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spinning nose-first to the ground. Clearheaded and cool he counted the revolutions, allowed her to do four turns, then put her into a straight dive, pulled out gently on to an even keel, and flew past the window again. He raised his hand in salute as he passed, then flew back to the aerodrome and made a slow landing just outside the hangar door.
    Rawdon watched him to the ground and departed.

    Morris paid the final attentions to his machine, closed the sliding doors of the hangar, and walked slowly back to the hut. He was vaguely depressed; the arrival of the designer on the scene had crystallised in his mind a train of ideas which had worried him before. He went into the hut, washed his hands, and then strolled out of the gates and down the lane.
    It led to the sea, that lane running past the hangars. It ran down between cool green hedges, muddy and fragrant. Morris wandered down it, whistling very softly beneath his breath. He was not altogether happy in his prospects. It seemed to him extremely probable that the business would not survive the winter.
    During the past weeks he had rather let things slide, but now he must consider the subject seriously.
    He was not at all sanguine about the prospects of the air lines. If they failed, there would be still less demand for pilots. The statistics published in the papers showed that the machines on the Paris lines were running with an average load of only about one third of their capacity - that could not be a paying proposition. They were running in competition with subsidised French lines,and the subsidy question had just come up in Parliament, when it had been announced that ‘Civil aviation must fly by itself’. That might be the sound policy for the ultimate development of the industry, but it would mean precious few jobs for pilots next year.
    What if he were to chuck piloting and make for the design side of the business? That was undoubtedly the sound thing to do, if he could get a job, which seemed very unlikely.… Anyway, it was a good thing to have met Rawdon, and he would see about getting those books. He did not believe that there was very much in aircraft engineering that could not be picked up by a mathematician reading in his spare time.
    He came out on to the shore and walked along the beach.
    He would have a look at those books; there was a certain amount of spare time in the evenings. He smiled a little to himself; ‘the Virtuous Apprentice’. It was the only course open to him at the moment to better things than this.
    He walked backwards and forwards along a little beach in a cove between the rocks, immersed in dreams.
    He had thought that pain was an evanescent emotion. But it was not that - it worked out differently. Pain did not vanish, but turned to hardness - a great hardness and regret. One did not forget these things … he had thought that perhaps one might. Perhaps one did, really, only he hadn’t been long enough at the game. He had only had three months, or three and a half. That was not very long to decide the permanence of a grand emotion. Still, he should know his own mind if ever he was going to. He was twenty-five years old.
    He left the beach and walked slowly back to the aerodrome by the same road through the cool evening.
    At the gate of the aerodrome he met Stenning and Riley.
    ‘Your luck’s in,’ said Stenning. ‘The old lady sent a ruddy great basket of peaches by the chauffeur, for the dashing bird-man.’
    Morris laughed. ‘I’d better write a note this evening. We’ll have them at supper.’
    A week later the books arrived.

    The arrival of what Riley termed the ‘light literature’ precipitated a discussion on the policy of the firm. This had been brewing for some weeks, only nobody had cared to be the first to put into words what he really thought about the future of the joy-riding business. But when Morris one evening blandly produced the
Theory of Structures
and proceeded to study it, Stenning, after a flippant