"Kitts!" he called, but she did not hear, or disdained to pay attention. He tried to call again, but his mouth dried up and his feet seemed rooted to the ground. For, swinging round the turf-banked corner of the avenue at its junction with another, charging at a terrific pace down upon the little brilliant creature, came a whity-brown figure on a motorcycle, the frantic honking of its horn and the racket of its engine’s open throttle mingling deafeningly with the tractor’s roar. *CHAPTER VI* *SHERBRAND* The frantic honking of the pneumatic horn was lost in the crashing collision of earth and metal. Franky, pallid and damp with apprehension, reassured himself by a rapid glance that Margot was safe and sound. The aëroplane had ceased buzzing and hovering, headed southwards, and floated on, trailing her shadow, leaving the traces of her passage in a smear of brown earth indicating a vicious slash made by the right-side foot-rest of a motor-cycle in the greensward, conserved and sacred to the French Republic—the upset machine to which the foot-rest appertained, and an angry young man in dusty overalls, sitting in the middle of the raked-up avenue. "You’ve had a spill! ..." Franky heard himself saying. "Yes.... I have had a spill—thanks to that young lady!" The dusty young man’s tone was frankly savage; he regarded the brilliant little figure in the distance with a scowl of resentment as he gathered himself up from the gravel, and dabbed at a jagged, oozing cut on his prominent chin with a handkerchief of Isabella hue. "The brake-handle did that," he curtly explained, more for his own benefit than apologetic Franky’s. But he looked full in the flushed and dewy countenance of Margot’s lord as he added: "If I’d killed her, a French jury would have found that she deserved it!—running like a corncrake across the avenue when I was scorching up at top speed! ..." "I know," Franky stammered. "I—I see how it all happened. You had to steer slap into the bank—to save my—my wife’s life. How can I apologise? ... You see, she was crazy about the aëroplane.... She’d been warned to keep well out of the way—you know what women are! ..." "Oh, as to that! ..." The dusty young man, moving with a perceptible limp, went to the prone motor-cycle, stood it up on its bent stand with one twist of his big-boned wrist, and began to examine into its injuries. "Not much wrong," he said to himself, and straightened his back, and in the act of throwing a leg over the saddle, felt Franky’s restraining grip upon his arm. "You don’t go until my wife has thanked you!" Franky’s upper-lip was Rhadamanthine. "Margot!" he called, in a tone of authority such as he had never previously heard from his own mouth; "Come here at once, please! I want to speak to you!" The fluttering little figure waved a hand to him. The gay little voice called back: