(continued)

"How would you like a trip to the moon?" I cried.

"I never did hold with them ballooneys," she said evidently under the impression that this was a common excursion enough.  "I wouldn't go up in one—not for ever so."

This struck me as being funny.  After I had supped I sat on a bench by the door of the inn and gossiped with two labourers about brickmaking, and motor cars, and the cricket of last year.  And in the sky a faint new crescent, blue and vague as a distant Alp, sank westward over the sun. 

The next day I returned to Cavor.  "I am coming," I said.  "I've been a little out of order, that's all."

That was the only time I felt any serious doubt our enterprise.  Nerves purely!  After that I worked a little more carefully, and took a trudge for an hour every day.  And at last, save for the heating in the furnace, our labours were at an end.

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