The Gay Triangle: The Romance of the First Air Adventurers
wounds. So, for the sake of peace and fresh air, he had invested a part of his capital in a small motor business at Fenways. If he was not making a fortune he was at least living, and the keen Norfolk air was rapidly bringing him back to health.

At times the longing for the old life, the rash and whirl of the city, came upon him with almost overwhelming force.

Suddenly a cameo of his days in France leapt into his mental vision. He found himself once again staring, as in a mirror, at the slim figure of a half-fainting French girl stealing through the dusk towards the British lines. A crackling volley of shots from the Boche lines followed her, but by some miracle she came on unhurt. Dick had been sent up to the front to supervise the removal of a German plane of a new pattern which had crashed just behind the trenches and had wandered into the front line (where, of course, he had no business!), and it was he who caught the exhausted girl in his arms as she dropped into the British trench.

He had often wondered since what had become of Yvette Pasquet. She had stayed on in the little town where Dick’s squadron was stationed, and they had become good friends. Dick had thus learnt something of her tragic history.

An Alsatian, French to the finger-tips, Yvette had lived in London for some years and spoke English well. But she had seen her father and mother shot down by the Germans on the threshold of their home, and she herself had only been preserved from a worse fate by a young German officer, who had risked his life to save her from his drink-maddened soldiers. Sweet and gentle in all other respects, Yvette Pasquet was a merciless fiend where Germans were concerned; her hatred of them reached a passion of intensity which dominated every other emotion.

How she had managed to get through the German lines she never quite remembered. Her father had been well-to-do, and before her escape after the final tragedy, Yvette had managed to secure the scrip and shares which represented the bulk of his fortune, and had brought them across with her safely concealed under her clothing.

From that time forward she had been the brain of a remarkable organisation which had devoted itself to smuggling from the occupied regions into France gold, jewellery, and securities, which had been hidden from the prying eyes of the Hun.

After his wound Dick had lost sight of her. For many months he had lain dangerously ill, and when he had recovered sufficiently to write, 
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