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 far as she wished; she had accomplished her present purpose. What? What had she been after in this planned provocation of him?

I glanced about the table where everyone now was served with chilled consomme but few were eating. I returned to Helen Lacey who sat with her brown hair bronze-gold in a shaft of the sun and with her grey eyes aghast before Sally Gessler, before Pete and me. Before Bane; for now she confronted him.

"The army pilot—and the mail flyer," she began.

"Fell!" declared Bane. "Fell; fell," he insisted; whereat Sally laughed and Helen Lacey looked at her, at Pete and me; she looked past Bane at her father; and she relapsed in her chair.

Pete, I saw, straightened a little; and I pulled up with warmer blood beating in me, too, as I became sure of the reason for this bold baiting of Bane. It was because the brown-haired girl beside him had not known of the actual adventures of her effigy which masked the pilot mechanism of that murderous monoplane; not only had she played no