"Well, you’ve chosen the—kind of career that is going to use up a good many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there’s much of the slacker about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy—that is, going by looks, you know! But if the Kaiser’s Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as they brag they can"—his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the other’s face—"then——" "Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!" "Thumbs up! Ten to one you’d come down with a broken wing or so." There was something that touched Franky’s latent quality of imagination in the fellow’s queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And—by the Great Brass Hat!—now I come to think of it—the livin’ image of old Sir Roger Sherbrand—his and my great-grandfather—goin’ by the portrait in the gallery at Whins." "So you’re firm on joinin’ the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size. "Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances——" "And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than I had with No. I.!" "You’re building a new ’plane?" The brown eyes were alight with interest. "Rather! Come and have a look at her one day." "Like a shot, if only I’d time! Did she tot to a hatful of money?" "Something under £700. £500 of that goes for the new ’Gnome’ engine. You see that German—" Sherbrand broke off. "I remember! Pretty rough on you, that North Sea crossin’ business. Must have been an awful loss. Look here!" Franky reddened again and began to flounder. "Could I—couldn’t I—help with the boodle? Got £700 lying by idle. Frightfully glad if you’d let me chip in!—just in a cousinly sort o’ way!" "I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater." Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of patronage. He went on, holding his head high: "You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty is understood by people of your world. Apart from what my profession brings me I have something in the way of income. My mother’s brother left me a sum of money that brings in yearly over £200." He went on as Franky regarded with unaffected interest the man who wasn’t poor on two hundred _per annum_: "The principal—I suppose it tots up to £6,000—I shall naturally settle on my wife." He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the word. His cold eyes grew soft and his brows smoothed pleasantly. He said with a glowing pride, and a kind of brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have adored: "I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes of a Commission—I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing off. But the moment it comes along I shall persuade her to marry me. We’ll be man and wife before I fly for the Front."