"Your father said something about that," said the doctor. "What's it all about?" "While I've been down and out," Potter said, slowly, "I've discovered that I've been a man without a country. I've found my country. I've thought _hard_ and I believe my country is going to need me.... It can have me. If we get into this war, Doctor, we're going to need twenty thousand aeroplanes--quick. I've a knack that way. By the time this country needs the 'planes I'm going to know more about building them than anybody else this side the water--I'm going to be on the spot--ready.... That's all there is to it. Dad thinks it's a fad like stamp-collecting, and that I'm a crank." "If it is," said the fat old practitioner, blinking his eyes, "I wish a hundred millions of us could get bumped on the head and have a similar fad jarred into us. You go to it, son. Stay by it. Don't let them whisper and ridicule you out of it. Do you know that the greatest automobile manufacturer in the world was once called Crazy Henry by his friends? You don't hear anybody calling him Crazy Henry now, do you?... And remember this: There'll always be some to believe in you, and their belief will be worth more to you than the ridicule of all the rest. There'll be a girl.... And there'll be a fat old man. Shake, son." They shook hands gravely. "Now get well--and show 'em." The last thought the doctor left with Potter remained. "There'll always be some to believe in you.... There'll be a girl." He wondered if there would be a girl, and if she would believe in him. Naturally there would be a girl sometime; there never had been girls who ranked higher than episodes. He had never seen a girl he wanted as a man should want the girl who is to be his wife. Marriage had been a dim event in the distant future. It was so now. But, he thought, to have such a girl, to give her such a love as he could imagine--_and to have her believe in him_! That would be something. He pondered it. Somehow he found himself thinking about Hildegarde von Essen. It was a pleasant exercise. He recalled her as he had seen her that morning when she alighted from her machine at the door of his hangar, radiant, vibrant, boyish--a flame of a girl. That picture had persisted. They had visited the borderland of death together. That event connected them, would always connect them, by an invisible thread. He would not think of her as he thought of other women, nor she of him. Always the one would be to the other something peculiarly distinct. There was an overpowering intimacy about knocking hand in hand at the door of death.