by a proprietor editor who, before all understood compression.
And about five o'clock, if not before, Filmer left his room and
wandered out of the sleeping house into the park, alive by that time
with sunlight and birds and squirrels and the fallow deer. MacAndrew,
who was also an early riser, met him near the machine, and they went
and had a look at it together.

It is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgency
of Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number
he seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went
into the shrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary
Elkinghorn there. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation
with her old school friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer
had never met the latter lady before, he joined them and walked
beside them for some time. There were several silences in spite
of the Lady Mary's brilliance. The situation was a difficult one,
and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its difficulty. "He struck me,"
she said afterwards with a luminous self-contradiction, "as a very
unhappy person who had something to say, and wanted before all things
to be helped to say it. But how was one to help him when one didn't
know what it was?"

At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park
were crammed, there was an intermittent stream of equipages along
the belt which circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted
over the lawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park,
in a series of brilliantly attired knots, all making for the
flying machine. Filmer walked in a group of three with Banghurst,
who was supremely and conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle,
the president of the Aeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close