A puff of hot desert air lifted the Tatler cutting and tumbled it away along the ground and into the furrow beside the half-buried engine. The pilot gave up trying to crawl back into the cockpit upside down and turned, a very lightweight canteen dangling by its strap from his hand. Gravely he retrieved the bit of paper from the ground and carried it towards its owner. Except for a slight limp from a banged kneecap, the pilot was uninjured. It was notable that he wore the uniform of a wing-commander.

“The Honorable Alice is a long way from home,” he remarked casually, replacing her beside the letters on the coat.

Hilary Shenstone pinned her down with the compass and glanced up at the tall figure beside him.

“I’m feeling the least little bit in the world homesick myself,” he admitted.

The pilot offered him the canteen in silence. Hilary shook it questioningly and hesitated.

“There’s another one in the plane,” lied the pilot, and watched while the wounded man took a long, grateful swallow.

With fingers that were no longer steady, Hilary gathered up his keys and the penciled pages he had signed.

“You take charge of these,” he said. “Pearson wants them badly at Peshawur.”

“Then he’d better come and get them,” said the pilot cheerfully. “We’re staying here, my lad.”

“You too?”

“Me too,” he nodded, looking up at the crippled machine. “If Pearson sends after us they’ll sight the plane. And I think he’ll send after us.” He sat down beside the parachute bundle, in the shade of the mighty wing. “We’re very valuable people,” he added, and grinned.

“One of us is damaged,” remarked Hilary, with a glance at his wound. “You’ll have to write my family, Bill. You’ll hate that, won’t you!”

“How do you know I’ll have to?” objected the other man, and his eyes went up to the empty, brassy sky. “The postal service round here is none too good just now.”

They sat for a long minute in silence, so that the rustle of dry tufts of grass in the hot wind was audible. But the sound their ears were subconsciously attuned to, the hum of a distant plane, was absent.

“Homesick are you,” said Wing-Commander Dalton at last. “And what part of England belongs to you?”

“Well, there’s that bit there.” Hilary handed him the picture of the gray house with the hills beyond. “In the Mendips.”

“Mendips, eh,” said Dalton. “That’s a weird piece of country. I’m from Buckinghamshire, myself. Up Amersham way.”