Page:The Zeppelin Destroyer.djvu/215

 sent out to neutral countries with the object of being seized upon by their sensational newspapers. No! Airships are big, unwieldy, as well as very vulnerable things. That the enemy has a number of them is quite certain, but the policy of frightfulness on paper is part of the Teuton plan. I admit that we are behindhand with our air-defences; but I do not support the Press in its shrieking clamours. We shall defeat the Huns one day—never fear. England has never yet been beaten.'

And again I glanced at my well-beloved, whom I saw had already read what was passing in my mind. Our secret was our own.

But I was glad to have the views of such an air expert as my friend Tringham, because he reflected what was just then uppermost in the official mind.

Evidently the 'nest of hornets' fallacy had been dismissed.

When the Flight-Commander and his wife left us—for he was on forty-eight hours leave, and they were motoring back to town—Roseye and I went for a stroll back into the town. There was nothing to do before dinner, so we went into a cinema and sat watching the latest picture-drama—a certain photo-play that was highly popular at that moment and which, with transpontine vividness, showed a fuzzy-haired heroine, bound and gagged by the cigarette-smoking villain, flung down into a slimy sewer, and afterwards rescued by the muscular and, of course, clean-shaven hero. I wonder why, to-day, no hero ever wears a beard? Twenty years ago they were all blonde-bearded. But Mr. Frank Richardson