"Will you come, Miss Smythe?" asked the subaltern, turning to the girl.

"Yes, love to," she said, "and Dad oan pack up the tea things." She stood up and brushed the crumbs and dust from her frock.

"I utterly refuse to pack up any tea things," replied the Colonel, extending himself luxuriously. "I shall lie here in peace and comfort with a oheroot while you two young idiots go and climb impossible stairs to get exactly the same view as I get here."

"It's much better higher up, sir."

"Well, I'll wait till your flying-machine is going, thanks."

"Be a good girl, Pat, and don't break your neck if you can help it," he added as she stepped out into the sunlight on to the broken old stone stairs leading to the upper battlements, where the rosered gate-towers of carved stone stabbed the vivid blue of the sky.

Manning followed the slim figure that stepped so steadily on the very edge of nothing, until they reached the top of the high gate-towers, where two little stone “ohattri” pavilions of carved red granite, still gay with inlay of blue and green tiling, lent an air af dainty finish to the massive strength of the gates rising in double tier well over eighty feet of sheer smooth-cut ashlar, topped with the warmer red of old Moghul brick,

The girl climbed into one of them, and resting one

shapely arm on the red stone where the gold bracelet glinted vividly, pointed out over the wide landscape-tomb and tower and ruined palace.

"Dreams of dead kings, Mr Manning. Isn't it fascinating? I wonder what the man who built this fort thought when he stood here and looked out. Do you think he pictured this lying ruined, and you and me standing here, 'strangers within the gates'?"

"He must have had some dim foresight, since he had imagination enough to design this place. But I suppose he said to himself, 'It'll last my time, and his, and theirs, and the rest is with Allah.' "Seven cities mured the girl as her eyes swept over the plain . . . "and now

mur

"Tumbledown tombs and crumbling arches," said Manning, "but, which is eternal, reses. I picked that one at Humayon's Gardens." He held out a great, heavy-scented, yellow rose.

The girl took it and held it to her nostrils. "How lovely! Why do they always have such topping flowers in those old gardens?"

"I sometimes think that never blows the rose so red As where some buried Cæsar bled,'"

quoted Manning. "Rose-petal perfume of past grandeur. No, it's for you," he said, as she offered it him back.

"Oh, thanks awfully." She pinned it into her dress with an enamel brooch.

She pointed out in front.

"Look at that vulture coming down wind." The great bird swept past them noiselessly, and turning into the wind, hovered over the battlements awhile and then swept back again.

"That's real flight, Miss Smythe, and you and I will do it yet: do it soon now, too, I think. We shall fly over this very place with its atmosphere of dreams and lazy sunkissed hours."

"You do really believe it, don't you, Mr Manning? It's not only to make Dad argue?" "Of course I do. The Wrights have shown that it's possible, and all we've got to do is to make it really practicable."

"And then what is there left? We shall be like Alexander, with no more worlds to conquer."

Man's

"Not in reality. found out about one-millionth of what there is to be found out, and the discovery of another millionth won't finish everything. But it's going to revolutionise war when it does come."

The girl looked at him. "I wish it could revolutionise it out of existence," she said.

"I'm afraid it won't do that yet," he replied gravely. "But we're getting on pretty fast. Think! Three hundred years ago Humayon stood on this very gate watching his troops marching out, horse and foot and elephants, all in clinking olattering mail. You and I, perhaps, will stand on this gate and watch the troops of the future passing by, not horse and foot and elephants,

but horse and foot and birds— chiefly birds, great birds sweeping past, with the glint of brass and steel over the gleaming fabric of their wings, and the dull blue of machineguns and pompoms. When that comes, the horse and foot will begin to go and wars be won in the air."

The voice was full of enthusiasm, and the speaker's face held the far-off rapt look of one who gazes from the high hills new strange country, yet one which seems half familiar from being so often visualised in the lonely halts of the long upolimb.

over

The girl looked at him in wonderment. What funny things men were. Why did they sometimes suddenly wander out into the blue like that, where you couldn't follow them? It was bad enough now with "shows" and expeditions on which they vanished periodically. If they could fly off into the skies as well, poor woman might give up trying to hold them at all. Unlesswhy not?-she should go with them, lend grace and lightness as well as lissom strength to the great wings. Why shouldn't a woman do as much as a man in that line? Surely if flight were to come, woman might claim her equal right of wings to soar above the dust and haze haze into the higher clearer level where legendary has always held her sphere to be.

The thought fired her. Why shouldn't she try the new road with this dreamer?

"Will you teach me some

thing about it, Billy? I'd love to learn."

He came back to earth with a jump. It was very rarely that she called him Billy. "Rather," he stammered; "but do you really want to learn?"

He had learnt from bitter experience to keep his hobby to himself on most occasions, for it bored the majority of people to tears.

"Honour bright, I'd love to. I'm not fooling. I do really want to understand all about it."

So Manning launched forthwith into the elemental facts of the cambered wing and its action in the air, its wonders and its paradoxes, making his subject live as only one who loves it can, while the great

white vultures and the curvedwinged kites swam past on motionless outstretched wings, with slow lazy turnings of their heads, to look at the two engrossed figures in the rosered pavilion, until Colonel Smythe came shouting up the stairs to ask if they wanted to spend the whole night there.

As they went down the broken steps the girl's head was in a whirl with angles of incidence and relative speeds and negative pressures; but the boy's head was also in a whirl with just something else, for "Parler de soi à celle qu'on aime, c'est presque parler amour," and talking of flight was was to Manning practieally "parler de soi," and-well— Pat was-Pat.

The squadron commander sat up and looked at his wristwatoh. "It's about time they started over," he said. "You've got a new roll of films in, Pat, haven't you? I'm very keen to have that snap of a bus just clearing the gate."

"Yes, dear. I put one in before we started. The light's just right this evening, and if they come low down we ought to get a first-class picture. Do you remember when we sat on the gate tower and talked of possibilities, and you said that one day we would look out from here and see the troops of the future-horse and foot and birds?"

it made me realise that if a woman wishes to be a real companion to a man instead of a plaything for his leisure moments, she's got to take an interest in the things he's working at, and a little understanding is essential to interest. Then you'll get on towards sex-equality and real companionship. Like the Brownings, for instance."

"Well, you've got it, Pat, darling, haven't you? There's precious little about flight that you don't understand. You generally lead the way

now.'

"No, I don't, dear, but I've learnt to share your dreams a bit, especially the great one. Do you think we're tumbling on the edge of things a little now?"

Billy Manning sat up and pointed to a kite wheeling round over the Qila Kuhna Mosque, the slow spirals bring ing him past the Sher Mandal every half-minute or so.

"Never a tremor of wing except just the flexing and twisting of the tips for balance 89 one uses one's ailerons. And yet he not only keeps in horizontal flight but climbs steadily. We know what his wing is the same cambered 'plane we use ourselves; we know its action, and we know that to secure lift from the air that wing must be driven through it at a certain minimum speed, a speed that you and I have calculated out dozens of times. We know that if the relative speed drops below that figure the lift will fall and the bird must glide

down. There's nothing visible driving him through the air— he's stopped his engine so to speak, no longer flapping his wings-and yet he maintains sufficient flying speed to go on olimbing continuously and circling by the half-hour. You can't assume that his original momentum keeps him going, because if you do you're abolishing air resistance and getting perpetual motion.

"Therefore, one comes back always to the same conclusion, that some unknown force must be driving him through the air at a relative speed, high enough to give him a margin of lift and climb."

"I know, dear: we've worked it out dozens of times and always come back to that. But what? what? what?"

"God only knows!" said Billy. "He made the cambered wing that we've copied, and He made the bird; and now He's left us to find out, as He always does. That's what we were given brains for."

"Is it heat or is it light or is it electricity?" said Pat reflectively. "Some force produced by the bird itself which sends it forward; some alteration in pressure front and rear. І виррове we shall stumble on it some day." "Some one

some

where some day," said Billy. "Perhaps you and I, Pat-who knows? It won't be for lack of searching." He threw a stone at the kite as it sailed by six feet away. The bird checked, swerved, and dived and zoomed back

A faint, far-off, humming vibration of the air, felt rather than heard, caused them to look up over the walls to where, against the eau-de-nil sky, three aircraft showed like midges.

"There they are," said Pat, getting to her feet and unstrapping the camera. "Horse and foot and . . . birds.' I wonder if the dust of dead kings is stirred?"

The aeroplanes drew nearer, B.E. 28, prehistoric machines to Western eyes, but the last word in flying for India. They swung out on a circle to Humayon's tomb, and then turning, bore down on Indrapat, looking like long thin dragonflies gleaming in the sinking sun.

“I told Adam to come low over the South Gate," said Pat, as she focussed the camera, Adam Smythe was her cousin, a keen lad fresh from home, who had recently been posted to Billy's squadron. I thought that would give us a real fascinating photo, the wall and gates of the city of dead kings and 'planing above them, the living realisation of mankind's eternal dream."

"It's a fine symbol, dear, and it's good for mankind to see its dreams realised sometimes, even if only partly, lest it lose heart altogether. Look out; here he comes."

The leading 'plane swooped down to the gate, the pilot pulling her up at the last moment olearing the gate

seemed.

"Good lad," murmured Manning, who liked to see clean well-judged work. "Got him, Pat?"

"Nicely, thank you," she replied, as she turned on the film.

The whole amphitheatre of the old walls seemed full of sound as the machines circled low above them, and the steady hum of the engines woke the kites to remonstrance as one 'plane even lower than the rest swept past the Sher Mandal, Pat waving back in response to the observer's raucous greeting on the Klaxon.

She secured another snap of one that swept round over the mosque, and a final one as Adam Smythe, cart-wheeling above the west gate, slid back over the river and then banked left handed towards Delhi Fort, the other two close behind.

"Well, Pat, there's some display for the ghosts of the old kings. I wonder if Baber and Humayon and Akbar are anywhere about at the moment? I'm sure Akbar would have been as keen as nuts to see that display."

"Or Baber, who held that no knowledge could come amiss to a king," said Pat, closing the camera.

"They were a sporting lot anyway," remarked Billy, as he seated himself on the edge of the low oiroling wall. I think these old buildings of theirs always seem friendly to people like you and me, dreamers of dreams."