She stood quite still for a moment. Then she opened it slowly. Telegrams from the Boy gave her a delicious memory of the way he used to jump about. He would be out of his chair, and sitting at her feet, before she knew he was going to move. She opened it slowly, turned to a window, and read it. "_How are you, dear? Please tell me. I am going to do my big fly to-morrow. I jolly well mean to break the record. Wish me luck._" She took up the reply-paid form and wrote: "_Quite well. Good luck; but please be careful, Little Boy Blue._" She hesitated a moment, before writing the playful name by which she so often called him. But his telegram was so absolutely the Boy, all over. It was best he should know nothing of "the man she loved," who had gone out at the gate. It was best he should not know what she would have called him, had he been under the mulberry just now. She was--undoubtedly--going to marry the Professor. In which case she would never call the Boy anything but "Little Boy Blue." So she put it into her telegram, as a repartee to his audacious "dear." Then she went out, and sent it off herself. It was comforting to have something, however small, to do for him. She came in again; dressed for the evening, and dined. She was thoroughly tired; and one sentence beat itself incessantly against the mirror of her reflection, like a frightened bird with a broken wing: "_He is going to do a big fly to-morrow.... He is going to do a big fly to-morrow! Little Boy Blue is going to fly and break the record._" She sat in the stillness of her drawing-room, and tried to read. But between her eyes and the printed page, burned in letters of fire: "_He is going to fly to-morrow._" She went down the garden to the chairs beneath the mulberry-tree. It was cooler there; but the loneliness was too fierce an agony. She walked up and down the lawn, now bathed in silvery moonlight. "_He is going to do a big fly to-morrow. He jolly well means to break the record._" She passed in, and went to her bedroom. She lay in the darkness and tried to sleep. She tried in vain. What if he got into cross-currents? What if the propeller broke? What if the steering-gear twisted? She began remembering every detail he had told herself and Mollie; when she sat listening, thinking of him as Mollie's lover, though all the while he had been her--Little Boy Blue.... "_Oh of course then it is all U P.--But there must be pioneers!_" At last she could bear it no longer. She lighted her candle, and rose. She went to her medicine cupboard, and did a thing she had never done before, in the whole of her healthy life. She took a sleeping draught. The draught was one of Miss Ann's; left behind at the close of a recent visit. She knew it contained chiefly bromide; harmless but effective. She put out the light, and lay once more in darkness. The bromide began to act. The bird with the broken wing became less insistent.