To the girls’ disappointment there was no flying going on while they were on the field, but they were partly appeased when Dick showed them a group of students, aviation observers, he called them, who were learning to sketch from a miniature battlefield, and in this way learn how it would look from the air. As they were about to leave the field they saw some students bringing out a machine, to get it ready for flying, as testing the motor and so on. At this particular moment one of the girls uttered a sudden cry, and as all eyes glanced upward with newly awakened eagerness, they were rewarded by seeing an aëroplane returning from a training flight. As Nathalie gazed eagerly at the machine that flew like some strange monster above their heads, the perils of flying in space came to her with a sudden, keen realization, and, with a sickening pang as to what might happen to Dick some day, her eyes darkened with apprehensive terror and she turned hastily away. But Dick, catching sight of the girl’s pale face and fear-haunted eyes, as if to divert her mind from dismal forebodings, called attention to the camp mascot, a little yellow police-dog, who was standing by his master, equipped, like him, with goggles. The girls were soon laughing heartily as Dick told of the dog’s alertness in doing “stunts,” and the eagerness he showed when waiting to take a flight in one of the machines. CHAPTER VIII SEVEN PILLARS Nathalie, seated in a low chair at one end of the broad white veranda, gazed with rapt intentness at the sun-hazed landscape, rising in green, undulating waves against the purple blur of the towering mountain-heights, that stretched in wide expanse before her, with a strange, mystical beauty. Into her eyes, city-tired, came rest, as they swept over the velvet green of the meadow, splashed with the bloom of wild flowers, its scrubby bushes aglow with pink spires, and its spruces and maples standing upright with the slimness of youth, as it sloped gently down to the glen below. The trees of the glen, closely massed in a rich, feathery green, sombered by the darker line of the pines and firs, to the girl seemed weird and mysterious.