"Tenez! up! up! Ah ça! A clean shave, mister, hein?"

A touch on the lever had sent the aeroplane soaring aloft at a steep
angle, and she cleared by little more than a hair's breadth the edge
of a thick plantation of firs.

"A close shave, as you say, Roddy," came the answer. And then the
speaker let forth a gust of wrathful language which his companion
heard in sympathetic silence.

Lieutenant Charles Thesiger Smith, of H.M.S. _Imperturbable_, was
normally a good-tempered fellow, and his outburst would have deceived
nobody who knew him so well as Laurent Rodier.

It was the dusk of an evening in mid spring. Above, the sky was clear,
washed by the rain that had fallen without intermission since early
morning. Below, the chill of coming night, acting on the
moisture-laden air, had covered the land with a white mist, that
curled and heaved beneath the aeroplane in huge waves. It looked like
a billowy sea of cotton-wool, but the airmen who had just emerged from
it, had no comfort in its soft embrace. Their eyes were smarting, they
drew their breath painfully, and little streams of water trickling
from the soaked planes made cold, shuddering streaks on their faces
and necks.

An hour ago they had sailed by Salisbury spire, calculating that a few
minutes' run, at two or three miles a minute, would bring them to
their destination on the outskirts of Portsmouth. But a few miles