Page:Stevenson and Quiller-Couch - St Ives .djvu/401

 He broke off and gazed reproachfully into Dalmahoy's impassive face. "Ayr—air," he explained: "a little play upon words."

"Skye would have been better," suggested Dalmahoy, without moving an eyelid.

"Skye? Dear me—capital, capital! Only you see," he urged, "she wouldn't expect me to be in Skye."

A minute later he drew me aside. "Excellent company your friend is, sir; most gentlemanly manners; but at times, if I may say so, not very gleg."

My hands by this time were numb with cold. "We had been ascending steadily, and Byfield's English thermometer stood at thirteen degrees. I borrowed from the heap a thicker overcoat, in the pocket of which I was lucky enough to find a pair of furred gloves; and leaned over for another look below, still with a corner of my eye for the aëronaut, who stood biting his nails, as far from me as the car allowed.

The sea-fog had vanished, and the south of Scotland lay spread beneath us from sea to sea, like a map in monotint. Nay, yonder was England, with the Solway cleaving the coast—a broad, bright spearhead, slightly bent at the tip—and the fells of Cumberland beyond, mere hummocks on the horizon; all else flat as a board or as the bottom of a saucer. White threads of high-road connected town to town: the intervening hills had fallen down, and the towns, as if in fright, had shrunk into themselves, contracting their suburbs as a snail his horns. The old poet was right who said that Olympians had a delicate view. The lace-makers of Valenciennes might have had the tracing of those towns and high-roads; those knots of guipure and ligatures of finest réseau-work. And when I considered that what I looked down on—this, with its arteries and nodules of public traffic—was a nation; that each