he must have seen more and more distinctly the festive preparations

beyond the beech clumps near the green pavilion in the outer park,

the three stands for the privileged spectators, the raw, new fencing

of the enclosure, the sheds and workshops, the Venetian masts

and fluttering flags that Banghurst had considered essential,

black and limp in the breezeless dawn, and amidst all these things

a great shape covered with tarpauling. A strange and terrible

portent for humanity was that shape, a beginning that must surely

spread and widen and change and dominate all the affairs of men,

but to Filmer it is very doubtful whether it appeared in anything

but a narrow and personal light. Several people heard him pacing

in the small hours--for the vast place was packed with guests

by a proprietor editor who, before all understood compression.

And about five o'clock, if not before, Filmer left his room and

wandered out of the sleeping house into the park, alive by that time

with sunlight and birds and squirrels and the fallow deer. MacAndrew,

who was also an early riser, met him near the machine, and they went

and had a look at it together.



It is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgency

of Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number

he seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went

into the shrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary

Elkinghorn there. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation

with her old school friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer

had never met the latter lady before, he joined them and walked

beside them for some time. There were several silences in spite

of the Lady Mary's brilliance. The situation was a difficult one,

and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its difficulty. "He struck me,"

she said afterwards with a luminous self-contradiction, "as a very

unhappy person who had something to say, and wanted before all things

to be helped to say it. But how was one to help him when one didn't

know what it was?"



At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park

were crammed, there was an intermittent stream of equipages along

the belt which circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted

over the lawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park,

in a series of brilliantly attired knots, all making for the

flying machine. Filmer walked in a group of three with Banghurst,

who was supremely and conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle,

the president of the Aeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close

behind with the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, Georgina Hickle, and the Dean

of Stays. Banghurst was large and copious in speech, and such

interstices as he left were filled in by Hickle with complimentary

remarks to Filmer. And Filmer walked between them saying not a word

except by way of unavoidable reply. Behind, Mrs. Banghurst listened

to the admirably suitable and shapely conversation of the Dean

with that fluttered attention to the ampler clergy ten years

of social ascent and ascendency had not cured in her; and the Lady Mary



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