The major laughed and motioned to her to sit down. “Going to have tiffin now. Don’t bother us with your family troubles down there, at least not until after the whistle blows,” he called through the telephone, and doubling his legs under him he sat down on the bottom of the basket, with an appetizing-looking luncheon spread out on a piece of paper in his lap. They could hear the wind roaring over them now, but only breaths of it sucked down into the basket. A thermos bottle of tea that was still hot was handed to Grace, Major Colt producing another from “nowhere” for his own consumption. “Drink it down. It will put new life into you. Dip into the food too. There’s plenty and to spare. Suppose you never sat down to tiffin thirty-five hundred feet in the air?” Grace said she never had. “Were you ever shot down while on observation work?” she asked him between mouthfuls. “Yes, a few times.” “What happened?” “I came down.” He grinned. “What else, sir?” persisted Grace, determined to get the story from him. “Nothing except that a Boche flier took a mean advantage of me and sneaked up on me in an Allied plane that the enemy had captured. Then he calmly dropped a bomb on the old bag.” “What did you do then, sir?” “Deserted the ship and woke up in a hospital. You see I bumped my head against a stone wall in landing. My head from infancy has been soft and demands most delicate handling.” Grace said she couldn’t imagine such a thing. To her the major was a heroic figure. He reminded her of Hippy Wingate. Like Hippy he made a joke of the desperate work he had done and was still doing. There were no heroics about those cloudland pirates. “What did you do before the war, if it is not an impertinent question? You know a woman’s curiosity must be satisfied.” “No impertinence about it at all. I had a good job, and maybe I shall have the luck to get it back again after the war is over. I was a floor-walker in a Newark, New Jersey, department store. I’ve been up in the world since then. Had my ups and downs as it were.” Grace laughed. War played strange freaks with human beings. The officer’s confession, instead of decreasing her admiration of him, increased it. A man who could step from department store life into the perilous life of a wartime balloonist was a _man_! That was the way with her wonderful Americans. But to have to return to the chattering crowds of shoppers, directing this one to the ribbon counter, that one to the galvanized cooking utensil sale in the basement--the thought was too much for Grace Harlowe. She could not reconcile herself to it nor adjust herself to seeing this hardy pirate acting in any such rôle in the future. “You do not think so, eh?” he demanded shrewdly. “Watch me. One day you will step up to me, without recognizing me, and say, ‘Floor-walker, will you please direct me to the cosmetics?’” “I will not,” declared Grace Harlowe. “I never use them.” Both laughed heartily.