was the point whence you first caught sight of the towers of the ancient capital of Western Flanders, rising above a bank of grey mist, sucked from the thawing earth by the warmth of the April sun. ”

“ His hand touched hers and she drew it away, not before a keen, sharp thrill had traversed her. "Vile, hateful creature!" she said to the Patrine von Herrnung knew—the other woman within her, whom she loathed. "Is not it enough that you have done what you have done?" Then as she passed out into the night, feeling beneath her feet the roughness of the gravel walk that led between grass-plats studded with green painted chairs and little iron tables, a strange roaring filled her ears and hellish tongues of fire licked a sky of vivid blackness. ”

“ Then the buzzing had stopped, and the second Bird of War, rising higher to escape the backwash of light airs from the cliffs, had launched into a splendid sweeping spiral, ending in a long glide, and alighted on the well-rolled Station aërodrome—and Sherbrand had come home.
Surely never until the thought of Flight,—formed in the brain-cells of Man and fertilised by the lust of Adventure,—hatched out in the Bird that bears the Knight of To-day upon the air-path, did lover return to his lady after a fashion so wonderful as this.
The Flying Men have always been coming. ”

“ When the fierce men in the proud German Field-grey have swarmed over the soil of England,—when, amidst the squadron of night-birds whose feathers gleam mysteriously in the pale moonlight, thy lover flies onward, singing his war-song, laden with his cargo of explosives—when the Red Cock crows on the roof-trees of London's wilderness of houses and London's fire-bells, amidst terrific explosions, ring out the last battle of the century, will Isis then think of me? ”

“ The Distinguished Visitors must be Royalties, decided Margot, as she skirted the barrier, looking right and left for a peephole, recognising the vast back of Sir Thomas Brayham, the skeleton back of the Goblin, the willowy back of Trixie Wastwood, the backs of Lady Beauvayse, Cynthia Charterhouse, Tota Stannus, and Patrine Saxham with other backs pertaining to divers dear friends, consolidated into the rampart of humanity over which the towering feathers of Vanity Fair nodded and bobbed and waved. ”

“ We are sure to win; the French are cowards, and the English stupid fools. As for you—you are now all Belgo-Germans, our Kaiser has said so! When we leave here we are going to Calais, Paris next, and then London—it's nothing at all to get to London in our magnificent Zeppelins!"
Then suddenly the Germans had gone away—and with them trains of waggons crammed with booty. A week later, amidst the vivas of the people, twenty-one thousand British had poured into the town. They had rolled down the streets like a tawny river singing lustily:
"Here we are—here we are—here we are again! ”

“ She banished the hateful, knowing faces with a gallant effort and turned to Sherbrand, asking whether he had been an Eton, or Rugby, or Harrow boy?
For had her Flying Man borne the cachet of the Public School Patrine Saxham would have infinitely preferred it. That it is possible to be a snob even in the most tragic or romantic moment of one's existence, she had not realised before she discovered herself to herself in this way. ”

“ How the dusk would spring alive with the eyes of foes, and long rays of searchlight would go probing, and the mobile noses of guns great and lesser would be thrust from their hoods of proof-armour, sniffing bloodthirstily for the enemy up in the sky. While from the Flagship's mothering side, a Navy seaplane, armed with a Vickers' machine-gun, might swing out and plop upon the water, rise from the white snarl of waves with a vicious scream of her propeller, and, keen as a gull-hunting sea-hawk, launch herself in chase. ”

“ You are to imagine the tiny thing and her Franky seated—not in one of the smart automobiles that wait for hire outside Spitz's, but in a little red taxi, borne along with the broad double stream of traffic of every description that ceaselessly roared east and west under the now withering red-and-white blossoms of the chestnut-trees of the Avenue of the Champs Elysées, inhaling the stimulating breezes—flavoured with hot dust and petrol, Seine stink, sewer-gas, coffee, patchouli, fruit, Régie tobacco and roses—of Paris in the end of June. ”