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Clayton mutely followed Lilienthal to the door of a private room in the "Bavaria" and, with a wildly beating heart, was bowing low before the woman whose shining eyes had brought to his bosom such strange unrest. "It is like a page from a novel," the flute-like voice murmured, "that this lucky picture should have brought us together again, as it strangely did once face to face."
Percy S. Pilcher, now thirty-three years of age, having received his early training in the Navy, retired from the Service to become a civil engineer, and had been for some time a partner in the firm of Wilson and Pilcher. For four or five years he had been experimenting in soaring flight, using a Lilienthal machine, which he improved to suit his own methods.
Clayton had stumbled along in New York, blinded to its dual existence, its gilded shams. "I will never set foot in that place again," remarked Clayton, as he strode alone down University Place to the bank. "Lilienthal must never know of my further acquaintance with the Fräulein."
At any rate, Lilienthal accepted the proffered task. He was commissioned to tour the Pale of Settlement, to organize there the few isolated progressive Jews, "the lovers of enlightenment," or Maskilim, as they styled themselves, and to propagate the idea of a school-reform among the orthodox Jewish masses.
For two years he continued to work in the counting-house by day, and to pore over the Mécanique Céleste and the Differential Calculus by night. But the post of assistant in Schröter's observatory at Lilienthal having become vacant by the removal of Harding to Göttingen in 1805, Olbers procured for him the offer of it.
"We are just packing it up for a lady. An exquisite thing; sorry I cannot replace it, sir," remarked the vendor, "Show you anything else?" "You could not order me another, could you?" blankly demanded Clayton, with a baffled sense of losing both the lady and the art gem. "It was a unique proof," volubly continued Lilienthal.
Randall Clayton's eyes were fixed on the floor, as he nodded an assent. "I'll be back in half an hour. See what you can do," he pleasantly said. "And at any rate, I'll be thankful to be allowed to have the data." "I think I can fix it all right," genially remarked Lilienthal. "Fräulein Gluyas is a Hungarian prima donna of rare merit, an artist, too, of no mean order.
And still, he dared not abandon his uneasy flitting about the neighborhood of the company's office. His haggard face was now known, even to Mr. Adolph Lilienthal. The startled proprietor of the Newport Art Gallery had sealed up all his vague suspicions in his guilty breast. He never dared to confide even in Robert Wade, sneaking in furtively to the "private view" gallery.
Practically all glides gave the same result, and in one the machine rose higher and higher until it lost all headway. 'This was the position from which Lilienthal had always found difficulty in extricating himself, as his machine then, in spite of his greatest exertions, manifested a tendency to dive downward almost vertically and strike the ground head on with frightful velocity.
Few people, I fancy, who know the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim, and Chanute, but will be inclined to believe that long before the year A.D. 2000, and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound. Directly that is accomplished the new invention will be most assuredly applied to war.
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