Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 01.djvu/81

 in pairs, each mating season. He felt the same thing in his own breast now, the urge toward this girl. He did not think of it as love, but suddenly he loved her.

He told Ruth Hall slowly, "I'm all right now."

But she said, "You must stay here until you're completely well. It's the least we can do when it was our servant who almost killed you."

David stayed, as the wound healed. He did not like the house, whose rooms seemed so dark and stiflingly close to him, but he found that he could stay outside during the day, and could sleep on a porch at night.

Neither did he like the newspaper men and cameramen who came to Wilson Hall's house to get stories about the winged man's accident; but these soon ceased coming, for David Rand was not now the sensation he had been years ago. And while visitors to the Hall home stared rather disconcertingly at him and at his wings, he got used to that.

He put up with everything, so that he might be near Ruth Hall. His love for her was a clean fire burning inside him and nothing in the world now seemed so desirable as that she should love him too. Yet because he was still mostly of the wild, and had had little experience in talking, he found it hard to tell her what he felt.

He did tell her, finally, sitting beside her in the sunlit garden. When he had finished, Ruth's gentle brown eyes were troubled.

"You want me to marry you, David?"

"Why, yes," he said, a little puzzled. "That's what they call it when people mate, isn't it? And I want you for my mate."

She said, distressed, "But David, your wings"

He laughed. "Why, there's nothing the matter with my wings. The accident didn't hurt them. See!"

And he leaped to his feet, whipping open the great bronze wings that glittred in the sunlight, looking like a figure of fable poised for a leap into the blue, his slim tanned body clad only in the shorts which were all the clothing he would wear.

The trouble did not leave Ruth's eyes. She explained, "It's not that David—it's that your wings make you so different from everybody else. Of course it's wonderful that you can fly, but they make you so different from everyone else that people look on you as a kind of freak."

David stared. "You don't look on me as that, Ruth?"

"Of course not," Ruth said. "But it does seem somehow a little abnormal, monstrous, your having wings."

"Monstrous?" he repeated. "Why, it's nothing like that. It's just—beautiful, being able to fly. See!"

And he sprang upward with great wings whirring—up and up, climbing into the blue sky, dipping and darting and turning up there like a swallow, then cometing down in a breathless swoop to land lightly on his toes beside the girl.

"Is there anything monstrous about that?" he demanded joyously. "Why, Ruth, I want you to fly with me, held in my arms, so that you'll know the beauty of it as I know it."

The girl shuddered a little. "I couldn't, David. I know it's silly, but when I see you in the air like that you don't seem so much a man as a bird, a flying animal, something unhuman."

David Rand stared at her, suddenly miserable. "Then you won't marry me—because of my wings?"

He grasped her in his strong, tanned arms, his lips seeking her soft mouth.