Page:Flying Death.pdf/117

 father," Bane informed Helen and me. "You can speak to him; he's in his room," Bane told her. "Take what you want for the trip."

"How long?"

"A day."

She asked nothing more but turned from him and went into the house, he watching her; and I watched how he hungered for her, how his eyes caressed her hair, the curve of her cheek, the white of her neck and followed the line of her figure to her pretty legs and her little feet. So I recognized, with a rush of relief, how selective was his insanity and how it guarded her.

Brutally, with no regard for them at all, he had slain Selby, Kent, the army pilot and the mail flyer; how many more, I could not know. With complete callousness he planned, with his airplanes and ton bombs of TNT, the most frightful and pitiless catastrophe because the ganglion of preventive mercy was milked dry in his mind; but other ganglia, filled by his mother with chivalry and respect of another sort, held full.

He hungered for this girl but he hungered