Releasing her hand, he stepped back, saluted the lovers with a smile and gay gesture, and clambered briskly to the pilot’s seat of the biplane.
When firmly established, he turned the switch of the starting mechanism.
The heavy, distinctive hum of the great motor filled that isolated hollow in the Downs like the purring of a dynamo.
With a final wave of his hand, Wertheimer grasped the starting-lever.
Its brool deepening, the Parrott stirred, shot forward abruptly. In two seconds it was fifty yards distant, its silhouette already blurred, its wheels lifting from the rim of the hollow.
Then lightly it leaped, soared, parted the mists, vanished. …
For some time Lanyard and Lucy Shannon remained motionless, clinging together, hand-in-hand, listening to the drone that presently dwindled to a mere thread of sound and died out altogether in the obscurity above them.
Then, turning, they faced each other, smiling a trace uncertainly, a smile that said: “So all that is finished! … Or, perhaps, we dreamed it!” …
Suddenly, with a low cry, the girl gave herself to Lanyard’s arms; and as this happened the mists parted and bright sunlight flooded the hollow in the Downs.
Colophon
The Lone Wolf
was published in by
Louis Joseph Vance.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Anthony Bongers,
and is based on a transcription produced in by
Suzanne Shell, Jayam Subramanian, and Distributed Proofreaders
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
L’Esplanade des Invalides, en 1916,
a painting completed in by
Henri Gervex.
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League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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The League of Moveable Type.
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