All hope of winning the great prize must be abandoned. Slave as he might, this night’s work was irreparable. He had never trusted unfamiliar hands upon his machine and would not do so now. The great prize must go, and that hope of success which meant so much to him. It was a heavy price to pay for the sympathy of a woman to whom he had spoken for the first time yesterday, and it made strange appeals to his sense of irony. That he should have played the fool, he, "Benny the philosopher," who used to say that the Greeks were right when they kept their women in sheds at the bottom of the garden! How she would laugh when she heard the truth! He was quite sure of it, and dwelt upon it almost savagely as though he were destined to bear the world’s contempt whatever he did. The "little widow" would call it an excellent joke and narrate the story in the hotel. Benny could almost pick and choose the words she would employ. He could hear the music of her laugh and read the story in her eyes—at least he thought that he could; and that was much the same thing to a man who might have an hour to live if luck stood by him. He had managed to get almost free of the cage by this time, but not of the wings themselves, and they held him tenaciously, though he did not quite understand what new thing was happening to him. Anyone familiar with skis would have told him that the smaller ailerons fixed to the tail were holding the machine in the snow, while his head and shoulders were being dragged down by the weight of it, inch by inch, with a subtlety of cruelty defying description. When Benny realised this his courage quavered, and he uttered a loud cry, more in despair than in the hope that anyone could possibly hear him. For who should be on the Zaat at such an hour of the night, and what absurd chance of ten million would bring peasants to the woods when the new day was not an hour old? Benny knew it to be impossible; but the cry was forced from him nevertheless, and upon it another and another as the machine pulled him down without pity, and the snow began to close about his ears and neck. In five minutes or in ten it would cover his mouth; but whether sooner or later, he must suffer a lingering death, dying as a man held up a little while upon the surface of lake or river and then drawn down imperceptibly but irresistibly to the depths. So much Benny understood at the crisis of it, and so much his brother, who had watched him from the window of the bedroom, perceived in a flash when he detected the black speck upon the distant slope and knew that Benny indeed had fallen.