The Foot of Time: A Novel of Australia and the South Seas: (1933)

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70
THE FOOT OF TIME
enough for me. It's a mortal sin in the eyes of
Heaven to get took into the air. A mortal sin it is,
and God's judgment ag'in they as does it. No
good won't come of it."
Edith inherited her father's strong will, but the
inheritance of one characteristic does not necessarily
embrace another. The girl was determined to
fly, and when the only child of William Burne set
her heart upon a thing, by one means or another
she generally obtained it.
Near Sydney lies a place named Mascot. Perhaps
it is named after its adherants' love of carrying
such talismans of good fortune into the ether with
them. Be that as it may, Edith Burne was often
there during her lunch hour, or in the early evening.
And the person who financed her discouraged
hobby, was her darling villainous old aunt, Miss
Tooth.
Aunt Florence Tooth was a character. For one
thing she loathed, hated and detested her brotherin-law.
For another, sad to relate, she was scarcely
religious, and to sum all, her religion was a contempt
of men as such, an "idee fixe" that women
were better men than the sterner sex, and a putting
into practice of her suffragist views on every conceivable
occasion. A love disappointment had
started it, and the advent into her family of the
well-meaning, kind-hearted, bombastic and narrow-minded
William had finished it.
Yet Alice Burne, her sister, loved her husband
with a dog-like docility, which fact, aided particularly
by its full justification, incensed Miss
Florence beyond the power of speech. No sooner
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THE FOOT OF TIME 71
did she learn that her darling Edith had more than
a hankering to fly, than Florence preened up her
feathers, got out her cheque-book, and took Edith
forthwith to Mascot.
Arrived there, nothing would satisfy her but that
the two of them should be taken up together then
and there. Taken up, sun or fog, suitable or risky.
Fortunately, Sydney was behaving itself in its com-
paratively usual, exemplary manner, and up the
two went. The young Australian who took them
would have graced any plane, and so the seal was
set on Edith's wish to fly, which, now aided by Miss
Tooth, became an obsession.
Came the day when, in a curious fit of humour,
Edith, seated in a dual control monoplane, and up
for a long cruise, persuaded her instructor to run
out West as far as Orange and back, skim low
over her father's property, and so back to Mascot
again. Well advanced in her new art, the girl took
the joy-stick when well over Orange, and had the
double thrill of seeing her home from the air and
picturing her dad's righteous indignation afterwards.
The girl was too much taken up with the controls
to see it, but actually while over her home
acres, William Burne shook his fist at the unconscious
plane. "May the Almighty teach you the
error of your ways," he prayed; but the plane flew
on unheeding. Soon it was lost to sight in the dim
blue haze of the dividing line between coastal plains
and the "outback."
The delight of Florence when she heard of the
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