"Oh! but I can’t promise! One never knows! Best to have people up an’ ready when there might be need of ’em!" Patrine heard, as she wrenched at the handle of the green curtained glass door. "No—no! Let me!" 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. She recoiled, saying in awed and shaken tones: "Why! What has happened? What does it mean? ... How horrible!" The door had shut behind them. Now the round dome of the sky showed not black, but velvety purple. Away in the south-east a fierce red moon drifted like some derelict vessel burning away to embers on a waveless midnight sea. And sheaves of dazzling blue-white flames, leaping and roaring, fenced in, or seemed to fence, a dreadful lake of Stygian darkness, upon the surface of which figures—were they men or devils?—moved.... "Don’t be scared, Miss Saxham! It’s nothing ... though I ought to have wanted you...!" Not with intent, her heaving shoulder pressed against the breast of the man who had followed her. Perhaps the contact thrilled him, for his voice was unsteady as he went on: "I was rather a brute to forget! ... It’s a night-flare to guide—possible home-comers! ... Wads of tow dipped in petrol, burning in iron buckets round our landing-place.’ "I ought to have guessed," she said ruefully. "Forgive me for being such an idiot!" His answer was unexpected. "On condition that you’ll leave off saying ’Great Scott!’ and things like that." "All right! But what’s the matter with the expression, anyhow?" she demanded. "Do you always get riled when women use slang?" They had been standing within the gate that led upon the Flying Ground, still girdled by its Valkyr-ring of leaping flame. He said, holding open the gate to let her pass through: "I use slang myself, habitually, like every other man I know. But I don’t know a man who really likes to hear his wife or sweetheart copy him in that respect. For myself who have neither wife, sweetheart, nor even sister, I can only say what I feel. It is—that a beautiful woman should use beautiful language. One of the old Greek poets put the whole thing into two lines. I’ve forgotten the original, but the translation runs like this: "From the goddess the speech of Olympus, From the herd-maid the language of the cows." "I’m no goddess, God knows!" said Patrine, sorrowfully and sincerely.