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Title: The Boy with Wings

Author: Berta Ruck

Release date: May 27, 2011 [eBook #36223]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36223

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BOY WITH
WINGS ***

THE BOY
WITH WINGS

Berta Ruck

THE BOY WITH WINGS

The
Boy With Wings

By BERTA RUCK
(MRS. OLIVER ONIONS)

AUTHOR OF
"His Official Fiancée,"
"The Wooing of Rosamond Fayre,"
"In Another Girl's Shoes," Etc.

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company

Copyright, 1915,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

Published in England under the title of
"The Lad With Wings."

DEDICATED, WITH AFFECTION
TO THAT BRAINLESS ARMY TYPE.
MY YOUNGEST BROTHER

"The men of my own stock
Bitter-bad they may be,
But at least they hear the things I hear.
They see the things I see."
Kipling.

CONTENTS
PART I
MAY, JUNE, JULY, 1914
CHAPTER PAGE
I Aerial Light Horse 3
II The Bosom-chums 19
III The Eyes of Icarus 34
IV The Song of All the Ages 54
V The Workaday World 62
VI The Invitation 71
VII A Bachelor's Tea-party 75
VIII Laughing Odds 82
IX A Day in the Country 89
X Leslie, on "The Roots of the Rose" 107
XI The Heels of Mercury 122
XII The Kiss Withheld 128
XIII The Flying Dream 144
XIVAn Awakening 152
XV Leslie on "Too Much Love" 168
XVI The Aeroplane Lady 178
XVII Leslie on "Marriage" 186
XVIII The Obvious Thing 193
XIXThe Sealed Box 212

PART II
JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER, 1914
I The Aviation Dinner 223
II The Whisper of War 235
III The Last Sunday of Peace 241
IV That Week-end 259
V The Die is Cast 265

VI Her Guardian's Consent 267
VII Haste to the Wedding! 280
VIII The Girl He Left Behind Him 293
IX This Side of "the Front" 300
X Leslie, on "The Motley of Mars" 310
XI A Love-letter—and a Rose 321

PART III
SEPTEMBER, NINETEEN-FOURTEEN
I A War-time Honeymoon 335
II The Soul of Undine 345
III A Last Favour 350
IV The Departure for France 361
V The Nuptial Flight 364
VI The Winged Victory 370
Postscript—Myrtle and Laurel Leaf 376

PART I

MAY, JUNE, JULY, 1914

CHAPTER I
AERIAL LIGHT HORSE

Hendon!
An exquisite May afternoon, still and sunny. Above, a canopy of unflecked
sapphire-blue. Below, the broad khaki-green expanse of the flying-ground,
whence the tall, red-white-and-blue pylons pointed giant fingers to the sky.
Against the iron railings of the ground the border of chairs was thronged
with spectators; women and girls in summery frocks, men in light overcoats
with field-glasses slung by a strap about them. The movement of this crowd
was that of a breeze in a drift of coloured petals; the talk and laughter rose
and fell as people looked about at the great sheds with their huge lettered
names, at the big stand, at the parked-up motors behind the seats; at the men
in uniform carrying their brass instruments slowly across to the bandstand
on the left.
At intervals everybody said to everybody else: "Isn't this just a perfect
afternoon for the flying?"

Presently, there passed the turnstile entrance at the back of the parked
motor-cars a group of three young girls, chattering together.
One was in pink; one was in cornflower-blue. The girl who walked between
them wore all white, with a sunshine-yellow jersey-coat flung over her arm.
Crammed well down upon her head she wore a shady white hat, bristling
with a flight of white wings; it seemed to overshadow the whole of her
small compact, but supple little person, which was finished off by a pair of
tiny, white-canvas-shod feet. She was the youngest as well as the smallest
of the trio standing at the turnstile. (Observe her, if you please; then leave or
follow her, for she is the Girl of this story.)

"This is my show!" she declared. Her softly-modulated voice had a trace of
Welsh accent as she added, "I'm paying for this, indeed!"
"No, you aren't, then, Gwenna Williams!" protested the girl in pink (whose
accent was Higher Cockney). "We were all to pay for ourselves!"
"Yes; but wasn't it me that made you come into the half-crown places
because I was so keen to see a flying-machine close?... I'll pay the
difference then, if you must make a fuss. We'll settle up at the office on
Monday," said the girl who had been addressed as Gwenna Williams.
With a girlish, self-conscious little gesture she took half a sovereign out of
her wash-leather glove and handed it to the tall, be-medalledd
commissionaire.
"Come on, now, girls," she said. "This is going to be lovely!" And she led
the way forward to that line of seats, where there were just three green
chairs vacant together.
Laughing, chattering, gay with the ease of Youth in its own company, the
three, squeezed rather close together by the press, sat down; Gwenna, the
Welsh girl, in the middle. The broad brim of her hat brushed against the
roses of the pink-clad girl's cheaper hat as Gwenna leaned forward.
"Sorry, Butcher," she said. She moved.
This time one of the white wings caught a pin in the hat of the plump
blonde in blue, who exclaimed resignedly and in an accent that was neither
of Wales nor of England, "Now komm I also into this hat-business of
Candlestick-maker. It is a bit of oll right!"
"So sorry, Baker," apologised the girl in white again, putting up her hands to
disengage the hat. "I'll take it off, like a matinée. Yes, I will, indeed. We
shall all see better." She removed the hat from a small head that was very
prettily overgrown with brown, thick, cropped curls. The bright eyes with
which she blinked at first in the strong sunlight were of the colour of the
flying-ground before them: earth-brown and turf-green mixed.
"I will hold your hat, since it is for me that you take him off," said the girl
whom they called Baker.

Her real name was Becker; Ottilie Becker. She worked at the German
correspondence of that London office where the other two girls, Gwenna
Williams and Mabel Butcher, were typists. It was one of the many small
jokes of the place to allude to themselves as the Butcher, the Baker, and the
Candlestick-maker.
All three were excellent friends....
The other two scarcely realised that Gwenna, the Celt, was different from
themselves; more absent-minded, yet more alive. A passer-by might have
summed her up as "a pretty, commonplace little thing;" a girl like millions
of others. But under the ready-made muslin blouse of that season's style
there was ripening, all unsuspected, the dormant bud of Passion. This is no
flower of the commonplace. And her eyes were full of dreams, innocent
dreams. Some of them had come true already. For hadn't she broken away
from home to follow them? Hadn't she left the valley where nothing ever
went on except the eternal Welsh rain that blurred the skylines of the
mountains opposite, and that drooped in curtains of silver-grey gauze over
the slate roofs of the quarry-village, set in that brook-threaded wedge
between wooded hillsides? Hadn't she escaped from that cage of a chapel
house sitting-room with its kitchen-range and its many bookshelves and its
steel print of John Bunyan and its maddening old grandfather-clock that
always said half-pastt two and its everlasting smell of singeing hearthrug,
and never a window open? Yes! she'd given her uncle-guardian no peace
until he'd washed his hands over Gwenna's coming up to London. So here
she was in London now, making fresh discoveries every day, and enjoying
that mixture of drudgery and frivolling that makes up the life of the London
bachelor-girl. She was still "fancy-free," as people say of a girl who loves
and lives in fancies, and she was still at the age for bosom-friendships. One
sincerely adored girl-chum had her confidence. This was a young woman at
the Residential Club, where Gwenna lived; not one of these from the office.
But the office trio could take an occasional Saturday jaunt together as
enjoyingly as if they never met during the week.

"Postcards, picture postcards!" chanted a shrill treble voice above the buzz
of the talking, waiting crowds.
Before the seats a small boy passed with a tray of photographs. These
showed views of the hangars and of the ground; portraits of the aviators.
"Postcards!" He paused before that cluster of blue and white and pink
frocks. "Any picture postcards?"
"Yes! Wait a minute. Let's choose some," said Miss Butcher. And three
heads bent together over the display of glazed cards. "Tell you what, Baker;
we'll send one off to your soldier-brother in Germany. Shall we? All sign it,
like we did that one to your mother, from the Zoo."
"Ah, yes. A bier-karte!" said the German girl, with her good-natured giggle.
"Here, I choose this one. View of Hendon. We write 'Es lassen grüssen
unbekannter Weise'—'there send greeting to Karl, the Unknown.'"
"Oh, but hadn't we better send him this awfully nice-looking airman, just as
a sort of example of what a young man really can do in the way of
appearance, what?" suggested Miss Butcher, picking out another card.
"Peach, isn't he? Look! He's standing up in the thingamagig just like an
archangel in his car; or do I mean Apollo?—Gwenna'd know.... Which are
you going to choose, Gwenna?"
Gwenna had picked out three cards. A view of the ground, a picture of a
biplane in mid-air, and a portrait of one of the other airmen.
He had been taken in his machine against the blank background of sky. The
big, boyish hands gripped the wheel, the cap, goggles in front, peak behind,
was pushed back from the careless, clean-shaven lad's face, with its cheeks
creased with deep dimples of a smile.
"This one," said Gwenna Williams. And there was no whisper of Fate at her
heart as she announced lightly, "This is my love." (She did not guess, as you
do, that here was the portrait of the Boy of this story.)
The other girls leaned across her to look as she added: "He's the most like
Icarus, I think."

"Who's Icarus, when he's at home?" inquired Miss Butcher. And Gwenna,
out of one of her skimmed books, gave a hurried explanation of Icarus, the
first flying-man, the classic youth who "dared the sun" on wings of wax....
Together the girls inspected the postcard of his modern type, the Hendon
aviator. They laughed; they read aloud the name "P. Dampier;" they
compared his looks with those of other airmen, treating the whole subject
precisely as they would have treated the dancing or singing of their
favourite actresses in the revues....
For it was still May, Nineteen-fourteen in England. The feeling of warm and
drowsy peace in the air was only intensified by the brisk, sharp strains of
the military band on the left of the flying-ground, playing the "Light-
Cavalry" march....

"Dear me! Are we going on like this for ever?" remonstrated Gwenna
presently. "Aren't they ever going up?"
She was answered by a shattering roar from the right.
It ceased. Then, on the field before her excited eyes, there was brought out
of one of the hangars by a cluster of mechanics in khaki-brown overalls the
Winged Romance that came into this tired and blasé world with that most
wondrous of all Ages—the Twentieth Century. At first only a long gleaming
upper plane, jolting over the uneven ground, could be seen over the heads
of the watchers. Then it reached the enclosure. For the first time in her life
Gwenna beheld a Maurice Farman biplane.
And for the moment she was a little disappointed, for she had said it was
"going to be so lovely!"
She had expected—what? Something that would look more like what it
was, the new Bird of man's making. Here the sunlight gleamed on the taut,
cambered wings, on the bamboo spars, the varnished blade of the
motionless propeller, all shiny as a new toyshop. But the girl saw no grace
in it. Its skids rested on the sunburned grass like a couple of ski in the
Sketch photographs of winter sports. It had absurd little wheels, too, looking
as if, when it had finished skiing, the machine might take to roller-skating.
The whole thing seemed gaunt and cumbrous and clogged to the earth.

Gwenna did not then know that, unlike Antæus, this half-godlike creature
only awoke to life and beauty when it felt the earth no more.
Then, as she watched, a mechanic, the Dædalus who strapped on the wings
for the Icarus seized the propeller, which kicked thrice, rebelliously, and
then, with another roar, dissolved into a circle of mist. Other brown figures
were clinging to the under parts of the structure, holding it back; Gwenna
did not see the signal to let go. All that she saw was the clumsy forward run
of the thing as, like a swan that tries to clear its feet of the water, the biplane
struggled to free itself from the drag of Earth....
Then, as the wonder happened, the untried and imaginative little Welsh
country-girl, watching, gave a gasp. "Ah——!"
The machine was fettered no longer.
Suddenly those absurd skids and wheels had become no more than the tiny
feet that a seagull tucks away under itself, and like a gull the biplane rose. It
soared, its engine shouting triumph as it sped. Gwenna's heart beat as
tensely as that engine. Her eyes sparkled. What they saw was not now a
machine, but the beauty of those curves it cut in the conquered air. It soared,
it banked, it swayed gently as if on a keel. Swiftly circling, up and up it
went, until it seemed to dwindle to something not even larger than the
seagull it resembled; then it was a flying-fish, then a dragonfly wheeling in
the blue immensity above.
Suddenly, like a fog-signal, there boomed out the voice of the man with the
megaphone, the man who made from the judges' stand, behind the
committee-enclosure all announcements for the meeting:
"Ladies and gentul MEN," it boomed.
"Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice
Farman bi plane!"
The huge convolvulus-trumpet of the megaphone swung round. The
announcement was made from the other side of the stand; the sound of that
booming voice being subdued as it reached the group of three girls.
"Mister Paul Dampier——"

"You hear, Gwenna? It is your young man," said Miss Baker; Miss Butcher
adding, "Hope you had a good look at him and saw if that photo did him
justice?"
"From here? Well, how could I? It's not much I could see of him,"
complained Gwenna, laughing. "He only looked about as big as a knot in a
cat's cradle!"
Another roar, another small commotion on the ground. Another of those
ramshackle looking giant grasshoppers slid forward and upward into the air.
Presently three aeroplanes, then four together were circling and soaring
together in the sapphire-blue arena.
Below, a pair of swallows, swift as light, chased each other over the ground,
above their own shadows, towards the tea-pavilion.
Yet another flyer winged his tireless way across the aerodrome. He was a
droning bee, buzzing and hovering unheeded over a tuft of dusty white
clover growing by the rails that were so closely thronged by human beings
come to watch and wonder over man's still new miracle of flight.

"Oh, flying! Mustn't it be too glorious!" sighed the Welsh girl, watching the
aeroplane that was now scarcely larger than a winged bullet in the blue.
"Oh, wouldn't I love to go up! Wouldn't it be Heaven!"
"It's been Heaven for several poor fellows lately," suggested the shrewd,
Cockney-voiced little Miss Butcher, grimly, from her right. "What about
that poor young What's-his-name, fallen and killed on the spot at twenty-
one!"
"I don't call him 'poor,'" declared Gwenna Williams softly. "I should think
there could be worse things happen to one than get killed, quickly, right in
the middle of being so young and jolly and doing such things——"
"Ah, look! That's it! See that?" murmured a voice near them. "Flying upside
down, now, that first one—see him?"
And now Gwenna, at gaze, watched breathlessly the wonder that seemed
already natural enough to the multitude; the swoop and curve, the loop and

dash and recover of the biplane that seemed for the moment a winged white
quill held in a hand unseen, writing its challenge on the blue wall of Heaven
itself.

Again the megaphone boomed out through the still and soft June air:
"Ladies and gentul MEN! Pass enger
flights from this aer riodrome may now
be booked at the office un der this
Stand!"
"Two guineas, my dears, for the chance of breaking your necks,"
commented Miss Butcher. "Three guineas for a longer flight, I believe; that
is, a better chance. Well, I bet that if I did happen to have two gleaming
golden jimmyohgoblins to my name, I'd find something else to spend 'em
on, first!"
"I also!" agreed Miss Baker.
Gwenna moved a little impatiently. She hadn't two guineas, either, to spend.
She still owed a guinea, now, for that unjustifiable extravagance, that white
hat with the wings. In spite of earning her own living, in spite of having a
little money of her own, left her by her father who had owned shares in a
Welsh quarry, she never had any guineas! But oh, if she had! Wouldn't she
go straight off to that stand and book for a passenger-flight!...
While her covetous eyes were still on the biplane, her ears caught a stir of
discussion that came from the motor nearest to the chairs.
A lady was speaking in a softly dominant voice, the voice of a class that
recognises no overhearing save by its chosen friends.
"My dear woman, it's as safe as the Tubes and the motor-buses. These
exhibition passenger-flights aren't really flying, Cuckoo said. Didn't you,
Cuckoo?"
A short deep masculine laugh sounded from behind the ladies, then a
drawled "What are they then, what? Haw? Flip-flap, White City, what?"

"Men always pretend afterwards that they've never said anything. Cuckoo
told me that when these people 'mean business' they can fly millions of
times higher and faster than we ever see them here. He said there wasn't the
slightest reason why Muriel shouldn't——"
Here the sound, hard and clear as an icicle, of a very young girl's voice,
ringing out:
"And anyhow, mother, I'm going to!"
Glancing round, Gwenna saw a lanky girl younger than herself spring down
from the big, dove-grey car, and stride, followed by a tall man wearing a
top-hat, to the booking-office below the stand. This girl wore a long brown
oilskin coat over her white sweater and her short, admirably-cut skirt; a
brown chiffon veil tied over her head showed the shape and the auburn
gleam of it without giving a hair to the breeze.
"Lovely to be those sort of people," sighed the enviously watching Gwenna,
as other girls from the cars strolled into the enclosure with the notice
"COMMITTEE ONLY," and seemed to be discussing, laying bets, perhaps,
about the impending race for machines carrying a lady-passenger. "Fancy,
whenever any of them want to do or to see or even to be anything, they've
only got to say, 'Anyhow, I'm going to!' and there they are! That's the way
to live!"
Presently the three London typists were sitting at a table under the green
awning and the hanging flower-baskets; one of a score of tables where folk
sat and chattered and turned their eyes ceaselessly upwards to the blue sky,
pointed at by those giant pylon-fingers, invaded by those soaring, whirring,
insolent, space daring creatures of man.

The first biplane had been preparing for the Ladies' Race. Now came the
start; with the dropped white flag the announcement from that dominating
magnified voice:
"Mis ter Damp ier on a Maurice Far
man bi plane ac companied by Miss
Mu riel Con yers——"

The German girl put in, "Your man again, Gwenna!"
"My man indeed. And I haven't seen him, even yet," complained the Welsh
girl again, laughing over her cup of cooling tea, "only in the photograph!
Don't suppose I ever shall, either. It's my fate, girls. Nothing really exciting
ever happens to me!" She sighed, then brightened again as she remembered
something. "I must be off now.... I've got to go out this evening."
"Anywhere thrilling?" asked Miss Butcher.
"I don't know what it'll be like. It's Leslie Long; it's my friend at the Club's
married sister somewhere in Kensington, giving a dinner-party," Gwenna
answered in the scrambling New English in which she was learning to
disguise her Welshiness, "and there's a girl fallen through at the last minute.
So she 'phoned through this morning to ask if this girl could rake any one
up."
"How mouldy for you, my dear," said Mabel Butcher in her sympathetic
Cockney as the Welsh girl rose, took up her sunshine-yellow coat from the
back of her chair and chinked down a shilling upon her thick white plate.
"Means you'll have to sit next some youth who only forced himself into his
dress-suit for the sake of taking that 'fallen through' girl into dinner. He'll be
scowling fit to murder you, I expect, for being you and not her. (I know
their ways.) Never mind. Pinch a couple of liqueur-choc'lates off the table
for me when the Blighted Being isn't looking, will you? And tell us what
he's like on Monday, won't you?"
"All right," promised the Welsh girl, smiling back at her friends. She
threaded her way through the tables with the plates of coloured cakes, the
brown teapots, the coarse white crockery. She passed behind that park of
cars with that leisured, well-dressed, upward-gazing throng. She turned her
back on the glimpse beyond them of the green field where the brown-clad
mechanics ran up towards the slowly downward swooping biplane.
As she reached the entrance she caught again the announcement of that
distant megaphone:
"Ladies and gentul men Pass enger flights
may now be booked——"

The band in the distance was playing the dashing tune of the "Uhlanenritt."
Gwenna Williams passed out of the gates beside the big poster of the
aeroplane in full flight carrying a girl-passenger who waved a scarf. It was
everywhere, that Spring. So was the other notice:
"An afternoon in the country is always refreshing! Flying is always
interesting to watch!"
In the dusty bit of lane mended by the wooden sleepers a line of grass-green
taxis was drawn up.
Gwenna hesitated.
Should she——? Taxi all the way home to the Ladies' Residential Club in
Hampstead where she lived?
Four shillings, perhaps.... Extravagance again! "But it's not an everyday sort
of day," Gwenna told herself as she hailed the taxi. "This afternoon, the
flying! This evening, a party with Leslie! Oh, and there was I saying to the
other girls that nothing exciting ever happened to me!"
For even now every day of her life seemed to this enjoying Welsh ingénue,
packed with thrills. Thrills of anticipation, of amusement—sometimes of
disappointment and embarrassment. But what did those matter? Supreme
through all there glowed the conviction of youth that, at any moment,
Something-More-Exciting still might happen....
It might be waiting to happen, waiting now, just round the corner....
All young people know that feeling. And to many it remains the most
poignant pleasure that they are to know—that thought of "the party to-
night," that wonder "what may happen at it!"

CHAPTER II
THE BOSOM-CHUMS

Through leafy side-streets and little squares of Georgian houses, Gwenna's
taxi took her to a newer road that sloped sharply from the Heath at the top
to the church and schools at the bottom.
The taxi stopped at the glass porch of the large, red-brick building with the
many casement-windows, out of which some enterprising committee had
formed the Ladies' Residential Club. It was a place where a mixed assembly
of young women (governesses, art-students, earnest suffrage workers,
secretaries and so on) lived cheaply enough and with a good deal of fun and
noise, of feud and good-fellowship. The head of it was a clergyman's widow
and the sort of lady who is never to be seen otherwise than wearing a neat
delaine blouse of the Edwardian era, a gold curb tie-pin, a hairnet and a
disapproving glance.
Gwenna passed this lady in the tessellated hall; she then almost collided
with the object of the lady's most constant disapproval.
This was a very tall, dark girl with an impish face, a figure boyishly slim.
She looked almost insolently untidy, for she wore a shabby brown hat,
something after the pattern of a Boy Scout's, under which her black hair
was preparing to slide down over the collar of a rain-coat which (as its
owner would have told you) had seen at least two reigns. It was also
covered with loose white hairs, after the fashion of garments whose wearers
are continually with dogs.
Gwenna caught joyously at the long arm in the crumpled sleeve.
"Oh, Leslie!" she cried eagerly.
For this was the bosom-chum.
"Ha, Taffy-child! Got back early for this orgie of ours? Good," exclaimed
Leslie Long in a clear, nonchalant voice. It was very much the same voice,

Gwenna noticed now, as those people's at the flying-ground, who belonged
to that easy, lordly world of which Gwenna knew nothing. Leslie, now, did
seem to know something about it. Yet she was the hardest-up girl in the
whole club. She had been for a short time a Slade student, for a shorter time
still a probationer at some hospital. Now all her days were given up to being
paid companion to an old lady in Highgate who kept seventeen toy-Poms;
but her evenings remained her own.
"Afraid this party isn't going to be much of a spree for you," she told
Gwenna as they went upstairs. "I don't know who's going, but my brother-
in-law's friends seldom are what you could describe as 'men.' Being a
stockbroker and rich, he feels he must go in heavily for Art and Music.
Long hair to take you in, probably. Hope you don't awfully mind coming to
the rescue——"
"Don't mind what it is, as long as I'm going out somewhere, and with you,
Leslie!" the younger girl returned blithely. "Will you do me up the back,
presently?"
"Rather! I'm dressing in your room. There's a better light there. Hurry up!"

Gwenna's long, narrowish front bedroom at the club was soon breathing of
that characteristic atmosphere that surrounds the making of a full-dress
toilette; warm, scented soap-suds, hot curling-irons, powder, Odol, perfume.
The room possessed a large dressing-table, a long wardrobe, and a fairly
spacious chest-of-drawers. But all this did not prevent the heaping of
Gwenna's bed with the garments, with the gilded, high-heeled cothurns and
with the other gauds belonging to her self-invited guest.
That guest, with her hair turbaned in a towel and her lengthy young body
sheathed in tricot, towered above the toilet-table like some modern's
illustration of a genie in the Arabian Nights. The small, more closely-knit
Welsh girl, who wore a kimono of pink cotton crêpe slipping from
shoulders noticeably well modelled for so young a girl, tried to steal a
glimpse at herself from under her friend's arm.

"Get out, Taffy," ordered the other coolly. "You're in my way."
"I like that," remonstrated Gwenna, laughing. "It's my glass, Leslie!"
But she was ready to give up her glass or any of her belongings to this
freakish-tongued, kind-hearted, unconventional Leslie Long. Nearly
everybody at the club, whether they were of the advanced suffrage party or
the orthodox set, were "shocked" at her. Gwenna loved her. Leslie had taken
a very homesick little Welsh exile under her wing from her first night at the
club; Leslie had mothered her with introductions, loans, advice. Leslie had
bestowed upon her that last favour which woman shows to sister-woman
when she tells her "at which shops to buy what." Leslie had, practically,
dressed her. And it was thanks to this that Gwenna had all the freshness and
bloom of the country-girl without any of the country-girl's all-concealing
frumpiness.
Leslie talked an obligato to everything that Leslie did.
"I must dress first. I need it more, because I'm so much plainer than you,"
said she. "But never mind; it won't take me more than half an hour to
transform myself into a credit to my brother-in-law's table. 'I am a
chrysoberyl, and 'tis night.' The Sometimes-Lvely Girl, that's the type I
belong to. I was told that, once, by one of the nicest boys who ever loved
me. Once I get my hair done, I'll show you. In the meantime you get well
out of my way on the bed, Taffy, like a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft.
And then I'll explain to you why Romance is dead—oh, shove that
anywhere; on the floor—and what the matter is with us modern girls. Fact
is, we're losing our Femininity. We're losing the power, dear Miss Williams,
to please Men."
She took up a jar of some white paste, and smeared it in a scented mask
above her features. As she did so she did not for one moment cease to rattle.
"Men—that is, Nice Men," she gave out unctuously, as she worked the
paste with her palms over her Pierrot-like face, "detest all this skin-food—
and massage. It's Pampering the Person. No nice girl would think of it. As
for this powder-to-finish business, it's only another form of make-up. They
always see through it. (Hem!) And they abhor anything that makes a girl—a
nice girl—look in the least——" The mocking voice was lowered at the

word—"Actressy ...! This is what I was told to-day, Taff, dear, by my old
lady I take the Poms and Pekes out for. I suppose she's never heard of any
actress marrying. But she's a mine of information. Always telling me where
I've missed it, and how."
Here the tall girl reached for the silver shoe-horn off Gwenna's dressing-
table, and proceeded to use it as the Greek youth used his strigil, stripping
the warmed unguent from her face and neck. She went on talking while
Gwenna, putting a gloss on her short curls with a brush in each hand,
listened and laughed, and watched her from the bed with greeny-brown
eyes full of an unreserved admiration. So far, Leslie Long's was the society
in which Gwenna Williams most delighted. The younger, less sophisticated
girl poured out upon her chum that affection which is not to be bribed or
begged. It is not even to be found in any but a heart which is yet untouched,
save in its dreams, by Love.
"No Charm about us modern girls. No Mystery," enlarged Miss Long. "No
Glamour. (What is glamour? Is it a herb? State reasons for your answer.)
What Nice Men love to see in a girl is The Being Apart. (Gem of
Information Number Sixty-three.) Sweet, refined, modest; in every look and
tone the gentlewoman. Not a mere slangy imitation of themselves. (Chuck
us that other towel.) Not a creature who makes herself cheap, calls out 'Hi!'
and waves to them from the top of omnibuses. Ah, no, my dear; the girl
who'll laugh and 'lark' with men on equal terms may seem popular with
them in a way, but"—here the voice was again lowered impressively
—"that's not the girl they marry. She's just 'very good fun,' 'a good sort,' a
'pal.' She's treated just as they'd treat another young man. (I'd watch it!)
Which is the girl with whom they fall in love, though? The shrinking,
clinging, feminine creature who is all-wool—I mean all-woman, Taffy.
She"—with enormous expression—"is never left long without her mate!"
"But," objected Gwenna doubtfully, "she—this old lady of yours—wasn't
married ever?"
"Oh, never. Always lets you know that she has 'loved and lost.' Whether that
means 'Killed at the Battle of Waterloo' or merely 'Didn't propose' I couldn't
say.... Poor old dear, she's rather lonely, in spite of the great cloud of Poms,"
said the old lady's paid "daily companion," dropping the mockery for the

moment, "and I believe she's thankful to have even me to talk to and scold
about the horrid, unsexed girl of To-day.... Our lack of ... everything! Our
clothes! Why, she, as a girl, would have sunk into the ground rather than be
seen in—you know the kind of thing. Our general shapelessness!—Well, of
course," turning to meet that adoring glance from the little heroine-
worshipper on the bed, "you never see a young woman nowadays with what
you could call a figure!"
Here Leslie, reaching for the giant powder-puff she had flung on to the foot
of the bed, gave a backward bend and a "straighten" that would not have
disgraced an acrobat.
"No waists! Now if there is a feature that a man admires in a girl it's her
tiny, trimly-corseted waist. My old lady went to a fancy-dress dance once,
in a black-and-yellow plush bodice as 'A Wasp,' and everybody said how
splendid. She never allowed herself to spread into anything more than
Eighteens until she was thirty! But now the girls are allowed to slop about
in these loud, fast-looking, golf-jackets or whatever they call them, made
just like a man's—and the young men simply aren't marrying any more. No
wonder!"
"Oh, Leslie! do you think it's true?" put in Gwenna, a trifle nervously.
"So she told me, my dear. Told Bonnie Leslie, whose bag had been two
proposals that same week," said Miss Long nonchalantly. "One of 'em with
me in the act of wearing that Futurist Harlequin's get-up at the Art Rebel's
Revel. You know; the one I got the idea of from noticing the reflections of
the ground-glass diamond patterns on me through the bath-room window. I
say! she'd have sunk pretty well through into the Antipodes at the sight of
me in that rig, what? Yet here was an infatuated youth swearing that:

'He would like to have the chance
All his life with me to dance,
For he liked his partner best of all!'"

Leslie hummed the old musical-comedy tune. "Son of a Dean, too!"
Gwenna looked wistfully thrilled. "Wasn't he—nice enough?"

"Oh, a sweet boy. Handsome eyes. (I always want to pick them out with a
fork and put them into my own head.) But too simple for me, thanks," said
Leslie lightly. "He was rather cut up when I told him so."
"Didn't you tell your old lady—anything about it, Leslie?"
"Does that kind of woman ever get told the truth, Gwenna? I trow not.
That's why the dear old legends live on and on about what men like and
who they propose to. Also the kind old rules, drawn up by people who are
past taking a hand in the game."
Again she mimicked the old lady's voice: "Nice men have one standard for
the women they marry, and another (a very different standard!) for the—er
—women they flirt with. (So satisfactory, don't you know, for the girl they
marry. No wonder we never find those marriages being a complete
washout!) But supposing that a sort of Leslie-girl came along and insisted
upon Marriage being brought up to the flirtation standard—hein?"
"But your old lady, Leslie? D'you mean you just let her go on thinking that
you've never had any admiration, and that you've got to agree with
everything she says?"
"Rather!" said Miss Long with her enjoying laugh. "I take it in with r-r-rapt
attention, looking my worst, as I always do when I'm behaving my best.
Partly because one's bound to listen respectfully to one's bread-and-butter
speaking. And partly because I am genuinely interested in her remarks,"
said Leslie Long. "It's the interest of a rather smart young soldier—if I may
say so—let loose in a museum of obsolete small-arms!"
Even as she spoke her hands were busy with puff and brush, with hair-pad,
pins, and pencil. Gwenna still regarded her with that full, discriminating
admiration which is never grudged by one attractive girl to another—of an
opposite type.
With the admiration for this was mixed a tiny dread, well known to the
untried girl—"If she is what They like, they won't like me!" ... Also a
wonder, "What in the world would Uncle have said to her?"
And a mental picture rose before Gwenna of the guardian she had left in the
valley. She saw his shock of white, bog-cotton hair, his face of a Jesuit

priest and his voice of a Welsh dissenting minister. She heard that much-
resented voice declaiming slowly. "Yes, Yes. I know the meaning of London
and self-respect and earning one's own living. I know all about these
College girls and these girls going to business and working same as the
men, 'shoulder to shoulder'—Indeed, it's very likely! 'Something better to
do, nowadays, than sit at home frowsting over drawn-thread work until a
husband chooses to appear'—All the same thing! All the same thing! As it
was in the beginning! 'A wider field'—for making eyes! And only two eyes
to make them with. Oh, forget-ful Providence, not to let a modern girl have
four! 'Larger opportunities'—more chance of finding a young man! Yes,
yes. That's it, Gwenna!"
Gwenna, at the mere memory of it, broke out indignantly, "Sometimes I
should like to stab old people!"
"Meaning the celebrated Uncle Hugh? Too wise, isn't he?" laughed Leslie
lightly, with her hands at her hair. "Too full of home-truths about the
business girl's typewriter, and the art-student's palette and the shilling
thermometer of the hospital nurse, eh? He knows that they're the modern
girl's equivalent of the silken rope-ladder—what, what? And the chaise to
Gretna Green! This Way Out. This Way—to Romance. Why not? Allow me,
Madam——"
Here she took up an oval box of eighteenth-century enamel, picked out a
tiny black velvet patch and placed it to the left of a careless red mouth.
"Effective, I think?"
"Yes; and how can you say there's such a thing as 'obsolete' in the middle of
all this?" protested Gwenna. "Look, how the old fashions come up again!"
"Child, curb your dialect. 'Look,'" Leslie mimicked the Welsh girl's rising
accent. "'The old fashshons.' Of course we modify the fashions now to suit
ourselves. My old lady had to follow them just as they were. We," said this
twentieth-century sage, "are just the same as she was in lots of ways. The
all-important thing to us is still what she calls the Mate!"
"M'm,—I don't believe it would be to me," said Gwenna simply. And
thinking of the other possibilities of Life—fresh experiences, work,

friendship, adventure (flying, say!)—she meant what she said. That was the
truth.
Side by side with this, not contradicting but emphasising it, was another
truth.
For, as in a house one may arrange roses in a drawing-room and reck
nothing of the homely business of the kitchen—then presently descend and
forget, in the smell of baking bread, the flowers behind those other doors, so
divided, so uncommunicating, so pigeon-holed are the compartments, lived
in one at a time, of a young maid's mind.
Clearer to Gwenna's inner eyes than the larch green and slate purple of her
familiar valley had been the colours of a secret picture; herself in a pink
summer frock (always a summer frock, regardless of time, season or place)
being proposed to by a blonde youth with eyes as blue as lupins....
Mocking Leslie was urging her, again in the old lady's tone, to "wait until
Mr. Right came along. Jewelled phrase! Such an old world fragrance about
it; moth powder, I suppose. Yet we know what it means, and they didn't. We
know it isn't just anybody in trousers that would be Mr. Right. (My dear! I
use such strange expressions; I quite shock me sometimes)," she
interpolated; adding, "It's a mercy for us in some ways; so good if we do get
the right man. Worse than it used to be if we don't. Swings and roundabouts
again. But it's still true that

Two things greater than all things are,
The first is Love and the second is War."

"I can't imagine such a thing as war, now," mused Gwenna on the bed. "Can
you?"
"Oh, vaguely; yes," said Leslie Long. "You know my people, poor darlings,
were all in the Army. But the poisonously rich man my sister married says
there'll never be any war again, except perhaps among a few dying-out
savage races. He does so grudge every ha'penny to the Navy Estimates; and
he's quite violent about these useless standing armies! You know he's no
sahib. 'His tongue is like a scarlet snake that dances to fantastic tunes.'
However, never mind him. I'm the central figure. Which is to be my frock

of fascination to-night? 'The White Hope?' or 'The Yellow Peril?' You're
wearing your white, Taffy. Righto, then I'll put on this," decided the elder
girl.
She stepped into and drew up about her a moulding sheath of amber-
coloured satin that clung to her limbs as a wave clings to a bather—such
was the fleeting fashion now defunct! There was a corolla of escholtzia-
yellow about the strait hips, a heavy golden girdle dangling.
"There! Now! How's the Bakst view?" demanded Leslie.
She turned slowly, rising on her toes, lifting the glossy black head above a
generous display of creamy shoulder-blades; posing, laughing while
Gwenna caught her breath.
"Les-lie!... And where did you get it?"
"Cast-off from an opulent cousin. What I should do if I didn't get a few
clothes given me I don't know; I should be sent back by the policeman at
the corner, I suppose. One can't live at fancy dances at the Albert Hall," said
Miss Long philosophically. "Don't I look like a Rilette advertisement on the
end page of Punch? Don't I vary? Would anybody think I was the same
wispy rag-bag you met in the hall? Nay. 'From Slattern to Show-girl,' that's
my gamut. But you, Taff, I've never seen you look really plain. It's partly
your curls. You've got the sort of hair some boys have and all women envy.
Come here, now, and let's arrange you. I've already been attending to your
frock."
The frock which Gwenna was to wear that evening at the dinner-party was
one which she had bought, without advice, out of an Oxford Street shop
window during a summer sale. It was of satin of which the dead-white
gleam was softened by a misty over-dress. So far, so good; but what of the
heavy, expensive-looking garniture—sash, knots, and what-nots of lurid
colour—with which the French artist's conception had been "brightened up"
in this English version?
"Ripped off," explained Leslie Long, firmly, as its owner gazed in horror at
a mutilated gown. "No cerise—it's a 'married' colour—No mural
decorations for you, Taffy, my child. 'Oh, what a power has white
simplicity.' White, pure white, with these little transparent ruffles that kind

Leslie has sewn into the sleeves and round the fichu arrangement for you;
and a sash of very pale sky-blue."
"Shan't I look like a baby?"
"Yes; the sweetest portrait of one, by Sir Joshua Reynolds."
"Oh! And I'd bought a cerise and diamanté hair-ornament."
"Quite imposs. A hair-ornament? One of the housemaids will love it for her
next tango tea in Camden Town. As for you, don't dare to touch your curls
again—no, nor to put anything round your neck! Take away that bauble!"
"Aren't I even to wear my gold Liberty beads?"
"No! you aren't. Partly because I am, in my hair. Besides, what d'you want
them for, with a throat like that? Necklaces are such a mistake," decreed
Leslie. "If a girl's got a nice neck, it hides the line; if she hasn't, it shows the
defect up!"
"Well," protested Gwenna doubtfully, "but mightn't you say that of anything
to wear?"
"Precisely. Still, you can't live up to every counsel of perfection. Not in this
climate!"
"You might let me have my thin silver chain, whatever, and my little heart
that my Auntie Margie gave me—in fact, I'm going to. It's a mascot," said
Gwenna, as she hung the little mother-o'-pearl pendant obstinately about her
neck. "There!"
"Very well. Spoil the look of that lovely little dimply hollow you've got just
at the base there if you must. A man," said Gwenna's chum with a quick,
critical glance, "a man would find that very easy to kiss."
"Easy!" said Gwenna, with a quicker blush of anger. "He wouldn't then,
indeed!"
"Oh, my dear, I didn't mean that," explained Leslie as she caught up her
gloves and wrap and prepared to lead the way out of the room and
downstairs to the hall. They would walk as far as the Tube, then book to

South Kensington. "All I meant was, that a man would—- that is, might—er
—possibly get the better—ah—of his—say, his natural repugnance to trying
——"
A little wistfully, Gwenna volunteered: "One never has."
"I know, Taffy. Not yet," said Leslie Long. "But one will. 'Cheer up, girls,
he is getting on his boots!' Ready? Come along."

CHAPTER III
THE EYES OF ICARUS

Gwenna, who was always bubbling over with young curiosity about the
fresh people whom she was to meet at a party, had never taken overmuch
interest in the places where the party might be held.
She had not yet reached the age when, for information about new
acquaintances, one glances first at their background.
To her the well-appointed though slightly "Art"-y Smith establishment
where her friend was taking her to dine was merely "a married house." She
took for granted the arrangements thereof. She lumped them all—from the
slim, deferential parlour-maid who ushered them through a thickly-carpeted
corridor with framed French etchings into a spacious bedroom where the
girls removed their wraps, down to the ivory, bemonogrammed pin-tray and
powder-box in front of the big mirror—she lumped these all together as
"things you have when you're married."
It never struck her—it never strikes eight out of ten young girls—that
Marriage does not necessarily bring these "things" with their subtle
assurance of ease, security, and dignity in its train. She never thought about
it. Marriage indeed seemed to her a sort of dullish postscript to what she
imagined must be a thrilling letter.
Why must nearly all married people become so stodgy? Gwenna simply
couldn't imagine herself getting stodgy—or fat, like this married sister of
Leslie Long's, who was receiving her guests in the large upstairs drawing-
room into which the two girls were now shown.
This room, golden and creamy, seemed softly aglow. There were standard
lamps with huge amber crinolines, bead-fringed; and flowers—yellow roses
and white lilies—seemed everywhere.

Leslie Long drew one of the lilies out of a Venetian vase and held it out,
like an usher's rod, towards Gwenna as she followed her into the bright,
bewildering room, full of people. She announced, "Maudie, here's the stop-
gap. Taffy Williams, your hostess."
Her hostess was a version of Leslie grown incredibly matronly. Her
auricula-coloured velvet tea-gown looked as if it had been clutched about
her at the last moment. (Which in point of fact it had. Mrs. Smith was quite
an old-fashioned mother.) Yet from her eyes smiled the indestructible Girl
that is embedded in so many a respectable matron, and she looked down
very kindly at Gwenna, the cherub-headed, in her white frock.
Mr. Smith, who had a large smooth face and a bald head, gave Gwenna a
less cordial glance. Had the truth been known, he was sulking over the non-
appearance of the intelligent young woman (from the Poets' Club) whose
place was taken by this vacuous-looking flapper (his summing-up of Miss
Gwenna Williams). For Gwenna this bald and wedded patriarch of forty-
five scarcely existed. She glanced, nervous and fluttered and interested,
towards the group of other guests gathered about the nearer of the two
flower-filled fireplaces; a pretty woman in rose-colour and two men of
thirty or thereabouts, one of whom (rather stout, with an eye-glass, a black
stock-tie, and a lock of brown hair brought down beside his ear like a tiny
side-whisker) made straight for Leslie Long.
"Now don't attempt to pretend we haven't met," Gwenna heard him say in a
voice of flirtatious yearning. "Last time you cut my dance——"
Here the maid announced, from the door, some name.... Gwenna, standing
shyly, as if on the brink of the party, heard the hostess saying: "We hardly
hoped you'd come ... we know you people always are besieged by
invitations——"
"Dear me! All these people seem dreat-fully grand," thought the Welsh girl
hastily to herself. "I wonder if it wouldn't have been better, now, if Leslie
had left that cerise velvet trimming as it was on my dress?"
Instinctively she glanced about for the nearest mirror. There was a big oval
gilt-framed one over the yellow brocaded Empire couch near which
Gwenna stood. Her rather bewildered brown eyes strayed from the stranger

faces about her to the reflection of the face and figure that she best knew. In
the oval of gilded leaves she beheld herself framed. She looked small and
very young with her cherub's curls and her soft babyish white gown and that
heaven-coloured sash. But she looked pretty. She hoped she did....
Then suddenly in that mirror she caught sight of another face, a face she
saw for the first time.

She beheld, looking over her white-mirrored shoulder, the reflection of a
young man. Clear-featured, sunburnt but blonde, he carried his fair head
tilted a little backward, and his eyes—strange eyes!—were looking straight
into hers. They were clear and blue and space-daring eyes, with something
about them that Gwenna, not recognising, would have summed up vaguely
as "like a sailor's." ... They were eyes that seemed to have borrowed light
and colour from long scanning of far horizons. And now all that keenness of
theirs was turned, like a searchlight, to gaze into the wondering, receptive
glance of a girl....
Who was this?
Before Gwenna turned to face this stranger who had followed their hostess
up to her, his gaze seemed to hold hers, as a hand might have held her own,
for longer than a minute....

Afterwards she told herself that it seemed, not a minute, but an age before
that first look was loosed, before she had turned round to her hostess's, "I
want to introduce Mr.——"
(Something or other. She did not catch the name.)
"He's nice!" was the young girl's pristine and uncoloured first impression.
Then she thought, "Oh, if it's this one who's going to take me in to dinner, I
am glad!"
It was he who was to take her in.

For Mr. Smith took the pretty lady whose name, as far as Gwenna was
concerned, remained "Mrs. Rose-colour." Her husband, a neutral-tinted
being, went in with Mrs. Smith. The man with the side-whisker (who, if
he'd been thinner, certainly might have looked rather like the portrait of
Chopin) laughed and chattered to Leslie as they went downstairs together.
Gwenna, falling to the lot of the blue-eyed young man as a dinner-partner,
altered her mind about her "gladness" almost before she came to her third
spoonful of clear soup.
For it seemed as if this young man whose name she hadn't caught were not
really "nice" after all! That is, of course, he wasn't "not nice." But he
seemed stupid! Nothing in him! Nothing to say! Or else very absent-
minded, which is just as bad as far as the other people at a party are
concerned. Or worse, because it's rude.
Gwenna, taking in every detail of the pretty round table and the lights under
the enormous parasol of a pink shade, approving the banked flowers, the
silver, the glass, those delicious-looking chocolates in the filigree dishes,
the tiny "Steinlen-kitten" menu-holders, Gwenna, dazed yet stimulated by
the soft glitter in her eyes, the subdued buzz of talk in her ears, stole a
glance at Leslie (who was looking her best and probably behaving her
worst) and felt that every prospect was pleasing—except that of spending
all this time beside that silent, stodgy young man.
"Perhaps he thinks it's me that's too silly to talk to. I knew Leslie'd made me
look too young with this sash! Yes! indeed I look like some advertisement
for Baby's Outfitting Department," thought Gwenna, vexed. "Or is it
because he's the kind of young man that just sits and eats and never really
sees or thinks about anything at all?"
Now, had she known it at the time, the thoughts of the blonde and blue-eyed
youth beside her were, with certain modifications, something on these lines.
"Dash that stud! Dash the thing. This pin's going into the back of my neck
directly. I know it is. That beastly stud must have gone through a crack in
the boards.... I shall buy a bushel of 'em to-morrow. Why a man's such a
fool as to depend upon one stud.... I know this pin's going into the back of
my neck when I'm not thinking about it. I shall squawk blue murder and
terrify 'em into fits.... What have we here?" (with a glance from those

waking eyes at the menu). "Good. Smiths always do themselves thundering
well.... Now, who are all these frocks? The Pink 'Un. That's a Mrs....
Damsel in the bright yellow lampshade affair about six foot high, that old
Hugo's giving the glad eye to. Old Hugo weighs about a stone and a half too
much. Does himself a lot too well. Revolting sight. I wonder if I can work
the blood-is-thicker-than-water touch on him for a fiver afterwards?... This
little girl I've got to talk to, this little thing with the neck and the curly hair.
Pretty. Very pretty. Knocks the shine out of the others. I know if I turn my
head to speak to her, though, that dashed pin will cut adrift and run into the
back of my neck. Dash that stud. Here goes, though——"
And, stiffly and cautiously moving his head in a piece with his shoulders,
he turned, remarking at last to Gwenna in a voice that, though deep-toned
and boyish, was almost womanishly gentle, "You don't live in town, I
suppose?"
The girl from that remote Welsh valley straightened her back a little. "Yes, I
do live in town, indeed!" she returned a trifle defensively. "What made you
think I lived in the country?"
"Came up yesterday, I s'pose," the young man told himself as the soup-
plates were whisked away.
Gwenna suspected a twinkle in those unusual blue eyes as he said next,
"Haven't you lived in Wales, though?"
"Well, yes, I have," admitted Gwenna Williams in her soft, quaint accent,
"but how did you know?"
"Oh, I guessed. I've stayed there myself, fishing, one time and another," her
neighbour told her. "Used to go down to a farmhouse there, sort of place
that's all slate slabs, and china dogs, and light-cakes for tea; ages ago, with
my cousin. That cousin," and he gave a little jerk of his fair head towards
the black-stocked, Trelawney-whiskered young man who was engrossed
with Miss Long. "We used to—Ah! Dash!" he broke off suddenly and
violently. "It's gone down my back now."
Gwenna, startled, gazed upon this stranger who was so good to look at and
so extremely odd to listen to. Gone down his back? She simply could not
help asking, "What has?"

"That pin," he answered ruefully.
Then he tilted back his fair head and smiled, with deep dimples creasing his
sunburnt cheeks and a flash of even white showing between his care-free,
strongly-modelled lips. And hereupon Gwenna realised that after all she'd
been right. He was "nice." He began to laugh outright, adding, "You must
think me an absolute lunatic: I'd better tell you what it's all about——"
He took a mouthful of sole and told her, "Fact is, I lost my collar-stud when
I was dressing, the stud for the back of my collar; and I had to fasten my
collar down at the last minute with a pin. It's been getting on my nerves.
Has, really. I've been waiting for it to run into the back of my neck——"
"So that was why he seemed so absent-minded!" thought Gwenna, feeling
quite disproportionately glad and amused over this trifle. She said, "I
thought you turned as if you'd got a stiff neck! I thought you'd been sitting
in a draught."
He made another puzzling remark.
"Draught, by Jove!" he laughed. "It's always fairly draughty where I have to
sit!"
He went on again to mourn over his collar. "Worse than before, now," he
said. "It's going to hitch up to the back of my head, and I shall have to keep
wiggling my shoulder-blades about as if I'd got St. Vitus's dance!"
Gwenna felt she would have liked to have taken a tiny safety-pin that there
was hidden away under her sky-blue sash, and to have given it to him to
fasten that collar securely and without danger of pricking. Leslie, she knew,
would have done that. She, Gwenna, would have been too shy, with a
perfect stranger—only, now that he'd broken the ice with that collar-stud, so
to speak, she couldn't feel as if this keen-eyed, deep-voiced young man
were any longer quite a stranger. In her own dialect, he seemed, now, "so
homely, like——"
And over the next course he was talking to her about home, about the places
where he'd fished in Wales.

"There was one topping little trout-stream," he told her in that deep and
gentle voice. "Bubbly as soda-water, green and clear as bottle-glass.
Awfully jolly pools under the shade of the branches. You look right down
and it's all speckly at the bottom, with brown-and-grey stones and slates and
things, under the green water. It's like——"
He was looking straight at her, and suddenly he stopped. He had caught her
eyes, full; as he had caught them before dinner in that mirror. Now that he
was so close to them he saw that they were clear and browny-green, with
speckles of slate-colour. They were not unlike those pools themselves, by
Jove.... Almost as if he had been fishing for something out of those depths
he still looked down, hard into them.... He forgot that he had stopped
talking. And then under his own eyes he saw the little thing begin to colour
up; blushing from that sturdy white throat of hers to the brow where those
thick brown cherub's-curls began to grow. He looked away, hastily. Hastily
he said, "It—er—it had a pretty name, that stream. Quite a pronounceable
Welsh name, for once: The Dulas."
"Oh, dear me! Do you know the Dulas?" cried Gwenna Williams in delight,
forgetting that she had just been feeling acutely conscious and shy under the
fixed stare of a pair of searching blue eyes. "Why! It's not very far from
there that's my home!"
They went on talking—about places. Unconsciously they were leading the
whole table after them; the jerkiness went out of sentences; the pitch of the
talk rose. It was all a buzz to Gwenna; but when, at the joint, her neighbour
turned at last to answer a comment of the rose-coloured lady on his other
hand, she amused herself by seeking to find out what all the others were
talking about.

"I like some of his things very much. Now, his water-colours at the——"
This was Mr. Smith, holding forth about pictures.... There appeared to be a
good deal of it. Ending up with, "And I know for a fact that he only got two
hundred guineas for that; two hundred! Incredible!"
It certainly did seem to Gwenna an incredible amount of money for a
picture, a thing you just hang on a wall and forgot all about. Two hundred

guineas! What couldn't she, Gwenna, do with that! Travel all over the place
for a year! Go flying every week, at Hendon!
"What an experience! What a change it's made in the whole of English
thought!" the pretty, rose-coloured lady was saying earnestly. "We can
never be the same again now. It's set us, as a nation, such an entirely new
and higher standard——"
This was very solemn, Gwenna thought. What was it about?
"I can't imagine, now, how we can have existed for so long without that
point of view," went on Mrs. Rose-colour. "As I say, the first time I ever
saw the Russian Ballet——"
The Russian Ballet—Ah! Gwenna had been with Leslie to see that; she had
thought herself in a fairyland of dazzling colour, and of movement as
wonderful as that of the flying biplanes. It had been a magic world of
enchanted creatures that seemed half-bird, half-flower, who whirled and
leaped, light as blown flame, to strangest music.... Gwenna had been dazed
with delight; but she could not have talked about it as these people talked.
"Mr. Rose-colour," Mr. Smith, and Leslie's whiskered young man were all
joining in together now.
"You won't deny that a trace of the Morbid——"
"But that hint of savagery is really the attraction," Mr. Smith explained
rather pompously. "We over-civilised peoples, who know no savagery in
modern life, who have done with that aspect of evolution, I suppose we
welcome something so——"
"Elemental——"
"Primitive——"
"Brutal?" suggested Mrs. Rose-colour, appreciatively.
"And that infinitude of gesture——" murmured the whiskered man, eating
asparagus.
"Yes, but Isadora——"

"Ah, but Karsavina!"
"You must admit that Nijinski is ultra-romantic——"
"Define Romance!"
"Geltzer——"
"Scheherazade——"
Utterly bewildered by the strange words of the language spoken by half
London in early summer, Nineteen-fourteen, the young girl from the wilds
sought a glimpse of her friend's black-swathed head and vivid, impish face
above the banked flowers of the table-centre. Did Leslie know all these
words? Was she talking? She was laughing flippantly enough; speaking as
nonchalantly.
"Yes, I'm going to the next Chelsea Arts Ball in that all-mauve rig he wears
in the 'Spectre de la Rose.' I am. Watch the effect. 'Oh, Hades, the Ladies!
They'll leave their wooden huts!' You needn't laugh, Mr. Swayne"—this to
the Chopin young man. "Anybody would be taken in. I can look quite as
much of a man as Nijinski does. In fact, far——"
Here suddenly Gwenna's neighbour leaned forward over the table towards
his hostess and broke in, his deep, gentle voice carrying above the buzz.
"Mrs. Smith! I say! I beg your pardon," he exclaimed quickly, "but isn't that
a baby crying like anything somewhere?"
This remark of the young man's, and that which followed it, surprised and
puzzled Gwenna even more than his curious remark about draughts. Who
was he? What sort of a young man was this who always sat in draughts and
who could catch the sound of a baby's cry when even its own mother hadn't
heard it through the thick portière, the doors, the walls and that high-
pitched buzz of conversation round about the table?
For Mrs. Smith had fled from the table with a murmured word of apology,
and had presently returned just as the ornate fruit-and-jelly mould was
being handed round, and Gwenna heard her saying to Mrs. Rose-colour,
"Yes, it was. He's off again now. He simply won't go down for Nurse—I
always have to rush——"

Gwenna turned to her companion, whose collar was now well up over the
back of his neck. Wondering, she said to him, "Fancy your hearing that,
through all this other noise!"
"Ah, one gets pretty quick at listening to, and placing, noises," he told her,
helping himself to the jelly and shrugging his shoulders and that collar at
the same time. "It's being accustomed to notice any squeak that oughtn't to
be there, you know, in the engines. One gets to hear the tiniest sound,
through anything."
Gwenna, more puzzled than before, turned from that delectable pudding on
her plate, to this strangely interesting young man beside her. She said: "Are
you an engineer?"
"I used to be," he said. "A mechanic, you know, in the shops, before I got to
be a pilot."
"A pilot?" She wondered if he thought it rude of her, if it bothered him to be
asked questions about himself like this, by just a girl? And still she couldn't
help asking yet another question.
She said, "Are you a sailor, then?"
"Me?" he said, as if surprised. "Oh, no——"
And then, quite simply and as if it were nothing, he made what was to
Gwenna an epic announcement.
"I'm an airman," he said.
She gasped.
He went on. "Belong to a firm that sends me flying. Taking up passengers at
Hendon, that sort of thing."
"An airman? Are you?" was all that Gwenna could for the moment reply.
"Oh ... Oh!"
Perhaps her eyes, widening upon the face above her, were more eloquent of
what she felt.

That it was to her a miracle to find herself actually sitting next to him!
Actually speaking to one of these scarcely credible beings whom she had
watched this afternoon! An airman.... There was something about the very
word that seemed mysterious, uncanny. Was it because of its comparative
newness in the speech of man? Perhaps, ages ago, primitive maids found
something as arresting in the term "A seaman"? But this was an airman! It
was his part to ride the Winged Victory, the aeroplane that dared those
sapphire heights above the flying-ground. Oh! And she had been chattering
to him about the slate-margined brooks and the ferny glens of her low-lying
valley, just as if he'd been what this ingenuous maid called to herself "Any
young man" who had spent holidays fishing in Wales? She hadn't known.
That was why he had those queer, keen eyes: blue and reckless, yet
measuring.
Not a sailor's, not a soldier's ... but the eyes of Icarus!...
"I—I never heard your name," said Gwenna, a little breathless, timid.
"Which is it, please?"
For reply he dabbed a big, boyish finger down on the slender name-card
among the crumbs of his bread. "Here you are," he said, "Dampier; Paul
Dampier."

So whirling and bewildered was Gwenna's mind by this time that she
scarcely wondered over the added surprise. This, she just realised, was the
name she had first heard bellowed aloud through the megaphone from the
judges' stand. She hardly remembered then that a photograph of this same
aviator was tossed in among her wash-leather gloves, velvet hair-bands, and
her handkerchief-sachet in the top right-hand drawer of her dressing-table at
the Club. Certainly she did not remember at this minute what she had said,
laughing, over that portrait, to her two friends on the flying-ground.
There, she had admired the machine; that un-Antæus-like thing that was not
itself until it had shaken off the fetters of Earth from its skids and wheels.
Here, she marvelled over the man; for he was part of it. He was its skill and
its will. He was the planner of those curves and bankings and soarings,
those vol-planés that had left, as it were, their lovely lines visible in the air.

His Icarian mind had determined—his large but supple body had executed
them.
A girl could understand that, without understanding how it was all done.
Those big, boyish hands of his, of course, would grasp certain mechanisms;
his feet, too, would be busy; his knees—every inch of his lithe length and
breadth—every muscle of him; yes! even to the tiny muscles that moved his
wonderful eyes.
"I saw you, then," she told him, in a dazed little voice. "I was at Hendon
this afternoon! It was the first time in my life...."
"Really?" he said. "What did you think of it all?"
"Oh, splendid!" she said, ardently, though vaguely.
How she longed to be able to talk quickly and easily to anybody, as Leslie
could! How stupid he—the Airman—must think her! A little shakily she
forced herself to go on: "I did think it so wonderful, but I can't explain, like.
Ever. I never can. But——"
Perhaps, again, she was explaining better than she knew, with that small,
eager face raised to his.
"Oh!" she begged. "Do tell me about it!"
He laughed. "Tell you what? Isn't much to tell."
"Oh, yes, there must be! You tell me," she urged softly, unconscious that her
very tone was pure and concentrated flattery. "Do!"
And with another short, deprecating laugh, another shrug to his collar, the
boy began to "tell" her things, though the girl did not pretend to understand.
She listened to that voice, strong and deep, but womanishly gentle. She
forgot that by rights she ought to pay some attention to her neighbour, the
imitation Chopin. She listened to this other.
Words like "controls," "pockets," "yawing," went in at one of the ears under
her brown curls and out at the other, leaving nothing but a quivering
atmosphere of "the wonderfulness" of it all. Presently she saw those hands

of his, big, sensitive, clever, arranging forks and spoons upon the sheeny
tablecloth before her.
"Imagine that's your machine," he said. "Now you see there are three
possible movements. This"—he tilted a dessert-knife from side to side
—"and this"—he dipped it—"and this, which is yawing—you understand?"
"No!" she confessed, with the quickest little gesture. "I couldn't understand
those sort of things. I shouldn't want to. What I really want to know is—
well, about it, like!"
"About what?"
"About flying!"
He laughed outright again. "But, that is flying!"
She shook her head. "No, not what I mean. That's all—machinery!" She
pronounced the word "machinery" with something almost like disdain. He
looked at her as if puzzled.
"Sorry you aren't interested in machinery," he said quite reprovingly,
"because, you know, that's just what I am interested in. I'm up to my eyes in
it just now, pretty well every minute that I can spare. In fact I've got a
machine—only the drawings for it, of course, but——"
"Do you mean you've invented one?"
"Oh, I don't know about 'invent.' Call it an improvement. It should be about
as different from the lumbering concern you saw me go up in to-day as
that's different from—say from one of those old Cambrian Railway steam
engines," he declared exultantly. "It's——"
Here, he plunged into another vortex of mysterious jargon about "automatic
stability," about "skin friction," and a hundred other matters that left the
listening girl as giddy as a flight itself might have done.
What she did understand from all this was that here, after all, in the
Machine, must be the secret of all the magic. This was what interested the
Man. An inventor, too, he talked as if he loved to talk of it—even to her; his
steel-blue eyes holding her own. Perhaps he didn't even see her, she

thought; perhaps he scarcely remembered there was a girl there, leaving
strawberries and cream untasted on an apple-green plate, listening with all
her ears, with all of herself—as he, with all of himself, guided a machine.
Ah, he talked of a just-invented machine as in the same tone Gwenna had
heard young mothers talk of their new-born babies.
This was what he lived for!
"Yes," concluded the enthusiast with a long sigh, "if I could get that
completed, and upon the market——"
"Well?" Gwenna took up softly; ignorant, but following his every change of
tone. "Why can't you?"
"Why not? For the usual reason that people who are keen to get things done
can't do 'em," the boy said ruefully, watching that responsive shadow cloud
her face as he told her. "It's a question of the dashed money."
"Oh!" said the girl more softly still. "I see."
So he, too, even he knew what it was to find that fettering want of guineas
clog a soaring impulse? What a shame, she thought....
He thought (as many another young man with a Subject has thought of
some rapt and girlish listener!) that the little thing was jolly intelligent, for a
girl, more so than you were supposed to expect of such a pretty face——
Pretty? Come to look at her she was quite lovely. Made that baggage in the
yellow dress and the Mrs. in the Pink look like a couple of half-artificial
florists' blooms by the side of a lily-of-the-valley freshly-plucked from
some country garden, sappy and sturdy, and sweet. And her skin was like
the bit of mother-of-pearl she was wearing as a heart-shaped locket.
Quite suddenly he said to her: "Look here! Should you care to go up?"
Gwenna gasped.
The whole room, the bright table and the chattering guests seemed now to
whirl about her in a circle of shiny mist—as that aeroplane propeller had
whirled.... Care to go up? "Care!" Would she? Would she not?
"Oh——" she began.

But this throbbing moment was the moment chosen by her hostess to glance
smilingly at Mrs. Rose-colour and to rise, marshalling the women from the
room.

CHAPTER IV
THE SONG OF ALL THE AGES

"Now isn't life extraordinary?" thought Gwenna Williams, incoherently in
the drawing-room as she sat on the yellow Empire sofa under the mirror,
holding a tiny coffee-cup and answering the small-talk of kindly Mrs.
Smith. "Fancy, before this afternoon I'd never seen any flying! And now on
the very same evening I'm asked to go flying myself! Me! Just like that girl
who was with him in the race! (I wonder is she a great friend of his.) I
wonder when he'll take me? Will he come and settle about it—oh, I do hope
so!—before we all have to go away?"
But there was no chance of "settling" this for some time after the door
opened to a little commotion of bass laughter, a trail of cigar-scent, and the
entrance of the man.
Mrs. Rose-colour, with some coquettish remark that Gwenna didn't catch,
summoned the tall airman to the yellow-brocaded pouffe at her feet. Her
husband crossed over to Gwenna (who suddenly discovered that she hated
him) and began talking Welsh folk-songs. Whereupon Hugo Swayne,
fondling his Chopin curl, asked Leslie, who towered above him near the
piano, if she were going to sing.
"I'm in such a mood," he told her, "to listen to something rawly and entirely
modern!"
"You shall, then," agreed Miss Long, suddenly demure. "D'you know the—
er—Skizzen Macabres, those deliciously perverse little things of
Wedekind's? They've been quite well translated.... Righto, my dear"—in
answer to a nervous glance from her sister, "I'll only sing the primmer
verses. The music is by that wonderful new Hungarian person—er—
Sjambok."
Her tall golden figure reflected itself in the ebony mirror of the piano as
Leslie, with a malicious gleam in the tail of her eye, sat down.

"I shan't sing for him, all the same," she thought. "I shall sing for Taffy and
that Air-boy. I bet I can hit on something that they'll both like.... Yes...."
And she struck the first chords of her accompaniment.
And what was it, this "crudely modern" song that Leslie had chosen for the
sake of the two youngest people present at that party?
There is a quintette of banjo-players and harpists who are sometimes "on" at
the Coliseum in London, but who are more often touring our Colonies from
Capetown to Salter, Sask. And wherever they may go, it seems, they bring
down the house with that same song. For, to the hearts of exiled and
homesick and middle-aged toilers that simple tune means England, Home
and Beauty still. They waltzed to it, long ago in the Nineteenth Century.
They "turned over" for some pretty girl who "practised" it. So, when they
hear it, they encore it still, with a lump in their throats....
It was the last verse of this song that drifted in Leslie's deep contralto,
across this more enlightened drawing-room audience of Nineteen-fourteen.
Softly the crooning, simply phrased melody stole out:

"Even to-day we hear Love's song of yore!
Low in our hearts it rings for evermore.
Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,
Still we can hear it at the close of day!"

—"and it's at least as pleasant as any of their beastly 'artistic' music,"
thought Leslie, rebelliously, as she sang:

"Still to the end," (chord) "while Life's dim shadows fall,
Love will be found the sweetest song of all!"

She ended in a ripple of arpeggios, triumphantly, for she had glanced at the
two youngest people in the room. Little Gwenna's eyes were full of the
facile tears of her race; and the Dampier boy's face was grave with
enjoyment. Alas, for the musical taste of these two! They had liked the old
song....

The enlightened others were puzzled for a moment. What was that thing
——?
Mr. Swayne explained languidly. "Priceless old ditty entitled 'Love's Old
Sweet Song.' A favourite of the dear late Queen's, long before any of US
were thought of. Miss Long has been trying to pull our legs with it!"
"Oh, Leslie, dear, you are so amusing always," said Mrs. Rose-colour,
turning with her little superior smile to the singer. "But won't you sing
something really?"
Leslie's quick black eyes caught a glance of half-conscious, half-inarticulate
sympathy that was passing between the youngest girl in the room and the
man who had taken her in to dinner. It was as if they'd said, together, "I
wish she'd sing again. I wish she'd sing something like that again...."
They were alone in their wish!
For now Mrs. Smith sat down and played something. Something very
long....
And still what Gwenna longed to happen did not happen. In spite of that
glance of sympathy just now, it did not happen.
The Airman, sitting there on that brocaded pouffe, his long legs stretched
out over the soft putty-coloured carpet, did not come up to her to speak
again of that so miraculously proffered flight in his aeroplane. He went on
being talked to by Mrs. Rose-colour.
And when that pretty lady and her husband rose to go, the young girl in her
corner had a very blank and tense moment. For she heard those people offer
to take Mr. Dampier with them and drop him at his rooms. Oh, that would
mean that she, Gwenna, wouldn't have another word with him! He'd go!
And his invitation had been unanswered!
"Care to go up?" he'd said—and Gwenna hadn't even had time to tell him
"Yes!"
Ah, it would have been too good to be true!——
Very likely he'd forgotten what he'd said at, dinner....

He hadn't meant it....
He'd thought she'd meant "No."
He was going now——
But no. To her unspeakable relief she heard his deep "Thanks awfully, but
I'm going on with Hugo presently. Taking him to meet some people at the
Aero Club."

Now, just imagine that! thought the country girl. Here it was already half-
past ten at night; but he was going on to meet some more people
somewhere else. This wonderful party, which had marked an epoch in her
life, was nothing to him; it was just the beginning of the evening. And, after
days in the skies, all his evenings were like this! Hadn't Mrs. Smith said
when he came in, "We know you are besieged with invitations?" Oh, the
inconceivably interesting life that was his! Why, why was Gwenna nothing
but a girl, a creature who, even nowadays, had to stay within the
circumscribed limits where she was put, who could not see or be or do
anything, really! Might as well be born a tortoise....
Here the voice of Mr. Hugo Swayne (to which she'd paid scant attention so
far) said something about taking Miss Long and her friend up to Hampstead
first, and that Paul could come along.
Gwenna, enraptured, discovered that this meant in his, Mr. Swayne's, car.
The four of them were to motor up to her and Leslie's Club together. All
that lovely long drive?
But though "lovely," that journey back to Hampstead, speeding through the
broad, uncrowded streets that the lights showed smooth and polished as a
ballroom floor, with the giant shadows of plane-tree leaves a-dance upon
the pavement—that journey was unbelievably, relentlessly short.
Mr. Swayne seemed to tear along! He was driving, with Leslie, gay and
talkative and teasing, beside him in front. The younger girl sat behind with
his cousin. The Airman was hatless; and he wore a light loose overcoat of
which the big sleeve brushed the black satin of Gwenna's wrap.

"Warm enough?" he asked, gently, and (as carefully as if she'd been some
old invalid, she thought) he tucked a rug about her. Eagerly Gwenna longed
for him to return to that absorbing question he'd put to her at the dinner-
table. But there seemed scarcely time to say a single word before, with a
jarring of brakes, the car drew up in the slanting road before the big square
block of the Club. The arc-lights blazed into the depths of the tall chestnut-
trees beside the street, while the four young people stood for a moment
clustered together on the asphalt walk before the glass-porch.
"All over now," thought Gwenna with quite a ridiculously sharp little pang
as good-nights and good-byes were said.
Oh! Wasn't he going to say anything else? About the flying? She couldn't!
He was holding her hand (for good-night) while Mr. Swayne still laughed
with Leslie.
"Look here," the Airman said abruptly. "About that flying——"
"Yes! Oh, yes!" Gwenna returned in a breathless little flurry. There mustn't
be any mistake about what she wished. She looked up into his holding eyes
once more, and said quiveringly, "I would so love it!"
"You would. Right," he said, and seemed to have forgotten that they had
shaken hands, and that he had not yet loosed her fingers from his large and
hearty grip. He shook hands again. "Then I'll come round And fix it up
——"
And the next instant, it seemed, he was whirled away from her again, this
Stranger who had dropped into the middle of her life as it were from the
skies which were his hunting-ground. There was the noise of a retreating
car droning down the hill (not unlike the receding drone of a biplane in full
flight), then the grating of a key in the lock of the Club door....
Gwenna sighed. Then she went upstairs, humming softly, without knowing
what the tune was, Leslie's song:

"Once in the dear, dead days beyond recall——"

Leslie followed her into her room where she turned up the gas.

"I'll undo you, Taffy, shall I?... Enjoyed yourself rather, after all, didn't
you?" said the elder girl, adding quickly, "What's the matter?"
For Gwenna before the glass stood with a dismayed look upon her face. Her
hand was up to her round white throat, touching the dimpled hollow where
there had rested—where there rested no longer—that mother-of-pearl
pendant.
"It's gone," she exclaimed ruefully.
"What has, child? What have you dropped?"
Gwenna, still with her hand at her throat, explained, "I've lost my heart".

CHAPTER V
THE WORKADAY WORLD

The day after the dinner-party was spent by Gwenna metaphorically, at
least, in the clouds.
By her vivid day-dreams she was carried off, as Ganymede was carried by
the eagle, sky-high; she felt the rush of keen air on her face; she saw the
khaki-green flying-ground beneath her with the clustered onlookers, as
small as ants. And—thus she imagined it—she heard that megaphone
announcement:
"Ladies and gentul MEN! Mis ter Paul
Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi
plane ac companied by Miss Williams!"
with the sound of it dying down, faintly, below her.

Then in her musing mind she went over and over what had already
happened. Those throbbing moments when her new friend had said, "Look
here! Would you care to come up?" and, "Then I'll come up here and fix it
——"
Would he? Oh, when would he? It was of course hardly to be thought that
this flying-man ("besieged with invitations" as he was) would come to
ratify his offer on Sunday, the very day after he'd made it. Too much to
expect....
Therefore that Sunday Gwenna Williams refused to go out, even on the
Heath for the shortest loitering stroll. Leslie Long, with an indescribable
look that the younger girl did not catch, went out without her. Gwenna
stayed on the green bench in the small, leafy garden at the back of the Club,
reading and listening, listening for the sound of the bell at the front door, or
for the summons to the telephone.

None came, of course.

Also, of course, no note to make an appointment to go flying appeared at
that long, crowded breakfast-table of the Club on Monday morning for Miss
Gwenna Williams.
That, too, she could hardly have expected.
Quite possibly he'd forgotten that the appointment had ever been made. A
young man of that sort had got so many things to think about. So many
people to make appointments with. So many other girls to take up.
"I wonder if he's promised to go up again soon with that girl called Muriel,"
she thought. "Sure to know millions of girls——"
And it was in a very chastened mood of reaction that Gwenna Williams,
typist—now dressed in the business-girl's uniform of serge costume, light
blouse, and small hat—left her Club that morning. She walked down the
sunny morning road to the stopping-place of the motor-omnibuses and got
on to a big scarlet "24" bus, bound for Charing Cross and her day's work.
The place where she worked was a huge new building in process of
construction on the south side of the Embankment near Westminster Bridge.
Above the slowly sliding tides of the river, with its barges and boats, there
towered several courses of granite blocks, clean as a freshly-split kernel. In
contrast to them were the half demolished, dingy shells of houses on either
side, where the varied squares of wallpaper and the rusting, floorless
fireplaces showed where one room had ended and the next begun. The
scaffolding rose above the new pile like a mighty web. Above this again the
enormous triangular lattice rose so high that it seemed like a length of
ironwork lace stretched out on two crochet-needles against the blue-grey
and hot vault of the London sky.
As she passed the entrance Gwenna's eyes rose to this lattice.
"It looks almost as high up in the air as one could fly in that biplane," she
thought. "Oh, to be right up! Looking down on everything, with the blue
beneath one instead of only above!"

She crossed the big yard, which was already vocal with the noises of
chipping and hammering, the trampling and the voices of men. Two of them
—the genial young electrician called Grant and the Yorkshire foreman who
was a regular father to his gang, nodded good-morning to the youngest
typist as she passed. She walked quickly past the stacks of new timber and
the gantries and travelling cranes (plenty of machinery here; it ought to
please Mr. Dampier, since he'd said that was what he was interested in!).
One great square of the hewn granite was swinging in mid-air from a crane
as she left the hot sunlight and noise outside and entered the door of the
square, corrugated iron building that held the office where she worked.
To reach it she had to pass through the clerk-of-the-works' offices, with
long drawing-benches with brass handled drawers beneath, full of plans,
and elevations. These details seemed mysteriously, tantalisingly
incomprehensible and yet irritating to Gwenna's feminine mind. She was
imaginative enough to realise that all these details, these "man's-things,"
from the T-squares on the benches to the immense iron safe in the corner,
seemed to put her, Gwenna, "in her place." She was merely another detail in
the big whole of man's work that was going on here. The place made her
feel tiny, unimportant. She went on to the light and airy room, smelling of
new wood and tracing-paper, the extension of the clerk-of-the-works' office
that she shared with her two colleagues.
In the centre of this room there was a large square table with a telephone, a
telephone-book, various other books of reference and a shallow wicker
basket for letters. Besides this there were the typing tables for each of the
three girl-clerks. Gwenna's and Miss Baker's were side by side. The German
girl sat nearest to the window that gave the view up the river, with Lambeth
Bridge and the Houses of Parliament looming grey and stately against the
smiling June sky, and a distant glimpse of Westminster Abbey. On the frame
of the pane just above her Miss Baker had fastened, with drawing-pins, two
photographs. One was a crude coloured postcard of a red-roofed village
among pine-forests. The other was a portrait of a young man, moustached
and smiling under a spiked German helmet; across this photograph ran the
autograph, "Karl Becker." Thus the blue and guileless eyes of this young
foreigner in our midst could rest upon mementoes of her Fatherland and her
family any time she raised her blonde head from bending over her work.
Both girls looked up this morning as Gwenna, the last arrival, came in.

They scolded her good-naturedly because she'd brought none of those
chocolates she'd promised from the dinner-table. They asked how she'd
enjoyed herself at that party.
It would have been presumably natural to the young Welsh girl to have
broken out into a bubblingly excited—"And, girls! Who d'you suppose I sat
next. A real live airman! And, my dears!" (with a rapturous gasp), "who
should it be but the one I bought the photo of on Saturday! You know; the
one you called my young man—Mr. Dampier—Paul Dampier—Yes, but
wait; that isn't all. Just fancy! He talked to me yards and yards about his
new aeroplane, and I say, what do you think! This was the best. He's asked
me to come up one day—yes, indeed! He's going to take me flying—with
him!"
But, as it was, Gwenna said not one word of all this. She could not have
explained why, even to herself. Only she replied to Miss Butcher's, "What
was the party like?" with a flavourless, "Oh, it was all right, thanks."
That sounded so English, she thought!

She had a dull day at the office. Dry-as-dust letters and specifications,
builders' quantities, and so on, to type out. Tiresome calls on the telephone
that had to be put through to the other office....
Never before had she seemed to mind the monotony of those clicking keys
and that "I'll inquire. Hold the line, please." Never before had she found
herself irritated by the constant procession of men who were in and out all
day; including Mr. Grant, who sometimes seemed to make errands to talk to
Miss Butcher, but who never stayed for more than a moment, concluding
invariably with the cheerful remark, "Well! Duty calls, I must away." Men
seemed actually to enjoy "duty," Gwenna thought. At least the men here did.
All of them, from Mr. Henderson in the other office to the brown-faced men
in the yard with their shirt-sleeves rolled up above tattooed arms, seemed to
be "keen" on the building, on the job in hand. They seemed glad to be
together. Gwenna wondered how they could....
To-day she was all out of tune. She was quite cross when, for the second
time, Albert, the seventeen-year old Cockney office-boy, bustled in,

stamping a little louder than was strictly necessary on the echoing boards.
He rubbed his hands together importantly, demanding in a voice that began
in a bass roar and ended in a treble squeak, "Those specifications, miss.
Quick, too, or you'll hear about it!"
"Goodness me, what an ugly way you London boys do have of talking!"
retorted the Welsh girl pettishly. "Sut-ch an accent!"
The rebuked Albert only snorted with laughter as he took her sheaf of
papers. Then, looking back over his shoulder at the pretty typist perched on
the edge of the centre table to refill her fountain pen, he added in his
breaking treble, "Don't you sit on that tyble, Miss! Sittin' on the tyble's
s'posed to mean you want to be kissed, and it looks so bad! Don't it, Miss
Butcher? There's other ways of gittin' orf than that, isn't there?"
"Outside!" snapped Miss Butcher, blushing, as the boy stumped away.
Gwenna sighed angrily and longed for lunch-time, so that she could get out.

At one o'clock, an hour after the buzzer had sounded for the mid-day meal
of the yard-men, the other two girls in the office would not even come out
for a breath of air. They had brought fruit and cake. They made Bovril (with
a kettle of hot water begged from the fatherly foreman) and lunched where
they'd sat all the morning. Miss Butcher, munching, was deep in a library-
book lent to her by the young electrician. Miss Baker counted stitches in a
new pattern for a crochet-work Kante, or length of fine thread insertion. It
was not unlike the pattern of the iron trellis above the scaffolding, that
tapered black against the sky; man's fancy-work.
What hideously tame things women had to fill their lives with, Gwenna
thought as she sat in the upper window of her tea-shop at the corner of the
Embankment. She watched the luncheon-time crowd walking over
Westminster Bridge. So many of these people were business-girls just like
herself and the Butcher and the Baker! Would anything more amusing ever
happen to them, or to her?
But that German girl, Gwenna thought, would stare to hear her work called
"hideous" or "tame." It was her greatest interest. Already, she'd told

Gwenna, her bottom drawer at her boarding-house was crammed with long,
rolled-up crochet-work strips of white or creamy lace. There were also her
piles of tray-cloths, petticoat flounces and chemise-tops, all hand-
embroidered and bemonogrammed by Miss Baker herself. She was not
engaged to be married, but, as she'd artlessly said, "Something a young girl
can have always ready."
Day-dreams in crochet!
"I'd rather never fall in love than have it all spoilt by mixing it up with such
a lot of sewing and cookery that it wouldn't get disentangled, like," thought
the dreamy, impatient Gwenna. She returned, to find the German girl
measuring her crochet lace against her arm and crying, "Since Saturday I
have made till there." ...
Then Miss Baker turned to her German version of an English trade firm's
letter. Miss Butcher unfastened another packet of stationery. Miss Williams
fetched a number of envelopes from the inner office to be addressed....
Would the afternoon never come to an end?

CHAPTER VI
THE INVITATION

At last six o'clock found her, released from the day's work and back at her
Club.
But still, still there was no envelope addressed to Miss Gwenna Williams
stuck up in the criss-cross tapes of the green-baize-covered letter-board in
the hall.
She went upstairs rather slowly to take off her hat. On the landing the voice
of Leslie Long called to her from the bathroom.
"Come in here, Taffy. I'm washing blouses. I want to tell you some news."
Gwenna entered the steamy bathroom, to find her chum's tall figure bent in
two over the bath and up to its bare elbows in suds of Lux.
"I say, child, you know your locket that you lost at my sister's?" announced
Leslie. "It's all right. It's been found."
"Has it?" said Gwenna, not very enthusiastically. "Did I leave it in Mrs.
Smith's room?"
"You didn't. You left it in Hugo Swayne's car," said Leslie, wringing out the
wet handful of transparent net that would presently serve her as a garment.
"That young man came up about half an hour ago to tell you."
"Mr. Swayne did? How kind of him."
"Yes, wasn't it? But not of Mr. Swayne," said Leslie, wringing. "It was—
just let out the water and turn me on some fresh hot, will you?—It was the
other one that came: the aviator boy."
"What?" cried Gwenna sharply. "Mr. Dampier?"

"Yes. Your bird-man. He came up here—in full plumage and song! Nice
grey suit—rather old; brown boots awfully well cleaned—by himself; blue
tie, very expensive Burlington Arcade one—lifted from his cousin Hugo, I
bet," enlarged Leslie, spreading the blouse out over the white china edge of
the bath. "I met him at the gate just as I got back from my old lady's. He
asked for my friend—meaning you. Hadn't grasped your name. He came in
for ten minutes. But he couldn't wait, Taffy, so——"
Here, straightening herself, Leslie suddenly stopped. She stopped at the
sight of the small, blankly dismayed face with which her chum had been
listening to this chatter.
And Gwenna, standing aghast against the frosted glass panes of the
bathroom door, pronounced, in her softest, most agitated Welsh accent, an
everyday Maid's Tragedy in just six words:
"He came! When I was out!"
"He was awfully sorry——"
But Gwenna, seeming not to hear her friend, broke out: "He said he'd come
and settle about taking me flying, and there was I think-ing he'd forgotten
all about it, and then he did come after all, and I wasn't here! Oh, Leslie!—-
-"
Leslie, sitting on the edge of the bath, gave her a glance that was serious
and whimsical, rueful and tender, all at once.
"Yes, you can't understand," mourned Gwenna, "but I did so want to go up
in an aeroplane for once in my life! I'd set my heart on it, Leslie, ever since
he said about it. It's only now I see how badly I wanted it," explained the
younger girl, flushed with emotion, and relapsing into her Welshiest accent,
as do all the Welsh in their moments of stress. "And now I shan't get another
chance. I know I shan't——"
And such was the impetus of her grief that Leslie could hardly get her to
listen to the rest of the news that should be balm for this wound of
disappointment; namely, that Mr. Dampier was going to make an
appointment with both girls to come and have tea with him at his rooms,
either on Saturday or Sunday.

"He'll write to you," concluded Leslie Long, "and let you know which. I
said we'd go either day, Taffy."
Gwenna, caught up into delight again from the lowest depths of
disappointment, could hardly trust herself to speak. Surely Leslie must
think her a most awful baby, nearly crying because she'd had an outing
postponed! So the young girl (laughing a little shakily) put up quite a
plucky fight to treat it all as quite a trifle....
Even the next morning at breakfast she took it quite casually that there was
a note upon her plate stamped with the address of the Aero Club. She even
waited a moment before she opened it and read in a handwriting as small as
if it had been traced by a crow-quill:
"Monday night.
"Dear Miss Williams,
"Will you and Miss Long come to tea with me at my place about
4.30 on Sunday? I find I shall not have to go to Hendon on that
day. I'll come and call for you if I may.
"Yours sincerely,
"P. Dampier."
"At last!" thought Gwenna to herself, rather breathlessly, as she put the note
back into the envelope. "Now he'll settle about when I'm to go flying with
him. Oh! I do, do hope there's nothing going to get in the way of that!"

CHAPTER VII
A BACHELOR'S TEA-PARTY

The first of a series of "things that got in the way" of Gwenna's making an
appointment to go flying occurred on that Sunday afternoon, when Leslie
and she were to have tea at Paul Dampier's place.

"A mixture of chaos and comfy chairs, I expect; ash everywhere, and
beastly cakes. (I know these bachelor tea-parties.) That," Leslie said, "is
what his 'place' will be like."
Gwenna, as usual, hadn't wasted any thoughts over this. She had been too
full of what their host himself would say and do—about the flying. She was
all ready, in the white dress, the white hat with the wings, half an hour after
Sunday mid-day dinner at the Ladies' Club. But it was very nearly half-past
four by the time Mr. Dampier did come, as he had promised, to fetch the
two girls.
He came in the car that had driven them back on the night of the dinner-
party.
And he was hurried, and apologetic for his lateness. He even seemed a little
shy. This had the effect of making Gwenna feel quite self-possessed as she
took the seat beside him ("I hate sitting by the driver, really. Makes me so
nervous!" Leslie had declared) and inquired whether he borrowed his
cousin's car any time he had visitors.
"Well, but Hugo's got everything," he told her, with a twinkle, "so I always
borrow anything of his that I can collar!"
"Studs, too?" asked Gwenna, quickly.
"Oh, come! I didn't think it of you. What a pun!" he retorted.

She coloured a little, shy again, hurt. But he turned his head to look at her,
confided to her: "It was on the chest-of-drawers, all the time!"
And, as the car whizzed westwards, they laughed together. That dinner-table
incident of the collar—or collared—stud brought, for the second time, a
sudden homely glow of friendly feeling between this boy and girl.
She thought, "He's just as easy to get on with as if he were another girl, like
Leslie——"
For always, at the beginning of things, the very young woman compares her
first man-friend with the dearest girl-chum she has known.
—"Or as if he were just nobody, instead of being so wonder-ful, and an
airman, good gracious!"
Appropriately enough for an airman, his place seemed to be nearly on the
house-tops of a block of buildings near Victoria Street.
The lift carried them up past six landings and many boards inscribed with
names of firms. It stopped at the seventh story, almost directly opposite a
cream-coloured door with a small, old-fashioned brass knocker, polished
like gold.
Paul Dampier tapped sharply at it.
The door was opened by a thick-set man in an excellent suit of clothes and
with the face of a wooden sphinx.
"Tea as soon as you can, Johnson," said the young Airman over his
shoulder, as the trio passed in.
The long sitting-room occupied half the flat and its windows took up the
whole of one side. It was to these open windows that Gwenna turned.
"Oh, what a view!" she cried, looking out, enraptured at the height and
airiness, looking past the leads, with their wooden tubs of standard laurel-
bushes, among which pigeons were strutting and bridling and pecking
crumbs. She looked down, down, at the bird's-eye view of London, spread
far below her in a map of grey roofs and green tree-tops under a soft mist of
smoke that seemed of the clouds themselves.

"Oh, can't you see for miles!" exclaimed Gwenna. "There's St. Paul's, looks
like a big grey soap-bubble, coming up out of the mist! Oh, you can see
between a crack in the houses, our place at Westminster! It's like a cottage
from here! Oh, and that iron lacey thing on the roof! Even this must be
something like being up in an aeroplane, I should think! Look, Leslie!"
Miss Long seemed more engrossed in looking round Mr. Dampier's
bachelor sitting-room. It was incredibly luxurious compared to what she'd
expected. The polished floor was black and shiny as the wood of the piano
at the further end, the Persian rugs softly brilliant. In the middle of the
Adams mantelpiece simpered an exquisite Chelsea shepherdess; to the left
and right of her there stood squat toys in ivory, old slender-stalked
champagne-glasses holding sweet-peas. And upon the leaf-brown walls
were decorations that seemed complacently to draw attention to the catholic
taste of their owner. A rare eighteenth-century print of Tom Jones upon his
knees, asking "forgiveness" of his Sophia, hung just above a Futurist's
grimace in paint; and there was a frieze of ultra-modern French fashion-
designs, framed in passe-partout, from the "Bon Ton."
"What a—what a surprising number of pictures you have, Mr. Dampier,"
said Leslie, mildly. "Hasn't he, Taffy?"
Gwenna, turning at last from the window, realised dimly that this
sophisticated room did seem somehow out of keeping as an eyrie for this
eagle. The view outside, yes! But these armchairs? And she wouldn't have
thought that he would have bothered to have things pretty, like this——
"And what a lot of books you've got," she said. For the wall opposite to the
windows was taken up by bookshelves, set under a trophy of swords of out-
of-date patterns, and arranged with some thought.
The top shelves held volumes of verse, and of plays, from Beaumont and
Fletcher to Galsworthy. The Russian novelists were ranged together; also
the French. There was a corner for Sudermann and Schnitzler. A shelf
further down came all the English moderns, and below that all the Yellow
Books, a long blue line of all the English Reviews, from the beginning; a
stack of The New Age, and a lurid pink-covered copy of Blast.

But before Gwenna could wonder further over these possessions of this
young man, more incongruous possessions were brought in by the Sphinx-
faced man-servant; a tea-table of beaten copper, a peasant-embroidered
cloth, a tea-service of old Coalport; with a silver spirit-kettle, with an iced
cake, with toast, and wafer, bread-and-butter and cress-sandwiches and
Parisian petits-fours that all seemed, as the young girl put it simply to
herself, "So unlike him!"
Her chum had already guessed the meaning of it all.
The Dampier boy's rooms? His library and ornaments? Ah, no. He'd never
read one of all those books there. Not he! And these were not the type of
"things" he'd buy, even if he'd had the money to throw away, thought Leslie.
It was no surprise to that young woman when the legitimate owner of this
lavishly appointed garçonnière made his sudden appearance in the middle
of tea.

The click of a latchkey outside. Two masculine voices in the hall. Then the
door was thrown open.
There walked in a foreign-looking young man, with bright dark eyes and a
small moustache, followed by Mr. Hugo Swayne, attired in a Victorian
mode that, as Leslie put it afterwards, "cried 'Horse, horse!' where there
was no horse." His tall bowler was dove-grey; his black stock allowed a
quarter-inch of white collar to appear; below his striking waistcoat dangled
a bunch of seals and a fob. This costume Leslie recognised as a revival of
the Beggarstaff Touch. Gwenna wondered why this young man seemed
always to be in fancy dress. Leslie could have told her that Mr. Swayne's
laziness and vanity had led him to abandon himself on the coast of
Bohemia, where he had not been born. His father had been quite a
distinguished soldier in Egypt. His father's son took things more easily at
the Grafton Gallery and the Café Royal and Artists' Clubs. He neither
painted, wrote, nor composed, but his life was set largely among flatterers
who did these things—after a fashion.
He came in saying, "Now this is where I live when I'm——"

He broke off with a start at the sight of the party within. The girls turned to
him with surprised and smiling greeting.
Paul Dampier, fixing him with those blue eyes, remarked composedly,
"Hullo, my dear chap. Have some tea, won't you? I'll ring for Johnson to
bring in two more cups."
"That will be very nice," said Hugo Swayne, rising to the occasion with all
the more grace because he was backed up by a tiny understanding glance
from Miss Long. And he introduced his young Frenchman by a name that
made Leslie exclaim, "Why! You are that Post-Impressionist painter, aren't
you?"
"Not I, mademoiselle, but my brother," returned Hugo's French friend,
slowly and very politely. His dark face was simple and intelligent as that of
a nice child; he sat up as straight in his chair as he talked. "It is for that Mr.
Swayne, who is admirer of my brother's pictures, is so amiable for to show
me London. Me, I am not artiste. I am ingénieur only."
"'Only'!" thought Gwenna over her teacup.
Surely any one should be proud of being an engineer, considering that Mr.
Dampier had thus begun his career; he who was now in what the romantic
girl considered the First of All Professions? Perhaps her attitude towards the
Airman as such was noted by the Airman's cousin. Hugo, who had dropped
a little heavily into the softest chair near Miss Long, turned his
Chopinesque profile against a purple cushion to shoot a rather satirical
glance at the cleaner-built youth in the worn grey suit.
"Now, how like a man! He doesn't admire Taffy particularly, but he's piqued
to see her admire another type." Leslie summed this up quickly to herself.
"Not really a bad sort; he behaved well about the invasion of these rooms.
But he's like all these well-off young men who potter about antique shops
when they ought to be taking exercise—he's plenty of feminine little ways.
Since they call spitefulness 'feminine'!"
There was a distinctly spiteful note in the young man's voice as he made his
next remark to his cousin.
This remark surprised even Leslie for a moment.

And to Gwenna's heart it struck with a sudden, unreasonable shock of
consternation.
For Mr. Swayne inquired blandly across the tea-table:
"Well, Paul; how's your fiancée?"

CHAPTER VIII
LAUGHING ODDS

Before he answered, Gwenna had time to think smartingly, "His fiancée!
There! I might have known he was engaged. I might have guessed it! It's
nothing to do with me.... Only ... I believe that's what's going to get in the
way of my flying with him. She won't let him. I mean he'll always be taking
her up! And I know who it is, too. It's sure to be the one called Muriel that I
saw go up with him at Hendon with the red hair and the scarf. I sort of
guessed when I heard they were going up together that she must be his
fiancée."
And all the while her eyes were, apparently, on the silver stand of the spirit-
kettle, they watched the young Airman's face (which looked a little
sheepish). She listened, tensely, for his reply. Quite shortly Paul Dampier,
still munching cake, said, "Who? Oh! Going on as usual, thanks."
"Now I may tell you that that's merely a pose to conceal devotion," laughed
his cousin, turning to Gwenna. "Just as if every moment were not grudged
that he spends away from HER!"
"Is it?" said the young girl with a smile. There was a bad lump in her throat,
but she spoke with her most carefully-fostered "English" accent. "I—I
suppose that's natural!" she remarked.
Hugo, fondling his Chopin curl again, went on amusing himself with this
chosen subject.
"But, as is so often the case with a young man's fancy," he announced,
"nobody else sees anything in 'her'!"
The stricken Gwenna looked quickly at young Dampier, who was cutting
the Titan wedges that men call "slices," of cake. How would he take it that
it had been said of his adored one that no one saw anything in her?

He only gave a short laugh, a confident nod of his fair head and said, "They
will, though."
"Infatuated youth!" commented Hugo Swayne, resignedly, leaning back.
"And he tries to cover it up by seeming casual. 'Going on as usual' is said
just as a blind. It sounds so much more like a mere wife than a fiancée,
don't you think?"
"Ah, but you are cynique, monsieur," protested the young Frenchman,
looking mildly shocked. "For you it is not sacred, the love for a wife?"
"Oh, look here! Hadn't you better explain to them," broke in Paul Dampier
boyishly, having finished a large mouthful of his cake, "that you're rotting?
Fiancée, indeed. Haven't got such a thing in the world, of course."
At this Gwenna suddenly felt as if some crushing weight of disappointment
had fallen from her. "It's because I shall be able to go flying with him after
all," she thought.
Young Dampier, rising to take her cup, grumbled laughingly, "D'you
suppose girls will look at a man nowadays who can't afford to spend the
whole of his time gadding about after 'em, Hugo, as you can, or blowing
what's my salary for an entire year on their engagement-rings——"
"My dear fellow, no girl in the world exacts as much of a man's time and
money as that grande passion of yours does," retorted Hugo Swayne, not
ill-naturedly. And turning to Leslie, he explained: "What I call Paul's
fiancée is that eternal aeroplane he's supposed to be making."
"Ah!" said Gwenna, and then blushed violently; partly because she hadn't
meant to speak, and partly because this had drawn the blue eyes of the
Airman quickly upon herself.
"Yes, that incessant flying-machine of his," enlarged Mr. Swayne, lolling
back in his chair and addressing the meeting. "She—I believe it's correct to
call the thing 'she'?—is more of a nuisance even than any engaged girl I've
ever met. She interferes with everything this man does. Ask him to come
along to a dance or the Opera or to see some amusing people, and it's
always 'Can't; I'm working on the cylinder or the spiral or the Fourth
Dimension' or whatever it is he does think he's working on. Practically 'she'

spends all the time he's away from her ringing him up, or getting him rung
up, on the telephone. 'She' eats all his spare cash, too——"
"In steel instead of chocolate, I suppose?" smiled Leslie. "And must she be
humoured? She seems to have every drawback of a young woman with 'a
diamond half-hoop.' Is she jealous, as well?"
And then, while taking a cigarette from Hugo's case, the elder girl made,
lightly, a suggestion that the listening Gwenna was fated to remember.
"What would happen," asked Leslie dryly, "if a real flesh-and-blood fiancée
were to come along as a rival to the one of machinery?"
"Nothing would happen," Hugo assured her, holding out a lighted match.
"That's why it would be rather interesting to watch. The complication of the
Aeroplane or the Lady. The struggle in the mind of the young Inventor,
what? The Girl"—he tossed aside the match and glanced fleetingly at the
grave cherub's-face under Gwenna's white-winged hat—"The Girl versus
the Flying Machine. I'd lay fifteen to one on the Machine, Miss Long."
"Done," said Leslie, demurely but promptly. "In half-crowns."
"Yes! You'd back your sex, of course," Hugo took up gaily. The young
Frenchman murmured: "But the Machine—the Machine is also of the sex of
Mademoiselle."

Here, suddenly, the silently listening Gwenna gave a tiny shiver. She turned
her head abruptly towards the open windows behind her with the strutting
pigeons and the sailing clouds beyond. It had seemed to the fanciful Celt
that there in that too dainty room now hazy with cigarette-smoke, in that
careless company of two girls and three young men, she had felt the hint of
another Presence. It was rather horrid and ghostly—all this talk of a
Machine that was made more of than a Woman! A Machine who "clawed"
the man that owned her, just like a jealous betrothed who will not let her
lover out of her sight! And supposing that Conflict did come, on which
Gwenna's chum and Mr. Dampier's cousin had laid their laughing bets? The
struggle between the sweetheart of steel springs and the sweetheart of soft

flesh and warm blood? For one clear instant Gwenna knew that this fight
would, must come. It was coming——

Then she turned her head and forgot her presentiments; coming back to the
light-hearted Present. She watched Leslie, to whom the young Frenchman
had been talking; he was now fixing dark earnest eyes upon "Mademoiselle
Langue" as she, in the rather stilted phraseology with which our nation
speaks its own language for the benefit of foreigners, expounded to him an
English story.
There was a short pause.
Then the room rang to the laughter of the foreigner. "Ha! Yes! I have
understood him! It is very amusing, that! It is good!" he cried delightedly,
with a flash of white teeth and dark eyes. "He say, 'There are parts of it that
are excellent!' Aha! Très spirituel," and he laughed again joyously over the
story of the Curate's Egg, while Hugo murmured something about how
stimulating it was to hear, for once, the Immemorial Anecdote fall upon
Virgin Soil.
The young Airman moved nearer to Gwenna, who, still watching Leslie,
gave a little start to hear that deep and gentle voice so close beside her as he
spoke.
"Look here, we haven't settled up yet," he said, his voice gentle but carrying
above the chatter of the others. "About that flying. Sunday this week I have
got to be off somewhere. Now, are you free next Saturday?"
Gwenna, eager and tremulous, was just about to say, "Yes." But Hugo
Swayne interrupted.
"I say, I hate to make mischief. But if you're talking about Saturday——?
D'you remember, Paul? It was the only day I could take you down to Ascot
to see Colonel Conyers."
"Oh, Lord, so it was," said the young Airman, turning an apologetic face to
the girl. "I'm so sorry," he explained, "but this is a man I've simply got to
get hold of if I can. It's the Air-craft Conyers—'Cuckoo' Conyers they call

him. And he was a friend of Hugo's father, and what I've been trying to see
him about is working the War-office to take up my new Machine——"
"The Fiancée again, you notice," laughed his cousin, with an imperceptible
aside to Leslie. "Score to the Aeroplane."
"Yes, I see," said Gwenna, nodding at the Airman. "Of course! I mean of
course I don't mind!"
"Then shall we say Saturday week for you to come up with me instead?"
suggested young Dampier.
And Gwenna agreed to the date, thinking, "If only nothing stops it again! If
only there isn't something else, then, to do with his Machine! That
Machine! I——" Here she paused.
After all, it would be too ridiculous to allow oneself even to think that one
"hated" a machine!

CHAPTER IX
A DAY IN THE COUNTRY

Eagerly as Gwenna longed to fly, she was not to do so even yet.
After that appointment made at Hugo Swayne's rooms she lived through a
fortnight of dreaming, tingling anticipation. Then came another of those
brief direct notes from "hers, P. Dampier." The girl jumped for joy. It was
not to be at Hendon this time, but at Brooklands. Was she not rapidly
gaining experiences? First Hendon, then Brooklands; at this rate she would
soon know all the flying-grounds—Shoreham, Eastchurch, Farnborough, all
of them!
"I'll call for you," the note said, "in the car."
"'The' car is good," commented Leslie, arranging a mist-blue scarf over
Gwenna's small hat just before she started off on this expedition. "In the
Army all things are in common, including money and tobacco but the
Dampier boy isn't in the Army."
"Why shouldn't he?" took up Gwenna, ungrammatically and defiantly. She
considered Mr. Swayne's motor was honoured by this other young man who
condescended to drive it, to fetch and whirl away with him a girl who felt
herself a nymph about to be swept up and up above the clouds to some
modern version of Elysium.
So twelve o'clock that Saturday morning (Gwenna having obtained special
leave of absence from the office) found the young man and the girl
speeding through Kensington and Hammersmith, on the Woking Road.
The sun was hot above them; the road white; the hedges so dusty that they
seemed grey ribbons streaming past. Gwenna scarcely realised how they
went. She sat there beside him, thrilled and breathless, hardly knowing to
which delight to give herself up, that of the coming flight, that of the
present swift drive in the fresh breeze, or that of the companionship of this

Demigod of Modern Times, whose arm almost touched hers sometimes as
he moved or turned, or put on the brake.
Except for an occasional remark to the car: "Come on, don't be funny, old
lady, don't be funny," or "Now for the hills; watch her sit down and laugh at
'em!" he spoke little; Gwenna didn't particularly want him to speak. The girl
was in a golden and moving dream, and scarcely knew where it carried her.

She came out of that dream, not with a shock, but gradually. Was the car
slowing down? It stopped; stopped in a wide part of that dust-white road
between the tall, dust-grey hedges, opposite to a creosoted telegraph-pole
spiked with nails. Through a gap in the hedge Gwenna caught sight of a
moon-daisied field, with a dark hedge and trees beyond. Not a house, not a
cottage in sight. This couldn't be Brooklands?

"Hul-lo," the boy was muttering. "What's up now?"
"What is it?" she asked.
He did not reply. This was not rudeness, as she guessed, but intentness; he
took it for granted that she would not understand the mechanical
explanation. Resignedly she said to herself, "Machinery gone wrong?
Sometimes it really seems as if that were all machinery ever did do! Yet
that's what he said he was interested in, more than anything!"
He was out of the car and had flung back the bonnet. Then he took off his
coat and hung it up on one of the nails on that telegraph-pole. He pushed up
his shirt-sleeves and bent over the tool-box on the step.
Sitting there on the hot leather, Gwenna watched him, she heard the
chinking of wrenches and spanners. Then he returned to the bonnet again,
fumbling, handling, burrowing, grunting at things.... Ten minutes elapsed....
He then broke out emphatically: "Oh, Lord! I have done it now!"
"Done what?" asked the girl anxiously.

In tightening a nut with a spanner the spanner had slipped. He had broken
the porcelain insulation of the plug controlling the current.
And now, good-humouredly smiling at his guest, he leaned on the door of
the car with his brown forearms crossed and said, "Short circuited. Yes. I'm
afraid that's killed it."
"Killed what?" asked little Gwenna, in affright.
"Our flying for to-day," he said.
He went on to speak about "spare parts," and how it would be necessary to
send some one back to fetch—something—Gwenna didn't care what it was.
Her heart sank in dismay. No flying? Must they go back after all, now?
"Can't we get on?" she sighed.
He shook his shining head.
"We can make a picnic of it, anyhow," he said more encouragingly. "Shall
you be all right here if I run back to that inn we passed just now with the bit
of green outside? I shan't be ten minutes. Send some one off on a bicycle,
and bring some grub back here."
He jerked on his coat and was off.

Little Gwenna, sitting there waiting in the useless car—her small,
disconsolate face framed in the gauze scarf with which she'd meant to bind
her curls for the flying—was passed by half a dozen other motors on the
road to Brooklands. It did not strike her, dreamily downcast as she was, that
surely what the messenger from the inn was being despatched to fetch
might have been borrowed from one of these other motorists? Some of
them, surely, would be men who knew young Paul Dampier quite well. Any
of them might have come to the rescue?
This, as a matter of fact, had struck Paul Dampier at once. But he didn't
want to go on to Brooklands! Brooklands? Beastly hot day; crowds of
people; go up in an affair like an old Vanguard?

What he wanted, after a hard day's work yesterday on his own (so different)
Machine, was a day's peace and quiet and to think things a bit over about
her (the Machine) lying on his back somewhere shady, with a pipe.
Actually, he would rather have been alone. But this little girl, Miss
Williams.... She was all right. Not only pretty ... but such a quiet, sensible
sort of little thing. He'd take her up another time, since she was keen. He
certainly would take her up. Not to-day. To-day they'd just picnic. She
wouldn't want to be giggling and chattering about herself the whole time,
and all that sort of thing, like some of them. She liked to listen.
She'd be interested to hear what he'd been doing lately, about the Machine.
For a girl, she was pretty bright, and even if she didn't grasp things at once,
she evidently liked hearing about the Machine; besides which, it often
cleared one's own ideas to one's self, to have to set 'em out and explain
about the machinery very simply, to some one who was keen, but who
hadn't a notion. They'd have a nice, peaceful time, this afternoon;
somewhere cool, instead of Brooklands. And a nice long talk—all about the
Machine.

He returned to the girl waiting in the car. Gwenna, cheering up at the sight
of him, saw that his pockets were bulging with bottles, and that he carried a
square, straw basket.
"There. I might have taken Hugo's luncheon-basket and filled that while I
was about it; only I forgot there was one," he said, standing on the road and
screwing up his eyes a little in the midday sun as he faced the car. "It's nicer
eating out of doors, when you get a chance. Beastly dusty on the road here,
though, and things going by all the time and kicking up clouds of it all over
you. We'll find a pitch in that field."
So she jumped down from her seat and the two left the glaring road and got
through that gap in the hedgerow where maybush and blackberry trail and
grass and campion alike were all thickly powdered and drooping with dust.
The boy and girl skirted another hedge that ran at right angles to the road.
Half-way up that field a big elm tree spread a patch of shade at its base like
a dark-green rug for them to sit on. Paul Dampier put his coat down also.

They sat, with moon-daisies and branching buttercups, and cow-parsley all
sweet and clean about them.
Here the country-bred girl, forgetting her disappointment, gave a quick little
sigh of content. She glanced about her at the known faces of flower-friends
in the grass; a diaper of colours. Each year she had loved the time when
white daisies and red sorrel and yellow rattle flaunted together over the
heads of the lower-growing clovers and speedwells and potentillas. This
year it seemed lovelier than ever. She put out her hand and pulled up a lance
of jointed grass, nibbling the soft, pale-green end of it.
"Here, are you as hungry as all that?" laughed young Dampier at her side.
"We'll feed."
He let Gwenna spread out upon the clean dinner-napkin in which they were
wrapped the provisions that he had brought from the inn.
"All I could get. Bread-and-cheese. Couple of hunks of cold beef. Butter—
salt," he said, giving her the things as he named them. "Plates I said we
wouldn't worry about; chuck the crumbs to the birds. Here's what I got to
drink; cider. D'you like it?"
"Love it," said Gwenna, who had never happened to taste it. But she knew
that she would love it.
"Good. Oh! Now I've forgotten the glass, though," exclaimed young
Dampier, sitting up on his knees on the shaded patch of grass beside her.
"We shall both have to use the lower half of my flask. Sorry—hope you
don't mind."
Gwenna, taking her first taste of cider in bird-like sips from that oblong
silver thing, remembered the old saying, "Drink from my cup and you will
think my thoughts." Then he put down upon the dinner napkin the half-loaf
and the lump of cheese that he had been munching. He took the half of the
flask, simply, out of the girl's hand, poured out more cider, and drank in
turn.
"That's better," he said, smiling. She smiled back at him.

She had ceased to feel any shyness of this fair-haired aviator who rested
there beside her in this oasis of shade from the elm, while beyond them
stretched the wide, dazzlingly bright desert of the flowering meadow,
bounded by its hedges. He cut off the crusty part of the loaf for her (since
she said she liked it). He sliced for her the damp and pinkish beef, since she
would not confide to him her deep and feminine loathing of this fare. The
woman is not yet born who can look upon cold meat as a food. And they
drank in turn from his silver flask. This was their third meal together; yet
Gwenna felt that she had been grown-up and conscious of delight in the
world about her only since they had met.
Ease and gaiety rose between them in a haze like that which vibrated over
the warm hay-field where they feasted.
"I say, I shall have to give a lunch at the Carlton to everybody I know," he
laughed, half to himself, presently, "if I do get Colonel Conyers to make 'em
take up the P.D.Q." Then, turning more directly to her. "Sorry—you don't
know that joke. It's my Aeroplane, you know."
"Oh, yes, the one Mr. Swayne calls your Fiancée!" took up Gwenna
quickly. Then she wished she hadn't said that. She reddened. She turned her
supple little body to toss crumbs to a yellow-hammer that was eyeing them
from a branch in the hedge behind her. And then she asked. "Why 'the
P.D.Q.'?"
"Because she will be the Paul Dampier One, I hope," explained the young
inventor, "and I always think of her as that other because it means 'Pretty
Dam—Dashed Quick.'"
"Oh, is that it?" said Gwenna.
She echoed crossly to herself, "'I always think of her' indeed! It sounds like
——"
And she finished her thought with the hardest-working word in her native
tongue; the Welsh for sweetheart.
"It does sound just as if he were talking about his cariad."
Absently she brushed more crumbs off her side of the dinner-napkin.

For one-half only of Gwenna now seemed to note that they were eating
crusty loaf and drinking cider out of doors between a lupin-blue sky and a
flowerful meadow; the other was conscious of nothing but her companion;
of the clear friendliness of his eyes, those eyes of Icarus! Of his deep and
gentle voice saying, "Mind if I smoke? You don't, I know," of those brown
hard-looking forearms from which he had not troubled to pull down the
sleeves, of his nearness.
Suddenly he came nearer still.
He had not stopped talking of his aeroplane, but she hardly remembered
that she had asked him the meaning of one of the expressions that he had
used.
He was repeating it.
"'Camber?' ... Well, it's a curve. A curve like——" He glanced about for an
example of the soft, end-wise curve on the great wings of an aeroplane; his
eyes passing quickly from the green hedge to the ground, to the things on
the picnic cloth, to Gwenna Williams's small hand as it rested in the grass.
She wondered, thrilled, if the young Airman were actually going to take
hold of her hand.
He did take her hand, as simply as he had taken the silver cup from it. He
bent it over so that her wrist made a gentle curve. He passed his own large
fingers across it.
"Yes; there—that's the curve," he said. "Almost exactly."
It might have been a caress.
But, done as he did it, the light movement was nothing of the kind. Instinct
told the girl that. It wasn't her small and soft and pink-palmed hand that he
was thinking of holding. She looked at him as he said, "That's the curve,"
and she caught a gleam of quickened interest in his eyes. But in one
mortified flash she knew that this had nothing to do with her. She guessed
that at this moment he'd forgotten that there was a girl sitting there beside
him at all.
And she knew why.

Angrily she said to herself, "He's thinking of nothing but that old machine
of his! And I do—yes, I do, do hate her!"
Then she sat for a moment still as the elm-trunk against which she'd been
leaning.
She had been struck thus motionless by a thought.
Something had been brought home to her by that sharp and sudden twinge
of—Jealousy!
Yes! She knew now! What she felt, and must have been feeling for days
past, was what they meant by falling in love.
"That's what I've done!" she thought rapidly; half in consternation, half in
delight. "It's beginning to happen what Mr. Swayne was talking about at
that tea: the Girl or the Flying Machine!"
She glanced towards the gap in the hedge as if to look at the car that had
brought them, motionless by the road-side; she turned her face away from
the Airman, who sat lighting a pipe with the shadows of the elm-branches
dappling his fair head and shirt-sleeved shoulders.
She was blushing warmly at her own thoughts.
"It's only the flying-machine he cares about! He does like me, too; in a
way.... If only he'd forget that other for a minute! But if he won't," thought
Gwenna, happening upon an ancient piece of feminine philosophy, "I'd
rather have him talking about her than not talking to me at all!"
She spoke aloud, sedately but interestedly.
"Oh, is that a camber?" That light touch of his seemed still upon her wrist,
though he had withdrawn it carelessly at once. She paused, then said, "And
what was that other thing, Mr. Dampier? Something about an angle?"
"A dihedral angle?" he said, drawing at that pipe. "Oh, that's the angle you
see from the front of the thing. It's—look, it's like that."
This time it was not her hand he took as an illustration. He pointed, pipe in
hand, to where, above the opposite hedge, a crow was sailing slowly, a

vandyke of black across the cloudless blue.
"See that bird? It's that very slight V he makes; now."
"And this machine of yours?" persisted the girl, with a little twitch of her
mouth for the rival whom he, it seemed, always thought of as "the P.D.Q."
and whom Gwenna must always think of as "the Fiancée." She wondered
where it lived, the creature that meant all to him. She said, "Where—where
d'you make that machine?"
"Oh, I'm afraid it isn't a machine yet, you see. It's only a model of one, so
far. You know, like a model yacht," he explained. "That's the worst of it.
You see, you can make a model do anything. It's when you get the thing
life-size that the trouble begins. Model doesn't give a really fair idea of
what you've got to get. The difficulties—it's never the real thing."
Gwenna thought, "It must be like making love to the person you aren't
really in love with!" But what she said, with her hand stripping a spike of
flowering grass, was, "I suppose it's like practising scales and all that on a
mute piano?"
"Never tried", he said. Then: "The model's at my own place, my rooms
in"——here he broke off with a laugh. He looked straight into her face and
said, still laughing, and in a more personal tone:
"Not in Victoria Street. I say, you spotted that that place wasn't mine, didn't
you?"
"Leslie 'spotted' and said so, afterwards," admitted Gwenna demurely,
picking and sniffing at a piece of pink clover before she fastened it into her
white blouse. "I did think at the time that it wasn't—wasn't the sort of place
where you'd find a man living who did things, like."
"Rather rough on old Hugo."
"Well, but does he do things?"
"He doesn't have to. He'd be all right if he did. Sweat some of that beef off
him, give him something to think about," averred his cousin, carelessly
knocking out his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "But, you know, my
place is in Camden Town; most inferior. Three rooms over a paper shop;

two small cubby-holes where I sleep and eat, and a rather bigger one where
I keep the 'P.D.Q.' stuff. I couldn't have you there that Sunday."
"Why not?" Gwenna asked sharply, and jealous again. It was almost as if
the Fiancée had said to him, "No, not here!"
"Because," he said with a chuckle, "because at the last moment, when I'd
got the tea ready and everything"—he tossed his fair head back—"a fall of
soot down the chimney! Everything in the most ghastly mess! Pitch black
wherever you put a finger. I simply couldn't—it was four o'clock then; I
expect you both thought it rotten of me. Still," he concluded, rather ruefully,
"I couldn't give you the sort of polite tea Hugo can, anyhow."
"I don't want polite teas!" Gwenna protested, looking round at the field
where she had feasted as if in Elysium. "You don't suppose I care for things
all grand like that, do you?"
He responded, "Would you care to see my Camden Town place, then, and
the model? You and Miss Long. It's quite near you, you know."
"Yes, I should," said Gwenna quietly, stripping her grass.

How could he, she wondered, ask if she "cared" for these things that opened
out new worlds to her? If he only knew, just to be with him was part of that
new, soaring freedom which to her was summed up in the idea of flying!
This, she felt, was flying. She didn't care, after all, if there were no other
flying that afternoon. Care? She wouldn't mind sitting there until the sun
slipped slowly downwards towards the western hedge and the moon-daisies
closed in the tall grass, and clouds of other tiny flying creatures poised and
hovered above them. She wasn't sorry that the mechanic did not return in
haste to minister to that broken-down car. When she did remember about it,
it was almost to hope that he would not be back! Not just yet! Not to put an
end to this golden afternoon of talk that, trivial as it was, seemed to her to
be the endowment of a new faculty, and of comradeship that was as
beguiling and satisfying as that of her bosom-chum, Leslie. Only newer,
only more complete. So it seemed to Gwenna, as the shadows moved
further up the grass where she sat with her new boy-friend.

For it is a commonplace that in all comradeship between man and woman
passionate love claims a share. But also in all passionate love there is more
comradeship than the unimaginative choose to admit; there is a happy inner
meaning to the cottage phrase, "To keep company with."

What he thought about it she did not know. Except that he surely must like
talking to her? He could not go on like this out of politeness.
Ah, besides—! Besides, she knew, without reasoning about it, that, even
with that absorbing interest of the aeroplane in the background, he did like
her. Just as Leslie, her other friend, who also knew so much more than she
did, had liked her at once.
"Only," decided Gwenna, in the uttermost depths of her shy and daring
heart, "only he's got to like me, some day, better than Leslie ever could. He
must. Yes; he must!"
And she thought it so ardently that she almost expected him, catching her
thought, to answer it in words. She looked—no, he had caught nothing. But,
meeting his eyes again, her own read a message that her fluttered mind had
been told before this, but would scarcely let her believe. He thought she was
pretty to look at. She had taken off her hat now, as she liked to do in the
open air, and the light breeze tossed her short locks about.
"I believe he thinks," Gwenna told herself, "that my hair's nice."

As a matter of fact she was right. If she could have read her companion's
thoughts at the moment she would have known of a quite foolish but
recurrent wish on his part. A wish that he might just run his fingers through
all those brown and thickly-twisting curls, to find out if they felt as silky as
they looked.
A lark was carolling over her head, soaring, poising, poising, soaring, and
singing all the while....
"That's what we can't do, even yet; hover," he said. And again he went on
talking to the Little Thing (in his mind this babyish-faced but quite quick-

witted girl was now always to be "the Little Thing") about the chance of
getting Colonel Conyers to take up that invention of his.
"I'm to go to spend the week-end at Ascot with him and have another talk
about it," he said. "I know he's dead keen. He knows that it's aeroplanes that
are going to make all the difference; simply knock out, under some
conditions, any other form of scouting. In modern warfare, you know—it's
bound to come, some time—anybody with any sense knows that——"
"Yes, of course," agreed Gwenna, watching him as he stretched himself
lazily out, chest downwards, elbows in, on the grass, chin propped in his
hands, talking (all about the Machine).
"If he gave me a chance to build Her—make trial flights in the P.D.Q.! If
he'd only back me——"
"Oh, he will, surely!" said Gwenna, her whole small face brightening or
sobering in response to every modulation of his voice.
It was jolly, he thought, to find a girl who wasn't in the least bored by
"Shop." She was a very jolly Little Thing. So sensible. No nonsense about
her, thought the boy.

And she, when at last they rose and left the place, threw a last look back at
that patch of sky above the hedge, where the black crow had made a
dihedral angle, at that brooding elm, at that hay field, golden in the level
rays, at that patch of dusty road where the car had pulled up, at that black
telegraph-pole where he had hung up his coat. That picture was graven, as
by a tool, into the very heart of the girl.

At the end of an expedition that a young woman of more experience and
less imagination would have pronounced "tame enough," Gwenna, bright-
eyed and rosy from her day in the sunshine, could hardly believe that a
whole lifetime had not elapsed since last she'd seen the everyday, the
humdrum and incredibly dull Club where she lived.
She burst into her chum's bedroom as Leslie was going to bed.

"Taffy—back at last?" smiled Leslie, between the curtains of black hair on
either side of her nightgown. "How's flying?—What?" she exclaimed, "you
didn't go up at all? Broke down on the way to Brooklands? I say! How
rotten for you, my poor lamb. Had anything to eat?"
"I think so—I mean, rather! He gave me a lovely lunch on the road while
we were waiting for the man to mend the car—and then we'd tea at a
cottage while he was doing it—and then there wasn't time to do anything
but come back to town," explained Gwenna breathlessly, untying her scarf;
"and then we'd sort of dinner at the inn before we started back; they brought
out a table and things into the garden under the trees."
"What did you have for dinner?"
"I don't know. Oh, there were gooseberries," said Gwenna vaguely, "and a
lamp. And the moths all came. Oh, Leslie! It's been so splendid!" She
caught her breath. "I mean, it was dreatful about no flying, but——"
"Glad the afternoon wasn't entirely a washout," said Miss Long, in an even
voice as she plaited her hair.
"By the way, did the Dampier boy give you back that locket of yours?"
"I forgot all about it," said Gwenna, picking up the head of pink clover that
had fallen out of her blouse. "I'll ask him next time. He's going to take me
up soon, you know, again."
Just as an alarm is "set" to sound at some given hour, so the whole of the
girl's innocent being was set, to wait and wait for that "next time" of
meeting him—whenever it should be.

CHAPTER X
LESLIE, ON "THE ROOTS OF THE ROSE"

Leslie Long was lounging in a rickety deck-chair under the acacia tree that
overshadowed the small lawn behind the Ladies' Residential Club. Miss
Long looked nonchalantly untidy and her hair was coming down again. But
she had an eye to an occasion on which she meant to shine. She was
carefully darning a pair of silk stockings, stockings she was to wear with
her all-mauve Nijinski rig at a costume dance in a week's time. She was
looking forward to that dance.
It was a late Saturday afternoon, a fortnight after that Saturday that Gwenna
Williams had spent in the country with the Dampier boy. Most of the girls
in the Club were out somewhere now. Only one of the students from the
College of Music was practising Liszt's "Liebestraum." Presently however,
a sunshine-yellow jersey coat appeared on the steps at the back entrance of
the Club. Gwenna Williams was looking out. She saw her chum in the
garden and ran down to her; dropping upon the lawn at her feet, and
nestling her curly head down upon the lengthy knee that supported the
darning-basket.
Gwenna's small face looked petulant, miserable. She felt it. Leslie, to
whom, of course, the other girl was as an open book, asked no question.
She left that to Gwenna, who had never, so far, made any spoken admission
of what had happened—or not happened—since the evening when they had
dressed together to go to that dinner-party at the Smiths'. It was Gwenna
who asked the first question.
With a stormy and troubled sigh, she broke out, à propos of nothing: "How
is one to make him? I mean how is one ever to get a young man to like one
if he hardly ever sees one?"
Leslie looked down at her over the second mauve stocking that she was
drawing over a yellow wooden darning mushroom.

"Tut," said Leslie, with her usual mock unction. "What is all this about
'getting' a young man to like one? What an expression, my love. And,
worse; what a sentiment! Surely you know that men (nice men) think very
lightly of a girl who does not have to be wooed. With deference, Taffy. With
reverence. With hovering uncertainty and suspense and—er—the rest of
that bag of tricks."
The soft, persistent notes of the "Liebestraum" coming through the open
Club windows filled a short pause. Leslie threaded her needle with mauve
silk, then took up her mushroom—and her theme—once more.
"Men care little for the girl who drops like a ripe plum (unripe fruit being
obviously so much sweeter) into their mouths. (Query, why go about with
their mouths open?) Not so. The girl who pleases is the girl who is hard to
please."
A small discouraged sigh from Gwenna, as she sat there with her yellow
jersey coat spread round her like a great dandelion in the grass.
"Oh, but supposing she isn't hard to please?" she faltered. "Supposing
somebody pleased her awfully? If he'd let her, I mean—oh, I daresay you
think I'm dreadful?"
"You outrage my most sacred what's-their-names—convictions, Taffy,"
declared Leslie, solemnly running her needle in and out of the stretched
silk. "How many times must you be told that the girl a man prizes is she
who knows how to set the very highest Value upon herself? The sweetly
reserved Girl who keeps Him Guessing. The ter-ruly maidenly type who
puts a Barrier about herself, and, as it were, says, 'Mind the barbed wire.
Thus far—unless it's going to be made worth my while, for good.' Haggling
little Hebrew!" concluded Miss Long.
For the girl at whom everybody is shocked has standards of her own. Yes!
There are things at which she, even she, is shocked in turn.
Leslie, speaking of that other, belauded type, quoted:
"'Oh, the glory of the winning when she's won!'
(per-haps!)."

And in her voice there was honest disgust.
"No, but Leslie! Stop laughing about it all! And tell me, really, now—"
appealed the younger girl, leaning an arm upon her friend's knee and
looking up with eyes imploring guidance. "You've known lots of men.
You've had them—well, admiring you and telling you so?"
"Thank you, yes," said Leslie, demurely darning. "You mightn't think it, to
look at me in this blouse, but I have been—er—stood plenty of emotional
drinks of that kind."
"Then you know. You tell me—" pleaded Gwenna, pathetically earnest. "Is
it true that men don't like you if they think you like them very much?"
Leslie's impish face peeped at her over the silk stocking held up over the
mushroom. And Leslie's mouth was one crooked scarlet curve of derision.
But it straightened into gravity again as she said, "I don't know, Taffy.
Honest injun! One woman can't lay down rules for another woman. She's
got to reckon with her own type—just pick up that hairpin, will you—and
his. I can only tell you that what is one man's meat is—another man's won't
meet."
Gwenna, at her knee, sighed stormily again.
Leslie, rearranging herself cautiously in the insecure deck-chair, put a finger
through one of Gwenna's curls, and said very gently, "Doesn't the Dampier
boy come to meet it, then?"
Gwenna, carnation red, cried, "Oh no! Of course not. I wasn't thinking of
him."
In the same breath she added shamefacedly, "How did you know, Leslie?
You are clever!" And then, in a soft burst of confidence, "Oh, I have been so
worrying! All these days and days, Leslie! And to-day I felt I simply had to
tell you about it—or burst! I haven't really been able to think of anything
but him. And he—he hates me, I know."
She used that word to console herself. Hate is so infinitely less discouraging
than polite indifference!

Leslie glanced very kindly at the flushed face, at the compact yet lissom
little body sitting up on its heels on the Club lawn. She asked, "Doesn't the
creature look at you? The other day when he took you out and broke down
the motor? Didn't he then?"
"Yes, he did," admitted Gwenna, "a little."
"That's a start, then. So 'Cheer up, Taff, don't let your spirits go down,'"
hummed Leslie. "Ask your Fräulein at the works if she knows an excellent
slang German phrase for falling in love. 'Der hat sich aber man ordentlich
verguckt?' 'He's been and looked himself well into it'—I am glad the
Dampier boy did look. It is engendered in the eyes, as poor old Bernard
Shaw used to say. It will be all right."
"Will it, d'you think? Will it?"
Gwenna, kneeling beside the dishevelled, graceful figure with its long limbs
stretched out far beyond the deck-chair, gazed up as if into the face of an
oracle.
"What do I do," she persisted innocently, "to make him look—to make him
like me?"
"You don't 'do.' You 'be,' and pretty hard too. You, my child, sit tight. It's
what they call the Passive Rôle of Woman," explained Leslie, with a
twinkle. "Like this." And she drew out of her darning-basket a slender
horseshoe-shaped implement such as workwomen use to pick up a dropped
needle, painted scarlet to within half an inch of its end. She held it
motionless a little away from her darning. There was a flash in the sunlight
and a sharp little "click" as the needle flew up and clung to the magnet.
"D'you see, Turtle-dove?"
"Yes; but that isn't what you seemed to be talking about just now," objected
Gwenna. "You seemed to think that a girl needn't mind 'doing' something
about it. Letting a person see that she liked him."
"That isn't 'doing.' A girl can get in such a lot of useful execution—excuse
my calling spade work spade work—all the time she is going on being as

passive as—as that magnet," pronounced the mentor. "Of course you've got
to take care to look as nice as you know how to all the time.
"And here you score, Miss Williams. Allow a friend to say that you're not
only as pretty as they make 'em, but you know how to take care that you're
as pretty as they're made!"
The younger girl, puzzled, asked the difference.
"I mean that you've cultivated the garden, and haven't got to start digging
up the weeds and sweeping the lawn five minutes before you expect the
garden-party," explained Leslie, in the analogies that she loved. "Some girls
don't seem to think of 'making the most of themselves' until the man comes
along that they want to make much of them. Then it's so often a scramble.
You've had the instinct. You haven't got your appearance into any of the
little ways that put a man off without his knowing quite what he's been put
off by. One excellent thing about you——"
"Yes?" said Gwenna, rapt, expectant.
The particular unsolicited testimonial that followed was unexpected
enough.
"For one thing, Taffy, you're always—washed!"
"Why, of course. But, Leslie—surely—so's everybody!"
"Are they?" ejaculated Miss Long darkly. "They think they are. They simply
haven't grasped how much soap and water and loofah go to that, in big
towns. Half the girls aren't what I call tubbed. How many of them, with
bathrooms a yard from their bedrooms, bother to have a scrub at night as
well as in the mornings? It's at night they're grimy, Taff. It's at night they
leave it on, powder and all, to work into themselves until that 'unfresh' look
gets chronic. My dear, I tell you that the two-bath-a-day rule would give us
much less of the Lonely-and-Neglected Women Problem. There!"
Gwenna Williams, twisting between finger and thumb the stalk of a daisy
she had picked off the lawn, murmured something about it's being funny,
love having anything to do with how often a girl washed!

"Of course you think Leslie is revoltingly unpoetic to suggest it. But it's
sound enough," declared the elder girl. "Flowers don't look as if 'anything to
do with' earth had ever touched them, do they? But aren't their roots bedded
deep down in it right enough? All these hints I give you about Health and
Body-culture, these are the Roots of the Rose. Some of them, anyhow.
Especially washing. I tell you, Taff"—she spoke sepulchrally—"half the
'nice' girls we know don't wash enough. That's why they don't get half the
attention they'd like. Men like what they call a 'healthy-looking' girl. As
often as not it simply means the girl happens to be specially clean. Beauty's
skin-deep; moral, look after your skin. Now, you do. No soap on your face,
Taff?"
"No; just a 'clean' after washing, with Oatine and things like that."
"Right. Costs you about fourpence a week. It might cost four guineas, to
judge from the economical spirit of some girls over that," said Leslie.
"Then, to go on with this grossly material subject that is really the root of
Poetry, do you shampoo your hair nice and often? It looks thick and soft
and glossy and with the curls all big, as if you did."
"Oh, yes, I do. But then that's easy for me; it's short."
"Mine's long enough, but I do it religiously every fortnight. Pays me," said
Miss Long candidly as she went on working. "Untidy it may be, but it does
feel and smell all right. One of my medical students at the hospital where I
trained for five minutes—the boy Monty, the Dean's son—he said once that
the scent of my hair was like cherry-wood. 'Course I didn't confide in him
that I watered it well with bay rum and rosemary every night. Better than
being like Miss Armitage, the suffragette-woman here, who's so nice-
minded that she's 'above' pampering the body. What's the consequence?
She, and half the girls here, go about smelling—to put it plainly—like cold
grease and goloshes! Can they wonder that men don't seem to think they'd
be—be very nice to marry?"
"Some suffragettes, and sort of brainy women," hesitated Gwenna, "are
married."
"Yes; and have you observed the usual type of their husbands?" scoffed
Leslie. "Eugh!"

Gwenna, set upon her own subject, drew her back with innocent directness
to the matter in hand.
"What else ought one to do? Besides lots of washing, besides taking care of
one's hair and skin?"
"One's shape, of course," mused Leslie. "There you're all right. Thank
goodness—and me—that you've left off those weird, those unearthly stays
you came up to town in. My dear, they were like a hamper strapped round
the middle of you and sending your shoulders up, squared, into your ears!
You've got a pretty slope there now, besides setting free all your 'lines.' I
suppose elastic has pretty well solved the great corset question at last."
"Thirty shillings was a dreat-ful lot to give for just an elastic belt,"
murmured Gwenna, with her little hand at her supple waist. "Still, you said
I must, even if I didn't have a new blouse over it for eighteen months."
Again she looked up for guidance. "What else? What's a good thing, Leslie?
About clothes and that?"
"Oh, child, you know it all now, practically. Let's see—shoes"—she glanced
at the tiny brown one half-tucked under Gwenna's knee. "Boots and shoes
men seem to notice as much as any other part of your get-up. Attractive
shoes, even with an unfashionable skirt, will pull you through, when shabby
shoes would ruin the look of the smartest rig. They see that, even when
they've no idea what colour you've got on."
She went on to another hole in the stocking and continued: "As for colours,
a man does seem to notice 'a girl in black,' or all-white, or pale blue. I read
once that pale blue is 'the sex colour'—couldn't tell you, never worn it
myself. Managed well enough without it, too!" mused Leslie. "Then 'a girl
in pink' is very often a success in the evening. Men seem to have settled
vaguely that pink is 'the pretty girl's colour.' So then they fondly imagine
that anything that dares to wear it must be lovely. You needn't yet. Keep it
for later. Pink—judicious pink—takes off ten years, Taffy!"
"I—I suppose I shall still care what I look like," murmured the young girl
wistfully, "at thirty-two...."
"Pearl of Wisdom Number Forty-eight: When in doubt, wear the coat-and-
skirt (if it's decently cut) rather than the frock," decreed Leslie. "White silk

shirts they seem to like, always. (I'm glad I weaned you of the pin-on tie,
Taffy. It always looked like 'sixpence-three-farthings.' Whereas you buy a
piece of narrow ribbon for 'six-three,' you tie it, you fasten it with a plain
silver brooch to your shirt, and it looks good.)"
"I'll remember," murmured Gwenna devoutly, from the grass.
Leslie said, "One of the housemaids here—(never stoop to gossip with the
servants, dearest. It is so unhelpful and demoralising to both classes)—one
of the housemaids once told me that her young man had told her that
'nothing in the wide world set a young woman off like a nice, fresh, clean,
simple shirt blouse, same as what she was wearing then!' Of course, he was
a policeman. Not an aviator or a dean's son. But when it comes to a girl in
the case, I expect they're 'brothers under their skins,'" said Leslie Long.
Husky with much talking, she cleared her throat.
"Pearl of Wisdom Number Forty-nine: Be awfully careful about your collar,
the ends of your sleeves and the hem of your skirt. (Keeping a strong force
on the Frontier; that is always important.) Don't ever let your clothes be
'picturesque,' except for indoors. A man loathes walking along beside
anything that flaps in the wind, or anything that looks like what he calls
'fancy dress.' Outside, don't wear anything that you can't skip easily on to
the last bus in. Don't have 'bits' of anything about you. Try to be as neat as
the very dowdiest girl you know, without the dowdiness. Neatness, my
belovèd sisters, is the—— (Here am I talking like this; but why," she
interrupted herself, laughing, "why aren't I neater myself when in mufti? I
mean, when there's nobody about? 'In time of Peace, prepare for War.' It
would be better. Might get my hair out of its habit of descending at the
wrong moment.) And then, then, when all your good points are mobilised,
you wait for the Enemy."
"The enemy?" said little Gwenna, doubtfully.
"Yes. The Man. The opposing force, if you like. You can think and think
and wish and wish about him then until the whole air about you goes
shivery-quivery with it. 'Creating an atmosphere' is what they call it, I
believe. And get him well into the zone of that," advised Leslie. "For it's no
use the magnet being a magnet if it doesn't allow itself to get within miles

of a needle, is it? Might as well be any old bit of scrap-iron. Plenty of girls
—nice girls, I mean—not like that deplorably vulgar Miss Long. What she's
doing in a Club that's supposed to be for ladies I don't know. The horrid
things she says! Bad! Bad form! And I'm sure if she says those here, she
must have heaps of other worse things she could say, and probably does, to
some people! Er—oh, where was I? Ah, yes!" rattled on Leslie, with her
black head flung against the striped canvas back of the chair, her eyes on
her surprisingly neat darning. "I was going to say—plenty of nice girls muff
everything by putting too much distance that doesn't lend enchantment to
the view between themselves and the men that aren't often sharp enough to
deserve being called 'the needle.' Don't you make the mistake of those nice
girls, Taffy."
"Well, do I want to? But how can I help it? How can I even try to 'be'
anything, if he isn't there to know anything at all about it? I don't see him! I
don't meet him!" mourned the Welsh girl in the soft accent that was very
unmistakable to-day. "It's a whole fortnight, Leslie, since that lovely day in
the fields. It seems years. He hasn't written or anything. I've waited and
waited.... And sometimes I feel as if perhaps I shouldn't ever see him again.
After all, I never did see him properly before we went to your sister's that
night. Oh, isn't it awful to think what little chances make all the difference
to who one sees or doesn't see? I can't know for certain that I shall ever see
him again. Oh, Leslie!"
Leslie cut her last needleful of lilac silk and answered in the most
reassuringly matter-of-fact tone:
"But of course you will. If you want to enough. For instance—should you
like to see him at this dance?"
"Dance?" inquired Gwenna, dazed.
"Yes. This fancy-dress affair that I'm doing these stockings for. (I won these
in a bet from one of my Woolwich cadets.) This tamasha next week?"
"But—he isn't going, is he? And I'm not even asked."
"And can't these things ever be arranged?" demanded her chum, laughing.
"Can do, Taffy. Leslie will manage."

"Oh—but that's so kind!" murmured the younger girl, overcome.
"Do you expect me not to be 'kind'? To another girl, in love? Nay, oh Taffy!
I leave that to the 'nicest' of the girls who think it 'horrid' to think about
young men, even. Gem of Truth Number Eighty: It isn't the little girl who's
had plenty to eat who's ready to snatch the bun out of the hand of the next
little girl," said Leslie. She rolled the silk stockings into a ball, and rose in
sections from that sagging chair. "Leslie will see you're done all right. All
that remains to be discussed is the question of what you're to wear at the
dance."
This question Leslie settled as the two girls went for an after-supper stroll.
They went past the summer crowd patrolling the Spaniards Road, past the
patch of common and the benches and the pond by the flagstaff that make
that part of Hampstead so like a bit of the seaside. It was a golden evening.
In the hazy distance a small, greyish, winged object rose above the plane
which was Hendon, and moved to the left towards the blue taper of Harrow
Church, then sank out of sight again.
"There's one," sighed Gwenna, her eyes on the glowing sky, where the
biplane had been circling. "He's in it, perhaps."
"Little recking what plans are now being made for his welfare by me,"
observed Miss Long, as the two girls descended the hill and found at last a
birch thicket that was not held by Cockney lovers. She let herself down
cross-legged into the bracken. The Welsh girl perched herself on a branch of
the birch tree that was polished smooth as an old bench. Thus she sat among
the stirring leaves, head on one side, listening, her babyish face looking
down intent against the sky.
"Ah! That's you! 'A Cherub.' That's what your fancy dress is to be,"
pronounced the elder girl. "Just your own little crop-curled head with
nothing on it; and a ruff of cherub's wings up to your chin. Those little
wings off your hat will do beautifully. Below the ruff, clouds. Appropriate
background for cherubs. Your misty-white frock with no sash this time, and
one of those soap-bubble coloured scarves of Liberty gauze draped over it
to represent a rainbow. Little silver shoes. Strictly speaking, cherubs don't
have those, of course. But if you can't become a Queen of Spain—if you
can't be realistic, be pretty. Your own, nearly-always expression of dreamy

innocence will come in nicely for the costume," added Leslie. "Quite in
keeping."
"I'm sure I'm not that," protested the Welsh girl, piqued. "I'm not what they
call 'innocent.'"
"No, I don't think you are. 'What they call innocent' in a girl is such a
mixture. It means (a) no sense of humour at all; (b) the chilliest
temperament you can shiver at, and (c) a complete absence of observation.
But I believe you have 'beneath your little frostings the brilliance of your
fires,' Taffy. Yours is the real innocence."
"It isn't, indeed," protested the girl, who was young enough to wish to be
everything but what she was. "Why, look at the way you say anything to
me, Leslie!"
Leslie laughed, with a remoter glance. Then suddenly she dropped her black
head and put a light caress on the corner of the sunshine-yellow jersey coat.
"Be as sweet always," she said, lightly too. "Look as sweet—at the dance!"

CHAPTER XI
THE HEELS OF MERCURY

This injunction Gwenna carried out to the letter a week later. Never had she
looked so pretty as when she smiled at her own reflection in her bedroom
mirror above the cherub's ruff of wings on the evening of the dance.
It was given by some wealthy theatrical people whose "set" often
intermingled with that to which Hugo Swayne belonged. And it was held in
a couple of big marquees that had been set up on the lawn behind their
house; a lawn of which the banks sloped down to the willows that fringed
the river. There was a houseboat as buffet. There were Japanese lanterns
and fairy-lights. Red carpet had been put down to save costumes from dewy
grass or gravel.
For this dance was held at the height of that brief and grotesque period in
the English history when dancing and costume—more particularly when the
two were combined—became an affair of national moment. That was the
time when tickets for an Artists' Ball were gambled with even as stocks and
shares; when prizes for costume were given of which the value ran into
hundreds of pounds. When columns of responsible newspapers were given
up to descriptions of some "brilliant carnival." When Society, the Arts,
Commerce, the Stage and the Middle Class joined hands to dance the
maddest ring-o'-roses round some mulberry bush rooted in Heaven knew
what soil of slackness. That was the time when women who were mothers
and able-bodied men were ready to fritter away the remnant of their youth
on what could be no longer pleasure, since they chased it with such deadly
ardour, discussing the lightest types of merrymaking as if thereupon hung
the fate of an empire!
Even little cherub-headed Gwenna Williams found something disquieting
about the sight of this throng as she scanned it with anxious eyes, for—no,
HE hadn't come! He was late. Not here. Perhaps it was merely this that
caused her to dislike the look of some of these other people? That buxomly-

formed young woman of twenty-five tricked out in the costume of a child of
three! That tall, fragile youth in black grave-clothes, mouthing falsetto
patter! That pretty "lady" in spreading Georgian brocade and a white wig,
from whose crimsoned lips there came presently a robust masculine shout!
That Madame Potiphar in the—Good gracious!—it was another boy! No!
Gwenna didn't like them, somehow.... Perhaps it was just because they were
here and he, the only partner she wished for, had not arrived. Oh, supposing
he were not coming, after all?
Under the canvas roof where garlands swung and an installation of electric
light had been improvised, the crowd eddied and chattered and laughed
from one end to the other of the marquee where the long tables were laid
out. For it was a theatrical ball, late in beginning. Supper was to come first.
Gwenna, sitting beside a Futurist Folly whom her friend Leslie had
introduced vaguely as "one of my medical students," watched that supper-
crowd (still he did not come), as they feasted, leaning across the tables to
laugh and shriek to acquaintances. It was not the girls or the younger men
who seemed most boisterous, but those well over thirty. This surprised her.
And even when they were most unrestrained "they seemed," as the Welsh
girl put it, "to be making themselves do it, like." ...
Then she saw, by an opening in the canvas of the marquee, the apparition of
a steady man's figure, dead-white against the purple gloom outside. A figure
erect and neatly-shouldered under the close linen jacket of a Continental
waiter. Gwenna wondered where she had seen him before? In a
photograph? Or perhaps attending to one of the tables at Appenrodt's, when
she and Leslie had had tea after a matinée somewhere? She had seen that
young waiter, whose appearance was in such arresting contrast to the
bizarre costumes and painted faces of the noisy, laughing rabble about him.
His face was restrained and grave as that of some very young Daniel at the
feast of some modern Belshazzar.
Suddenly besides that still, watching apparition there came up another
boyish figure—typically English, in ordinary evening dress, and tall,
towering above the young German waiter of whom he was making some
inquiry. For a second they stood so; the waiter glancinc up, the newcomer,
Paul Dampier, with his blonde head tilted a little back, his eyes raking the
crowd.

"Ah! he's come," cried Gwenna aloud, but unheard in the universal clatter.
Her heart leaped....
But Paul Dampier, the airman, was swallowed up again almost directly in a
forest of odd, luridly-coloured head-dresses. He had not seen her.
And she did not see him again until some time after supper was ended, and
the throng was whirling and writhing in one-step and ragtime in the other
marquee.
Gwenna had danced with an Apache, with a Primitive Man, with Mr. Hugo
Swayne (in a mask and crazy-work domino as a Simultaneous Dynamism
of Something), and she was standing waiting, one of a figure in a revived
cotillon.
While the Viennese band swooped and tore through the waltz "Nights of
Gladness" a sheet had been fetched and was held up at the end of the
ballroom between a Morris-dancer and an incredibly handsome "Turco"
(who presently revealed himself as Mr. Swayne's French engineer), as a
screen before six of the girls. Six men were to be led up to it in turn; each to
choose his partner by the feet that were just allowed to show below the
sheet.
Soft laughter and twittering went on at the side where the half-dozen girls
stood.
"I say," exclaimed a damsel dressed as an Austrian Peasant to her crinolined
neighbour, "now we see why you were so anxious to explain why you were
wearing scarlet——"
"Of course he'd know yours anywhere," retorted the next girl.
"Ssh! Play fair!" protested the next. "Mustn't be recognised by your voice!"
"Oh, look at the Cherub girl's little shoes! Aren't they sweet? Just like silver
minnows peeping out——"
Here Gwenna, standing sedately beside the scintillating, mauve-limbed
Nijinski, Leslie, lifted her head in quick attention. She had recognised a
voice on the other side of the sheet. A voice deep and gentle and carrying
through the clatter of talk and the mad, syncopated music. It protested with

a laugh, "But, look here! I can't dance all these weird——" It was the
Airman—her Airman.
"Oh, he's just there. He's going to choose. If only he'd choose me," thought
Gwenna, breathlessly fluttering where she stood. Then she remembered.
"Oh, but he won't know me. He doesn't know I was to have silver shoes. If
there was only something! Something to show him which I was, I believe
he'd choose me. What could I do?"
Suddenly she thought what she could do.... Yes! Winged feet, of course, for
a girl who longed to fly!
Hurriedly she put her hands up to the ruff made of those white wings.
Hastily she plucked two of them out. How was she to fasten them to her
feet, though? Alas, for the short curls that deprived her of woman's
universal tool! She turned to her chum who was impatiently jigging in time
to the music, with her long black hair swathed for once securely under that
purple casque.
"Leslie, quick, a hairpin! Lend me two hairpins," she whispered and
snatched them from her friend's hand. Then, holding on to Leslie's mauve
silken shoulder to support herself, Gwenna raised first one small foot, and
then the other, fastening to each between the stocking and the silver shoe,
one of those tiny wings.
They were the feathered heels of Mercury, the flying-god, that the girl who
loved a flying-man allowed to peep under the curtain behind which she
stood.
Above the commotion of people laughing and talking all about her and the
music she felt that he was close, only just behind that sheet. She could have
put out a hand and, through that sheet, have touched his shoulder.... Mustn't,
of course.... Must play fair. Would he note the message of the winged feet?
Would he stop and choose her?
Or would he pass on?

CHAPTER XII
THE KISS WITHHELD

He did not pass.
He stopped—Gwenna felt the touch of his finger on the silver tip of her
shoe. All a-tremble with delight she moved aside, and stepped from behind
the screen to face the partner who had chosen her.
"Hullo!" exclaimed Paul Dampier, with real surprise in his smile. "I didn't
know it was you!"
Gwenna felt a little dashed, even as he slipped his arm about her and they
began to waltz. She looked up into the blonde face that seemed burned so
very brown against his dress-shirt, and she ventured, "You didn't know it
was me? I thought that was why you chose me—I mean, I thought because I
was somebody you knew——"
"Didn't know you were here. I never thought those were your feet!" he said
in that adorably deep and gentle voice of his. Adding, as they turned with
the turning throng, something that lifted her heart again, "I chose them
because they were the prettiest, I thought."
It was simply stated, as a fact. But this, the first compliment he'd paid her,
kept her silent with delight. Even as they waltzed, his arm about her
rainbow scarf, the girl felt the strongest wish—the wish that the dance were
at an end and she back in her bedroom at the Club, alone, so that she might
think and think again over what he had said. He'd thought she had the
prettiest feet!
"D'you think you could manage to spare me some others?" he asked at the
end of that waltz. "You know, you're about the only girl here that I know
except Miss Long."
"Leslie would introduce you to anybody you liked"—suggested little
Gwenna, feeling very good for having done so. And virtue brought its

reward. For with a glance about him at that coloured noisy crowd that
seemed a handful of confetti tossed by a whirlwind, he told her he didn't
think he wanted to be introduced, much. He wasn't really keen on a lot of
people he'd never seen. But if she and Miss Long would give him a few
dances——?
The girl from the country thought it almost too good to be true that she need
not share him with any of these dangerously fascinating London people
here, except Leslie!
In a pause they went up to where Leslie was standing near the band. Close
beside her the Morris-dancer was wrangling with Hugo Swayne in his
crazy-work domino, who declared, "Miss Long promised me every other
dance. A week ago, my dear man. Ten days ago——"
Yes; Leslie seemed to be engaged for every dance and every extra. She
tossed a "so sorry, Mr. Dampier!" over her shoulder, following it with an
imperceptible feminine grimace for Gwenna's benefit. With the first bars of
the next waltz she was whirled away by a tall youth garbed, becomingly
enough, as a Black Panther. The room was still clear. The Black Panther and
the boyishly slim girl in mauve tunic and tights waltzed, for one recurrence
of the tune, alone....
Gwenna, looking after that shapely couple, knew who he was; Monty Scott,
the Dean's son who had been a medical student when Leslie was at the
Hospital. He had followed her to the Slade to study sculpture, and already
he had proposed to her twice.
The tall and supple youth held Leslie, now, by his black-taloned gloves on
her strait hips. Leslie waltzed with hands clasped at the back of his neck.
Then, with a backward fling of her head and body, she twisted herself out of
his hold. She waltzed, holding the flat palms of her hands pressed lightly to
the palms of his. The music altered; Leslie varying her step to suit it. She
threw back her head again. Round and round her partner she revolved,
undulating from nape to heels, not touching him, not holding him save by
the attraction of her black eyes set upon his handsome eyes, and of her red
lips of a flirt, from which (it was evident!) the boy could not take his gaze.
Once more she shook her purple-casqued head; once more she let him catch
her about the hips. Over the canvas floor they spun, Leslie and Monty,

black-and-mauve, moving together with a voluptuous swing and zest that
marked them as the best-matched dancers in the room. Well-matched,
perhaps, for life, thought Leslie's chum.... But no; as they passed Gwenna
saw that the black eyes and the red mouth were laughing cynically together;
she caught, through the music, Leslie's clear "Don't talk! don't talk when
you're dancing, my good boy.... Spoils everything.... You can waltz.... You
know you've never anything to say, Mont!"
"I have. I say——"
Leslie waltzed on unheeding. Whatever he had to say she did not take it
seriously. She laughed over his shoulder to little Gwenna, watching....
Couple after couple had joined in now, following the swift tall graceful
black shape and the light-limbed mauve one as they circled by. A flutter of
draperies and tinsel, a toss and jingle of stage accoutrements; the dancers
were caught and sped by the music like a wreath of rainbow-bubbles on the
rise and fall of a wave.
Gwenna, the Cherub-girl, was left standing for a wistful moment by the side
of the tall Airman in evening dress.
He said, through the music, "Who's your partner for this?"
She had forgotten. It was the Futurist Folly again. He had to find another
partner. Gwenna danced with her Airman again ... and again....
Scarcely realising how it happened—indeed, how do these arrangements
make themselves?—this boy and girl from a simpler world than that of this
tinsel Bohemia spent almost the whole of the rest of that evening as they
had spent that day in the country, as she would have asked to spend the rest
of their lives together.
Some of the time they danced in the brilliant, heated marquee under the
swinging garlands and the lamps. Then again they strolled out into the
Riverside garden. Here it was cool and dewy and dim except where, from
the tent-openings, there was flung upon the grass a broad path of light,
across which flitted, moth-like, the figures of the dancers. Above the
marquee the summer night was purple velvet, be-diamonded with stars. At

the end of the lawn the river whispered to the willows and reflected, here
the point of a star, there the red blot of a lantern caught in a tree.
Hugo Swayne went by in this bewildering stage, light-and-shade with a
very naughty-looking lady who declared that her white frock was merely
"'Milk,' out of 'The Blue Bird.'" In passing he announced to his cousin that
the whole scene was like a Conder fan that he had at his rooms. Groups of
his friends were simply sitting about and making themselves into quite good
Fragonards. Little Gwenna did not even try to remember what Fragonard
was. None of these people in this place seemed real to her but herself and
her partner. And the purple dusk and velvet shadows, the lights and colours,
the throb and thrill of the music were just the setting for this "night of
gladness" that was only a little more substantial than her other fancies.
More quickly it seemed to be passing! Every now and again she exultantly
reminded herself, "I am here, with him, out of all these people! He is only
speaking to me! I have him to myself—I must feel that as hard as I can all
the time now, for we shall be going home at the end of this Ball, and then I
shall be alone again.... If only I could be with him for always! How
extraordinary, that just to be with one particular person out of all the world
should be enough to make all this happiness!"
With her crop-curled head close against his shoulder as they danced, she
stole at her boyish partner the shy, defiantly possessive glance that a child
gives sometimes to the favourite toy, the toy that focusses all his dreams.
This was "the one particular person out of all the world" whose company
answered every conscious and unconscious demand of the young girl's
nature even as his waltz-step suited her own.
Yet she guessed that this special quiet rapture could not last. Even before
the end of the dance the end of this must surely come.

It must have been long hours after the waltz-cotillon that they strolled down
to a sitting-out arbour that had been arranged at the end of the path nearest
the river. It was softly lighted by two big Chinese lanterns, primrose-
coloured, ribbed like caterpillars, with a black base and a splash of

patterned colour upon each; a rug had been thrown on the grass, and there
were two big white-cane chairs, with house-boat cushions.
Here the two sat down, to munch sandwiches, drink hock-cup.
"I remembered to bring two glasses, this time," said Paul Dampier.
Gwenna smiled as she nodded. Her eyes were on those silver white-finned
minnows of her feet, that he had called pretty.
He followed her glance as he took another sandwich. "Rather a good idea,
wings to your shoes because you're supposed to be a cherub."
"Oh, but that's not what the wings were supposed to be for," she said
quickly. "I only put those in at the waltz-cotillon so that——"
Here she stopped dead, wishing that the carpeted grass might open at those
winged feet of hers and swallow her up!
How could she have given herself away like this? Let him know how she
had wanted him to choose her! when he hadn't even known she was there;
hadn't been thinking about her!
She flurried on: "S-so that they should look more like fancy-dress shoes
instead of real ones!"
He turned his head, dark and clean-cut against the lambent swaying lantern.
He said, out of the gloom that spared her whelming blush, "Oh, was that it!
I thought," he added with a teasing note in his voice, "I thought you were
going to say it was to remind me that I'd promised to take you flying, and
that it's never come off yet!"
Gwenna, hesitating for a moment, sat back against the cushions of the
wicker-chair. She looked away from him, and then ventured a retort—a tiny
reproach.
"Well—it hasn't come off."
"No, you know—it's too bad, really. I have been most frightfully busy," he
apologised. "But we'll fix it up before you go to-night, shall we? You must
come." At this he was glad to see that the Little Thing looked really pleased.

She was awfully nice and sensible, he thought for the severalth time. Again
the odd wish took him that had taken him in that field. Yes! He would like
to touch those babyish-looking curls of hers with a finger. Or even to
rumple them against his cheek.... Another most foolish and
incomprehensible wish had occurred to him about this girl, even in her
absence. Apropos of nothing, one evening in his rooms he had remembered
the look of that throat of hers; round and sturdy and white above her low
collar. And he had thought he would rather like to put his own hands about
it, and to pretend—quite gently, of course—to throttle the Little Thing. To-
night she'd bundled it all up in that sort of feather boa.... Pity.... She was
ever so much prettier without.
Fellow can't say that sort of thing to a girl, though, thought the simple Paul.
So he merely said, instead, "Let me stick that down for you somewhere,"
and he leant forward and took from her the plate that had held her cress-
and-chicken sandwiches. Then he crossed his long legs and leant back
again. It was jolly and restful here in the dim arbour with her; the sound of
music and laughter came, much softened, from the marquee. Nearer to
them, on the water below the willows, there was a little splashing and
twittering of the moor-hen, roused by something, and the scarcely audible
murmur of the Thames, speeding past House-boat Country to London ... the
workaday Embankment.... It was jolly to be so quiet....

Then, into the happy silence that had fallen between them, there came a
sound—the sound of the crunching of gravel. Gwenna looked up. Two
figures sauntered past down the path; both tall and shapely and black
against the paling, star-sprinkled sky above the frieze of sighing willows.
Then Leslie's clear, careless voice drifted to their ears.
"Afraid not.... Anyhow, what on earth would be the good of caring 'a
little'?... I look upon you as such an infant—in arms——"
Here there was a bass mutter of, "Make it your arms, and I don't mind!"
Then Leslie's insouciant: "I knew you'd say that obvious thing. I always do
know what you're going to do or say next ... fatal, that.... A girl can't want to
marry a man when——"

Apparently, then, the Dean's son was proposing again?
As the couple of free-limbed black shadows passed nearer, Paul Dampier
kicked his heel against his chair. He moved in it to make it creak more
noisily.
Good manners wasted!
For Leslie, as she afterwards told her chum, took for her motto upon such
occasions, "And if the others see, what matter they?"
Her partner seemed oblivious that there were any "others" sitting in the
shadows. The couple passed, leaving upon the night-breeze a trail of
cigarette-smoke (Leslie's), and an indistinguishable growl, presumably from
the Black Panther.
Leslie's voice floated back, "Not in the mood. Besides! You had, last time,
'to soften the edges,' as you call it."
More audibly her partner grumbled, "What's a kiss you've had? About as
satisfying as last summer's strawberry-ice——"

A mere nothing—the incident.
Yet it brought (or hastened) a change into the atmosphere of that arbour
where, under the giant glowworms of lights swinging above them, two
young people sat at ease together without speaking.
For Gwenna, envious, thought, "Leslie can make a man think of nothing but
her, even when she's 'not in the mood!' I can't. Yet I believe I could, but for
one thing. Even now I don't know that he isn't thinking about That Other
——"
"That Other" was her rival, that machine of his that Gwenna had not
mentioned all the evening....
It had come, she knew, that duel between the Girl and the Aeroplane for the
first place in the heart of a Flying Man. A duel as old as the world, between
the thing a man greatly loves, and that which he loves more greatly still.

She thought of Lovelace who "loved Honour more." She thought of the cold
Sea that robs the patient, warm-hearted women ashore, of the icy Pole
whose magnetism drew men from their wives. The work that drew the
thoughts of her Airman was that Invention that was known already as his
Fiancée....
"Leslie says it's not as bad as if it were another woman, but I see her as a
woman," thought the silent, fanciful girl, "I see her as a sort of winged
dragon with a figure-head—aeroplanes don't have figure-heads, but this one
seems to me to have, just like some of those vessels that come into the
harbour at Aberdovey. Or like those pictures of harps that are half a woman.
Smooth red hair she has, and a long neck stretched out, and a rather thin,
pale, don't-care sort of face like that girl called Muriel. And—and eagle's
talons for hands. That's how I see that Fiancée of his, with claws for hands
that won't, won't ever let him go...."
A puff of wind knocked one of the lanterns above their heads softly against
the other; the willows rustled silkily outside. Gwenna sat motionless,
holding her breath. Suddenly her reverie had broken off with an abrupt,
unspoken—"but it's me he's thinking of now...."
Paul Dampier had been lightly amused by that passing of the other couple.
That friend of hers, Miss Long, was more than a bit of a flirt, he considered.
This Little Thing wasn't. Couldn't imagine her giving a kiss as some girls
give a dance; or even to "soften" a refusal.... Her mouth, he found himself
noticing, was full and curly and exactly the colour of the buds of those fox-
gloves that grew all over the shop at her place in Wales. It was probably
softer than those curls of hers that he would (also) like to touch.
Idiotic idea, though——
But an idea which is transmittable.
Gwenna, thrilled by this message which she had caught by a method older
and less demonstrable than Marconi's, realised: "He heard that, just now;
that boy wanting to kiss Leslie.... He's thinking, now, that he might kiss
me."
The boy scarcely at arm's length from her thought a little confusedly, "I say,
though.... Rotten thing to do...."

The girl thought, "He would like to. What is he waiting about? We shall
have to go directly——"
For the sky outside had been swiftly paling. Now that pure pallor was
changing to the glow of Abyssinian gold. Dawn! From the marquee came a
louder blare of music; two long cornet notes and then a rollicking tune—
The old "Post Horn" Galop—the last dance. Presently a distant noise of
clapping and calls for "Extra"! There would be no time for extras, she'd
heard. They would have to go after this. People were beginning to go.
Already they had heard the noise of a car. His chair creaked as he moved a
little sidewards.
He told himself, more emphatically, "Beastly rotten thing to do. This Little
Thing would never speak to me again——"
And the girl sat there, without stirring, without glancing at him. Yet every
curve of her little body, every eyelash, every soft breath she drew was
calling him, was set upon "making" him. What could she do more to make
herself, as Leslie called it, a magnet? Love and innocent longing filled her
to the eyes, the tender fox-glove buds of lips that could have asked for
nothing better. Even if this were the only time! Even if she never saw him
again!
Wasn't he going to set the crown upon her wonderful dream of a summer
night?
"No, look here," the boy remonstrated silently with something in himself;
something that seemed to mock him. He lifted his fair head with a gleam of
that pride that goes so often before a fall. "Dash it all——"
"He will!" the girl thought breathlessly. And with her thought she seemed to
cast all of her heart into the spell....

And then, quite suddenly, something happened whereby that spell was
snapped. Even as she thought "he will," he rose from his chair.
He took a step to the entrance of their arbour, his shoulders blotting out the
glowing light.

"Listen," he said.
And Gwenna, rising too, listened, breathlessly, angrily. He would not—she
had been cheated. What was it that had—interfered? Presently she heard it,
she heard what she would have taken for the noise of another of the
departing motors.
Through the clatter from the last galop it was like, yet unlike, the noise of a
starting car. But there was in it an angrier note than that.
It is angry for want of any help but its own. A motor-car has solid earth
against which to drive; a steamship has dense water. But the Machine that
caused this noise was beating her metal thews against invisible air.
It was an aeroplane.
"Look!" said Paul Dampier.
Far away over the still benighted land she rose, and into that glory of
Abyssinian gold beyond the river. Gwenna, moving out on to the path,
watched the flight. Before, she had wondered that these soaring things
didn't come down. Now, she would have wondered if they had done so.
Steady as if running on rails, the aeroplane came on overhead; her sound as
she came now loud, now soft, but always angry, harsh—harshness like that
of a woman who lives to herself and her strivings, with no comradeship of
Earth on which to lean. Against the sky that was her playground she showed
as a slate-coloured dragonfly—a purple Empress of the Air soaring on and
on into the growing dazzle of the day.
"Oh, it is beautiful, though," cried the girl on the path, looking up, and
losing for that moment the angry sense that had fallen upon her of pleasure
past, of the end of the song. "It is wonderful."
"Pooh, that old horse-bus," laughed Paul Dampier above her shoulder, and
mentioned the names of the machine, the flyer in her. He could pick them
out of the note of her angry song.
"That will be nothing to my P.D.Q.," he declared exultantly as they walked
on up the path towards the marquee. "You wait until I've got my aeroplane

working! That'll be something new in aviation, you know. Nearest thing yet
to the absolute identity of the Man with the Machine."
He yawned a little with natural sleepiness, but his interest was wide-awake.
He could have gone on until breakfast-time explaining some fresh point
about his invention, while the girl in those little silver-heeled shoes paced
slowly up the path beside him.... He was going on.
"Make all those other types, English or foreign, as clumsy as the old-
fashioned bone-shake bicycle. Fact," he declared. "Now, take the Taube—
Hullo——"
"Bitte," said a voice.
The German word came across a pile of plates deftly balanced upon a
young man's forearm. That arm was clad in the sleeve of a trim white
jacket, buttoned over a thick and compact little chest. The waiter's hair was
a short, upright golden stubble, and another little stubble of gold sprouted
upon his steady upper lip. He had come up, very softly, behind them.
He spoke again in excellent English.
"By your leave, sir."
Dampier made way for him, and he passed. Gwenna, with a little shiver,
looked after him. The sight of the young waiter whom she had noticed at
the beginning of the evening had given her an unreasonable little chill....
Perhaps it was because his softly-moving, white figure against those
willows had loomed so like a ghost....
Dampier said, "Rotten job for a man, I always think, hanging about and
picking up things for other people like that."
"Yes," said Gwenna, absently, sadly. It was the end now. Quite the end.
They'd got to go home. Back to everyday life. The Club, the Works.
Nothing to live for, except—Ah, yes! His promise that he would take her
flying, soon....
Above in the glowing sky the aeroplane was dwindling—to disappear. The
waiter, turning a corner of the dark shrubbery, had also disappeared as they

passed. From behind the shelter of the branches he was watching,
watching....
He was looking after Paul Dampier, the Airman—the inventor of the newest
aeroplane.

CHAPTER XIII
THE FLYING DREAM

"Those dreams come true that are dreamed on Midsummer night!"
This saying Gwenna had read somewhere. But she had forgotten all about it
until, on the night of June 24th, 1914, she dreamed the most vivid dream of
all her twenty-two years.
Many people have that same dream—or versions of it—often in a lifetime.
Scientists have written papers on the whys and hows of it. They tack a long
name to it. But little Gwenna Williams had never heard of "levitation." To
herself she called it afterwards "that flying dream."
It seemed to her that when it began she was still half-awake, lying in her
narrow white bed with the blankets tossed on to the floor of her Club
bedroom, for it was a sultry night and close, in spite of her window on to
the garden being wide open and allowing what breeze there was to blow full
upon the girl's face, stirring her curls on the pillow, the ruffle of her night-
gown as she lay.
Suddenly a violent start ran over the whole of her body. And with that one
jerk she seemed to have come out of herself. She realised, first, that she was
no longer lying down, curled up in the kitten-like ball which was her
attitude for sleeping. She was upright as if she were standing.
But she was not standing. Her feet were not resting on anything. Looking
down, she found, without very much surprise, that she was poised, as a lark
is poised, in mid-air, at some immeasurable height. It was night, and the
earth—a distant hassock of dim trees and fields—was far, far below her.
She found herself moving downwards through the air.
She was flying!

Gently, gently, she sped, full of a quiet happiness in her new power, which,
after all, did not seem to be something new, but something restored to her.
"Dear me, I've flown before, I know I have," said Gwenna to herself as she
swooped downwards in her dream, with the breeze cool on the soles of her
little bare feet. "This is as lovely as swimming! It's lovelier, because one
doesn't have to do anything. So silly to imagine that one has to have wings
to fly!"
Now she was nearer to earth, she was hovering over a dark stream of water
with reflections that circled and broke. And beside it she saw something that
seemed like a huge lambent mushroom set in the dim fields below her. This
was a lighted tent, and from it there floated up to her faintly the throb and
thrill of dance-music, the two long-drawn-out notes of the "Post Horn"
Galop, the noise of laughter and clapping.... She wondered whom she
would see, if she were to alight. But the Force in her dream bore her up
again, higher, and away. She found presently that she had left the dancing-
tent far behind, and that what streamed below her was no longer a river with
reflections, but a road, white with dust, and by the side of it a car was
standing idle by the dusty hedge. On the other side of the hedge, as she flew
over, the grass was clean and full of flowers, and half-way up the field
stood a brooding elm that cast a patch of shadow.
"Sunshine, now!" wondered Gwenna. "How quickly it's changed from
night!"
She felt from head to foot her body light and buoyant as a drifting thistle-
down as on she went through the air. Close beside her, against a bank of
cloud, she noticed some black V-shaped thing that slanted and flapped slow
wings, then planed downwards out of her sight. "That's that crow. A
dihedral angle, they call it," said the dreaming girl. Her next downward
glance, as she sped upwards now, without effort, above the earth, showed
her a map of distant grey roofs and green trees, and something that looked
like a giant soap-bubble looming out of the mist.
"St. Paul's! London!" thought Gwenna. "I wonder shall I be able to look
down on our Westminster place."

Then, glancing about her, she saw that the scene had suddenly changed. She
was no longer in the free air with clouds about her as she flew like a little
white windblown feather with the earth small as a toy puzzle below. She
was between walls, with her feet not further than her own height from the
ground. Night again in a room. A long, narrowish room with an open
window through which came the light of a street-lamp that flung a bright
patch upon the carpet, the edge of a dressing-table, the end of a white bed.
Upon the bed, from which the coverings had been flung down, there lay
sleeping, curled up like a kitten, a figure in a white, ruffled night-gown,
with a cherub's head thrown backwards against the pillow. Gwenna, looking
down, thought, "Where have I seen her?"
In the next flash she had realised.
Herself!... Her own sleeping body that her dreaming soul had left for this
brief flight....
A start more violent than that with which her dream had begun shook the
dreamer as she came to herself again.
She woke. With a pitiful little "Oh," sounding in her own ears, she sat up in
bed and stared about her Club bedroom with its patches of light from the
street-lamp outside. She was trembling from head to foot, her curls were
wet with fright, and her first thought as she sprang out of bed and to the
door of that ghostly room was "I must go to Leslie."
But Leslie's bedroom was a story higher. Gwenna paused in the corridor
outside the nearest bedroom to her own. A thread of light showed below the
door. It was a Miss Armitage's, and she was one of the Club members, who
wrote pamphlets on the Suffrage, and like topics, far into the night.
Gwenna, feeling already more normal and cheered by the sense of any
human nearness, decided, "I won't go to her. She'll only want to read aloud
to me.... She laughed at me because I said I adored 'The Forest Lovers,' but
what books does she like? Only those dreat-ful long novels all about
nothing, except the diseases of people in the Potteries. Or else it'll be one of
her own tracts.... Somehow she does make everything she's interested in
sound so ugly. All those intellectual ones here do! Whether it's Marriage or
Not-getting-married, you really don't know which would be the most dull,

from these suffragettes," reflected the young girl, pattering down the
corridor again. "I'll go back to bed."
She went back, snuggling under the clothes. But she could not go to sleep
again for some time. She lay curled up, thinking.
She had thought too often and too long of that dance now three whole
weeks behind her. She had recalled, too many times! every moment of it;
every word and gesture of her partner's, going over and over his look, his
laugh, the tone in which he'd said, "Give me this waltz, will you?" All that
memory had had the sweetness smelt out of it like a child's posy. By this
time it was worn thin as heirloom silver. She turned from it.... It was then
she remembered that saying about the Midsummer Night's Dream. If that
were true, then Gwenna might expect soon to fly in reality.
For after all her plans and hopes, she had not even yet been taken up by
Paul Dampier in an aeroplane!
In that silent, unacknowledged conflict between the Girl and the Machine,
so far scarcely a score could have been put down to the credit of the Girl. It
was she who had always found herself put back, disappointed, frustrated.
This had been by the merest accidents.
First of all, the Airman hadn't been able to ask her and Miss Long to his
rooms in Camden Town to look at his model aeroplane. He had been kept
hanging on, not knowing which Saturday-to-Monday Colonel Conyers ("the
great Air-craft Conyers") was going to ask him down to stay at that house in
Ascot, to have another talk over the subject of the new Machine. ("A score
for the Machine," thought the girl; wakeful, tossing on her bed.)
She did not even know that the week after, on a glorious and cloudless
Saturday, young Dampier, blankly unaware that there was any conflict
going on in his world! had settled to ask "the Little Thing" to Hendon. On
the Friday afternoon, however, his firm had sent him out of town, down to
the factory near Aldershot. Here he had stayed until the following Tuesday,
putting up at the house of a kindred soul employed at that factory, and
wallowing in "Shop." ... Another win for the Machine!
The following Sunday the cup had been almost to Gwenna's lips. He had
called for her. Not in the car, this time. They had taken the Tube to Golders

Green; the motor-bus to Hendon Church; and then the path over the fields
together. Ah, delight! For even walking over the dusty grass beside that
swinging boy's figure in the grey tweed jacket was a joyous adventure. It
had been another when he had presently stooped and said, "Shoelace come
untied; might trip over that. I'll do it up," and had fastened her broad brown
shoe-ribbon securely for her. Her shoes had been powdered white. He had
taken his handkerchief out of his pocket and had flicked the dust off,
saying, as he did so, in a tone of some interest, "I say, what tiny feet girls do
have!"
("Pie for you, Taffy, of course," as Leslie had said later, when she'd heard of
this. "Second time he'd noticed them.")
Gwenna, in a tone half pleased, half piqued, had told him, "All girls don't
have them so small! And yet you don't seem to notice anything about people
but their feet." She had walked on, delightedly conscious of his laugh, his
amused, "Oh, don't I?" and his downward glance.... Wasn't this, she had
thought, something of a score at last for the Girl!
But hadn't even that small score been wiped out on the flying-ground?
There Gwenna had stood, waiting, gleeful and agitated; her mist-blue scarf
aflutter in the brisk breeze, but not fluttering as wildly as her heart....
And then had come frustration once again! Paul Dampier's deep and
womanishly-soft tone saying, "I say, I'm afraid it's going to be a bit too
blowy, after all. Wind's rising all the time;" and that other giant voice from
the megaphone announcing:
"Ladies and gentul Men! As the wind
is now blowing forty miles an hour it
will be im possible to make passenger
flights!"
Oh, bitter defeat for the Girl! For, this time, there had been no idyllic picnic
à deux to console her for any disappointment. There had been nothing but a
rather noisy tea in the Pavilion, with a whole chattering party of the young
Airman's acquaintances; with another young woman who had meant to fly,
but who had seemed resigned enough that it was "not to be, this afternoon,"
and with half a dozen strange, irrelevant young men; quite silly, Gwenna

had thought them. Two of them had given Gwenna a lift back to Hampstead
in their car afterwards, since Paul Dampier had explained that he "rather
wanted to go on with one of the other fellows"—somewhere! Gwenna
didn't know where. Only, out of her sight! Out of her world! And she was
quite certain, even though he hadn't said so, that he had been bent on some
quest that had something to do with the Fianceé of his, the "P.D.Q.," the
Machine!

CHAPTER XIV
AN AWAKENING

The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turned her
pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after the starlings had
been twittering and the milk-carts rattling by in the suburban road outside.
She awoke, dispirited. She came down late for breakfast; Leslie had already
gone off to her old lady in Highgate. Over the disordered breakfast-table
Miss Armitage was making plans, with some of the other Suffrage-workers,
to "speak" at a meeting of the Fabian Nursery. Those young women talked
loudly enough, but they didn't pronounce the ends of any of their words;
hideously slipshod it all sounded, thought the Welsh girl fretfully. Her world
was a desert to her, this fine June morning. For at the Westminster office
things seemed as dreary as they had at the Club. She began to see what
people meant when they said that on long sea-voyages one of the greatest
hardships was never to see a fresh face, but always the same ones, day after
day, well-known to weariness, all about one. It was just like that when one
was shut up to work day after day in an office with the same people. She
was sick to death of all the faces of all the people here. Miss Butcher with
her Cockney accent! Miss Baker with her eternal crochet! The men in the
yards with their awful tobacco and trousers! Nearly all men, she thought,
were ugly. All old men. And most of the young ones; round backs, horrid
hands, disgusting skins—Mr. Grant, for instance! (with a glance at that
well-meaning engineer, when he brought in some note for Mabel Butcher).
Those swarthy men never looked as if they had baths and proper shaves.
He'd a head like a black hatpin. And his accent, thought the girl from the
land where every letter of a word is pronounced, his accent was more
excruciating than any in Westminster.
"Needn't b'lieve me, if you don't want. But it's true-oo! Vis'ters this
aft'noon," he was saying to Miss Butcher. "Young French Dook or Comp or
something, he is; taking out a patent for a new crane. Coming in early with
some swagger friends of his. Wants to be shown the beauties of the buildin',

I s'pose. Better bring him in here and let him have a good look at you girls
first thing, hadn't I? S'long! Duty calls. I must away."
And away he went, leaving Miss Butcher smiling fondly after him, while
Miss Williams wondered how on earth any girl ever managed to fall in love,
considering there was nothing but young men to fall in love with. All
ordinary young men were awful. And all young men were ordinary....
Except, now and again, one ... far away ... out of reach.... Who just showed
how different and wonderful a thing a lover might be! If one could only,
only ever get near him!—instead of being stuck down here, in this perfectly
beastly place——
As the morning wore on, she found herself more and more dissatisfied with
all her surroundings. And for a girl of Gwenna's sort to be thoroughly
dissatisfied predicts one thing only. She will not long stay where she is.
Impatiently she sighed over her typing-table. Irritably she fidgeted in her
chair. This was what jerked the plump arm of Ottilie Becker, who was
passing behind her, and who now dropped a handful of papers on to the new
boards.
"Zere! Now see what you have made me do," said the German girl good-
naturedly enough. "My letter! Pick him up, Candlesticks-maker."
"Oh, pick him up yourself," retorted Gwenna school-girlishly, crossly. "It
wasn't my fault."
At this tone from a colleague of whom she was genuinely fond, tears rose to
Miss Becker's blue eyes. Miss Butcher, coming across to the centre table,
saw those tears.
"Well, really, anybody might apologise," she remarked reproachfully,
"when they've upset anybody."
At this rebuke Gwenna's strained nerves snapped.
An Aberystwith Collegiate School expression rose naturally to her lips
—"Cau dy gêg!" She translated it: "Shut up!" she said, quite rudely.
Then, the moment after she had given way to this little outburst of temper
she felt better. She was ready to be on the best of terms again with her

fellow-typists. They, as Miss Butcher would have said, "weren't having
any." They turned offended backs upon her. They talked pointedly to each
other, not to her.
"That's a precious long letter you've got written there, Baker," said Miss
Butcher, helping to gather up the half-dozen thin foreign sheets, covered
with neat, pointed German writing. "Is that to the beloved brother?"
Miss Becker nodded her plait-wreathed head as she put the letter that
began: "Geliebter Karl!" into the grey-lined envelope.
"He likes to hear what they make—do—at the works. Always he ask," she
said, "after what they do. And who come hier; and where everythings is
kept."
"Gracious! I do believe he's a regular German spy, like in the magazines,
this brother of yours," smiled Miss Butcher lightly. "Don't you give away
any of our State secrets, Baker, will you? We'd be having the authorities,
whoever they are, poking round and inquiring. Awful if England and your
country went to war, wouldn't it?—and you were supposed to be 'the
Enemy'!"
She spoke as if of something that was more fantastic than Gwenna's flying
dream of the night before. The German typist answered in the same strain.
"If it was war, I would speak to Karlchen's regiment that your house in
Clapham and your people should be saved," she promised. "But he is not
thinking now of war; he interests himself very much for buildings (because
our father is architect). And for maps of the river, and such. So I must write
on him every week a long letter.... We go out to-day to have our lunch,
yes?"
The two went out together towards Whitehall. The Welsh girl was left in
Coventry—and the deserted offices.
She didn't want any lunch. She drank a glass of tepid tap-water from the
dressing-room. She ate some strawberries, bought in their little flat basket
as she had come along. Then, hatless, and in her thin, one-piece dress of
grey linen, she strolled out into the yard for a breath of air.

It was empty and hot and sunny. Gwenna looked up from the wood-littered
ground where the ubiquitous London pigeons strutted and flirted and "Croo
—croo—do—I—do"-ed about her feet. Overhead, that giant lacework on
its iron crochet-hooks looked as if its pattern had been drawn with a pen
and black ink against the opaque blue-grey sky. The sight of that far-off
pinnacle put into her head again the thought of flying.
"I don't believe that I shall ever be as high up as that, with the blue beneath
me, like I've always wanted!" reflected the young girl, dolefully looking up.
"I believe that last night in my dream is all the flying I'm ever going to have
had!"
And again that longing took her. That pure longing to be high; above the
Law that clogs the children of Man to the Earth from which he came. To
feel the unfettered air above and below and about her all at once!... But
what could she do to gratify the impulse even a little?
Only one thing.
She might climb.
The idea with which she started off on her mad prank was to climb up to
that iron lattice of lacework; to run up that as a sailor climbs the rope-
ladders of his masts, and thence from the very highest peak attainable to
look down on London, even as last night she had looked down on it from
her dream.
Her start was not in the open air at all, but from the bottom of the
scaffolding inside, where it was all beams and uprights and floors of planks.
It reminded Gwenna of being underneath the old wooden pier at Aberdovey,
and looking up. She went up ladders, through trap-doors, walked over
wooden floors to other ladders until she got up to the last trap-door and
through it out of the shadow and the stuffiness to the sunshine and the fresh
air again. She stood on the top platform of the gantry which supported that
engine and the wheels that worked (she supposed) the iron lattice that was
still far above her head.
Presently she would climb that. She knew that she could. She was never
afraid of heights. Her head was steady enough. Her feet in their brown
shoes were as sure as the feet of the tiny sheep that picked their way up the

rocky steeps of her Welsh mountains. She could climb as well as any of the
men ... but for the moment she rested, standing by the platform hand-
railing, breathing in the freshened breeze.
The birds of the City—pigeons and sparrows—were taking their short
flights far beneath her perch. All London was spread below her, as it had
been in that flying dream, and with as strong a sense of security as in the
dream she looked down upon it.
There, between the forests of chimney-pots, gleamed that highway of the
Thames, blue-grey now as it reflected the sky, winding out of the distance
that meant the clean, green country and the willows below the lawns where
people had danced; flowing on into London that sullied it, and burdened it
with her barges, and spanned it with her bridges, but could not stay it; on
and out its waters passed towards Greenwich and the Docks and the tall
ships and the North Sea!
And there on its bank was the office, the dwindled yard from which
Gwenna had started. The men returning....
The whole place looked nothing more than a hen-run full of fowls. Their
voices ascended, more loudly than she would have expected to hear from
their diminished figures. How funny to see what midgets the creatures
looked from here, and to remember how majestically important each
considered himself! thought little Gwenna, forgetting that from the yard she
herself, with her grey linen frock, her brown feet and ankles, must look no
larger than a roosting pigeon.
She looked down, past the railing and the ends of timbers, feeling
immeasurably aloof from everybody in her world. She wished she need
never go down to it again.
"I've a good mind to give notice at the office, whatever, and go somewhere
quite different!" she thought defiantly, and immediately she felt elated. A
weight of depression seemed to have dropped from her already. Up, up
went the feather-weight spirits of Youth. She had forgotten for this moment
the longing and frustration of the last weeks, the exasperations of this
morning, her squabble with those other girls. She had climbed out of all
that....

Now, before she left this place, she would do something that none of the
girls she knew would dare. She'd climb further.
She turned to take a step towards the crane.

Then something gave her a start as violent as that in which she had, that
night before, been jerked out of her dream.
For now, into her absorbed musing there had broken without warning the
sound of a voice. It had seemed to have come out of nothing, from behind
her, and it had said, with a laugh deep and soft at once, "My machine? Oh,
yes.... Good of you to remember her——"
Paul Dampier's voice!
Little Gwenna, with her back to the trap-door, and wrapped in her own
thoughts, had heard nothing of the steps of five pairs of feet coming up the
way that she had come. In the violence of her surprise of hearing a voice, so
often heard in her daydreams now, here, in this unexpected place between
sky and ground, she started so that she lost her balance.
The girl's foot slipped. She fell. She was half over the platform—one small
foot and ankle stretched out over the giddy height as that crane was
stretched. She clutched on the crook of a slender grey arm, the railing of the
platform—So, for an agonised moment, she hung.
But hardly had she cried out before there was the dash of a tall man's figure
across the planks from the trap-door.
"It's all right—I've got you," said Paul Dampier, and caught her up from the
edge, in his arms.
They held her. That armful of a girl, soft and warm as one of the grey
pigeons, was crushed for a moment against the boy's chest. She was closer
to him than she had been in any of those waltzes. Yet it seemed no
strangeness to be so near—feeling his heart beat below hers, feeling the
roughness of his tweed jacket through the thin linen of her frock. She felt as
she'd felt about flying, in that dream of hers. "I must have known it all
before."

Then, dazed but happy, resting where she seemed to belong, she thought in
a twink, "I shall have to let go. Why can't I stay like this?... Oh, it's very
cruel. There! Now I have let go. But he won't.... He's getting his balance."
He had taken a step backwards.
Then she slid through his arms. She slipped, lightly as a squirrel slips down
the length of a beech, to the wooden floor of the platform.
Cruel; yes, cruel! And to add to the cruelty that such a moment must end,
the Airman, when she left his enforced clasp, scarcely looked at her. He
barely returned her greeting. He did not answer her breathless thanks. He
turned away from her—whom he had saved. Yes! He left her to the
meaningless babble of the others (she recognised now, in a dazed way, that
there were other men with him on the scaffolding). He left her to the
politenesses of his cousin Hugo and of that young French engineer (Mr.
Grant's "Comp" who had come up to inspect the crane). He never looked
again as Miss Williams was guided down the trap-door and the ladders by
the scolding Yorkshire foreman, who didn't leave her until she was safely at
the bottom.
She was met by the two other typists who had, from the office window, seen
her perched up, small as a bird, on the heights. Both girls had been terrified.
Miss Butcher now brought lavender salts. Miss Becker's pink moon of a
face was blanched with horror over her colleague's danger.
"Do you know what could have happened, Candlesticks-maker, my dear?"
cried the German girl with real emotion, as they all made tea together in the
varnished, stifling office. "You could have been killed, you!"
Gwenna thought, "That would have been too bad. Because then—then I
shouldn't have known when he held me!"

As it was, there were several things about that incident that the young girl—
passionate and infatuated and innocent—did not know.

For one thing, there was the resolution that Paul Dampier took just after he
had turned abruptly from her, had taken short leave of the others, and when
he was striding down Whitehall to the bus that went past the door of his
Camden Town rooms. And for another thing, there was the reason for that
resolution.
Now, in the fairy-stories of modern life, it is (of the two principals) not
always the Princess who has to be woken by a kiss, a touch, from the
untroubled sleep of years. Sometimes it is the Prince who is suddenly
stirred, jarred, or jolted broad awake by the touch, in some form or other, of
Love. In Paul Dampier's case the every-day miracle had been wrought by
the soft weight of that dove-breasted girl against his heart for no longer than
he could count ten, by her sliding to the earth through an embrace that he
had not intended for an embrace at all.
It hadn't seemed to matter what he had intended!
In a flock as of homing pigeons there flew back upon the young aviator all
at once his thoughts of the Little Thing ever since he'd met her.
How he'd thought her so jolly to look at ("So sensible"—this he forgot).
How topping and natural it had seemed to sit there with her in that field,
talking to her, drinking with her out of one silver cup. How he'd found
himself wanting to touch her curls; to span and squeeze her throat with his
hands. How he'd been within an inch of summarily kissing that fox-glove
pink mouth of hers, that night at the Dance....
And to-day, when he'd come to Westminster for another talk with that rather
decent young Frenchman of Hugo's, when he hadn't thought of seeing the
girl at all, what had happened? He'd actually held her clasped in his arms, as
a sweetheart is clasped.
Only by a sheer accident, of course.
Yes, but an accident that had left impressed on every fibre of him the
feeling of that warm and breathing burden which seemed even yet to rest
against his quickened heart.
In that heart there surged up a clamorous impulse to go back at once. To
snatch her up for the second time in his arms, and not to let her go again,

either. To satisfy that hunger of his fingers and lips for the touch of her——
"Hold hard!" muttered the boy to himself. "Hang it all, this won't do."
For he had found himself actually turning back, his face set towards the
Abbey.
He spun round on the hot pavement towards home again.
"Look here; can't have this!" he told himself grimly as he walked on,
swinging his straw hat in his hand, towards Trafalgar Square. "At this rate I
shall be making an ass of myself before I know where I am; going and
falling in—going and getting myself much too dashed fond of the Little
Thing."
Yes! He now saw that he was in some danger of that.
And if it did come to anything, he mused, walking among the London
summer crowd, it wouldn't be one of these Fancy-dress-dance flirtations.
Not that sort of girl. "Nor was he; really." Not that sort of man, he meant.
Sort of thing never had amused him, much; not, he knew, because he was
cold-blooded ("Lord, no!") but partly because he'd had such stacks of other
things to do, partly because—because he'd always thought it ought to be
(and could be) so much more—well, amusing than it was. This other. This
with the Little Thing—he somehow knew that it would have to be "for
keeps."
And that he couldn't have. Good Lord, no! There could be no question—
Great Scott!
For yes, if there was anything between him and the Little Thing, it would
have to be an engagement. Marriage, and all that.
And Paul Dampier didn't intend to get married. Out of the question for him.
He'd only just managed to scrape through and make "some sort of a
footing" for himself in the world as it was. His father, a hard-up Civil
engineer, and his mother (who had been looked askance at by her people,
the Swaynes, for marrying the penniless and undistinguished Paul Dampier,
senior)—they'd only just managed to give their boy "some kind of an
education" before they pegged out. Lessons at home when he'd been a little

fellow. Afterwards one of the (much) smaller public-schools. For friends
and pleasures and holidays he had been dependent on what he could "pick
up" for himself. Old Hugo had been decent enough. He'd asked his cousin
to fish with him in Wales, twice, and he hadn't allowed Paul to feel that he
was—the poor relation.
Only Paul remembered the day that Hugo was going back to Harrow for the
last time. He, Paul, had then been a year in the shops, to the day. He
remembered the sudden resentment of that. It was not snobbery, not envy. It
was Youth in him crying out, "I will be served! I won't be put off, and
stopped doing things, and shoved out of things for ever, just because I'm
poor. If being poor means being 'out of it,' having no Power of any kind, I'm
dashed if I stay poor. I'll show that I can make good——"
And, gradually, step by step, the young mechanic, pilot, aero-racer and
inventor had been "making good."
He'd made friends, too. People had been decent. He'd been made to feel that
they felt he was going to be a useful sort of chap. He'd quailed a bit under
the eyes of butlers in these houses where he'd stayed, but he'd been asked
again. That Mrs. What's-her-name (the woman in the pink frock at the
Smiths) had been awfully kind. Introducing him to her brothers with
capital; asking him down to the New Forest to meet some other influential
person; and knowing that he couldn't entertain in return. (He'd just sent her
some flowers and some tickets for Brooklands.) Then there was Colonel
Conyers. He'd asked whether he (Dampier) were engaged. And, at his
answer, had replied, "Good. Much easier for a bachelor, these days."
And now! Supposing he got married?
On his screw? Paul Dampier laughed bitterly.
Well, but supposing he got engaged; got some wretched girl to wait for——
Years of it! Thanks!
Then, quite apart from the money-question, what about all his work?
Everything he wanted to do! Everything he was really in earnest about.
His scheme—his invention—his Machine!

"End of it all, if he went complicating matters by starting a girl!"
Take up all his time. Interrupt—putting him off his job—yes, he knew!
Putting him off, like this afternoon in the yard, and that other night at the
Dance. Only more so. Incessant. "Mustn't have it; quite simply, he must
not."
Messing up his whole chance of a career, if——
But he was pulling himself up in time from that danger.
Up to now he hadn't realised that there might be something in all that rot of
old Hugo's about the struggle in a man's mind between an Aeroplane and a
Girl. Now—well, he'd realised. All the better. Now he was forewarned.
Good thing he could take a side for himself now.
By the time he'd reached the door of the National Portrait Gallery and stood
waiting for his motor omnibus, he had definitely taken that resolution of
which Gwenna Williams did not know.
Namely, that he must drop seeing the Girl. Have nothing more to say to her.
It was better so; wiser. Whatever he'd promised about taking her up would
have to be "off."
A pity—! Dashed shame a man couldn't have everything! She was ... so
awfully sweet....
Still, got to decide one way or the other.
This would fix it before it was too late, before he'd perhaps managed to put
ideas into the head of the Little Thing. She shouldn't ever come flying, with
him!
That ended it! he thought. He'd made up his mind. He would not allow
himself to wonder what she might think.
After all, what would a girl think? Probably nothing.
Nothing at all, probably.

CHAPTER XV
LESLIE ON "TOO MUCH LOVE"

It seemed to be decided for Gwenna that she should, after all, give notice at
the office.
For on the evening of the day of her climb up the scaffolding she met the
tall, sketchily-dressed figure of her chum coming down the hill that she was
ascending on her way to the Club. And Leslie accosted her with the words,
"Child, d'you happen to want to leave your place and take another job?
Because, if so, come along for a walk and we'll talk about it."
So the two "inseparables" strolled on together up past the Club, passing at
the crest of the hill a troop of Boy Scouts with their band.
"Only chance one ever gets of hearing a drum; jolly sound," sighed Leslie,
watching the brown faces, the sturdy legs marching by. "I wonder how
many of those lads will be soldiers? Very few, I suppose. We're told that the
authorities are so careful to keep the Boy Scout Movement apart from any
pernicious militarism, and ideas about National Service!"
And the girls took the road that dips downward from Hampstead, and the
chestnut avenue that leads into the Park of Golders Green. They passed the
Bandstand ringed by nurse-girls and perambulators. They crossed the rustic
bridge above the lily-pond, where children tossed crumbs to the minnows.
They went in at the door of the little flower-garden.
Here, except for an occasional sauntering couple, London seemed shut out.
In the late sunlight above the maze of paths, the roses were just at their best.
Over the pergolas and arbours they hung in garlands, they were massed in
great posies of pink and cream and crimson. The little fountain set in the
square of velvet turf tossed up a spray of white mist touched with a
rainbow, not unlike Gwenna's dance-frock.

The girls sat down on a shaded seat facing that fountain. Gwenna, turning to
her chum, said, "Now do tell me about that job you asked if I'd take. What
is it?"
"Oh! it's a woman who used to know some of my people; she came to the
Club this afternoon, and then on to my old lady's to see me about it," said
Leslie. "She wants a girl—partly to do secretarial work, partly to keep her
company, partly to help her in the 'odd bits' of her work down there where
she has her business."
Gwenna, rather listlessly thinking of typewriting offices, of blouses, or tea-
shops, asked what the lady did.
Leslie gave the extraordinary answer, "She builds aeroplanes."
"She does?" cried Gwenna, all thrilled. "Aeroplanes?"
"Yes. She's the only woman who's got an Aircraft Factory, men, shops and
all. It's about an hour's run from town. She's a pilot herself, and her son's an
aviator," said Leslie, speaking as though of everyday things. "Everything
supplied, from the Man to the Machine, what?"
"Oh! But what a gorgeous sort of Life for a woman, Leslie!" cried the
younger girl, her face suddenly alight. "Fancy spending her time making
things like that! Things that are going to make a difference to the whole
world! Instead of her just 'settling down' and embroidering 'duchesse sets,'
and sitting with tea-cups, like Uncle Hugh's 'Lady parishioners,' and talking
to callers about servants; and operations! Oh, oh, don't you want to take her
job?"
"I'm not especially keen on one job more than another. And my old lady
would be rather upset if I did leave her in the lurch," said Leslie, more
unselfishly than her chum suspected. The truth was that this much
disapproved-of Leslie had resigned a congenial post because it might mean
what Gwenna loved. "I told the Aeroplane Lady about you," she added.
"And she'd like you to go down and interview her at the Factory next
Saturday, if you'd care to."
"Care? Of course I'd care! Aeroplanes! After silly buildings and
specifications!" exclaimed Gwenna, clasping her hands in her grey linen

lap. But her face fell suddenly as she added, "But—it's an hour's run from
London, you say? I should have to live there?"
"'Away from Troilus, and away from Troy,'" quoted Leslie, smiling. "You
could come back to Troy for week-ends, Taffy. And I'll tell you what. It's no
bad thing for a young man who's always thought of a girl as being planted
in one particular place, to realise suddenly that she's been uprooted and set
up in quite another place. Gives him just a little jerk. By the way, is there
any fresh news of Troilus—of the Dampier boy?"
And Gwenna, sitting there with troubled eyes upon the roses, gave her the
history of that afternoon's adventure. She ended up sadly, "Never even said
'Good-bye' to me!"
"Getting nervous that he's going to like you too well!" translated Leslie,
without difficulty. "Probably deciding at this minute that he'd better not see
much more of you——"
"Oh, Leslie!" exclaimed the younger girl, alarmed.
"Sort of thing they do decide," said Leslie, lightly. "Well, we'll see what it
amounts to. And we'll wire to-morrow to the Aeroplane Lady. Or telephone
down to-night. I am going to telephone to Hugo Swayne to tell him I don't
feel in the mood to have dinner out to-night again."
"Again?" said Gwenna, rather wistfully, as they rose from the arbour and
walked slowly down the path by the peach-houses. "Has he been asking you
out several times, then?"
"Several," said Leslie with a laugh. She added in her insouciant way, "You
know, he wants to marry me now."
Gwenna regarded her with envy. Leslie spoke of what should be the eighth
wonder of the world, the making or rejecting of a man's life, as if it were an
everyday affair.
"Don't look so unflatteringly surprised, Taffy. Strictly pretty I may not be.
But a scrupulously neat and lady-like appearance," mocked Leslie, putting
out a long arm in a faded-silk sleeve that was torn at the cuff, "has often
(they tell one) done more to win husbands than actual good looks!"

Little Gwenna said, startled, "You aren't—aren't going to let Mr. Swayne be
your husband, are you?"
"I don't know," said Leslie, reflectively, a little wearily. "I don't know, yet.
He's fat—but of course that would come off after I'd worried him for a year
or so. He's flabby. He's rather like Kipling's person whose 'rooms at College
was beastly!' but he's good-natured, and his people were all right, and,
Taffy, he's delightfully well-off. And when one's turned twenty-six, one
does want to be sure of what's coming. One must have some investment
that'll bring in one's frocks and one's railway-fares and one's proper setting."
"There are other things," protested little Gwenna with a warm memory of
that moment's clasping on the heights that afternoon. "There are things one
wants more."
"Not me."
"Ah! That's because you don't know them," declared Gwenna, flushed.
And at that the elder girl gave a very rueful laugh.
"Not know them? I've known them too well," she admitted. "Listen, Taffy,
I'll tell you the sort of girl I am. I'm afraid there are plenty of us about."
She sighed, and went on with a little nod.
"We're the girl who works in the sweetshop and who never wants to touch
chocolates again. We're the sort of girl who's been turned loose too early at
dances and studio-parties and theatricals and so forth. The girl who's come
in for too much excitement and flattery and love-making. Yes! For in spite
of all my natural disadvantages (tuck in that bit of hair for me, will you?)
and in spite of not being quite a fool—I've been made too much of, by men.
The Monties and so forth. Here's where I pay for it. I and the girls like me.
We can't ever take a real live interest in men again!"
"But——!" objected Gwenna, seeing a mental image of Leslie as she had
been at that dance, whirling and flushed and radiant. "You seem to like
——"
"'The chase, not the quarry,'" quoted Leslie. "For when I've brought down
my bird, what happens?—He doesn't amuse me any more! It's like having

sweets to eat and such a cold that one can't taste 'em."
"But—that's such a pity!"
"D'you suppose I don't know that?" retorted Miss Long. "D'you suppose I
don't wish to Heaven that I could be 'in Love' with somebody? I can't
though. I see through men. And I don't see as much in them as there is in
myself. They can't boss me, or take me out of myself, or surprise me into
admiring them. Why can't they, dash them? they can't even say anything
that I can't think of, quicker, first!" complained the girl with many admirers,
resentfully. "And that's a fatal thing to any woman's happiness. Remember,
there's no fun for a woman in just being adored!"
The girl in love, kicking her small brown shoe against the pebbles of the
garden path, sighed that she wished that she could try "being adored." Just
for a change.
"Ah, but you, Taffy, you're lucky. You're so fresh, so eager. You're as much
in love with that aviator's job as you are with anything else about him.
You're as much amused by 'ordinary things' as any other girl is amused by
getting a young man. As for what you feel about the young man himself,
well!—I suppose that's a tune played half a yard to the right of the
keyboard of an ordinary girl's capacity. You're keen for Life; you've got
what men call 'a thirst you couldn't buy.' Wish I were like that!"
"Well, but it's so easy to be," argued Gwenna, "when you do meet some one
so wonderful——"
"It's not so easy to see 'wonder,' let me tell you. It's a gift. I've had it; lost it;
spoilt it," mourned the elder girl. "To you everything's thrilling: their
blessed airships—the men in them—the Air itself. All miracles to you!
Everything's an Adventure. So would Marriage be——"
"Oh, I don't—don't ever think of that. Being always with a person! Oh, it
would be too wonderful—— I shouldn't expect—Even to be a little liked, if
he once told me so, would be enough," whispered the little Welsh girl, so
softly that her chum did not catch it.
Leslie, striding along, said, "To a girl like me all that's as far behind as the
school-room. At the stage where I am, a girl looks upon Marriage—how?

As 'The Last 'Bus Home, or A Settled Job at last.' That's why she so often
ends up as an old man's darling—with some very young man as her slave.
That's what makes me ready to accept Hugo Swayne. And now forget I ever
told you so."
The two girls turned homewards; Gwenna a little sad.
To think that Leslie should lack what even ordinary little Mabel Butcher
had! To think that Leslie, underneath all her gaiety and rattle, should not
know any more the taste of real delight!
Gwenna, the simple-hearted, did not know the ways of self-critics. She did
not guess that possibly Miss Long had been analysing her own character
with less truth than gusto.... And she was surprised when, as they passed the
Park gates again, her chum broke the silence with all her old lightness of
tone.
"Talking of young men—a habit for which Leslie never bothers to apologise
—talking of young men, I believe there might be some at the Aeroplane
Lady's place. She often has some one there. A gentleman—'prentice or pupil
or something of that sort. Might be rather glad to see a new pretty face
about with real curls."
It was then that Gwenna turned up that blushing but rather indignant little
face. "But, Leslie! Don't you understand? If there were a million other
young men about, all thinking me—all thinking what you say, it wouldn't
make a bit of difference to me!"
"Possibly not," said Miss Long, "but there's no reason why it shouldn't be
made to make a difference to the Dampier boy, is there?"
"What d'you mean, Leslie?" demanded the other girl as they climbed the
hill together. For the first time a look of austerity crossed Gwenna's small
face. For the first time it seemed to her that the adored girl-chum was in the
wrong. Yes! She had never before been shocked at Leslie, whatever wild
thing she said. But now—now she was shocked. She was disappointed in
her. She repeated, rebukefully, "What do you mean?"
"What," took up Leslie, defiantly, "do you think I meant?"

"Well—did you mean make—make Mr. Dampier think other people liked
me, and that I might like somebody else better than him?"
"Something of the sort had crossed the mind of Leslie the Limit."
"Well, then, it isn't like you——"
"Think not?" There was more than a hint of quarrel in both the girlish
voices. Up to now they had never exchanged a word that was not of
affection, of comradeship.
Gwenna, flushing deeper, said, "It's—it's horrid of you, Leslie."
"Why, pray?"
"Because it would be sort of deceiving Mr. Dampier, for one thing. It's a
trick."
"M'yes!"
"And not a pretty one, either," said little Gwenna, red and angry now. "It's
—it's——"
"What?"
"Well, it's what I should have thought that you yourself, Leslie, would have
called 'so obvious.'"
"Exactly," agreed Miss Long, with a flippant little laugh that covered
smarting feelings. Taffy had turned against her now! Taffy, who used to
think that Leslie could do no wrong! This was what happened when one's
inseparable chum fell in love....
Leslie said impenitently, "I've never yet found that 'the obvious thing' was
'the unsuccessful thing.' Especially when it comes to anything to do with
young men. My good child, you and the Dampier boy, you

'Really constitute a pair,
Each being rather like an artless woodland elf.'

I mean, can't you see that the dear old-fashioned simple remedies and
recipes remain the best? For a sore throat, black-currant tea. (Never fails!)

For the hair, Macassar oil. (Unsurpassed since the Year Eighteen-dot!) For
the stimulation of an admirer's interest, jealousy. Jealousy and competition,
Taffy."
"He isn't an admirer," protested the younger girl, mollified. Then they
smiled together. The cloud of the first squabble had passed.
Leslie said, "Never mind. If you don't approve of my specific, don't think of
it again."

CHAPTER XVI
THE AEROPLANE LADY

Curiously enough, Gwenna did think of it again.
On the Saturday morning after that walk and talk she took that long dull
train-journey. The only bright spot on it was the passing of Hendon Flying
Ground. Over an hour afterwards she arrived at the little station, set in a
sunburnt waste, for the Aircraft Works.
She asked her way of the ticket-collector at the booking-office. But before
he could speak, she was answered by some one else, who had come down
to the station for a parcel. This was a shortish young man in greasy blue
overalls. He had a smiling, friendly, freckled face under a thatch of brilliant
red hair; and a voice that seemed oddly out of keeping with his garments. It
was an "Oxford" voice.
"The Works? I'm just going on there myself. I'll come with you and show
you, if I may," he said with evident zest.
Gwenna, walking beside him, wished that she had not immediately
remembered Leslie's remarks about young men at aircraft works who might
be glad of the arrival of a new pretty face. This young man, piloting her
down a straggling village street that seemed neither town nor country, told
her at once that he was a pupil at the Works and asked whether she herself
were going to help Mrs. Crewe there.
"I don't know yet," said Gwenna. "I hope so."
"So do I," said the young man gravely, but with a glint of unreserved
admiration in the eyes under the red thatch.
Little Gwenna, walking very erect, wished that she were strong and self-
reliant enough not to feel cheered by that admiration.
(But she was cheered. No denying that!)

The young man took her down a road flanked on either hand by sparse
hedges dividing it from that parched and uninteresting plain. The mountain-
bred girl found all this flat country incredibly ugly. Only, on her purple
Welsh heights and in the green ferny depths threaded by crystal water,
nothing ever happened. It was here, in this half-rural desert littered by
builders' rubbish and empty cans, that Enterprise was afoot. Strange!

On the right came an opening. She saw a yard with wooden debris and what
looked like the wrecks of a couple of motor-cars. Beyond was a cluster of
buildings with corrugated iron roofs.
The red-haired pupil mentioned the name of the Aeroplane Lady and said,
"I think you'll find her in the new Wing-room, over here——"
"What a wonderful name for it," thought the little enthusiast, catching her
breath, as she was shown through a door. "The Wing-room!"
It was high and clean and spacious, with white distempered walls and a
floor of wood-dura, firm yet comforting to the feet. The atmosphere of it
was, on that July day, somewhat overpowering. Two radiators were
working, and the air was heavy with a smell of what seemed like rubber-
solution and spirits mixed: this, Gwenna presently found, was the "dope" to
varnish the strong linen stretched across the wings of aeroplanes. Two of
those great wings were laid out horizontally on trestles to dry. Another of
the huge sails with cambered sections was set up on end across a corner;
and from behind it there moved, stepping daintily and majestically across
the floor, the tawny shape of a Great Dane, who came inquiringly up to the
stranger.
Then from behind the screening wing there came a slight, woman's figure in
dark blue. She followed the dog. Little Gwenna Williams, standing timidly
in that great room so strange and white, and characteristically scented,
found herself face to face with the mistress of the place; the Aeroplane
Lady.

Her hair was greying and fluffy as a head of windblown Traveller's Joy;
beneath it her eyes were blue and young and bright and—yes! with a little
glad start Gwenna recognised that in these eyes too there was something of
that space-daring gleam of the eyes of Icarus, of her own Flying Man.
"Ah ... I know," said the lady briskly. "You're the girl Leslie's sent down to
see me."
"Yes," said Gwenna, thinking it nice of her to say "Leslie" and not "Miss
Long." She noticed also that the Aeroplane Lady wore at the collar of her
shirt a rather wonderful brooch in the shape of the caducæus, the serpent-
twisted rod of Mercury. "Oh, I do hope she'll take me!" thought the young
girl, agitated. "I do want more than anything to come here to work with her.
Oh, supposing she thinks I'm too silly and young to be any use—supposing
she won't take me——"
She was tense with nervousness while the Aeroplane Lady, fondling the
Great Dane's tawny ear with a small, capable hand as she spoke, put the girl
through a short catechism; asking questions about her age, her people, her
previous experience, her salary.... And then she was told that she might
come and work on a month's trial at the Factory, occupying a room in the
Aeroplane Lady's own cottage in the village. The young girl, enraptured,
put down her success to the certificates from that Aberystwith school of
hers, where she had passed "with distinction" the Senior Cambridge and
other examinations. She did not guess that the Aeroplane Lady had taken
less than two minutes to make sure that this little Welsh typist-girl carried
out what Leslie Long had said of her.
Namely that "she was so desperately keen on anything to do with flying and
flyers that she'd scrub the floors of the shops for you if you wished it,
besides doing your business letters as carefully as if each one was about
some important Diplomatic secret ... try her!"
So on the following Monday Gwenna began her new life.
At first this new work of Gwenna's consisted very largely of what Leslie
had mentioned; the writing-out of business letters at the table set under the
window in the small private office adjoining the great Wing-room.

(Curious that the Wings for Airships, the giant butterfly aeroplanes
themselves, should grow out of a chrysalis of ordinary business, with letters
that began, "Sir, we beg to thank you for your favour of the 2nd instant, and
to assure you that same shall receive our immediate attention," exactly the
sort of letters that Gwenna had typed during all those weeks at
Westminster!)
Then there were orders to send off for more bales of the linen that was
stretched over the membranes of those wings; or for the great reels of wire
which strung the machines, and which cost fifteen pounds apiece; orders for
the metal which was to be worked in the shops across the parched yard,
where men of three nationalities toiled at the lathe; turning-screws,
strainers, washers, and all the tiny, complicated-looking parts that were to
be the bones and the sinews and the muscles of the finished Flying
Machine.
Gwenna, the typist, had at first only a glimpse or so of these other sides of
the Works.
Once, on a message from some visitor to the Aeroplane Lady she passed
through the great central room, larger than her Uncle's chapel at home, with
its concrete floor and the clear diffused light coming through the many
windows, and the never-ceasing throb of the gas-driven engine pulsing
through the lighter sounds of chinking and hammering. Mechanics were
busy all down the sides of this hall; in the aisle of it, three machines in the
making were set up on the stands. One was ready all but the wings; its body
seemed now more than it would ever seem that of a giant fish; it was
covered with the doped linen that was laced at the seams with braid, eyelets
and cord, like an old-fashioned woman's corset. The second was half-
covered. The third was all as yet uncovered, and looked like the skeleton of
a vast seagull cast up on some prehistoric shore.
Wondering, the girl passed on, to find her employer. She found her in the
fitter's shop. In a corner, the red-haired pupil, with goggles over his eyes,
was sitting at a stand working an acetylene blow-pipe; holding in his hand
the intense jet that shot out showers of squib-like sparks, and wielding a
socket, the Lady directing him. She took the girl's message, then walked
back with her to the office, her tawny dog following at her heels.

"Letters finished?... then I'd like you to help me on with the wings of that
machine that's all but done," she said. "That is"—she smiled—"if you don't
mind getting your hands all over this beastly stuff——"
Mind? Gwenna would have plastered her whole little white body with that
warmed and strongly-smelling dope if she'd thought that by so doing she
was actually taking a hand in the launching of a Ship for the Clouds.
The rest of the afternoon she spent in the hot and reeking Wing-room,
working side by side with the Aeroplane Lady. Industriously she pasted the
linen strips, patting them down with her little fingers on to the seams of
those wide sails that would presently be spread—for whom?
In her mind it was always one large and springy figure that she saw
ascending into the small plaited wicker seat of the Machine. It was always
the same careless, blonde, lad's face that she saw tilted slightly against the
background of plane and wires....
"I would love to work, even a little, on a machine that he was going to fly
in," thought Gwenna.
She stood, enveloped in a grey-blue overall, at the trestle-table, cutting out
fresh strips of linen with scissors that were sticky and clogged with dope.
She peeled the stuff from her hands in flakes like the bark of a silver-birch
as she added to her thought, "But I shouldn't want to do anything for that
aeroplane; his Fiancée, for the P.D.Q. Hateful creature, with her claws that
she doesn't think are going to let him go!"
Here she set the pannikin of dope to reheat, and there was a smile of
defiance on the girl's lips as she moved about from the trestles to the
radiator or the sewing-table.
For ever since she had been at the Works a change had come over Gwenna.
Curiously enough, she was happier now than she had been in her life. She
was more contented with what the present brought her; more steadily
hopeful about the future. It didn't seem to matter to her now that, the last
time she had seen him, her Aviator had turned almost sullenly away. She
laughed to herself over that, for she believed at last in Leslie's theory:
"Afraid he's going to like me." She did not fret because she hadn't had even

one of his brief notes since she had left London; nor sigh over the fact that
she, living down here in this Bedfordshire village, was so much further
away from those rooms of his at Camden Town than she had been when she
had stayed at the Hampstead Club.
For somehow she felt nearer to him now.
Absence can, in some subtle, unexplained way, spin fine threads of
communication over the gulf between a boy and a girl....
She found a conviction growing stronger and stronger in her girl's mind,
that gay, tangled chaos where faults and faculties, blindness and intuitions
flourish entwined and inseparable. She was meant to be his.
She'd no "reason" for thinking so, of course. There was very little reason
about Gwenna's whole make-up.
For instance, Leslie had tried "reasoning" with her, the night before she'd
left the Hampstead Club. Leslie had taken it into her impish black head to
be philosophical, and to attempt to talk her chum into the same mood.
Leslie, the nonchalant, had given a full hour to her comments on Marriage.
We will allow her a full chapter—but a short one.

CHAPTER XVII
LESLIE ON "MARRIAGE"

She'd said, "Supposing the moon did fall into your lap, Taffy? Suppose that
young Cloud-Dweller of yours did (a) take you flying, and (b) propose to
you?" and she'd recited solemnly:

"Somewhere I've read that the gods, waxing wroth at our
mad importunity,
Hurl us our boon and it falls with the weight of a curse at
our feet;
Perilous thing to intrude on their lofty Olympian immunity!
'Take it and die,' say the gods, and we die of our fondest
conceit."

"Yes; 'of' it! After having it. Who'd mind dying then?"
"But if it hadn't been worth it, Taffy? Suppose you were air-sick?" Leslie
had suggested. "Worse, suppose you were Paul-sick?"
"What?"
"Yes, supposing that Super-Boy of yours himself was the disappointment?
Suppose none of his 'little ways' happened to please you? Men don't realise
it, but, in love, a man is much easier to please than a woman!"
"No, Leslie. No," had come from the girl who knew nothing of love-making
—less than nothing, since she thought she knew.
Leslie had persisted. "The first pet-name a man calls you—awfully
important, that!—may hash up Love's young dream for ever. Some men, I
believe, begin with 'Dear old—something or other.' That's the end. Or
something that you know you're obviously not. Such as 'Little Woman,' to
me. Or they don't notice something that's specially there for them to notice.
That's unforgivable. Or they do notice something that's quite beside the

mark. Or they repeat themselves. Not good enough, a man who can't think
of one new way of saying he cares, each day. (Even a calendar can do that.)
Saying the wrong thing, though, isn't as bad as being silent. That's fatal.
Gives a girl such a lot of time to imagine all the things that another man
might have been saying at the time. That's why men with no vocabularies
ought never to get engaged or married. 'I'm a man of few words,' they say.
They ought to be told, 'Very well. Outside! It simply means you won't
trouble to amuse me.' Exit the Illusion.

'Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A look too short, or a kiss too long——'

(Especially with a look too short.) Yes," Leslie had concluded impressively,
"suppose the worst tragedy happened? Suppose the Dampier boy did get
engaged to you, and then you found out that he didn't in the least know how
to make love? To make love to you, I mean."
"There wouldn't have to be any love 'made,'" little Gwenna had murmured,
flushing. "Where he was, the love would be."
"My dear, you are what Hugo Swayne calls 'a Passé-iste' in love. Why, why
wasn't I brought up in the heart of the mountains (and far away from any
other kind of heart) until I was twenty-two, and then hurled into a love-
affair with the first decent-looking young man?" Leslie had cried, with
exaggerated envy. "The happier you! But, Taff, do remember that 'Love is a
Lad with Wings'—like yours. Even if the engagement were all your fancy
painted, that Grand Firework Display sort of feeling couldn't last. Don't
shoot! It's true. People couldn't go on living their lives and earning their
livings and making their careers and having their babies if it did last. It must
alter. It must die down into the usual dear old sun rising every morning. So,
when your 'Oiseau de feu' married you, and you found he was just—a
husband, like everybody else's——"
"Not 'like' anybody!"—indignantly.
"How d'you know what he's like?" Leslie had demanded. "What d'you
know of his temper? Men with that heather-honey kind of smile and those
deep dimples very often have a beastly temper. Probably jealous——"

"I would love him to be that."
"You wouldn't love to be poor, though," Leslie had gone off on another
tack. "Poor, and uncomfortable."
"I shall never be comfortable again without him," Gwenna had said
obstinately. "Might as well be uncomfortable with him!"
"In a nasty little brick villa near Hendon, so as to be close to the flying,
perhaps? With a horrid dark bathroom? And the smell of cooking haddocks
and of Lux all over it!" Leslie had enlarged. "And you having to use up all
your own little tiny income to help pay the butcher, and the Gas Light and
Coke Company, and the rates, and loathsome details of that sort that a
woman never feels a ha'porth the better for! Instead of being able to get
yourself fresh gloves and silk stockings and a few trifles of that sort that
make absolutely all the difference to a woman's life!"
"Not all the difference, indeed," Gwenna had said softly. But Leslie had
continued to draw these fancy pictures of married life as lived with Mr. Paul
Dampier.
"Taffy, for one thing, you've never seen him anything but nicely-groomed
and attractive to look at. You try to imagine him in what Kipling calls 'the
ungirt hour.' They talk of a woman's slatternliness killing love. Have they
seen a man when he 'hasn't bothered' to groom himself? That sight——"
She had shaken her black head ineffably over the mental image of it, and
had averred, "That sight ought to be added to the Valid and Legitimate
Causes for Divorce! A wife ought to be able to consider herself as free as air
after the first time that she sees her husband going about the house without
a collar. Sordid, unbecoming grey flannel about his neck. Three half
buttons, smashed in the wringer, hanging by their last threads to his shirt.
And his old slippers bursting out at the side of the toe. And his 'comfortable'
jacket on, with matches and fur in all the pockets and a dab of marmalade—
also furred—on the front. And himself unshaved, with a zig-zag parting to
his hair. I believe some men do go about like this before their wives, and
then write wistful letters to the Daily Mirror about, 'Why is Marriage the
Tomb of Romance?'"
Gwenna had sniffed. "Oh! Some men! Those!"

"Valid cause for Divorce Number Ninety-three: The state of the bedroom
floor," Leslie had pursued. "I, slut as I am, do pick things up sometimes.
Men, never. Ask any married woman you know. Maudie told me.
Everything is hurled down, or stepped out of, or merely dropped. And left.
Left, my child, for you to gather up. Everything out of the chest-of-drawers
tossed upon the carpet. Handkerchiefs, dirty old pipes, shirts, ties, 'in one
red burial blent.' That means he's been 'looking for' something. Mind,
you've got to find it. Men are born 'find-silly.' Men never yet have found
anything (except the North Pole and a few things like that, that are no
earthly good in a villa), but they are for ever losing things!"
Gwenna had given a smile to the memory of a certain missing collar-stud
that she had heard much of.
"Yes, I suppose to be allowed to find his collar-studs is what he'd consider
'Paradise enow' for any girl!" Leslie had mocked. "I misdoubt me that the
Dampier boy would settle down after a year of marriage into a regular
Sultan of the Hearthrug. Looking upon his wife as something that belongs
to him, and goes about with him; like a portmanteau. Putting you in your
place as 'less than the dust beneath his chariot,' that is, 'beneath his biplane
wheels.'"
"Leslie! I shouldn't mind! I'd like to be! I believe it is my place," Gwenna
had interrupted, lifting towards her friend a small face quivering with
conviction. "He could make anything he liked or chose of me. What do I
care——"
"Not for clothes flung down in rings all over the floor like when a trout's
been rising? Nor for trousers left standing there like a pair of opera-glasses
—or concertinas? Braces all tangled up on the gas-bracket? Overcoat and
boots crushing your new hat on the bed? Seventeen holey socks for you to
mend? All odd ones—for you to sort——"
Little Gwenna had cried out: "I'd want to!"
"I'm not afraid you won't get what you want," Leslie had said finally. "All I
hope is that your wish won't fail when you get it!"
And of that Gwenna was never afraid.

"I should not care for him so much if he were not the only one who could
make me so happy," she told herself; "and unless the woman's very happy,
surely the man can't be. It must mean, then, that he'll feel, some day, that
this would be the way to happiness. I'm sure there are some marriages that
are different from what Leslie says. Some where you go on being
sweethearts even after you're quite old friends, like. I—I could make it like
that for him. I feel I could!"
Yes; she felt that some day (perhaps not soon) she must win him.
Sometimes she thought that this might be when her rival, the perfected
machine, had made his name and absorbed him no longer. Sometimes,
again, she told herself that he might have no success at all.
"Then, then he'd see there was something else in the world. Then he would
turn to me," said the girl to herself. She added, as every girl in love must
add, "No one could care as I do."
And one day she found on the leaf of the tear-off calendar in her cottage
bedroom a line of verse that seemed to have been written for her. It
remained the whole of Browning as far as Gwenna Williams was
concerned. And it said:
"What's Death? You'll love me yet!"

CHAPTER XVIII
THE OBVIOUS THING

She was in this mood to win a waiting game on the day that Paul Dampier
came down to the Aircraft Works.
This was just one of the more wonderful happenings that waited round the
corner and that the young girl might hope to encounter any day.
The first she knew of it was from hearing a remark of the Aeroplane Lady's
to one of her French mechanics at the lathes.
"This will make the eighteenth pattern of machine that we've turned out
from this place," she said. "I wonder if it's going to answer, André?"
"Which machine, madame?" the man asked. He was a big fellow, dark and
thick-haired and floridly handsome in his blue overalls; and his bright eyes
were fixed interestedly upon his principal as she explained through the buzz
and the clack and the clang of machinery in the large room, "This new
model that Colonel Conyers wants us to make for him."
Gwenna caught the name. She thought breathlessly, "That's his machine!
He's got Aircraft Conyers to take it up and have it made for him! It's his!"
She'd thought this, even before the Aeroplane Lady concluded, "It's the idea
of a young aviator I know. Such a nice boy: Paul Dampier of Hendon."
The French mechanic put some question, and the Aeroplane Lady
answered, "Might be an improvement. I hope so. I'd like him to have a
show, anyhow. He's sending the engine down to-morrow afternoon. They'll
bring it on a lorry. Ask Mr. Ryan to see about the unloading of it; I may not
get back from town before the thing comes."
Now Mr. Ryan was that red-haired pupil who had conducted Gwenna from
the station on the day of her first appearance at the Works. Probably Leslie
Long would have affirmed that this Mr. Ryan was also a factor in the

change that was coming over Gwenna and her outlook. Leslie considered
that no beauty treatment has more effect upon the body and mind of a
woman than has the regular application of masculine admiration.
Admiration was now being lavished by Mr. Ryan upon the little new typist
with the face of a baby-angel and the small, rounded figure; and Mr. Ryan
saw no point in hiding his approval. It did not stop at glances. Before a
week had gone by he had informed Miss Williams that she was a public
benefactor to bring anything so delightful to look at as herself into those
beastly, oily, dirty shops; that he hated, though, to see a woman with such
pretty fingers having to mess 'em up with that vile dope; and that he
wondered she hadn't thought of going on the stage.
"But I can't act," Gwenna had told him.
"What's that got to do with it?" the young man had inquired blithely. "All
they've got to do is to look. You could beat 'em at that."
"Oh, what nonsense, Mr. Ryan!" the girl had said, more pleased than she
admitted to herself, and holding her curly head erect as a brown tulip on a
sturdy stem.
"Not nonsense at all," he argued. "I tell you, if you went into musical
comedy and adopted a strong enough Cockney accent there'd be another
Stage and Society wedding before you could say 'knife.' You could get any
young peer to adore you, Miss Gwenna, if you smiled at him over the head
of a toy pom and called him 'Fice.' I can just see you becoming a Gaiety
puss and marrying some Duke——"
"I don't want to marry any Dukes, thanks."
"I'm sure I don't want you to," Mr. Ryan had said softly. "I'd miss you too
much myself...."
The fact is that he was a flirt for the moment out of work. He was also of
the type that delights in the proximity of "Girl"—using the word as one who
should say "Game." "Girl" suggested to him, as to many young men, a
collective mass of that which is pretty, soft, and to-be-made-love-to. He
found it pleasant to keep his hand in by paying these compliments to this
new instalment of Girl—who was rather a little pet, he thought, though
rather slow.

As for Gwenna, she bloomed under it, gaining also in poise. She learned to
take a compliment as if it were an offered flower, instead of dodging it like
a brick-bat, which is the very young girl's failing. She found that even if
receiving a compliment from the wrong man is like wearing a right-hand
glove on the left hand, it is better than having no gloves. (Especially it is
better than looking as if one had no gloves.)
The attentions of young Ryan, his comment on a new summer frock, the
rose laid by him on her desk in the morning; these things were not without
their effect—it was a different effect from any intended by the red-haired
pupil, who was her teacher in all this.
She would find herself thinking, "He doesn't look at me nearly so much, I
notice, in a trimmed-up hat, or a 'fussy' blouse. Men don't like them on me,
perhaps." (That blouse or hat would be discarded.) Or, "Well! if so-and-so
about me pleases him, it'll please other men."
And for "men" she read always, always the same one. She never realised
that if she had not met Paul Dampier she might have fallen in love with
young Peter Ryan. Presently he had begged her to call him "Peter."
She wouldn't.
"I think I'd do anything for you," young Ryan had urged, "if you asked for
it, using my Christian name!"
Gwenna had replied: "Very well! If there's anything I ever want, frightfully
badly, that you could give me, I shall ask for it like that."
"You mean there's nothing I could give you?" he had reproached her, in the
true flirt's tone. It can sound so much more tender, at times, than does the
tone of the truest lover. A note or so of it had found its way into Gwenna's
soft voice these days.
Yes; she had half unconsciously learned a good deal from Mr. Ryan.

"I say! Miss Gwenna!"

Mr. Ryan's rust-red head was popped round the door of the Wing-room
where Gwenna, alone, was pouring dope out of the tilted ten-gallon can on
the floor into her little pannikin.
"Come out for just one minute."
"Too busy," demurred the girl. "No time."
"Not just to look," he pleaded, "at the really pretty job I'm making of
unloading this lorry with Dampier's engine?"
Quickly Gwenna set down the can and came out, in her pinafore, to the
breezes and sunshine of the yard outside. It was as much because she
wanted to see what there was to be seen of that "Fiancée" of the aviator's,
as because this other young man wanted her to admire the work of his
hands.
Those hands themselves, Gwenna noticed, were masked and thick, half way
up his forearms, with soft soap. This he seemed to have been smearing on
certain boards, making a sliding way for that precious package that stood on
the low lorry. The boards were packed up in banks and stages, an irregular
stairway. This another assistant was carefully trying with a long straight
edge with a spirit level in the middle of it; and a third man stood on the
lorry, resting on a crowbar and considering the package that held the heart
of Paul Dampier's machine.
"You see if she doesn't come down as light as a bubble and stop exactly
there," said Mr. Ryan complacently, digging his heel into a pillowy heap of
debris. "Lay those other planks to take her inside, André." He wiped his
brow on a moderately clear patch of forearm, and moved away to check the
observations of the man in the shirt-sleeves.
Gwenna, watching, could not help admiring both this self-satisfied young
mudlark and his job. This was how women liked to see men busy: with
strenuous work that covered them with dirt and sweat, taxing their brains
and their muscles at the same time. Those girls who were so keen on the
Enfranchisement of Women and "Equal Opportunities" and those things,
those suffragettes at her Hampstead Club who "couldn't see where the
superiority of the male sex was supposed to come in"—Well! The reason
why they "couldn't" was (the more primitive Gwenna thought) simply

because they didn't see enough men at this sort of thing. The men these
enlightened young women knew best sat indoors all day, writing—that sort
of thing. Or talking about fans, like Mr. Swayne, and about "the right tone
of purple in the curtains" for a room. The women, of course, could do that
themselves. They could also go to colleges and pass men's exams. Lots did.
But (thought Gwenna) not many of them could get through the day's work
of Mr. Ryan, who had also been at Oxford, and who not only had forearms
that made her own look like ivory toys, but who could plan out his work so
that if he said that that squat, ponderous case would "stop exactly there"—
stop there it would. She watched; the breeze rollicking in her curls,
spreading the folds of her grey-blue pinafore out behind her like a sail,
moulding her skirt to her rounded shape as she stood.
Then she turned with a very friendly and pretty smile to young Ryan.
It was thus that Paul Dampier, entering the yard from behind them, came
upon the girl whom he had decided not to see again.

He knew already that "his little friend," as old Hugo insisted upon calling
her, had taken a job at the Aircraft Works. He'd heard that from his cousin,
who'd been told all about it by Miss Long.
And considering that he'd made up his mind that it would be better all round
if he were to drop having anything more to say to the girl, young Dampier
was glad, of course, that she'd left town. That would make things easier. He
wouldn't seem to be avoiding her, yet he needn't set eyes upon her again.
Of course he'd been glad. He hadn't wanted to see her.
Then, at the end of his negotiations with Colonel Conyers, he'd understood
that he would have to go over and pay a visit to the Aeroplane Lady. And
even in the middle of the new excitement he had remembered that this was
where Gwenna Williams was working. And for a moment he'd hesitated.
That would mean seeing the Little Thing again after all.
Then he'd thought, Well? Fellow can't look as if he were trying to keep out
of a girl's way? Besides, chances were he wouldn't see her when he did go,
he'd thought.

It wasn't likely that the Aeroplane Lady kept her clerk, or whatever she was,
in her pocket, he'd thought.
He'd just be taken to where the P.D.Q. was being assembled, he'd supposed.
The Little Thing would be kept busy with her typing and one thing and
another in some special office, he'd expected!

What he had not expected to find was the scene before him. The Little
Thing idling about outside the shops here; hatless, pinafored, looking
absolutely top-hole and perfectly at home, chatting with the ginger-haired
bloke who was unloading the engine as if he were no end of a pal of hers!
She was smiling up into his face and taking a most uncommon amount of
interest, it seemed, in what the fellow had been doing!
And, before, she'd said she wasn't interested in machinery! thought Dampier
as he came up, feeling suddenly unconscionably angry.
He forgot the hours that the Little Thing had already passed in hanging on
every word, mostly about a machine, that had fallen from his own lips. He
only remembered that moment at the Smiths' dinner-party, when she'd
admitted that that sort of thing didn't appeal to her.
Yet, here she was! Deep in it, by Jove!
He had come right up to her and this other chap before they noticed him....
She turned sharply at the sound of the young aviator's rather stiff "Good
afternoon."
She had expected that day to see his engine—no more. Here he stood, the
maker of the engine, backed by the scorched, flat landscape, in the sunlight
that picked out little clean-cut, intense shadows under the rim of his straw
hat, below his cleft chin, along his sleeve and the lapel of his jacket, making
him look (she thought) like a very good snapshot of himself. He had startled
her again; but this time she was self-possessed.
She came forward and faced him; prettier than ever, somehow (he thought
again), with tossed curls and pinafore blowing all about her. She might have
been a little schoolgirl let loose from some class in those gaunt buildings

behind her. But she spoke in a more "grown-up" manner, in some way, than
he'd ever heard her speak before. Looking up, she said in the soft accent
that always brought back to him his boyish holidays in her country, "How
do you do, Mr. Dampier? I'm afraid I can't shake hands. Mine are all sticky
with dope."
"Oh, are they," he said, and looked away from her (not without effort) to the
ginger-haired fellow.
"This," said Gwenna Williams, a little self-consciously at last, "is Mr.
Ryan."
Plenty of self-assurance about him! He nodded and said in a hail-fellow-
well-met sort of voice, "Hullo; you're Dampier, are you? Glad to meet you.
You see we're hard at it unpacking your engine here." Then he looked
towards the opening, the road, and the car—borrowed as usual—in which
the young aviator had motored down. There was another large package in
the body of the car; a box, iron-clamped, with letters stencilled upon it, and
sealed. "Something else interesting that you've brought with you?" said this
in sufferable man called Ryan. "Here, André, fetch that box down——"
"No," interrupted young Dampier curtly. The curtness was only partly for
this other chap. That sealed box, for reasons of his own and Colonel
Conyers', was not to be hauled about by any mechanic in the place. "You
and I'll fetch that in presently for Mrs. Crewe."
"Right. She'll be back at three o'clock," Ryan told him. "She told me to ask
you to have a look round the place or do anything you cared to until she
came in."
"Oh, thanks," said young Dampier.
At that moment what he would have "cared to do" would have been to get
this girl to himself somewhere where he could say to the Little Humbug,
"Look here. You aren't interested in machinery. You said so yourself. What
are you getting this carroty-headed Ass to talk to you about it for?"
Seeing that this was out of the question he hesitated.... He didn't want to go
round the shops with this fellow, to whom he'd taken a dislike. On sight. He
did that sometimes. On the other hand, he couldn't do what he wanted to do

—sit and talk to the Little Thing until the Aeroplane Lady returned. What
about saying he'd got to look up some one in the village, and bolting, until
three o'clock? No. No fear! Why should this other fellow imagine he could
have the whole field to himself for talking to Her?
So the trio, the age-old group that is composed of two young men and a girl,
stood there for a moment rather awkwardly.
Finally the Little Thing said, "Well, I've got to go back to my wings," and
turned.
Then the fellow Ryan said, "One minute, Miss Gwenna——"
Miss Gwenna! All but her Christian name! And he, Paul Dampier, who'd
known her a good deal longer—he'd never called her anything at all, but
"you"! Miss Gwenna, if you please!
What followed was even more of a bit of dashed cheek.
For the fellow turned quickly aside to her and said, "I say, it's Friday
afternoon. Supposing I don't see you again to-morrow morning—it's all
right, isn't it, about your coming up to town for that matinée with me?"
"Oh, yes, thanks," said the Little Thing brightly. "I asked Mrs. Crewe, and
it's all right."
Then the new note crept into her voice; the half-unconsciously-acquired
note of coquetry. She said, smiling again at the red-haired Ryan, "I am so
looking forward to that."
And, turning again to the Airman, she said with a half-shy, half-airy little
smile that, also, he found new in her, "Have you seen The Cinema Star? Mr.
Ryan is going to take me to-morrow afternoon."
"Oh, is he?" said Paul Dampier shortly.
Was he, indeed? Neck!
"You do come up to town sometimes from here, then?" added Mr. Dampier
to Miss Gwenna Williams, speaking a trifle more distinctly than usual, as he

concluded, "I was just going to ask you whether you could manage to come
out with me to-morrow evening?"
Nobody was more surprised to hear these last words than he himself.
Until that moment he hadn't had the faintest intention of ever asking the girl
out anywhere again. Now here he was; he'd done it. The Little Thing had
murmured, "Oh——" and was looking—yes, she was looking pleased. The
fellow was looking as if he'd been taken aback. Good. He'd probably
thought he was going to have her to himself for the evening as well as for
the matinée. Dinner at the "Petit Riche"—a music-hall afterwards—travel
down home with her. Well, Dampier had put a stopper on that plan. But now
that he had asked her, where was he going to take her himself? To another
musical comedy? No. Too like the other chap. To one of the Exhibitions?
No; not good enough. Anyhow, wherever he took her, he hadn't been out-
bidden by this soft-soapy young idiot. Infernal cheek.... Then, all in a flash
the brilliant solution came to Paul Dampier. Of course! Yes, he could work
it! The Aviation Dinner! He'd meant to go. He would take her. It would
involve taking Mrs. Crewe as well. Never mind. It was something to which
that other young ass wouldn't have the chance of taking her, and that was
enough.
"Yes," he went on saying, as coolly as if it had all been planned. "There's a
show on at the Wilbur Club; Wilbur Wright, you know. I thought I'd ask if
you and Mrs. Crewe would care to come with me to the dinner. Will you?—
Just break that packing up a bit more," he added negligently to the red-
haired youth. "And check those spaces—Will you take me into your place,
Miss Williams?"
That, he thought, was the way to deal with poachers on his particular
preserves!
It was only when he got inside the spacious white Wing-room and sat down,
riding a chair, close to the trestle-table where the girl bent her curly head so
conscientiously over the linen strips again, that he realised that this Little
Thing wasn't his particular preserves at all!
Hadn't he, only a couple of weeks ago, definitely decided that she was never
to mean anything of the sort to him? Hadn't he resolved——

Here, with his long arms crossed over the back of the chair as he sat facing
and watching her, he put back his head and laughed.
"What are you laughing at?" she asked, straightening herself in the big
pinafore with its front all stiff with that sticky mess she worked with.
He was laughing to think how dashed silly it was to make these resolutions.
Resolutions about which people you were or were not to see anything of!
As if Fate didn't arrange that for you! As if you didn't have to leave that to
Fate, and to take your chance!
Possibly Fate meant that he and the Little Thing should be friends, great
friends. Not now, of course. Not yet. In some years' time, perhaps, when his
position was assured; when he'd achieved some of the Big Things that he'd
got to do; when he had got something to offer a girl. Ages to wait.... Still, he
could leave it at that, now, he thought.... It might, or might not, come to
anything. Only, it was ripping to see her!
He didn't tell her this.
He uttered some conventional boy's joke about being amused to see her
actually at work for the first time since he'd met her. And she made a little
bridling of her neck above that vast, gull-like wing that she was pasting;
and retorted that, indeed, she worked very hard.
"Really," he teased her. "Always seem to be taking time off, whenever I've
come."
"You've only come twice, Mr. Dampier; and then it's been sort of lunch-
time."
"Oh, I see," he said. ("I may smoke, mayn't I?" and he lighted a cigarette.)
"D'you always take your lunch out of doors, Miss Gwenna?" (He didn't see
why he shouldn't call her that.)
She said, "I'd like to." Then she was suddenly afraid he might think she was
thinking of their open-air lunch in that field, weeks ago, and she said
quickly (still working): "I—I was so glad when I heard about the engine
coming, and that Colonel Conyers had ordered the P.D.Q. to be made here. I

—do congratulate you, Mr. Dampier. Tell me about the Machine, won't
you?"
He said, "Oh, you'll hear all about that presently; but look here, you haven't
told me about you——"
Gwenna could scarcely believe her ears; but yes, it was true. He was
turning, turning from talk about the Machine, the P.D.Q., the Fiancée!
Asking, for the first time, about herself. She drew a deep breath; she turned
her bright, greeny-brown eyes sideways, longing at that moment for Leslie
with whom to exchange a glance. Her own shyly triumphant look met only
the deep, wise eyes of the Great Dane, lying in his corner of the Wing-room
beside his kennel. He blinked, thumped his tail upon the floor.
"Darling," whispered Gwenna, a little shakily, as she passed the tawny dog.
"Darling!" She had to say it to something just then.
Paul Dampier pursued, looking at her over his crossed arms on the back of
that chair, "You haven't said whether you'll come to-morrow night."
She asked (as if it mattered to her where she went, as long as it was with
him), "What is this dinner?"
"The Wilbur dinner? Oh, there's one every year. Just a meeting of those
interested in flying. I thought you might care——"
"Who'll be there?"
"Oh, just people. Not many. Some ladies go. Why?"
"Only because I haven't got anything at all to wear," announced Gwenna,
much more confidently, however, than she could have done before Mr.
Ryan had told her so much about her own looks, "except my everlasting
white and the blue sash like at the Smiths'."
"Well, that was awfully pretty; wasn't it? Only——"
"What?"
"Well, may I say something?"
"Well, what is it?"

"Frightfully rude, really," said Paul Dampier, tilting himself back on his
chair, and still looking at her over a puff of smoke, staring even. She was
something to stare at. Why was she such a lot prettier? Had he forgotten
what her looks were? She seemed—she seemed, to-day, so much more of a
woman than he'd ever seen her. He forgot that he was going to say
something. She, with a little fluttering laugh for which he could have
clasped her, reminded him.
"What's the rude thing you were going to say to me?"
"Oh! It's only this. Don't go muffling your neck up in that sort of ruff affair
this time; looks ever so much nicer without," said the boy.
The girl retorted with quite a good show of disdainfulness, "I don't think
there's anything quite so funny as men talking about what we wear."
"Oh, all right," said the boy, and pretended to be offended. Then he laughed
again and said, "I've still got something of yours that you wear, as a matter
of fact——"
"Of mine?"
"Yes, I have; I've never given it you back yet. That locket of yours that you
lost."
"Oh——!" she exclaimed.
That locket! That little heart-shaped pendant of mother-o'-pearl that she had
worn the first evening that she'd ever seen him; and that she had dropped in
the car as they were driving back. So much had happened ... she felt she
was not even the same Gwenna as the girl who had snapped the slender
silver chain about her neck before they set out for the party.... She'd given
up wondering if her Airman had forgotten to give it back to her. She'd
forgotten all about it herself. And he'd had it, one of her own personal
belongings, somewhere in his keeping all this time.
"Oh, yes; my—my little mascot," she said. "Have you got it?"
"Not here. It's in my other jac—it's at my rooms, I'll bring it to the dinner
for you. And—er—look here, Miss Gwenna——"

He tilted forward again as the girl passed his side of the table to reach for
the little wooden pattern by which she cut out a patch for the end of the
strip, and then passed back again.
"I say," he began again, a trifle awkwardly, "if you don't mind, I want you to
give me something in exchange for that locket."
"Oh, do you?" murmured Gwenna. "What?"
And a chill took her.
She didn't want him, here and now, to ask for—what Mr. Ryan might have
asked.
But it was not a kiss he asked for, after all.
He said, "You know those little white wings you put in your shoes? You
remember, the night of that river dance? Well, I wish you'd let me have one
of those to keep as my mascot."
He hadn't thought of wishing it until there had intruded into his ken that
other young man who made appointments—and who might have the—
cheek to ask for keepsakes, but who shouldn't be first, after all!
Anxiously, as if it were for much more than that feathered trifle of a mascot
that he asked, he said, "Will you?"
"Oh! If you like!"
"Sure you don't mind?"
"Mind? I should like you to have it," said Gwenna softly. "Really."
And across the great white aeroplane wing the girl looked very sweetly and
soberly at her Aviator, who had just asked that other tiny wing of her, as a
knight begged his lady's favour.

It was at this moment that the Aeroplane Lady, an alert figure in dark blue,
came into a room where a young man and a girl had been talking idly

enough together while one smoked and the other went on working with that
five-foot barrier of the wing between them.
The Aeroplane Lady, being a woman, was sensitive to atmosphere—not the
spirit-and-solution-scented atmosphere of this place of which she was
mistress, but another.
In it she caught a vibration of something that made her say to herself,
"Bless me, what's this? I never knew those two had even met! 'Not saying
so,' I suppose. But certainly engaged, or on the verge of it!"
—Which all went to prove that the rebuked, the absent Leslie, was not far
wrong in saying that it is the Obvious Thing that always succeeds!

CHAPTER XIX
THE SEALED BOX

Whatever the Aeroplane Lady thought to herself about the two in the Wing-
room, there was no trace of it in her brisk greeting to Paul Dampier.
"I hope you haven't been waiting long?" she said. "I'm ready now."
Then she turned to her girl-assistant, who was once more laying the tacky
strips of linen along the seams. "That's right," she said. "You can go straight
on with that wing; that will take you some time. One of the wings for your
machine," she added to the aviator. "I'm ready, Mr. Dampier."
She and the young man left the Wing-room together and entered the
adjoining office, closing the door behind them.
Left alone, Gwenna went on swiftly working, and as swiftly dreaming.
Rapidly, but none the less surely, seam after long seam was covered; and
the busyness of her fingers seemed to help the fancies of her brain.
"One of the wings for his Machine!" she thought. "And there was I,
thinking I should mind working for that—for 'Her,'" she smiled. "I don't,
after all. I needn't care, now."
Her heart seemed singing within her. Nothing had happened, really. Only,
she was sure of her lover. That was all. All! She worked; and her small feet
on the floor seemed set on air, as in that flying dream.
"Such a great, huge wing for 'Her,'" she murmured to herself. "Such a little,
little wing for himself that he asked for. My tiny one that I put in my shoe.
It was for him I put it there! And now it's begun to bring him to me. It has!"
she exulted. "He's begun to care. I know he does."
From the other side of the door came a heightened murmur of voices in the
office. Something heavy seemed to be set down on the floor. That sealed
box, perhaps, that he'd brought with him in the car. Then came the shutting

of the outer door. Mr. Ryan passed the window. Then a sound of hammering
in the office, and the long squeak of a nail being prized out of wood. They
were opening that mysterious package of his. Gwenna's fingers flew over
her own task to the tune of her joyous thoughts.
"I don't care how long it lasts before anything else happens. Don't care how
this flying-machine of his does try to keep him from me. She won't. She
can't. Nothing can!" triumphed the girl, smoothing the canvas that was her
Rival's plumage. "He's going to be mine, with everything that he knows. So
much better, and cleverer, and belonging to different sort of people as he is,
and yet he's going to have me belonging to him. She's had the last of him
putting her always first!"
She heard in the office Paul Dampier's short laugh and his "Oh? you think
so?" to the Aeroplane Lady. Gwenna scarcely wondered what this might be
about. Some business to do with the Machine; but he would come to an end
of that, soon. He'd come back to her, with that look in his blue eyes, that
tone in his deep voice. She could wait patiently now for the day, whenever
it came, when he should tell her definitely that he loved her and wanted her
to be his. There would be that, of course—Gwenna, the inexperienced, still
saw "the proposal" as the scene set and prepared; the inevitable milestone
beside the course of true love. Never mind that now, though. It didn't matter
when. What mattered was that it would come. Then she would always be
with him. It would be for ever, like that blissful day in the hayfield, that
summer night by the river at the dance, those few bewildering seconds on
the Westminster scaffolding. And with no cruelty of separation afterwards
to spoil it. Nothing—nothing was going to part them, after all.

She had finished the wing. She looked about for the next thing to do.
There were three wings in the room, and all were finished. A fourth wing
still lay, a skeleton of fretted and glued wood, in the workshops; the skin
was not yet stretched over it.
And there were no more letters to write for the firm.

Gwenna had nothing to do.
"I shall have to go into the office and ask," she said, admitting to herself
that she was glad enough to go. So often she had painted for herself, out of
mere memories, the picture of her Airman. He was now in the office, in the
flesh! She need not have to satisfy herself with pictures of him. She slipped
off her sticky pinafore; the white muslin blouse beneath it was fresh and
pretty enough. She moved to the office-door. It was her room; she had never
yet had to knock at that door.
She pushed it open and stood waiting. For a moment she only saw the
Aeroplane Lady and the tall Aviator. They had their backs to her; they were
standing side by side and examining a plan that they had pinned up on the
matchboarding wall. Paul Dampier's finger was tracing a little arc on the
plan, and he was slowly shaking his head, with the gesture of a man who
says that something "won't do." The Aeroplane Lady's fingers were
meditatively at her lips, and her attitude echoed that of the young man.
Something that they had planned wouldn't do——
Then Gwenna's eyes fell, from these two people, to that "Something." It was
something that she had never seen about the Aircraft Works before. Indeed,
she did not remember having seen it ever before, anywhere, except in
pictures. This object was on the floor, half in and half out of the sealed
wooden box that Paul Dampier had brought down with him in the car, and
that he wouldn't let the workmen handle.... So this was why....
This was it. Aghast, she stared at it.
It was a long, khaki-painted cylinder, and from one end of it a wicked-
looking little nozzle projected for an inch or so. The other end, which
disappeared into the box, showed a peep of a magazine and a pistol-grip.
Even to Gwenna's unskilled eyes the thing appeared instantly what it was.
A machine-gun.
"A gun?" she thought, stupefied; "dear me—on an aeroplane?"
"No," said Paul Dampier's voice suddenly, decisively, speaking to the
Aeroplane Lady, "it'll have to be a rifle after all."

And with the sudden breaking of his voice upon her ear, there seemed to be
torn from before the girl's eyes a corner of some veil.
Quite suddenly (how, she could not explain) she knew what all this meant.
That plan for that new flying-machine. That gun. The whole object of the
ambitions of these people with their so romantic profession. Scraps of her
Aviator's talk about "scouting," and "the new Arm," and "modern warfare."
...
Just now she had been swept up aloft by his look and tone into the seventh
heaven of a woman's delight. That was Love. Here, epitomised in that
cylinder with that vicious little nozzle, she saw the Power that could take
him from her yet. This was War!
A shudder ran over her.
Her mind took no notice of the facts that there was no War for him to go to,
that this grim preparation must be for experimenting only, for manœuvres,
sham fights; that this was July, Nineteen-fourteen, an era of sleepy peace
(except for that gossip, half a joke, that we might have civil war in Ireland
yet), and that she and he and everybody they had to do with lived in the
Twentieth Century, in England....
Perhaps it was because she was not English, but British, Welsh. She entirely
lacked that Anglo-Saxon "balance" of which the English are so proud, and
that stolidity and that unimaginativeness. Her imagination caught some of
those unheard, unsuspected messages with which the air must have been
vibrant, all those midsummer weeks.
Her quick, unbalanced Celtic fancy had already shown her as clearly as if
she had seen it with her eyes that image of his Aeroplane as a winged and
taloned Woman-rival. Now it flashed before her, in a twink, another picture:
Paul Dampier, seated in that Aeroplane, swooping through the air, armed
and in danger!
The danger was from below. She did not see that danger. She saw only the
image, against grey, scudding clouds, of the Beloved. But she could feel it,
that poignant Threat to him, to him in every second of his flight. It was not

the mere risk of accident or falling. It was a new peril of which the shadow,
cast before, fell upon the receptive fancy of the girl who loved the
adventurer. And, set to that shadow-picture in her mind, there rang out to
some inner sense of hers a Voice that sounded clear and ominous words.
They called to her: "Fired at both by friend and foe——"
Then stopped.
The young girl didn't remember ever to have heard or even to have read
these words. How should she? It was the warning fore-echo of a phrase now
historic, but then as yet unuttered, that had transmitted itself to some
heightened sense of hers:

"Fired at both by friend and foe!"[A]

[A] This phrase occurred in a despatch from Sir David Henderson.

There! It was gone, the waking vision that left her trembling, with a
certainty.
Yes; here was the meaning of the sealed box, of the long confabulation of
her Airman with the Aeroplane Lady.... War was coming. And they knew.
Gwenna, standing there in the doorway, drawing a long breath and feeling
suddenly rather giddy, knew that she had come upon something that she had
not been meant to guess.
What was she to do about it?
Her hand was on the knob of the door.
Must she close it upon herself, or behind her?
Should she come forward and cry, "Oh, if it was a dreadful secret, why
didn't you lock the door?"
Or should she go out noiselessly, taking that burden of a secret with her?
She might confess to the Aeroplane Lady afterwards....
Here she saw that the Airman had half turned. His boyish, determined
profile was dark in shadow against the plan on the wall; the plan of the
P.D.Q. Sunlight through the office window touched and gilded the edge of
his blonde head.
"Yes; I thought so. Have to be a rifle after all," he repeated in a matter-of-
fact tone. Then, turning more round, his glance met the startled eyes of the
girl in the doorway.
And that finished the dilemma for Gwenna.
Something rose up in her and was too strong to let her be silent.
"Oh! I've seen it!" she cried sharply. "Paul!"

He took one stride towards her and slipped his arm about her as she swayed.
She was white to the lips.
"Is there any water——" began young Dampier, but already the Aeroplane
Lady had poured out a glassful.
It was he, however, who put it to Gwenna's lips, holding her still.
"It's all right, darling," he said reassuringly (and the give-away word
slipped very easily from his tongue). "Better, aren't you? Frightfully muggy
in that room with those radiators! You oughtn't to be—— Here!" He took
some of the cold water and dabbed it on her curls.
"I suppose he knew he could trust the child," thought the Aeroplane Lady as
she closed the door of the Wing-room between herself and those two in the
office, "but I don't know that I should have engaged her if I'd known. I don't
want lovers about the place, here. Of course, this explains his Aviation
dinner and everything——"

Little Gwenna, standing with her small face buried against the Aviator's
tweed jacket, was sighing out that she hadn't meant to come in, hadn't
meant to look at that horrible gun....
The girl didn't know what she was saying. The boy scarcely heard it. He
was rumpling with his cheek the short, silky curls he had always longed to
touch. Presently he tilted her cherub's head back against his shoulder, then
put both his hands about that throat of hers.
She gave an unsteady little laugh.
"You'll throttle me," she murmured.
Without loosening his clasp, he bent his fair head further down, and kissed
her, very gently, on the mouth.
"Don't mind, do you?" he said, into another kiss. "Do you?"

At that moment the Little Thing in his arms had banished all thought of
those Big Things from his mind.

PART II

JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER,
1914

CHAPTER I
THE AVIATION DINNER

Gwenna began to feel a little nervous and intimidated, even in the car that
took herself and the Aeroplane Lady and the Airman to the Aviation dinner.
A hundred yards before they reached the portals of the Club in Pall Mall
that car stopped. Then it began to advance again a yard or two at a time. A
long row of other cars and taxis was ahead, and from them alighted guests
in dull black opera hats, with mufflers; once or twice there was the light and
jewelled gleam of a woman's wrap, but they were mostly men who were
driving up.
"Colonel Conyers," said Paul Dampier to the attendant in the great marble-
tiled entrance.
Then he was shown off to the right; Gwenna and the Aeroplane Lady to the
dressing-rooms on the left. Before an immense glass they removed their
wraps and came out to the waiting-room, the girl all misty-white with the
sky-blue sash and the dancing-shoes; the Lady gowned in grey satin that
had just the gleam of aluminium in that factory of hers, and with her brooch
of the winged serpents fastened at her breast.
They sat down at one of the little polished tables in the waiting-room under
the long windows on to Pall Mall; it was a high, light-panelled room, with a
frieze of giant roses. A couple of ladies went by to the dressing-room,
greeting Mrs. Crew as they passed.
Then there stopped to speak to her a third and older and very handsome
lady all in black, with diamonds ablaze in her laces and in her grey, piled-up
hair.
"There should be some good speeches to-night, shouldn't there?" said this
lady. "All these splendid men!... You know, my dear, take us for all in all"—
and she gave a little laugh—"we are splendid!"

"But there are so few of us," said the Aeroplane Lady, ruefully.
The other woman, about to pass on, stopped for a moment again, and
looking over her white shoulder said, very seriously, something that both
her hearers were to remember. "If England is ever to be saved, it will be by
a few."
She went out; and Mrs. Crewe said to Gwenna, "That was Lady——"
(Something) "the wife of the man who's as responsible as most people for
the security of this Empire——"
Most of the people there seemed to know the Aeroplane Lady quite well,
Gwenna noticed, when Paul Dampier came up and took them out into the
Central Hall again, where the guests were assembling. The place seemed as
high as a cathedral, with a marble floor, and alcoves, and tall, classic, brass
tripod things to hold the end of men's cigarettes and ashes. The Aeroplane
Lady was at once surrounded by a group of men. Gwenna, feeling very shy
and little and of no account, turned to her Airman.
"You said," she murmured reproachfully, "that there weren't going to be a
lot of grand people."
"These aren't 'grand,' bless you! People aren't, who are really—well, who
'do things,' as you say. Not nearly as frilly here as at the Smiths, that other
dinner," he said, smiling down at her. "I'm going to bring up Colonel
Conyers and introduce him to you——"
"Him? Good gracious!" thought the little Welsh girl in consternation to
herself. "Colonel Conyers!—oh, no, please—I should be much too
frightened——"
But the tall figure had detached itself from a group at a word from Paul
Dampier, and Colonel Conyers came up. Gwenna recognised the lean,
smiling, half-mischievous face of the soldier who—those ages ago!—had
talked to those ladies in the motor-car at Hendon.
This was the man they called "Aircraft Conyers," the man practically at the
head of Aeronautics, Paul had, said, the man in whose hands rested (among
so many, many other things) the whole career of the inventor of the P.D.Q.!

Gwenna, with her curly head whirling, felt inclined to drop a schoolchild's
curtsy to this Great One of the Councils of the Earth.
He took her hand into his own long, lean one.
"How d'you do?" he drawled, smiling cheerfully. "Starving, what? I am, I
can tell you. Always late here. Won't be long, now. You're at my table, I
believe." Then, almost anxiously, "Fond of chocolates? You are? Good.
Then I can collect the lot of those little silver dishes around us and pretend
it's all for you. It's for me, really."
Gwenna, who was not able to help laughing at this unexpectedness on the
part of the great Aircraft Conyers, said: "Are you fond of them?"
"Passionately. Passionately!" said Colonel Conyers with a nod, as he turned
to find his own dinner-partner.
"Didn't frighten you much, did he?" laughed Paul Dampier to the Little
Thing at his side. "Course he didn't. I'll tell you who most of the others are
when we get into the supper-room."
In the great supper-room with its painted ceiling and gilded pillars dinner
was laid on a number of small tables for parties of six or eight. Gwenna
found herself the only woman at their table, the Aeroplane Lady sitting far
down at the other end of the room.
All dazed, the young girl looked about her like a stray bird that has fluttered
in through an open window. Beside her, Paul Dampier pointed out to her
this celebrity and that at the tables.
"Colonel Conyers you've seen...." (That personage had nodded to the young
girl over a stack of pink roses and had made a little movement to show the
basket of sweets beside his plate.) "Now that man with the Order, that's
Lord" (So-and-So), "Director of Coast Defence. And that" (So-and-So),
"Chief Engineer. And that little man one down—in the opposite direction
from where I'm looking—that's" (So-and-So), "editor of The Air. Wonderful
chap; brains enough to sink a ship."
An extraordinary mixture of men, Gwenna thought, as her glance followed
his direction, and he went on talking. Soldiers, sailors, chemists, scientists,

ministers; all banded together. Ranks and fortunes were merged. Here were
men of position, men of brains, men of money. Men whose names were in
all the newspapers, and men the papers had never heard of, all with one aim
and object, the furtherance of Civilisation's newest advance: the Conquest
of the Air.
The dinner proceeded. Pale amber wine whispered and bubbled in her glass,
dishes came and went, but the girl scarcely knew what she ate or drank. She
was in a new world, and he had brought her there. She felt it so intensely
that presently it almost numbed her. She was long past the stage of
excitement that manifests itself in gasps and exclamations. She could speak
ordinarily and calmly when Paul Dampier, turning from his talk to a
Physical Laboratory man in a very badly brushed coat, asked her: "Well?
Find it interesting?"
"You know I do," she said, with a grave little glance.
He said, smiling, "What did you say to the red-haired youth about not going
to the matinée with him first?"
"Mr. Ryan? Oh! I just told him I hadn't got over my headache from the
smell of dope, and that I was afraid it would tire me too much to do both."
"Pretty annoyed, I expect, wasn't he?"
"Yes, he was," replied Gwenna, with the absolute callousness of a woman in
love towards the feelings of any but the one man. She did not even trouble
whether it had been the feelings or the vanity of Mr. Peter Ryan that had
been hurt. What mattered was that Paul Dampier had not wished her to go
to that matinée.
Paul Dampier said, "Well, I cried off an engagement to-night, too. Colonel
Conyers wanted to take me back with him. But I'm seeing you home."
"Oh, but you mustn't; you needn't!" she protested happily. "I'm not going
down to the Works, you know, to-night. I'm sleeping at the Club. I'm
staying this week-end with Leslie."
"With Leslie, are you? M'm. But I'm taking you up to the Club afterwards,"
he persisted. "A fellow's got to look after"—here he laughed a little as if it

were a joke that pleased him—"a fellow's got to look after his fiancée,
hasn't he?"
She was a little subdued. She thought for the moment that he had put
Colonel Conyers off, not for her, after all! but for that Machine of his. Then
she thought: No!—the machine was second now. She said, half in hope, half
in dread, "D'you mean the P.D.Q.?"
He turned, with his mouth full of salad, staring whimsically at her.
"The P.D.Q.? What you thinking of? I meant you."
"Me?" She gave a little gasp.
Life and happiness were too much for her again. She felt as if that
whispering untouched champagne in her glass had gone to her head. Was it
really true—that, that he had said?
"Well, aren't you?" he said gaily, but dropping his voice a little as the
conversation rose about them. "Aren't you that to me? Engaged, aren't we?"
"Oh, I don't know," the young girl said, breathlessly. It was as if the moon
that one had cried for had suddenly dropped, to lie like a round, silver
mirror in one's lap. "Did you mean that, yesterday afternoon?"
"Didn't I mean it before that?" he said, half to himself. "What about all
those dances? that time when Hugo dragged me off to that place by the
river? Those would have been most incorrect," he teased her, "if we hadn't
been. We shall have to be, my dear."
Then an impulse took her. (It is known to any young girl who is sincerely in
Love.)
"No. Don't let's——" she said suddenly. "Don't let's be 'engaged'!"
For it seemed to her that a winged Dream was just about to alight and to
become a clumsy creature of Earth—like that Aeroplane on the Flying
Ground. The boy said, staring at her, "Not be engaged? Why on earth? How
d'you mean?"

"I mean, everybody gets 'engaged,'" she explained very softly and rapidly
over the bread that she was crumbling in her little fingers. "And it's such a
sort of fuss, with writing home, and congratulations, and how-long-has-this-
been-going-on, and all that sort of thing! People at tea-parties and things
talking about us! I know they would!" declared the Welsh girl with distaste,
"and saying, 'Dear me, she looks very young' and wondering about us! Oh,
no, don't let's have it! It would seem to spoil it, for me! Don't let's call it
anything, need we? Don't let's say anything yet, except to—just US."
"All right," said the boy with an easy shrug. (He was too young to know
what he was escaping.) "Sure I don't mind, as long as you're just with me,
all the time we can."
She said, wonderfully sedate above the tumult in her heart, "Did you bring
my locket with you to-night?"
"No. I didn't. D'you know why? Can't you guess? Because I wanted to give
it back to you when I could put it round my Girl's neck," he told her. And
she turned away from him, so happily confused again that she could not
speak.
She was his Girl; his. And because he was one of this band of brothers,
sitting here feasting and talking, each making it his business to contribute
his share to the sum of what was to be one of the World's greatest Forces,
why! because of that, even she, little Gwenna Williams, could feel herself to
be a tiny part of that Force. She was an Aviator's girl—even if it were a
wonderful secret that nobody knew, so far, but he and she.
(Already everybody at that table and many others in the room had remarked
what a pretty little creature young Dampier's sweetheart was.)

"The King!" announced the President of the Dinner.
There was a movement and a rustle all round the great supper-room as the
guests rose to the toast; another rustle as they reseated themselves. One of
the celebrities whom Paul had pointed out to her began to speak upon the
achievements of Wilbur Wright. At the table next to Gwenna some

journalists bent absorbed over scribbling pads. Speech followed speech as
the toasts were gone through. The opal-blue haze of cigarette smoke drifted
up above the white tables with their rose-pink and ferny decorations. Chairs
were pushed sidewards as guests turned alert and listening faces towards the
head of the room; and every now and again the grave and concise and
pleasantly modulated tones of some speaker-on-the-subject of his heart
were broken in upon by a soft storm of applause.
"Colonel Conyers to speak now," murmured Paul to Gwenna, as the long,
lean figure that had been sitting opposite to them rose. He stepped
backwards, to stand against one of those gilded pillars as he made his
speech, responding to the toast that had coupled his name with that of the
Flying Wing of the Army.
Gwenna listened with even more breathless attention than she had paid to
the other speakers.
Colonel Conyers spoke easily and lightly, as if he had been, not making a
speech, but talking to a knot of friends at his house. He reviewed, in terms
so simple that even the young girl at his table could follow all he said, the
difficulties and the risks of aviation, and the steps that had been taken to
minimise those risks. Wind, it seemed, had been in a great measure
overcome. Risk from faulty workmanship of machines—that, too, was
overcome. Workmanship was now well-nigh as perfect as it could be made.
Here Gwenna glowed with pride, exchanging a glance with her employer
far down the tables. This meant their workmanship at Aircraft Factories;
their Factory, too! This meant the labours of Mrs. Crewe and of Mr. Ryan,
and of André, and of the workmen in overalls at the lathes in that noisy
central shop. Even the brushful of dope that she, Gwenna, spread
conscientiously over each seam of the great wings, played its tiny part in
helping to preserve a Flyer's life!
The risk in stability, too, Colonel Conyers said, had been successfully
combatted by the gyroscope. There remained, however, Fog and Darkness
as the chief perils, which, at the present moment, of July, Nineteen-
fourteen, our Airmen had to fight....

In the soldier's lean face that shrewd, half-mischievous smile was flickering
as he spoke; his grey trim head turning now and again against the gilded
column, his keen eyes fixed upon some objective of his own, his strong
hand fidgeting in the small mechanical gesture of a man who is less
accustomed to speaking about things than to doing them.
Gwenna thought how different, how entirely different were all these people
here from that other dinner-party at the house of the prosperous and artistic
Smiths who had found so much to say about the Russian Ballet!
Definitely now Gwenna saw what the chief difference between them was.
Those other people treated and spoke of a pastime as though it were a
matter of Life and Death. These people here made Life and Death matters
their pastime.
"And these splendid real people are the ones I'm going to belong to," the
girl told herself with a glance at the tall boy beside her who had decided her
fate. That thought was to glow in the very depths of her, like a firefly
nestling at the heart of a rose, for as long as she lived.
The even, pleasant tones of Colonel Conyers went on to give as one of the
most hopeful features of aviation the readiness of the quite young man of
the present day to volunteer. No sooner was a fatality announced than for
one airman who, cheerfully giving his life for the service of his country, had
been put out of action, half a dozen promising young fellows were eager to
come forward and take his place.
"Two of 'em again yesterday.... Two of his lieutenants, killed in Yorkshire,"
whispered Paul Dampier, leaning to Gwenna.
She missed the next sentence of Colonel Conyers, which concluded cheerily
enough with the hard-worked but heartening reminder that whom the Gods
love die young....
Then, with a broadening of that humorous smile and with a glint in his eyes,
he referred to "those other people (plump and well-to-do—and quite young
people) who do, still, really appear to consider that the whole of a man's
duty to his country is to preserve his health for as long as possible and then,

having reached a ripe old age, to die comfortably and respectably in his
bed!—--"
There was a short ripple of laughter about the room; but after this Gwenna
heard very little.
Not only was she incapable of taking any more in, but this last sentence
pulled her up with a sudden memory of what she had seen, yesterday.
That gun at the Aircraft Works. That pictured presentiment in her own mind.
And she heard again, through Colonel Conyers' pleasant voice, the queer,
unexplained words that had haunted her:
"Fired at by both friend and foe."
She thought, "I must ask! I must say something to Paul about that——"

CHAPTER II
THE "WHISPER OF WAR"

She said it after the dinner had broken up.
In the great hall young Dampier had turned to the Aeroplane Lady with his
offer of motoring her to her Hotel first. She had good-naturedly laughed at
him and said, "No. I'm going to be driven back by the rightful owner of the
car this time. You take Miss Williams."
And then she had gone off with some friend of Paul's who had motors to
lend, and Paul had taken Gwenna to find a taxi to drive up to Hampstead.
They drove slowly through Piccadilly Circus, now brighter than at midday.
It was thronged with the theatre-crowds that surged towards the crossings.
Coloured restaurant-coats and jewelled head-gear and laughing faces were
gay in the lights that made that broad blazing belt about the fountain.
Higher up the whole air was a soft haze of gold, melting into the hot, star-
strewn purple of the night-sky. And against this there tapered, black and
slender, the apex of the fountain, the downward-swooping shape that is not
Mercury, but the flying Love—the Lad with Wings.
Paul Dampier leant back in the closed cab and would have drawn the girl to
him.
She put both hands on his broad chest to hold him a little away from her.
"I want to ask you something," she began a little tremulously. "It's just—Is
there going to be——"
"Well, what?" he asked, smiling close to her.
Of all things that he least expected came what the girl had to say.
"Is there going to be—a War, Paul?"
"A what?" he asked, thinking he had not heard aright.

She repeated it, tremulously. "A war. Real war."
"War?" he echoed, blankly, taken aback. He was silent from puzzled
astonishment over her asking this, as they turned up Shaftesbury Avenue.
They were held up outside the Hippodrome for some minutes. He was still
silent. The taxi gave a jerk and went on. And she still waited for his reply.
She had to remind him.
"Well," she said again, tremulous. "Is there going to be?"
"A war? A war indeed," he said again. "What an extraordinary—Who's—
What put such a thing into your head?"
She said, "Is there?"
The boy gave a half-amazed, half-uneasy laugh. He retorted, "What d'you
mean, Gwenna? A war where?"
She said flutteringly, "Anywhere."
"Oh," he said, and laughed as if relieved. "Always some war, somewhere.
Frontier shows in India, and so on. There is some scrapping going on in
Europe too, now, you know. Looks as if Austria and Servia were going to
have a set-to. You mean that."
"No, I don't," persisted the Welsh girl, to whom these places seemed
indescribably remote and beside the mark. "I mean ... a war to do with us,
like."
"Us——?"
"To do with England."
"But——" he said, frowning. "Why, how absurd! A war with England?
Why ... of course not. Why should you think of it?"
She cleared her throat and answered with another tremulous question.
"Why should you have—that gun-thing—on your aeroplane?"
"Not going to. Not on the P.D.Q.," he said, shaking his head. "Only an
experiment, anyhow."

"Why should you have 'experiments' with those things?" she faltered.
"'Have to be a rifle,' you said. Why should you talk about 'scouting' and
'modern warfare'?"
"I wasn't!" he said quite hotly.
"Yes, you were. That day we were together. That day in the field when you
were talking to me about the Machine."
"Oh, then! Weeks ago."
"Yes. Why should there be all that, unless you meant that there'd be a war,
with England in it. Paul!" she cried, almost accusingly, "you said yourself
that it was 'bound to come!'"
"Oh, well! Everybody said that," he assured her lightly. "Can't help seeing
Germany and that Fleet of hers, and her Zeppelins and things, going on
build, build, build. They don't do that for their health, you bet! Scrap's
bound to come; yes. Sooner or later."
"Yes, Paul; but when?"
"How should I know, my dear child?" retorted the young Airman. "Why
didn't you ask Lord Thingummy, or Conyers at the Club just now?" he
laughed. "Good speech of his, wasn't it?"
"Does he know?" persisted Gwenna, paling. "About the war coming, I
mean?"
"More likely to know than I am, those people. Not that they'd give it away
if they did. It won't be to-morrow, anyway. To-morrow; that's Sunday. Our
holiday. Another day we shall have all to ourselves. Tell me what time I'm
to call for you at the Club."
Not to be put off, she retorted, timid, persistent, "Tell me when you think it
would come. Soon?"
Half laughing, half impatient, he said, "I don't know. Soon enough for it to
be in my time, I hope."
"But—" she said, with a little catch in her voice, "you're not a soldier?"

He said quietly, "I'm an aviator."
An aviator; yes. That was what she meant. He belonged to the most daring
and romantic of professions; the most dangerous, but not that danger. An
inventor, part of his time; the rest of his time an airman at Hendon who
made flights above what the man with the megaphone called the "Aer-rio-
drome" above the khaki-green ground with the pylons and the border of
summer-frocked spectators. Her boy! An aviator.... Would that mean
presently a man flying above enemy country, to shoot and be shot at?
("Fired at by both friend and foe."). She said quiveringly: "You wouldn't
have to fight?"
He said: "Hope so, I'm sure."
"Oh, Paul!" she cried, aghast, her hands on his arm. "Just when—when I've
only just got you! To lose you again so soon——! Oh, no——!"
"Oh, I say, darling, don't be so silly," he said briskly and reassuringly. He
patted the little hands. "We're not going to talk about this sort of thing,
d'you hear? There's nothing to talk about. Actually, there's nothing.
Understand?"
"Yes," she murmured slowly. She thought, "Actually, 'there's nothing to talk
about' in what's between him and me. But it's there all the time."
And then, gradually, that presentiment of War began to fade in the reality of
her joy at being with him now, with him still....
They turned up the Hampstead Road, flaring with naphtha-lights above the
stalls, noisy with shouts of costers, crowded with the humble shoppers of
Saturday night.
"Well, and what about to-morrow?" Dampier took up.
"I was going with Leslie to——"
"So you said. With Leslie, indeed! D'you think you're going to be allowed
to go anywhere again, except with me?" he muttered as he put his arms
about her.

He held her as close as he had done on the scaffolding, that afternoon when
he had arranged with himself never to see the Little Thing again; close as
he'd done next time he did see her, at the Factory.
"Oh, you don't know!" he said quite resentfully (while she laughed softly
and happily in his hold), "you don't know how I've wanted you with me. I—
I haven't been able to think of anything—You have got a fellow fond of you
in a jolly short time, haven't you? How've you done it? M'm? I—Here!" he
broke off savagely, "what is this dashed idiot stopping the taxi for?"
"Because I get out here. It's the Club," Gwenna explained to him gravely,
opening the door of the cab for herself. "Good-night."
"What? No, you don't," protested the boy. "We're going up the Spaniards
Road and down by the Whitestone Pond, and round by Hendon first. I must
take you for a drive. It's not so late. Hang it, I haven't seen you to speak to
——"
She had made a dash out and across the lamp-lighted asphalt, and now she
nodded to him from the top step of the house, with her key already clicking
in the lock.
"There," she thought.
For even in the tie that binds the most adoring heart there is twisted some
little gay strand of retaliation.
Let him feel that after a whole evening of sitting in her pocket he hadn't
seen anything of her. She'd known that sort of feeling long enough. Let him
take his turn; let him have just a taste of it!
"Good-night!" she called softly to her lover before she disappeared. "See
you to-morrow!"

CHAPTER III
THE LAST SUNDAY OF PEACE

Never had Gwenna risen so early after having spent so little of a night in
sleep!

Into the small hours she had crouched in her kimono on the edge of Leslie's
camp bedstead in the light that came from the street lamp outside the
window; and she had talked and talked and talked.
For by "not saying anything about it" she had never meant keeping her
happiness from that close chum.
Miss Long, sincerely delighted, had listened and had nodded her wise black
head from the pillow. She had thrown in the confidante's running comments
of "There! What did Leslie tell you?... Oh, he would, of course.... Good....
Oh, my dear, how exactly like them all.... No, no; I didn't mean that. (Of
course there's nobody like him); I meant 'Fancy!' ... Yes and then what did
Paul say, Virginia?" At last repetitions had cropped up again and again into
the softly chattered recital, with all its girlish italics of: "Oh, but you don't
know what he's like; oh, Leslie, no, you can't imagine!"—At last Leslie had
sighed, a trifle enviously. And little Gwenna, pattering to the head of the
bed, had put her cheek to the other girl's and had whispered earnestly: "Oh,
Leslie, if I only could, d'you know what I'd do? I'd arrange so that he had a
twin-brother exactly like him, to fall in love with you!"
"Taffy! you are too ... sweet," the elder girl had whispered back in a stifled
voice.
Gwenna never guessed how Leslie Long had had much ado not to giggle
aloud over that idea. To think of her, Leslie, finding rapture with any one of
the type of the Dampier boy....

A twin-brother of his? Another equally bread-and-buttery blonde infant—an
infant-in-arms who was even "simpler" than Monty Scott? Oh, Ishtar!... For
thus does one woman count as profoundest boredom what brings to her
sister Ecstasy itself.

And now here was Gwenna, all in white, coming down to the Club's
Sunday breakfast with her broad hat already on her head and her gloves and
her vanity-bag in her hand.
At the head of the table sat the Vicar's widow with the gold curb brooch and
the look of resigned disapproval. Over the table Miss Armitage and the
other suffrage-workers were discussing the Cat-and-Mouse Act. Opposite to
them one of the art-students, with her hair cut à la Trilby, was listening
bewildered, ready to be convinced.... Not one of the usual things remained
unsaid....
Presently Gwenna's neighbour and bête noire, Miss Armitage, was
denouncing the few remaining members of her sex who still seemed to
acquiesce in the Oriental attitude towards Woman; who still remained serfs
or chattels or toys.
"However! Thy needn't think thy caount," declared the lecturer firmly,
stretching without apology across her neighbour to get the salt. With some
distaste Gwenna regarded her. She had spots on her face. "Pleasers of
Men!" she pursued, with noble scorn. "The remnant of the Slyve-girl Type,
now happily extinct——"
"Loud cheers," from Leslie Long.
"The serpent's tile," continued the suffragette, "the serpent's tile that, after
the reptile has been beaten to death, still gows on feebly wriggling——"
"Better wriggle off now, Taffy, my child," murmured Leslie, who sat facing
the breakfast-room window. "Here's a degraded Oriental coming up the path
now to call for his serf."
"You come," said Gwenna, warmly flushed as she rose. And she held her
chum's long arm, dragging her with her as she came into the hall where the

tall, typically English figure of her Airman stood, his straw hat in his hand.
A splash of scarlet from the stained glass of the hall door fell upon his fair
head and across his cheek as he turned.
"Good-morning," said Gwenna sedately, and without giving him so much as
a glance. She felt at that moment that she would rather keep him at arm's
length for ever than allow him even to hold her hand, with Leslie there. For
it takes those who are cooler in temperament than was the little Welsh girl,
or those who care less for their lovers than she did, to show themselves
warmer in the presence of others.
"Hullo," said Paul Dampier to her. Then, "Hullo, Miss Long! How d'you
do?"
Leslie gave him a very hearty shake of the hand, a more friendly glance and
a still more demure inquiry about that Machine of his.
Paul Dampier laughed, returning her glance.
She was a sport, he thought. She could be trusted not to claim, just yet, the
bet she'd won from his cousin; the laughing wager about the Aeroplane
versus the Girl. Fifteen to one on the Girl, wasn't it? And here was the Girl
home in his heart now, with the whole of a gorgeous July Sunday before
them for their first holiday together.
"I say, I'm not too early now, am I?" he asked as he and the girl walked
down the Club steps together. "I was the first time, so I just went for a walk
round the cricket-pitch and back. Sickening thing I couldn't rake up a car
anywhere for to-day. Put up with trains or tubes and taxis instead, I'm
afraid. D'you mind? Where shall we go?"

"Flying, of course," was Gwenna's first thought. "Now at last he'll take me
up." But that would be for the afternoon.
For the morning they wanted country, and grass, and trees to sit under....
Not Hampstead; Richmond Park was finally decided upon.

"We'll taxi to Waterloo," the boy said, with an inward doubt. He dived a
long brown hand into his pocket as they walked together down the road that
Gwenna used to take every morning to her Westminster bus. He was
particularly short of money just then. Dashed nuisance! Just when he would
have wished to be particularly flush! That's what came of buying a clock for
the Machine before it was wanted. Still, he couldn't let the Little Thing here
know that. Manage somehow. A taxi came rattling down the Pond Street
Hill from Belsize Park as they reached the stopping-place of the buses, and
Paul held up his hand.
"Taxi!"
But the driver shook his head. He pulled up the taxi in front of a small,
rather mean-looking house close to where Gwenna and Paul were standing
on the pavement. Then his fare came out of the house, a kit-bag in each
hand and a steamer-rug thrown over his arm; he was a small, compactly-
built young man in clothes so new and so smart that they seemed oddly out
of place with the slatternly entrance of his lodging-house. It was this that
made Paul Dampier look a little hard at him. Gwenna was wondering where
she'd seen that blonde, grave face of his before.
He sprang lightly into the cab; a pink-faced girl was sitting there, whom
Gwenna did not see. If she had seen her, she would have recognised her
Westminster colleague, Ottilie Becker.
"Liverpool Street," ordered Miss Becker's companion, setting down his
luggage.
Then, raising his head, he caught the eyes upon him of the other young man
in the street. He put a hand to his hat, gave a quick little odd smile, and
leaned forward out of the cab.
"Auf Wiedersehen!" he called, as the taxi started off—for Liverpool Street.
"Deuce did he mean by that?" exclaimed the young Englishman, staring
after the cab. "Who on earth was that fellow? I didn't know him."
"Nor did I. But I have seen him," said Gwenna.
"I believe I have, somewhere," said Paul, musing.

They puzzled over it for a bit as they went on to Waterloo on the top of their
bus.
And then, when they were passing "The Horse Shoe" in Tottenham Court
Road, and when they were talking about something quite different (about
the river-dance, in fact), they both broke off talking sharply. Gwenna, with a
little jump on the slanting front seat, exclaimed, "I know—!" Just as Paul
said, "By Jove! I've got it! I know who that fellow was. That German fellow
just now. He was one of the waiters at that very dance, Gwenna!"
Gwenna, turning, said breathlessly, "Yes, I know. The one who passed us on
the path. But I've thought of something else, too. I thought then his face
reminded me of somebody's; I know now who it is. It's that fair young man
who came down to try and be taken on at the Works."
"At Westminster?" Paul asked quickly.
"No; at the Aircraft Works one afternoon. He talked English awfully well,
and he said he was Swiss. And then André—you know, the big, dark French
workman—talked to him for quite a long time in French; he said he seemed
very intelligent. But he wouldn't give him a job, whatever."
"He wouldn't?"
"No. I heard him tell the Aeroplane Lady that the young man ('ce garçon-
là') came from the wrong canton," said Gwenna. "So he went away. I saw
him go out. He was awfully like that German waiter. I suppose most
Germans look alike, to us."
"S'pose so," said the Aviator, adding, "Was that the day that drawing of
mine was missing from the Aircraft Works, I wonder?"
She looked at him, surprised. "I didn't know one of your drawings was
missing, Paul."
"Yes. It didn't matter, as it happened. Drawing of a detail for my Machine.
I've taken jolly good care not to have complete drawings of it anywhere," he
said, with a little nod.
And some minutes later they had begun to talk of something else again, as
the bus lurched on through the hot, deserted Sunday streets.

The morning that had brought Gwenna to her lover left Gwenna's chum for
once at a loose end.
"Leslie, my child, aren't you a little tired of being the looker-on who sees
most of the game? Won't you take a hand?" Miss Long asked herself as she
went back into her Club bedroom. It was scented with the fresh smell of the
rosemary and bay-rum that Leslie used for her ink-black sheaf of hair, and
there drifted in through the open window the sound of bells from all the
churches.
"Sunday. My free morning! 'The better the day.' So I'll settle up at last what
I am going to do about this little matter of my future," she decided.
She sat down at the little bamboo writing-table set against the bedroom
wall. Above it there hung (since this was a girl's room!) a looking-glass; and
about the looking-glass there was festooned a little garland made up of
dance-programmes, dangling by their pencils, of gaudy paper-fans from
restaurants, and of strung beads. Stuck crookedly into a corner of the glass
there was a cockling snapshot. It showed Monty Scott's dark head above his
sculptor's blouse. Leslie picked it out and looked at it.
"Handsome, wicked eyes," she said to it lightly. "The only wicked things
about you, you unsophisticated infant-in-arms!" Then she said, "You and
your sculpturing!... Just like a baby with its box of bricks. Besides, I don't
suppose you'll ever have a penny. One doesn't marry a man because one
may like the look of him. No, boy."
She flicked the snapshot aside. There was conscientious carelessness in the
flick.
Then she took out the leather-cased ink-bottle from her dressing-bag, and
some paper.
She wrote: "My dear Hugo——"
Then she stopped and thought—"Maudie and Hilary Smith will be pleased
with me. So will the cousins, the opulent cousins who've always been kind
about clothes they've finished wearing, and invitations to parties where they

want another girl to brighten things up. You can give some bright parties for
them now, Leslie! Good Reason Number Ninety-nine for saying 'Yes.'"
She took up her pen.
"Nothing," she murmured, "Nothing will ever kill the idea that the girl who
isn't married is the girl who hasn't been asked. Nothing will ever spoil the
satisfaction of that girl when showing that she has!"
She wrote down the date, which she had forgotten.
"Poor Monty would be so much more decorative for 'show' purposes. But I
explained quite frankly to Hugo that it would be his money I'd want!"
She wrote, "After thinking it well over——"
Then again she meditated.
"Great things, reasons! The reason why so many marriages aren't a success
is because they haven't enough 'reasons why' behind them. Now, how far
had I got with mine—ah, yes. Reason Number a Hundred: I'm twenty-six; I
shall never been any better-looking than I am now. Not unless I'm better-
dressed. Which (Reason a Hundred and One) I should be if I married Hugo.
Reason a Hundred and Two: my old lady won't live for ever, and I should
never get a better job than hers. Except his. Reason Number a Hundred and
Two and a Half: I do quite like him. He doesn't expect anything more, so
there's the other half-reason for taking him. Reason a Hundred and Four:
he's never disapproved of me. Whereas Monty always likes me against his
better judgment. Much nicer for me, but annoying for a husband. I should
make Hugo an excellent wife." She added this half-aloud (to the snapshot).
"I should never shock him. Never bore him. Never interfere with him.
Never make him look silly—any sillier than he can't help looking with that
hair and that necktie he will wear. Leslie would have the sense, when she
wasn't amusing him at the moment, to retire to her own rooms (Reason a
Hundred and Five for marrying well), and to stay there until she was
fetched. Reason a——"
Here, in the full flow of her reasoning, Miss Long cast suddenly and rather
violently down her pen, and tore the sheet with Hugo's name in it into tiny

strips that she cast into the empty fireplace.
"I can't think to write a good letter to-day!" she excused herself to herself as
she got up from her chair. "I'm tired.... It was all that talking from Taffy last
night. Bother the child. Bother her. It's unsettling!—Bother all engaged
girls. (And all the people shall say Amen.) I wonder where they went to?... I
shall ring up somebody to take me on the river, I think. Plenty of time to say
'Yes' to Hugo later."
The letter to Hugo, between the lines of which there had come the vision of
an engaged girl's happy face, remained, for the present, unfinished.
Leslie went to the telephone.
"O-o-o Chelsea," she called. "I want to speak to Mr. Scott, please."
She thought, "This shall be my last free Sunday, and I'll have it in peace!"

In Richmond Park the grass was doubly cool and green beneath the shade
both of the oaks and of the breast-high bracken where Gwenna and Paul
Dampier sat, eating the fruit and cake that they had bought on the way, and
talking with long stretches of contented silence.
They were near enough actually to London and the multitude. But town and
people seemed far away, out of their world to-day.
Gwenna's soft, oddly-accented voice said presently into the warm stillness,
"You'll take me up this afternoon?"
"Up?" he said idly. "Where to?"
"Up flying, of course."
"No, I don't think so," said the young Airman quietly, putting his chin in his
hand as he lay in his favourite attitude, chest downwards in the grass,
looking at her.
"Not flying? Not this afternoon?"

"Don't think so, Little Thing."
"Oh, you're lazy," she teased him, touching a finger to his fair head and
taking it quickly back again. "You don't want to move."
"Not going to move, either; not until I've got to."
She sighed, not too disappointed.
Here in the dappled shade and the solitude with him it was heavenly
enough; even if she did glance upward at the peeps of sapphire-blue
through the leaves and wonder what added rapture it would be to soar to
those heights with her lover.
"D'you know how many times you've put me off?" she said presently,
fanning the midges away from herself with her broad white hat. "Always
you've said you'd take me flying with you, Paul. And always there's been
something to stop it. Let's settle it now. Now, when will you?"
"Ah," he said, and flung the stone of the peach he'd been eating into the
dark green jungle of bracken ahead of them. "Good shot. I wanted to see if I
could get that knob on that branch."
She moved nearer to him and said coaxingly, "What about next Sunday?"
"Hope it'll be as fine as this," he said, smiling at her. "I'd like all the
Sundays to be just like this one. Can't think what I did with all the ripping
days before this, Gwenna."
She said, "I meant, what about your taking me up next Sunday?"
"Nothing about it," he said, shaking his head. There was a little pause. He
crossed his long legs in the grass and said, "Not next Sunday. Nor the
Sunday after that. Nor any Sunday. Nor any time. I may as well tell you
now. You aren't ever coming flying," said the young aviator firmly to his
sweetheart. "I've settled that."
The cherub face of the girl looked blankly into his. "But, Paul! No flying?
Why? Surely—It's safe enough now!"
"Safe enough for me—and for most people."

"But you've taken Miss Conyers and plenty of girls flying."
"Girls. Yes."
"And you promised to take me!"
"That was ages ago. That was when you were a girl too."
"Well, what am I now, pray?"
"Don't you know? Not 'a girl.' My Girl!" he said.
Then he moved. He knelt up beside her. He made love to her sweetly
enough to cause her to forget all else for a time. And presently, flushed and
shy and enraptured, she brought out of her vanity-bag the tiny white wing
that was to be his mascot, and she safety-pinned it inside the breast of his
old grey jacket.
"That ought to be fastened somewhere to the P.D.Q.," he suggested. But she
shook her head. No. It was not for the P.D.Q. It was for him to wear.
Then she saw him weighing in his hand her own mascot, the little mother-
of-pearl heart with the silver chain.
"Ah! You did remember to bring it, at last?" she said.
Nestling against his arm, she lifted her chin and waited for him to snap the
trinket about her neck.
He laughed and hesitated. She looked at him rather wonderingly. Then he
made a confession.
"D'you know, I—I do hate to have to give it back again, Gwenna. I've had it
so long. Might as well let me hold on to it. May I?"
"Oh, you are greedy for keepsakes," she said, delighted. "What would you
do with a thing like that?"
"I've thought of something," said he, nodding at her.
She asked, "What?"

"Tell you another time," he smiled, with the locket clutched in the hand that
was about her waist. She flung back her head happily against his shoulder,
curling herself up like a kitten in his hold. They had settled that they were
going to walk on to Kew Gardens to tea, but it was not time yet, and it was
so peaceful here. Scarcely any one passed them in that nook of the Park.
Another happy silence fell upon the lovers. It was long before the boy broke
it, asking softly, "You do like being with me, don't you?" There was no
answer from the girl.
"Do you, Gwenna?" It seemed still odd to be able to call her whatever he
liked, now! "Do you, my Little Sweet Thing?"
Still she didn't answer. He bent closer to look at her.... Her long eyelashes
lay like two little dark half-moons upon her cheeks and her white blouse fell
and rose softly to her breathing. Drowsy from the late hours she'd kept last
night and from the sun-warmed silence under the trees, she had fallen
asleep in his arms. Her eyes were still shut when at last she heard his deep
and gentle voice again in her ear, "I suppose you know you owe me several
pairs of gloves, miss!"
She laughed sleepily, returning (still a little shyly and unfamiliarly!) the
next kiss that he put on her parted lips.
"I was nearly asleep," she said, with a little sudden stretch that ran all over
her like a shake given to a sheet of white aluminium at the Works. "Isn't it
quiet? Feels as if everything was asleep." She opened her eyes, blinking at
the rays of the sun, now level in her face. "Oh, I should like some tea,
wouldn't you?"
They rose to go and find a place for tea in Kew Gardens, among the happy,
lazing Sunday crowds of those whom it has been the fashion to treat so
condescendingly: England's big Middle-classes. There were the
conventional young married couples; "She" wearing out the long tussore
coat that seemed so voluminous; "He," pipe in mouth, wheeling the wicker
mail-cart that held their pink-and-white bud of a baby. There were also
courting couples innumerable....
(Not all of these were as reticent in the public eye as Gwenna had been with
her lover before Leslie.)

To Gwenna the bright landscape and the coloured figures seemed a page out
of some picture-book that she turned idly, her lover beside her. She had to
remind herself that to these other lovers she herself and Paul were also part
of a half-seen picture....
They sat down at one of the green wooden tea-tables, and a waiter in a
greasy black coat came out under the trees to take Dampier's order. Perhaps
that started another train of thought in the girl's mind, for quite suddenly she
exclaimed, "Ah! I've thought of another German now that he was like!"
"Who was that?" asked Paul.
"Only a picture I used to see every day. A photograph that our Miss Baker
kept pinned up over her desk at the works in Westminster," explained
Gwenna. "The photograph of that brother of hers that she was always
writing those long letters to."
"Always writing, was she? Was he a waiter?"
"No, he was a soldier. He was in uniform in that photo," Gwenna said, as
the little tray was set before her. "Karl was his name, Karl Becker.... Do you
take sugar?"
"Yes. You'll have to remember that for later on," he said, looking at her with
his head tilted back and a laugh in his eyes, as she poured out his tea. She
handed it to him, and then sat sipping her own, looking dreamily over the
English gardens, over the green spaces flowered with the light frocks and
white flannels of other couples who perhaps called themselves "in love,"
and who possibly imagined they could ever feel as she and her lover felt.
(Deluded beings!)
She murmured, "What do you suppose all these people are thinking about?"
"Oh! Whether they'll go to Brighton or to South-end for their fortnight, I
expect," returned Paul Dampier. "Everybody's thinking about holidays just
now."
Later, they stood together in the hushed gloom of the big chestnut aisle
beside the river that slipped softly under Kew Bridge, passing the willows
and islands and the incongruously rural-looking street of Strand-on-the-

Green. One of the cottage-windows there showed red blinds, lighted up and
homely.
Young Dampier whispered to his girl—"Going on holidays myself, perhaps,
presently, eh?"
"Oh, Paul!" she said blankly, "you aren't going away for a holiday, are
you?"
"Not yet, thanks. Not without you."
"Oh!" she said. Then she sighed happily, watching the stars. "To-day's been
the loveliest holiday I've ever had in my life. Hasn't it been perfect?"
"Not quite," he said, with his eyes on those red-lighted windows on the
opposite bank. "Not perfect, Gwen."
"Not——?" she took up quickly, wondering if she had said something that
he didn't like.
Almost roughly he broke out, "Oh, I say, darling! Don't let's go and have
one of these infernally long engagements, shall we?"
She turned, surprised.
"We said," she reminded him, "that we weren't 'engaged' at all."
"I know," he said. Then he laughed as he stooped and kissed her little
ringless fingers and the palms of her hands. "But——"
There was a pause.
"Got to marry me one day, you know," said young Paul Dampier seriously.
He might have spoken more seriously still if he had known that what he
said must happen in ten days' time from then.

CHAPTER IV
THAT WEEK-END

For the following week-end saw, among many other things that had not
been bargained for, those lovers apart again.
The very next Saturday after that Aviation Dinner was that not-to-be-
forgotten day in England, when this country, still uncertain, weighed the
part that she was to play in the Great War.
Late on the Friday night of an eventful week, Paul Dampier, the Airman,
had received a summons from Colonel Conyers.
And Gwenna, who had left the Aircraft Works on Saturday morning to
come up to her Hampstead Club, found there her lover's message:
"Away till Monday. Wait for me."
She waited with Leslie.
On that bright afternoon the two girls had walked, as they had so often
walked together, about the summer-burnt Heath that was noisy with
cricketers on the grass. They had turned down by the ponds where bathers
dived from the platforms set above the willows; clean-built English youths
splashing and shouting and laughing joyously over their sport. Last time
Gwenna had been with her chum it was she, the girl in love, who had done
all the talking, while Leslie listened.
Now it was Leslie who was restless, strung-up, talkative.... A new Leslie,
her dark eyes anxious and sombre, her usually nonchalant voice strained as
she talked.
"Taffy! D'you realise what it all means? Supposing we don't go in. We may
not go in to war with the others. I know lots of people in this country will
do their best so that we don't lift a finger. People like the Smiths; my
brother-in-law's people. Well-to-do, hating anything that might get in the

way of their having a good year and grubbing up as much money as usual....
Oh! If we don't go in, I shall emigrate—I shall turn American—I shan't
want to call myself English any more! P'raps you don't mind because you're
Welsh."
Little Gwenna, who was rather pale, but who had a curious stillness over
the growing anxiety in her heart, said, "Of course I mind."
She did not add her thoughts, "He said he hoped the War would come in his
time. I know he would think it perfectly awful if England didn't fight. And
even I can feel that it would be horribly mean—just looking on at fighting
when it came."
Leslie, striding beside her up the hill, went on bitterly, "War! Oh, it can't
come. For years we've said so. Haven't we taken good care not to let
ourselves get 'hysterical' over the German 'scare'? Haven't we disbanded
regiments? Haven't we beaten our swords into cash-registers? Haven't we
even kept down the Navy? Haven't we spread and spread the idea that
soldiering was a silly, obsolete kind of game? Aren't we quite clever and
enlightened enough to look down upon soldiers as a kind of joke? The
brainless Army type. Don't let's forget that phrase," urged the soldier's
daughter. "Why, Taffy, I'll tell you what happened only last May. I went to
Gamage's to get a birthday present for Hilary, my sister Maudie's little boy.
Of course he's got heaps of everything a child wants. Delightful floor
games. Beautiful hand-wrought artistic toys (made in Munich). Still, I
thought he might like a change. I told the man in the shop I wanted a toy-
book of soldiers. Nice simple drawings and jolly, crude, bright colours of all
the different regiments. Like we used to have at home. And what d'you
suppose the shopman said? He was very sorry, but 'they' hadn't stocked that
class of thing for some time now; so little demand for it! So little demand
for anything that reminds us we've got an Empire to keep!"
Gwenna said half absently, "It was only toys, Leslie."
"Only one more sign of what we're coming to! Teaching the young idea not
to shoot," said Leslie gloomily. "That, and a million other trifles, are going
to settle it, I'm afraid. If England is to come down, that's the sort of thing
that will have done it.... Oh, Leslie's been in it, too, and all her friends.

Dancing and drifting and dressing-up while Rome's been burning.... There'll
be no war, Taffy."
Gwenna said, quietly and convinced, "Yes, there will." And she quoted the
saying of the lady at the Aviation Dinner, "If England is ever to be saved, it
will be by the few."

They walked round the Highgate Ponds and down the steep hill between the
little, ramshackle, Victorian-looking shops of Heath Street. It was busy as
ever on a Saturday afternoon. They passed the usual troop of Boy Scouts;
the usual straggle of cricketers and lovers from or for the Heath, and then a
knot of rather boyish-looking girls and girlish-looking boys wearing the art-
green school-cap of some co-educational institution.
"What sort of soldiers do we expect those boys ever to make?" demanded
Leslie.
Outside the dark-red-tiled entrance to the Hampstead Tube there was a little
crowd of people gathered about the paper-sellers with their pink arresting
posters of
"RUMOURS OF WAR
ENGLAND'S DECISION."
"They'll publish a dozen before anything is decided," said Leslie. She
bought a paper, Gwenna another....
No; nothing in them but surmise—suspense—theories—they walked on,
passing Miss Armitage from the Club who had paused on the kerb to talk to
one of her friends, a long-haired man in a broad-leafed brown hat. He
seemed to be dispensing pamphlets to people in the street. As Miss
Armitage smiled and nodded good-bye to him the two other girls came up.
He of the locks slipped a pamphlet into the hand of Leslie Long.
She glanced at it, stopped, and looked at it again. It was headed:
"BRITAIN, STAND ASIDE!"

Leslie stood for a moment and regarded this male. She said very gently,
"You don't want any War?"
The long-haired person in the gutter gave a shrug and a little superior smile.
"Oh, well, that's assumed, isn't it?" he said. "We don't want any War."
"Or any country, I suppose?" said Leslie, walking on. She held the
pamphlet a little gingerly between her finger and thumb. She had thought of
tossing it into the gutter—but no. She kept it as a curiosity.

Late that night she sat on Gwenna Williams' bed at the Club, suspense
eating at her heart. For all the soldier blood in her had taken her back to old
times in barracks, or in shabby lodging-houses in garrison towns, or on
echoing, sunny parade-grounds.... Times before she had drifted into the gay
fringes of the cosmopolitan jungle of Bohemian life in London. Before the
Hospital, the Art-school, the daily "job," with her evenings for the theatre
and the Crab-tree Club, and the dances she loved. It is the first ten years of
a child's life that are said to "count." They counted now. The twenty-six-
year-old Leslie, whose childhood had been passed within sound of the
bugle-call, waited, waited, waited to know if the ideas of honour and
country and glory which she had taken in unconsciously in those far-off
times were now to be tossed down into the gutter as she would have tossed
the leaflet of that coward. These things, as Miss Armitage and her friends
could have told her, were mere sentimentalities—names—ideas. Yet what
has ever proved stronger than an Idea?
"Oh, Taffy!" she sighed impatiently. "If we're told that we're to sit still and
nothing will happen?"
And little Gwenna, lying curled up with a hand in her chum's, murmured
again, "That's not what's coming."
She was quiet because she was dazed with the sheer intensity of her own
more personal anxiety. "What will happen about Paul? What will he do?"

CHAPTER V
THE DIE IS CAST

On Sunday morning she and Leslie went to Church.
In the afternoon they walked again, aimlessly. She felt that she was only
living until Monday, until his return to tell her something. In the evening the
two girls sat out on a seat on Parliament Hill; near where the man with the
standing telescope used to offer peeps at London for a penny a time. Far, far
below, lay London under her web of twinkling lights. London, England's
heart, with that silver ribbon of the river running through it. Leslie looked
away over that prospect as though she had never seen it before. Little
Gwenna turned from it to the view on the other side—the grass spaces and
the trees towards Hendon. She thought, "On a night as clear as this,
aeroplanes could easily go up, even late."
As the two girls reached the Club again they found a motor drawn up beside
the entrance. Steps came out of the darkness behind them. A man's voice
said "Miss Long." Leslie turned.
There moved into the light of the street-lamp Hugo Swayne. His face,
somehow, had never looked less like an imitation of Chopin; or more like
an ordinary commonplace Englishman's. It was serious, set. Yet it was
exultant. For he, too, was a soldier's son.
He spoke. "I say, I thought I'd bring you the news," he began gravely. "It's
all right. England goes in."
"Is that official?" Leslie asked sharply.
There was a shaky little "War?" from Gwenna.
Then came other, quick steps on the asphalt path, and the girls saw over
Hugo's rather portly shoulder a taller, slighter figure coming up the road
behind him.

It was hatless; the lamplight shone golden on its blonde head. Gwenna's
heart leaped to her lips.
"Paul!" she cried, and made a running step towards him. In a moment
young Dampier was up with the others; the quartette standing as they had
stood on that spring night in this same place, after the Smiths' dinner-party.
There were hasty greetings, murmurs of "Not official?"
"Ah, that's all right——"
"They won't say for a day or so, but——"
Then, clear and distinct, young Dampier's boyish voice rang out in a curious
announcement. "Glad you're here, Hugo. I was coming to you. I want to
borrow rather a lot of money of you, at once. Forty pounds, I think it is.
Sorry. Must have it. It's for a marriage-licence!"
Hugo, utterly taken aback, stared and murmured, "My dear chap——
Certain—— A m——?"
"Yes. I shall have to be off, you know. Of course. And I shall get married
before I go," announced Paul Dampier, brusquely. He turned as brusquely to
the girl.
"You and I are going to get married by special licence," he told her, "the day
after to-morrow."

CHAPTER VI
HER GUARDIAN'S CONSENT

The Reverend Hugh Lloyd, who was Gwenna Williams' only relative and
guardian and therefore the person from whom consent might be asked if
ever the girl wished to be engaged, sat reading The Cambrian News. He sat,
over his breakfast eggs and tea, in the kitchen-sitting-room of his Chapel
House. Inside, the grandfather clock ticked slowly but still pointed (as ever)
to half-past two; and the cosy room, with its Welsh dresser and its book-
shelves, still held its characteristic smell of singeing hearthrug. Outside,
quiet brooded over the valley that fine August morning. The smoke from
the village chimneys rose blue and straight against the larches of the hill-
side. The more distant hills of that landscape were faintly mauve against the
cloudless, fainter blue of the late-summer sky. All the world seemed so
peaceful!
And the expression on the Reverend Hugh's face of a Jesuit priest under its
thatch of bog-cotton hair was that of a man at peace with all the world.
True, there were rumours, in some of the newspapers, of some War going
on somewhere in the world outside.
But it was a long way from here to that old Continent, as they called it! For
the matter of that, it was a long way to London, where they settled what
they were going to do about Germany....
What they were going to do about Welsh Disestablishment was a good deal
more important, to a Welshman. There were some very good things about
that in this very article. The Reverend Hugh had written it himself.
Presently, in the midst of his reading, his housekeeper (who was a small,
middle-aged woman, rather like a black hen) entered the room at a run.
"Telegram for you, sir."
"Ah, yes; thank you, Margat," her master said as he took it.

He had guessed already what was in it. Some arrangement to do with his
next Sabbath-day's journey. For he was a very popular preacher, invited to
give sermons by exchange in every country town in Wales.
"This," he told his housekeeper complacently, as he tore open the envelope,
"will be to say am I ex Pected in Carnarvon on the Sat Teudêh, or——"
Here he broke off, staring at the message in his hand. It was a long one.
There was a moment's silence while the clock ticked. Then that silence was
broken by an exclamation, in Welsh, from a man startled out of all
professional decorum. He added, with more restraint, but also in Welsh,
"Great King!"
Then he exclaimed, "Dear father!" and "Name of goodness!"
"What is it, Mr. Lloyd bach?" demanded his housekeeper excitedly in
Welsh, clutching her black, crochet wool shawl about her shoulders as she
waited by the side of the breakfast.
"Is it somebody died?" In her mind's eye she saw already that loved orgy of
her kind—a funeral.
The Reverend Hugh shook his handsome white head. Again he read through
the longest telegraph message that he had ever received:
It ran:
"Dear Sir am going to marry your niece Gwenna to-morrow
Tuesday morning at Hampstead regret forced to give you this
short notice but impossible to do otherwise owing military
duties trust you will excuse apparent casualness will write
further particulars yours sincerely Paul Dampier Lieutenant
Royal Flying Corps."
"Name of goodness!" breathed the Reverend Hugh, brushing back his white
locks in consternation. And at short intervals he continued to ejaculate.
"What did I tell her? What did I tell her!... Indeed, it's a great pity I ever let
her go away from home.... It was my fault; my fault.... Young men——!
This one sounds as if he was gone quite mad, whatever."

So the Reverend Hugh addressed his answer to Miss Gwenna Williams at
her Club.
And it said:
"Coming up to see you nine-thirty Euston to-night. Uncle."

"I'm sure he'll be simply horrid about it," Gwenna rather tremulously told
her betrothed that evening, as they walked, the small, curly-haired girl in
dark blue and the tall, grey-clad aviator, up and down the platform at Euston
Station, waiting for the Welsh train to come in.
Little Gwenna was experiencing a feeling not unknown among those
shortly to be married; namely, that every prospect was pleasing—save that
of having to face one's relatives with the affair!
"He was always rather a dret-ful old man," she confided anxiously to Paul,
as they paced the sooty flags of the platform. "It's just like him to be sixteen
minutes late already just when I want to get this over. He never understands
anything about—about people when they're young. And the first thing he's
sure to ask is whether you've got any money. Have you, Paul?"
"Stacks," said the Airman, reassuringly. "Old Hugo made it sixty, as a
wedding-present. Decent of him, wasn't it?"
They turned by the blackboard with the chalked-up notices of arrivals and
departures, and Gwenna ruefully went on with her prophecy of what her
Uncle would say.
"He'll say he never heard of anybody marrying an Airman. (I don't suppose
he's ever heard of an Airman at all before now!) Ministers, and quarry-
managers, and people with some prospects; that's the sort of thing they've
always married in Uncle Hugh's family," she said anxiously. "And he'll say
we've both behaved awfully badly not to let him know before this. (Just as
if there was anything to know.) And he'll say you turned my silly head when
I was much too young to know my own mind! And then he's quite, quite
sure to say that you only proposed to me because—— Well, of course," she

broke off a little reproachfully, "you never even did propose to me
properly!"
"Too late to start it now," said her lover, laughing, as the knot of porters
surged forward to the side of the platform. "Here's the train coming in!"

Now Gwenna was right about the first thing that Uncle Hugh would ask,
when, after a searching glance and a handshake to this tall young man that
his niece introduced to him at the carriage-door, he carried off the pair of
them to the near-by hotel where the Minister always put up on his few and
short visits to London.
"Well, young gentleman," he began, in his crisp yet deliberate Welsh accent.
He settled himself on the red plush sofa, and gazed steadily at Paul Dampier
on one of the red plush armchairs. "Well! And have you got the money
reck-quisite to keep a wife?"
"No. I'm afraid I haven't, sir, really," returned the young man, looking
frankly back at him. "Of course I'd my screw. Three pounds ten a week, I
was getting as a pilot. But that was only just enough for myself—with what
I had to do for the Machine. Of course I'm going to have her—the Flying
Machine—taken up now, so——"
"It's very little faith I have in such things as flying machines. Flying? Yes,
in the face of Providence, I call it," said the Reverend Hugh, discouragingly,
but with the dawn of some amusement in his searching eyes. "What I say
about the whole idea of Aviay-shon is—Kite-high lunacy!"
"Uncle!" scolded Gwenna; blushing for him. But the young Airman took the
rebuke soberly enough.
"And out of that income," went on Uncle Hugh, still looking hard, at this
modern suitor in that incongruous red-plush setting with its Nineteenth
Century clocks and ornaments, "out of that income you will not have saved
very much."

"Afraid not, sir," agreed young Dampier, who, last night, had been down to
his last eightpence ha'penny and a book of stamps. "Not much to put by,
you know——"
"Not even," took up the Reverend Hugh, shrewdly, "enough to pay for a
special marriage licence?"
"Oh, yes, I had that. That is, I've raised that"—("Good old Hugo!" he
thought.)—"and a bit over," he added, "to take us for some sort of a little
trip. To the sea, perhaps. Before I go on Service."
"Military service, do you mean?" said the Reverend Hugh. "Mmph! (I never
have held with soldiery. I do not think that I have ever come into act—ual
con—tackt with any.)"
"Yes, I probably am going on Service, Mr. Lloyd," answered the young
man, quickly, and with a glance at the girl that seemed to indicate that this
subject was only to be lightly dealt with at present. "When, I am not sure.
Then I shall get my pay as a Flight-Lieutenant, you see. Shan't want any
money much, then. So she"—with a little nod towards the small,
defensively set face of Gwenna, sitting very straight in the other red-plush
armchair—"she will get that sent home, to her."
"I shan't want all your pay, indeed," interrupted the girl, hastily. It seemed to
her too revoltingly horrible, this talk about money combined with this sense
that a woman, married, must be an expense, a burden. A woman, who longs
to mean only freedom and gifts and treasure to her lover!
"Oh, a woman ought never, never to feel she has to be kept," thought
Gwenna, rosy again with embarrassment. "If men don't think we mind, very
well, then let all the money in the world be taken away from men, and given
to us. Let them be kept. And if they don't mind it—well, then it will be a
happier world, all round!"
And as she was thinking this, she announced eagerly, "If—if you do go
away, I shall stay on with the Aeroplane Lady, as I told you, Paul. Yes. I'd
much rather I should have something to do. And I'd get nearly a pound a
week, and my keep. Besides! I've got my own money."
"Which money, dear?" asked Paul Dampier.

The quick eyes of the Reverend Hugh had not left the young man's face.
They were fixed still more scrutinisingly upon it as the old man interposed,
"Do you mean to tell me, Mr. Dampier, that you were not aware that my
niece had got a little bit of her own?"
"There! I knew Uncle would say that!" burst out the young girl, angry and
blushing and ashamed. "I knew he'd say you were only marrying me
because of that! He won't believe that it wouldn't make any difference to
you that I've got seventy-five pounds a year!"
"Seventy-five pounds a year? Have you?" said the young man, surprised.
"Really?"
And it was Gwenna's turn to be surprised as his frank face cleared and his
voice took a very relieved note.
"I say, how topping! Make no difference to me? But it does. Rather!" he
declared. "Don't you see that I shall know you won't have to work, and that
I shall be ever so much more comfortable about you? Why did you never
tell me?"
"I forgot," said Gwenna truly.
And the Reverend Hugh suddenly laughed aloud.
At the same time he hoped he had concealed his relief, which was great. His
youngest sister's girl was not going to be snapped up by a fortune-hunter
after all. That had always been his anxiety. Seventy-five pounds a year
(certain) remained a considerable fortune to this Victorian. In his valley
quite a large house, with a nice bit of garden, too (running steeply up a
mountain-side), was to be had for a rent of sixteen pounds. He would have
thought of that himself.... But the leggy, fair-haired boy who was now
smiling across the oval hotel table at his Gwenna had meant only what he
had said. The older man realised that. So, waiving for the present the
question of means, the Reverend Hugh went on, in rather a modified tone,
to ask other questions.
Asking questions of the newly accepted suitor seems to be all that remains
for the parent or guardian of our times. It is the sole survival of that potent

authority which once disposed (or said it disposed) of the young lady's
hand. Clearing his throat with the same little sound that so often heralded
the words of some text from his pulpit, the Reverend Hugh began by
inquiring where Gwenna, after her short honeymoon, was supposed to be
going to live.
Nowhere new, it appeared! She had her berth at the Aircraft Factory, her
room at Mrs. Crewe's cottage for when young Dampier was away. (Yes;
from his tone when he spoke of it, evidently that parting was to be kept in
the background and evaded as much as possible for the present.) And if he
were in London, he had his rooms in Camden Town. Do for them both,
perhaps.... His bachelor digs.; not bad ones....
Well, but no house? Dear me. That was a gipsyish sort of plan, wasn't it?
That was a new idea of setting up housekeeping to Uncle Hugh. He,
himself, was an old bachelor. But he could see that this was all very
different from the ideas of all the young couples in his time. When
Gwenna's father, now, was courting Gwenna's mother, well! he, Hugh
Lloyd, had never heard such a lot of talk about Mahoggani. And tebbel-
linen. And who was to have the three feather-beds from the old Quarry-
house; Gwenna's mother, or Gwenna's mother's sister——
(All this the Reverend Hugh declaimed in his most distinct Chapel voice,
but still with his searching eyes upon the face of the husband-to-be.)
The idea of most young girls, in getting married, he thought, was to get a
nice home of their own, as soon as possible. A comfortable house——
("I hate comfortable houses. So stuffy. Just like a tea-cosy. They'd smother
me!" from Gwenna.)
But the House, her Uncle Hugh had Olwês understood, was the Woman's
fetish. Spring-cleaning, now; the yearly rites! And that furniture. "The
Lares," he went on in an ever-strengthening Welsh accent. "The Pen—nates
——!"
"Oh, those!" scoffed the girl in love. "Those——!"
So Gwenna didn't seem to think she would miss these things? She was
willing to marry without them? Yes? Strange!... Well, well!

And what about this marriage-in-haste? Where was it to take place? In that
Church in Hampstead? A Church. Well! He, as an orthodox dissenting
minister, ought not, perhaps, to enter such a place of worship. But, after all,
this was not at home. This was only up here, in England. Perhaps it
wouldn't matter, just this once.
And who was the clergyman who was going to officiate at the cerrymonny?
And what sort of a preacher, now, was he? (This was not known.)
And Mr. Dampier's own relations? Would they all be at the Church?
Only one cousin, he was told. That was the only relation Paul Dampier had
left.
"Same as myself," said the Reverend Hugh, a little quietly. "A big family,
we were. Six boys, two girls; like people used to have. All gone. Nothing
left, but——"
Here, for the first time taking his eyes from young Dampier, he turned upon
his niece with an abrupt question. With a quick nod towards her husband-to-
be, he demanded: "And where did you find him?"
Little Gwenna, still on the defensive, but thawing gradually (since, after all,
Uncle Hugh had spoken in friendly tones to the Beloved), Gwenna asked,
"When, Uncle?"
"The time that counts, my girl," said the Reverend Hugh; "the first time."
"Oh! I think it was—it was at a party I went to with my friend, Miss Long,
that I've told you about," explained Gwenna, a little nervously. "And—and
he was there. It's—quite a long time ago, now."
"Dear me," said the Reverend Hugh. "Dukes! There is a lot of things seem
to go on, still, under the name of 'Party.'" And there was a sudden and quite
young twinkle in the eyes under the white thatch.
Paul Dampier, not seeing it, began hastily: "I hope you understand, sir, that
we were only keeping all this to ourselves, because—well——" He cleared
his throat and made another start. "If I'd had the—er—the the privilege of
seeing Gwenna at your place——" Yet another start. "We had no idea, of
course," said Paul Dampier, "until fairly recently——"

"Dear me," said the Reverend Hugh again. Then, turning to the young man
whom Gwenna had said he would accuse of turning the head of one too
young to know her own mind, he remarked with some feeling, "I dare say
she had made up her mind, that first time, not to give you a bit of peace
until you'd sent off that telly-gram to me!"

As he was taking the bride-to-be back to her Club, young Dampier said,
smiling: "Why, darling, he's not a bad old chap at all! You said he wouldn't
understand anything!"
"Well, he doesn't," persisted the mutinous Gwenna. But she laughed a little,
relentingly.
Twenty minutes later her lover took his leave with a whispered "Good-
night. Do you know that I shan't ever have to say it again at this blessed
door, after this?... And another, for luck.... Good-night—er—Miss
Williams!"
She ran upstairs humming a tune.
She was so happy that she could feel kind even to old and unsympathetic
and cynical people to-night.
To-morrow she was to be Paul Dampier's wife.
It was hardly believable, still it was true!
War, now threatening to tear him from her, had at least brought him to her,
first, sooner than she had ever hoped. Even if he were forced to leave her
quite soon, say in a month's time!—she would have had him all to herself
first, without any of these small, fretting good-byes that came so punctually
following every meeting! She would have been all his; his very own, she
thought.
And here it may be said that upon this subject Gwenna Williams' thoughts
were curiously, almost incredibly vague. That dormant bud of passion knew
so little of its own hidden root.

Marriage! To this young girl it was a journey into a country of which she
had never formed any clear idea. Her own dreams had been the rosy mists
that obscured alike the heights and depths of that scarcely guessed-at land.
All she saw, clearly, was her fellow traveller; the dear boy-comrade and
sweetheart who would not now leave her side. What did it matter where he
took her, so that it was with him always?
Only one more night, now, in the long, narrow Club bedroom where she
had dreamed that queer flying dream, and so many others, so many longing
daydreams about him!
To-morrow was her wedding-day!

CHAPTER VII
HASTE TO THE WEDDING!

The Tuesday morning that brought Gwenna's wedding-day as the morning
of the official declaration of war.
It was in all the papers over which the girls at the Hampstead Club pored,
before they went off to their various avocations, staring, half-realising only.
"Can it be true?... War?... Nowadays?... Good gracious!... D'you suppose it
means we shall really have to send an army of ours—an English Army—
over to France?... What do you think, Miss Armitage?"
Miss Armitage, the suffragette, then became voluble on the subject of how
very different all would have been if women had had the casting vote in the
matter. Intelligent women. Women with some insight into the wider
interests of their sex.... Not mere—— Here, by way of illustration, this
Feminist shot a vicious glance at Miss Long. Now, Leslie, dressed in a lilac
river-frock and wearing her black picture hat, was going round the
breakfast-table, under the very eye of the disapproving Lady Principal with
the gold curb brooch, on an errand of her own. She was collecting from it
the daintiest bits of dry toast, the nicest-looking pats of butter, a white rose
from the nosegay in the centre bowl, and all that was left of the marmalade.
For to Leslie Long the question whether War was to be or not to be seemed
now to have been settled an age ago. The burden of that anxiety was lifted.
The other anxieties ahead could be put aside for the present. And she
turned, with a tranquil face, to the immediate matter in hand. She was going
to take a little tray up to Gwenna, whom she had advised to have her
breakfast in bed and not to dress until she should make herself all ready for
her wedding at that church at the foot of the hill.
"'Good-morning, Madam Bride!'" said Leslie, smiling, as she came, tray in
hand, into the little room where Gwenna was still drowsily curled up
against her pillow. "Here's a little bit of sugar for the bird." She sat down on

the side of the bed, cutting the dry buttered toast into narrow strips for her
chum, taking the top off her egg for her.
"But I won't 'help to salt, help to sorrow' for you," she went on talking, just
a trifle more brightly than naturally. "Curious thing about a wedding, Taff—
I mean one of the curious things about a wedding, is the wide desire it gives
you to quote every aged, half-pay proverb and tag that you've ever heard.
'Marriage is a——"
"Not 'lottery,' Leslie! Not that one!" begged the bride-to-be, sitting up and
laughing with her mouth full of toast. "We had it four times from Uncle
Hugh before we left him last night. 'Few prizes! Many blanks!'" she quoted
joyously. All Monday she had been tremulously nervous. The reaction had
come at the right moment.
"'Happy is the Bride that the sun shines on,' then," amended Leslie. "You'll
be glad to hear it's shining like Billy-oh this morning."
"I saw it," said Gwenna, nodding her curls towards the open casement.
"And I shall be getting 'Married in white, sure to be right,' too!"
The white lingerie frock she was to put on was not new, but it was the
prettiest that she had. It lay, folded, crisp as a butterfly's wing and fresh
from the wash, on the top of her chest-of-drawers, with the white Princesse
slip—that was new, bought by her in a hurry the day before!—and the white
silk stockings, and the little white suède shoes.
"'Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue,'"
Leslie capped her quotation. "Where's the 'something blue,' Taffy?"
"Ribbons in my camisole; and I shall 'borrow' your real lace handkerchief,
may I?" said the bride-elect.
"Rather! All that I have, even unto the half of the best-man's attention!" said
Leslie, smiling gaily into the cherub face opposite.
But, even as she smiled, she felt that pang which is supposed to be known
only to the man who sees his chosen pal prepare to be "married and done
for."

For this morning, that turned an adoring sweetheart into a wife, was taking
something of her own, of the bridesmaid's youth away.
Gwenna Williams married!
That meant one more girl-chum who would never, never be quite the same
again to a once-treasured companion. That bubbling fountain of innocent
confidences would now run low, as far as Leslie was concerned. No longer
would the elder, quickly-sympathising, rebellious-tongued girl be the first
to hear what happened to her little, ingenuous friend.
The girlish gossip would have a masculine censor to pass.
Leslie could foretell the little scene when it first happened.
She could hear Gwenna's eager, "Oh, Paul! Leslie would so laugh at——"
whatever the little incident might be. "I must tell her that!"
Leslie, the bachelor-girl, could imagine the tilt of the young husband's
blonde head, and his doubtful, "Don't see why it should be supposed to
interest her."
She could imagine the little wife's agreeing, "Oh! Perhaps not."
And again the young husband's, "Don't you think Miss Long gets a little bit
much sometimes? Oh, she's all right, but—I mean, I shouldn't like you to go
on quite like that."
It would be only after years of marriage that the once-close chum would
turn for sympathy to Leslie Long. And then it would not be the same....
The last of Leslie's forebodings seemed the most inevitable. She heard
Gwenna's soft Welsh voice, once so full of unexpectedness, now grown
almost unrecognisably sedate. She heard it utter that finally "settled-down"-
sounding phrase:
"Say 'how d'you do' nicely to Auntie Leslie, now!"

Ah! That seemed to bring a shadow of Autumn already into the summer
sunshine of that bridal room with its white, prepared attire, its bonnie,
bright-eyed occupant. It seemed to show what must some day come: Taffy
middle-aged!
Also what probably would come: Taffy matter-of-fact! Taffy with all the
dreams out of her eyes! Taffy whose only preoccupations were, "Really that
stair-carpet's getting to look awful; I wonder if I could manage to get a new
one and put it on the upper flight?" or, "I never saw anything like the way
my children wear through their boots: it was only the other day I got that
quite expensive pair of Peter Pans for little Hughie. And now look at them.
Look!..."
Yes! This sort of change was wrought, by time and marriage and
domesticity, in girl after golden girl. Leslie had seen it. She would probably
see Taffy, the fanciful Celt, grown stodgy; Taffy, even Taffy, the compactly
supple, with all her fruit-like contours, grown stout!...
Horrible thought....
Then Miss Long gave a protesting shrug of her slim shoulders. This
wouldn't do. Come, come! Not on the wedding-morning itself should one
give way to thoughts of coming middle-age! The rose, that must, some day,
be overblown, was only just a pouting bud as yet. There were days and
fragrant days of beauty still before her.
So Leslie picked up her chum's rough towels, her loofah and her verbena-
scented soap.
"I'll turn on the bath for you, Taffy, shall I? Hot or cold?"
"Cold, please," said the Welsh girl, springing out of bed and pattering over
the oil-cloth to fetch her kimono. "Perhaps to-morrow I shall be able to
have a real swim! Oh, won't that be gorgeous?" For the couple had decided
upon Brighton for the honeymoon. It was near enough to London in case
young Dampier received a summons; yet near also to country-tramps and
sea-bathing. "I haven't had a swim this year, except in the baths. And you
can't count that. Oh, fancy the sea again, Leslie!"

Leslie could guess what was at the back of that little exultant skip of the
younger girl's through the bathroom door. It was sheer innocent delight over
the prospect of being able to display to her lover at last something that she
did really well.
For they had never been by the sea together, he and she.
And she was a pretty swimmer.

"Now I'll be your maid for the last time, and fasten you up," said Leslie,
when she returned from the bathroom. "I suppose you know there isn't a
single eye left at the neck of this dress? Always the way with that laundry!
It's nothing to it that untidiness puts a man off worse than anything else
(this from me). Never mind, I'll hook it into the lace.... That's all right. 'A
bonnie bride is soon buskit.' Almost a pity the girls will all have gone—
though I know you'd hate to have them staring. D'you know, you are a little
pocket-Venus? No, I'm not piling it on. You're lovely, Taffy. I hope the
Dampier boy tells you so, very often and much. He's vastly lucky."
"It's me that's lucky," said the girl in all-white devoutly. "Now where's my
hat?"
"Do you think you're going to be allowed to get married in a hat?"
"My best white one with the wings, I meant."
"Pooh! I've arranged for you to have these," said Leslie, and brought out a
cardboard box that she had been to fetch while Gwenna was having her
bath. From it she drew a slender chaplet of dark leaves, with round white
buds with waxen flowers.
"Orange-blossoms! Real orange-blossoms," cried Gwenna, delightedly
sniffing up the sensuous perfume of them. "Oh, but where did you get
them?"
"Covent Garden. I went down there this morning at five, with one of the
housemaids whose young man is at a florist's," explained Leslie, standing

above her to set the pretty wreath upon the pretty head. "Now you look like
a print of 'Cupid's Coronation,' or something like that. 'Through his curls as
the crown on them slips'—I'll twist this a tiny bit tighter. And here's the
veil."
Gwenna stared. "A veil, too, Leslie?"
"Rather. Only chance you get of appearing in this thoroughly becoming kit
that carries us all back to the worst days of Woman's Enslavement. May as
well take that chance!" remarked Miss Long cheerfully, as she shook out
soft, transparent folds of finest white net that she herself had embroidered,
working late into the night, with a border of leaves in white silk. "This is
from me."
"Oh, Les-lie! You got it as a surprise for me," said the little bride, much
touched. "You worked all these beautiful little laurel-leaves——"
"Not laurel, child. Meant for myrtle. Pity your geography is so weak,"
rattled on Leslie, as she heard, outside the Club, the stopping of the taxi
which had brought the Reverend Hugh Lloyd to call for his detachment of
the bridal party. "Refreshingly unconventional sort of wedding you're
having in some ways, aren't you? 'The presents were few and inexpensive'
(such a change from the usual report). 'The bride was attended by one
bridesmaid: her friend Miss Long, clad in mauve linen, mystic,
wonderful'—(taking into consideration that it had done her cousin for
Henley last year). 'The ceremony proceeded without a hitch, except for the
usual attempt on the part of the officiating clergyman to marry the bride to
the best man.' Which must not be, Taffy. You must remember that I've got
designs on Mr. Hugo Swayne myself——"
"Don't, Leslie!" protested the bride. "You know I do so hate to think of you
getting engaged in that sort of horrible way—instead of just because you
can't help it! If only there were somebody you could be really in love with
——"
"I shall be really rather in love with Uncle Hugh, I know," prophesied the
bridesmaid. "What a pity he isn't thirty years younger! Come along. He's
waiting. I'm going to kiss him, anyhow. Got your gloves? Right. Got my
hankerfish? You won't want to shed any tears into it, but——"

But there was an added brightness in the green-brown eyes of the little bride
as she glanced round the girlish room where Leslie would pack up and put
everything to rights for her after she had gone.
Impulsively she put her arms round that good chum.
"You've been so—so frightfully sweet to me, Leslie, always. Thanks so
awfully——"
"Don't kiss me through a veil, my child!" protested Leslie, drawing back.
"D'you want to bring me ill luck?"
"Oh, Leslie! I should want to bring you all the good luck in the world,"
cried the younger girl, earnestly, over her shoulder as they went out. "If I
were given three wishes now for a wedding-present, one of them would be
that you would some day be as happy as me!"
"My dear lamb!" said Leslie lightly, running downstairs after her, "How do
you know I'm not quite as happy in another—in my own way?"
Gwenna shook the curly head under the orange-blossom wreath and the
misty veil. It seemed to her that there was only The One Way in which a
woman could be happy.
"And the other two wishes?" suggested Leslie, at the sitting-room door.
"What are they?"
"Mustn't tell," smiled the little bride of Superstition with her finger at her
lips. "If I told they might not come true!"

Very earnestly she hoped that those two wishes might come true. She
thought of them again, presently, as she stood, there in church, a small,
white-mist-clad figure, backed by the coloured window and the crimson
altar. She had the kindly glances upon her of her uncle, of her tall girl-
chum, and of Hugo Swayne—who wore a perfect morning coat with a
white flower and grey trousers, admirably pressed by his man Johnson.
Hugo, but for his Chopin stock, would have looked the very model of a

prosperous and conventional bridegroom. He did, in fact, look far more like
the popular conception of a bridegroom than did young Paul Dampier in his
well-cut but ancient grey tweed suit.
—"The only togs I've got in the wide world," he'd confided to Gwenna,
"except working clothes and evening things!"
She stood with her hand in his large, boyish one, repeating in her soft, un-
English accent the vows that once seemed to her such a vast and solemn
and relentless undertaking.
"To love, honour, and obey ... as long as we both shall live...."
It seemed now so little to have to promise! It seemed only a fraction of all
that her heart gave gladly to the lord of it!
"Till Death us do part," she repeated quietly.
And it was then she thought of the two wishes. One was that Paul should be
always as much in love with her as he was at that moment.
She was too young fully to realise the greater wisdom of her own second
wish.
It was that she herself should always remain as much in love with Paul.
If only God would be very, very kind to them, she thought, and allow just
this to be!

"And you sign your name here," said the clergyman in the vestry to the
newly-made husband, who put down in his small neat handwriting, "Paul
Dampier, Lieutenant Royal Flying Corps," on the grey-blue sheet, which,
duly witnessed and blotted, he was going to tuck away into the breast-
pocket of his tweed jacket.
"No. Those marriage lines are not yours," the parson stopped him with a
smile. "Those are the property of your wife."

Gwenna, dazed, realised that this referred to herself. She took the folded
marriage-certificate and slipped it into the white satin ribbon girding her
pretty frock. She looked very childish for "a wife"! But for that bright
wedding-ring on her finger (half a size too large for it) she might have
passed for one of the veiled and white-clad First Communicants of an
Easter Sunday in Paris. Then she turned up the little face, from which the
veil had been thrown back, to be kissed by the others who had followed
them into the vestry. Vaguely she heard Leslie's voice, arranging in
murmurs with Hugo Swayne. "No. Perhaps I'll come on afterwards.... After
I've helped her to change.... No; you take Mr. Lloyd and feed him
somewhere. No! I'm sure those two won't want to come on to any lunch.
Lunch? My dear man!... Send them in your car to Victoria and Johnson can
bring it back.... They'll be getting away at once."
At once! Gwenna looked up into her young husband's blue eyes.
He caught her hand.
"Got you now," he said softly. "Can't run away this time."
By rights she should have walked down the church on his arm. But he did
not loose her hand. So it was hand-in-hand, like children, that they hurried
out again, ahead of the others, into the sunshine of the porch. The merry
breeze took the bride's veil and spread it, a curtain of mist, across the pair of
them. Gwenna Dampier caught it aside, laughing gleefully as they stepped
out of the porch. The gravity of the service had sparkled into gaiety in their
eyes. He crushed her fingers in his. Her heart sang. They would be off——!
It was almost too lovely to be true, but——
Yes. It was too lovely to be true.
A shadow fell across the path; across the bride's white shoe.
Johnson, Hugo's man, who had been waiting with the car, stepped quickly
up to the bridegroom.
"Excuse me, sir, but this message.... Came just as you'd gone into church. I
waited. The woman brought it on from your rooms, sir."
Paul Dampier took the wire and read it.

The white-frocked girl he had just married stood at the church entrance
watching him, while the breeze lifted her veil and stirred her curls and
tossed a couple of creamy petals, from her wreath, on to the breast of his
coat. She herself stood motionless, stony.
She knew that this was no wire of congratulation such as any bridal couple
may expect to receive as they come out of church from their wedding. She
knew, even before she heard his deep voice saying—blankly and hurriedly:
"I say. It's from the War Office. I shall have to go. I've got to leave you.
Now. I'm ordered to join at once!"

CHAPTER VIII
THE GIRL HE LEFT BEHIND HIM

Gwenna Dampier was always to be truly thankful that at that thunderbolt
moment of parting at the church door from the lover who had only been her
husband for the last quarter of an hour she had been too dazed to show any
emotion.
As at the Aviation Dinner she had been numbed by excess of joy, so, now,
the shock had left her stony. She knew that she had turned quite a calm little
face to the concerned and startled faces of the others as they hurried up to
ask what was happening that Paul should be getting into that car alone. It
was as quiet and calm to receive Paul's last kiss as he held her strained for a
moment almost painfully close to him, muttering, "Take care of yourself,
Little Thing."
At the moment it struck her as rather funny, that.
She was to take care of herself! She, who was just to stay quietly at home,
doing nothing. And this was what he told her; he, who was going off on
service, where, he himself didn't know. Off, to serve as an Army Aviator, a
flyer who swooped above enemy country, to shoot and to be shot at; every
instant in peril of his life.
She even smiled a little as the motor rattled down the hill with him, leaving
her to Leslie, and to Uncle Hugh, and to Mr. Hugo Swayne.
She found herself thinking, sedately, that it was a good thing Paul had got
most of his field service equipment yesterday; shopping while she had
shopped, while she had bought the white shoes and the silk stockings, the
Princesse slip and the handful of other dainty girlish things that had been all
the trousseau she could collect in such a hurry. Yes, Paul was all ready, she
told her friends. She wouldn't see him again before he left London, she
expected.

She did not see him again.
That night at the Club, when she was still dazedly quiet—it was Leslie
Long who had to swallow lumps in her own throat, and to blink back
starting tears from her eyes—that night there arrived the first note of his
that had ever been addressed to:
"Mrs. Paul Dampier."
It was scrawled and hurried and in pencil. It began:
"My darling Wife." It told her to address to the War Office until
she heard from him, and that she would hear from him whenever
he could manage it. It ended up, "I was so jolly proud of you
because you took it like that, you can't think. I always thought
you were a sweet Little Thing. I knew you'd be a plucky Little
Thing too. Bless you. It's going to be all right.
"Your affectionate husband,
"P. D."
It was Leslie who cried herself to sleep that night; not Gwenna Dampier.
Only gradually the girl came out of the stupor that had helped her, to the
realisation of what had really happened. He'd gone! She'd been left—
without him! But as one source of help disappeared, another came to hand.
It was that queer mixture of feelings that the more enlightened young
women at the Club would have called "The conventional point of view."
Miss Armitage at the Club tea-table said to her friends, "Nayowh, I don't
consider them at all 'splendid,' as you call it, these girls who go about quite
smiling and happily after their husbands have embarked for the War. Saying
good-bye without shedding a tear, indeed; and all that kind of thing. Shows
they can't care much. Heartless! Unsensitive! Callous, I call them."
The art-student with the Trilby hair, who was never quite certain whether
she agreed with all Miss Armitage's views or whether she didn't, remarked
that really—really anybody who'd seen Miss Williams' face when that
young man called for her couldn't help thinking that she cared. Most
awfully. If she didn't make a fuss, it must be because she was rather brave.

"Brive? I don't call it that," declared Miss Armitage. "It's just 'the thing to
do' among those people. They've made a regular idol of this stupid,
deadening Convention of theirs. They all want to be alike. 'Plucky.' 'Not
showing anything.' Pah! I call it crushing out their own individuality for the
sake of an ideal that isn't anything very much, if you ask me. They all catch
it from each other, these wretched Army men's wives. It's no more credit to
them than it is to some kinds of dogs not to howl when you hold them up by
their tiles."
The Trilby art-student put in shyly, "Doesn't that show that they're well
bred?"
Miss Armitage, the Socialist, fixing her through her glasses, demanded,
"When you sy 'Well bred' d'you mean the dogs are—or the women that
don't cry?"
"Well—both, perhaps," ventured the art-student, blushing as she helped
herself to jam. Miss Armitage, with her little superior smile, gave out,
"There's no such thing as well bred, what you mean by it. What you mean's
just pewer snobbery. The reel meaning of well bred is somebody who is
specially gifted in mind and body. Well, all you can say of the minds of
Army people is that they haven't got any. And I don't know that I'm
impressed by their bodies."
Here a student of music from the other side of the table said she saw what
Miss Armitage meant, exactly. Only, as for Army people, Gwenna Williams
couldn't have been called that. Her people were just sort of Welsh
Dissenters, awfully against soldiers and that kind of thing.
"Doesn't matter. She's the sort of girl who's just like a chameleon: takes all
her colour from the man she's supposed to be in love with," said Miss
Armitage loftily. "She'll know that she'll never keep him unless she's just
like the class of women he thinks most of. (As it is, I don't see what that
empty-headed girl's got to keep a man with.) So, as I say, she'll suppress her
own identity, and grow the kind 'He' happens to like."
The art-student murmured that she supposed it didn't really matter, a girl
doing that. Provided that the new "identity" which was "grown to please the
man" were a better one than the old.

Miss Armitage the Feminist, sniffed; silent with contempt for this idea.
Then she turned again to the student of music, to conclude the summing-up
of the new bride's character.
"She'll be positively stimulated and buoyed-up, all the time, by the thought
that 'He' considered it plucky of her to go on as if she was quite pleased that
he was fighting!" declared the lecturer. "You see! By and by she'll believe
she is pleased. She'll catch the whole detestable Jingow spirit, I know. Syme
attitude of mind as the Zulu who runs amuck at the sound of a drum.
Hysterical, that's what I call what's at the root of it all!"

But whatever Miss Armitage, the Cockney suffragette, chose to call it, it
was there, that Spirit.
In those few weeks after the declaration of war it spread and throve over all
England. It made Life still worth living, and well worth living, for
thousands of anxious sweethearts, and of mothers giving only sons for their
country, and of wives who missed closest comrades, and of young widows
who had but lately been made brides.
It inspired, through the girl he left behind him, the man who went to war;
and thus its influence became part of that subtle but crucial thing which is
known as the Moral of an Army, and of an Empire and of a Civilisation.
It was, as Leslie Long, the lover of quotations, often quoted to herself in
those days:

"The Voice to Kingly boys
To lift them through the fight;
And comfortress of Unsuccess
To give the dead Good-night.

"A rule to trick the arithmetic
Too base of leaguing odds,
The spur of trust, the curb of lust,
The hand-maid of the gods."

Little Gwenna, the wife who had been left at the church door, took all the
help that Spirit gave her.
Two days after her wedding her Uncle Hugh went back to the slate-roofed
village that was wedged between those steep, larch-grown Welch hills. But,
though his niece found that this "dreat-ful" old man could be all that was
gentle and kind for her, she refused to go home, as he begged her, with him.
She said she must live somewhere where she could "see a little bit of what
was going on." She must have some work, real work, to fill her time. She
thanked him; she would let him know directly she felt she could come down
to Wales. But just now, please, she wanted nothing but to get back to Mrs.
Crewe, her Aeroplane Lady at the Works. She'd go back just as if nothing
had happened.
She returned, to find changes at that Aircraft Factory.

CHAPTER IX
THIS SIDE OF "THE FRONT"

The first of these changes at the Aircraft Works was the sight of the khaki-
clad sentry at the entrance.
He was pacing up and down the bit of dusty road outside the shops; and he
stopped Gwenna peremptorily, not knowing that she was one of the staff.
She told him, and went on. She found the big central shop in a ferment of
activity. Mr. Ryan, striding out on some hurried errand, nearly knocked her
over. He called an "Awfully sorry, Miss Gwenna—Mrs. Dampier, I mean,"
over his shoulder. She saw that his day of dalliance was past, even had she
been still "Miss Gwenna." He had less time for Girl, nowadays. The frames
of no fewer than four aeroplanes were set up on the stocks; and out of the
body of the most nearly completed one there climbed the slight figure of the
Aeroplane Lady. Her blue and youthful eyes lighted up at the sight of the
girl standing in the clear, diffused light of the many windows and backed by
the spinning shafting.
"Ah! You've arrived, Mrs. Dampier," she said briskly, using the new name
without a pause or a smile, for which Gwenna blessed her. "Thank Heaven I
shall have a reliable clerk again.... No end of correspondence now, my dear.
A sheaf of it waiting in the office. Come on and see to it now, will you? And
for goodness' sake remind me that I am 'theirs obediently,' instead of merely
'truly,' to the Admiralty. I always forget. If I were left to myself my letters
would sound just like the aviator's who wrote to the POWERS-THAT-BE:
'Commander So-and-So presents his compliments and begs respectfully to
submit that don't you think it would be a jolly good thing if we started a
repairing shop?'—somewhere or other. Well! Here we are, you see. Stacks
of it!" she went on as they reached that office where an airman's sweetheart
had first realised the idea that an aeroplane might mean a ship of war—war
in the clouds.

"We shall have as much work as we can get through now," said the
Aeroplane Lady. "Look at this order from the War Office. And this—and
this!"
For to all intents and purposes the War Office and the Admiralty had "taken
over" Mrs. Crewe's Aircraft Factory.
The place rang and echoed, long after the hours of the ordinary working
man's working day, with the clinking and whirring and hammering of those
labours that went to bring forth these great wings of War.
Some of the French mechanics whom Gwenna had known well by sight had
disappeared. They had been served with their mobilisation papers and were
now off to serve under the Tricolour.
One or two of the English fitters, who were Reservists, had rejoined. One
had enlisted.
But now, the Aeroplane Lady explained, the enlisting of any more of her
men had been discouraged. They were too useful where they were. They,
with many other sturdy Britons who fretted because they were not to take
up other, riskier work on the other side of the Channel, were kept busy
enough preparing the arms which those other, envied men were to use.
It was for the encouragement of them and their fellow-workers in
Armament and Ammunition factories that a bundle of blue-lettered posters
came down presently to the Works.
Gwenna, once more arrayed in the grey-blue, dope-stiffened pinafore, had
the job of pinning up here and there, in the shops and sheds, these notices.
They announced to the Man at the Bench that he was as needful to his
country as the Man in the Trench. They gave out:
"YOU CAN HIT THE ENEMY AS HARD WITH
HAMMER AND RIVET AS YOU CAN WITH
RIFLE AND BULLET.
HIT HIM!
HURRY UP WITH THE SHIPS AND GUNS!"

And she, too, little Gwenna Dampier, clerk and odd-job-girl, felt herself
respond to the appeal. As she typed letters and orders, as she heated dope,
as she varnished for the men's handling those huge blue prints with the
white, spider's-web-like "working drawings," or as she tested square inches
of the fine wing-linen, she felt that she, too, was helping in her way to hurry
up with those needed ships and guns.
Was she not lucky in her job?
For always she was buoyed up by the notion that whatever she touched
might be of service, not only to the country which the Beloved was serving,
but to the Beloved himself. Who knew? He himself might have to fly in any
one of these very machines! Every least part, every atom of metal about
them bore the visible, indestructible stamp of the English War Office. And
Gwenna herself bore that unseen but indelible stamp of her love to her
absent lad in every inch of her pliant girl's body, in every thought of her
malleable girl's mind.
So the late summer weeks passed as she worked, glad in the thought that
any or all of it might be for him. She felt sorry for those women who, when
their man is away, have nothing but purely feminine work with which to fill
the empty days. Sewing, household cares, knitting.... She herself knitted,
snatching minutes from the twelve-o'clock dinner-hour in the cottage with
Mrs. Crewe to add rows to the khaki woollen cap-comforter that she had
started for Paul. It was just a detail in her own busy life. But it struck her
that for countless left-behind women this detail remained all that they had
to do; to knit all day, thinking, wondering, fretting over the Absent.
"That must be so awful! I don't think I should want to live," she told the
Aeroplane Lady one dinner-hour, "if there wasn't something else really
wanted by the men themselves, that I could have to do with! Every soldier's
wife," said Gwenna, drawing herself up above the table with a pretty and
very proud little gesture which made Mrs. Crewe smile a little, "I think
every soldier's wife ought to have the chance of a job in some factory of this
sort. Or in a shop for soldiers' comforts, perhaps. Like that woman has in
Bond Street where I bought those extra-nice khaki handkerchiefs for Paul.
She's always thinking out some sort of new 'dodge' for the Front. A new
sleeping-rug or trench-boots or something. A woman can feel she's taking

some part in the actual campaign then. Don't you think so, Mrs. Crewe? But
there aren't many other things she can do," concluded the girl with that soft,
up-and-down accent, "unless she's actually a Red Cross nurse looking after
the wounded. There's nothing else."
"Oh, isn't there? Surely——" began the Aeroplane Lady. Then she stopped,
with a half-humorous, half-sad little smile in her eyes.
She was going to have suggested that the biggest Job that a woman can
achieve has, at the root of things, everything to do with the carrying on of a
campaign. Those English workmen in the shops were responsible for the
perfect and reliable workmanship of the ships and guns. It was only the
women of England who could make themselves responsible for the
soundness and reliability of the men of the next generation, their little sons
now growing up, to be perhaps the soldiers of the next war. All this flashed
through the mind of the Aeroplane Lady, who was also the mother of a
fighting airman.
But, on second thoughts, she decided that she would not say anything about
it. Not to this cherub-headed, guileless girl who bore Paul Dampier's name,
and who wore his glitteringly new wedding-ring on her finger (that is, when
she hadn't forgotten it, where it lay in the soap-dish in the bathroom or
hanging up on a peg in the Wing-room beside her sunshine-yellow jersey
coat. It was, as the newly-married Mrs. Dampier explained, miles too big
for her, and she hated getting it a mass of dope).
So, instead of saying what she was going to say, the Aeroplane Lady drank
tea out of a workman-like-looking, saucerless Brittany cup with two
handles, and presently asked if there were anything exciting that she might
be allowed to hear out of the letter that had arrived that morning from Mr.
Dampier.
Those eagerly-looked-for, greedily-devoured letters from the young Airman
to his wife were uncertain qualities enough.
Sometimes they came regularly, frequently, even two in a day, for Gwenna
to kiss, and to learn by heart, and to slip under her pillow at night.
Then for days and weeks there would be nothing from him; and Gwenna
would seem to herself to be going about with her flesh holding its breath in

suspense all over her body.
That suspense was not (curiously enough) too agonised for his safety.
She had laughed quite easily the day that one of the older workmen had said
to her kindly, if tactlessly:
"Ah, Miss Williams—or ma'am, as I s'pose I ought to say—I do feel sorry
for you, I do. You here, same as when you was a single young lady. Your
young gentleman God knows where, and you knowing that as likely as not
you never will see him again, p'raps."
"If I were not going to see him again," the girl had said tranquilly, "I should
know. I should feel it. And I haven't that feeling at all, Mr. Harris. I'm one
of those people who believe in presentiments. And I know I shall see him,
though I don't know when."
That was the only trouble! When? When? When would she have something
for her love to live on, besides just messages on lifeless paper?
Paul's letters were sometimes mere hasty scrawls. An "All's well," a darling
or so, and his name on a bit of thin ruled paper torn from a note-book and
scented vaguely with tobacco....
To-day it was a longer one.
"It's dated four days ago only, and it's just headed 'France,'" said young
Mrs. Dampier, sitting, backed by the cottage window, with the level
Berkshire landscape, flowering now into lines of white tents for the New
Army in training, behind her curly head. "He says:

"'Last week I had a day, if you like! Engaged with two Taubes in
the morning. Machine hit in four places. In the afternoon, as I
was up reconnoitring, I saw below me a railway train,
immensely long, going along as slow as a slug, with two
engines. Sent in my report to Head Quarters, and wasn't
believed, if you please. They said there couldn't be a train there.
Line was destroyed. However, they did condescend to go and
look. Afterwards I was told my report was of the greatest value
——'
"There! Think of that," broke off Gwenna, with shining eyes.
"'And it's leaked out now that what I saw was a train crammed
with ammunition. Afterwards (same day) went and dropped
bombs on some works at—I'd better not say where!—and hope I
get to know what damage was done. I know one was a clinking
shot. A great game, isn't it?'
"Isn't it!" murmured the girl who had shuddered so at her first realisation of
her lover as a possible fighter. But now, after these weeks, she shrank no
longer. Gradually she had come to look upon War as a stupendous
Adventure from which it would have been cruelty to shut him out. She saw
it now as the reward of his years of working, waiting, experimenting. And
she said to herself fancifully, "It must be because I've 'drunk of his cup,' and
now I've come to 'think his thoughts.' I don't care what those suffragettes
say about losing one's individuality. I do think it's a great game!"
She read on:
"'Got three letters and Punch from you in the evening. Thanks
awfully. You will write to me all you can, darling, won't you?
The little wing is quite safe in my tunic-pocket. Give my love to
Mrs. Crewe and to your Uncle and to Leslie Long. Heard from
old Hugo that he was actually going to enlist. Do him lots of
good.'
"Then he sort of ends up," said Gwenna, dimpling to herself a little over the
ending:

("'Your always Boy.'),
"and then there's a postscript:
"'Wouldn't it be top-hole if I could get some leave to come over
and fetch the P.D.Q.? Guess the Censor will be puzzled to know
who she is; who's your lady friend? in fact.
"'P. D.'"
"Thank you, Mrs. Dampier," said the Aeroplane Lady as she rose briskly to
return with her assistant to the Works. "Give him my love, too (if I may),
when you write. And I should like to tell you to write and ask Leslie Long
down to see us one Saturday afternoon," she added as they came through
the gap in the dusty hedge to the entrance road. "But really we're too rushed
to think of such relaxations as visitors!"
For since Gwenna had come back to the Works neither she nor her
employer had taken any sort of holiday. That sacred right of the English
worker, the "Saturday half-day off," existed no more at those busy Aircraft
Works. Just as if it were any ordinary day of the week, the whistle sounded
after the midday rest. And just as if it were any other day of the week, Mrs.
Crewe's men (all picked workers, of whom not one happened to be a Trades
Unionist) stacked up the bicycles on which they'd ridden back from their
meal at home in the near-by town, and trooped into the shops. They
continued to hurry up with those ships and guns.
Again the whirring and the chinking and the other forge-like noises would
fill the place. Again the quick, achieving movements of clever hands, black
and soaked in oil, would be carried on, sometimes until, from the training-
camps on the surrounding ugly, useful plains, the bugles had sounded
"Lights Out." ...

CHAPTER X
LESLIE, ON "THE MOTLEY OF MARS"

Now, as it happened, Miss Leslie Long did not choose to wait for her
invitation to the Aircraft Works. Unasked and unexpected, she turned up
there the very next Saturday afternoon.
She was given a chair in that spacious, white, characteristically-scented
room where Mrs. Crewe and Gwenna were again busy with the wings. She
was told not to expect either of them to stop work to look at her, but to go
on talking and to tell them if there were anything new going on in London.
"Anything? Why, everything's new," Leslie told them gaily.
She wore the mauve linen frock and the shady hat that had been her
bridesmaid's attire for Gwenna's wedding. And she was looking well,
Gwenna noticed, as she stole a glance at her chum; well, and happier than
she had seen Leslie look since the beginning of this eventful summer.
Leslie then gossiped to them of the many changes in London. These are
now very ancient history to a whole nation. But at that time (in September,
Nineteen-fourteen) they sounded still strange enough to those who lived out
of town.
She spoke of the darkened streets. The bright, purposely-misleading lights
in the Park. Of the recruiting posters; the recruiting results. Of the first of
the refugees. Leslie's old lady had given hospitality to two ladies, a mother
and a daughter from Brussels, and it was Leslie's new duty to translate
English to them. Also of the departure of regiments she talked....
"Of course there are only two classes into which you can divide the young
men who aren't getting ready to go out," decreed Leslie, the whole-hearted.
"Either they're Objects of Pity, or else they're Objects of Contempt."
"Come, come!" put in the Aeroplane Lady, laughing a little, but without
raising her eyes from the stretched canvas on the trestles before her. "What

about my men outside there?"
"I bet they envy the rawest recruit in K.'s Army!" declared Leslie. "The
most anæmic little plucky shop-assistant who's only just scraped through on
his chest-measurement and who's never spent so many consecutive hours in
the open air in his whole life before!" She patted the stately head of the
Great Dane as he stepped up to her from his big wooden kennel in the
corner, and went on to say how she loved the New Armies.
"We see plenty of their doings up at Hampstead now, Taffy," she said. "'The
Heath has Armies plenty, and semi-warlike bands!' Queen's Westminsters
coming up in sweaters and shorts to do Physical Ekkers on the cricket-pitch.
Swagger young men, some of them, too. Driving up in cars. Wearing their
Jermyn Street winter-sports kit of last year under common privates'
overcoats."
"Mars in motley!" said the Aeroplane Lady.
Leslie said, "It is a mixture! New Army Type Number One, Section A: the
boy who was born to be a soldier and bred to be a clerk. The fighter who
wouldn't have got a chance to live if it hadn't been for this war. The Dear
Duck who's being taken to the water for the first time after twenty years!...
Then, of course, there's the New Army Type Number Forty-three: the
Honest Striver in Khaki, putting his back into learning a job that wasn't ever
meant to be his. Not one bit thrilled by the idea of a scrap. No fun to him.
Civilian down to his bones. But—'It is his duty, and he does.'"
"All the more credit," the Aeroplane Lady reminded her quietly, "to the
born civilian."
"Yes, I know, Mrs. Crewe. One thoroughly respects him for it," agreed the
soldier's daughter warmly.
Adding meditatively, "But it's rather an effort to like him as much as the
other kind!"
"Talking of duty, Mr. Grant has gone," said Gwenna as she worked. "You
know, Leslie: the engineer at our Westminster place who was always talking
to Mabel Butcher and then saying, 'Well! Duty calls. I must away.' I'm sure
he said that before he went off to enlist. He's in the R.E. And the office-boy

that had such an awful accent went with him. He's in the Halberdiers now;
billeted in the country in some garage with six other men."
"How funny! D'you know who one of the men is? My friend, Monty Scott,
the Dean's son," said Leslie, laughing again. "You remember him, Taffy, at
that dance? He wore that Black Panther get-up.... He came up to see me, in
uniform, last Sunday. I told him he'd only joined the Halberdiers because he
thought the touch of black suited him. Then he told me of his weird billet in
the country with these five other men. Two of them had lately come out of
prison, he said; and they were really awfully interesting, comparing the
grub they'd had there with what was served out to them here. I asked him
(Monty) how he was getting on. He summed up the lot of the New Ranker
rather well, I thought. He said, 'I've never been so uncomfortable or laughed
so much in my life'!"
The Aeroplane Lady, working, said she thought he must be a dear.
"He is, rather," agreed the girl who had thrice refused to marry this young
man.
"Why d'you sigh?" asked Gwenna quickly. A sigh meant, to her, only one
thing. Impatience over the absence of the Beloved!
"I—perhaps I was thinking of Monty Scott's eyes," said Leslie lightly,
bending over to smooth the dog's neck. "They are so absurdly handsome.
Such a pity one can't have them to wear as brooches!" Then, quickly, she
turned from the subject of Monty Scott. She drew something out of her
black silk bag. A picture postcard.
"From one of our Allies," said Leslie, showing it.
It gave a view of a French Regiment, still wearing the picturesque uniform
of Eighteen-seventy, marching down a sunny, chestnut-bordered boulevard.
The soldier in the immediate foreground showed under the jaunty képi a
dark, intelligent, mobile face that Gwenna recognised.
She sighed and smiled over the card. It brought back to her that tea at Hugo
Swayne's rooms with Leslie, and the tall, blonde Englishman who was to be
her husband, and that dark young French engineer who had said, "But the
Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle!" He had written on this card in

sprawling French writing and blue French ink, "À Mademoiselle Langue.
Salutation amicale. Remember, please, the private soldier Gaston, who
carries always in his knapsack the memory of the Curate's Egg!"
"Fancy, two of the men who were at Mr. Swayne's that afternoon are off at
the Front to-day," said Gwenna Dampier. "That is, all three, perhaps. Paul
said something about his cousin enlisting."
"Poor Hugo Swayne," said Leslie, with a laugh, that she stopped as if she
were sorry she had begun it. "It's too bad, really."
"What is? Isn't he enlisting?"
"Yes. Oh, yes, Taffy, he has. But merely enlisting isn't the whole job," said
Leslie. "He—to begin with, he could hardly get them to pass him——"
"Why? Too fat?" asked Gwenna mercilessly.
"Fat—Oh, no. They said three weeks' Swedish exercise and drill would take
that off. He was quite fit, they said, physically. It was his mental capacity
they seemed to doubt," explained Leslie. "Of course that was rather a shock
to Hugo to hear, after the years he's been looking up to himself as a rather
advanced and enlightened and thinking person. However, he took it very
well. He saw what they meant."
"Who were 'they'?" asked Mrs. Crewe.
"The soldier-men he went to first of all, old brother-officers of his father's,
who'd been with his father in Egypt, and whom he asked to find him a job
of some sort. They told him, quite gently, of course, that they were afraid he
was not 'up' to any soldiering job. They said they were afraid there were
heaps of young Englishmen like him, awfully anxious to 'do their bits,' but
simply not clever enough! (Rather nice, isn't it, the revenge, at last, of the
Brainless Army Type on the Cultured Civilian?) And he said to the old
Colonel or General or whatever it was, 'I know, sir. I see, sir. Yes, I suppose
I have addled myself up by too much reading and too much talk. I know I'm
a Stage-Society-and-Café-Royal rotter, and no earthly good at this crisis.'
And then he turned round and said quite angrily, 'Why wasn't I brought up
to be some use when the time came?' And the old soldier-man said quite
quietly, 'My dear Swayne, none of you "enlightened" people believed us

that there was any "time" coming. You see now that we were right.' And
Hugo said, 'You ought to have hammered it into me. Isn't there anything
that I can do, sir?' And at last they got him something."
"What?" demanded Gwenna.
"Well, of course it sounds rather ludicrous when you come to say what it
is," admitted Leslie, her mouth curling into a smile that she could not
suppress. "But it just shows the Philistines that there is some use (if not
beauty) in Futurist painting, after all. One always knew 'there must be
something, if one could but find it out.'"
"But your friend Mr. Swayne can't do Futurist paintings," objected the
Aeroplane Lady, "at the Front!"
"Well, but that's just what he is doing! He's in France; at Quisait. Painting
motor-buses to be used for transport wagons," explained Leslie. "You know
the most disguising colour for those things at a distance is said to be not
khaki, or feld-grau, or dull green, or any other single colour. You have to
have a sort of heather-mixture of all the most brilliant colours that can be
got! This simply makes the thing invisible a certain way off. It's the idea of
the game-feather tweed on the moors, you know. So Hugo's using his
talents by painting emerald-green and magenta and scarlet and black
triangles and cubes and splodges all over those big Vanguards——"
"Why, I could do that," murmured the girl who was so busy varnishing the
aeroplane wings. "Sure I could."
"Oh, but, Taffy, you haven't been educated up to it," protested Leslie
gravely. "You couldn't get it sufficiently dynamic and simultaneous and
marinetic!"
A message from the Central Shop to the Aeroplane Lady left the two girls
alone presently in the Wing-room. Then Leslie, putting her hand on the
rounded arm below the loose sleeve of Gwenna's working-pinafore, said
softly and quickly, "Look here, I came down because I had something to tell
you, Taffy."
The Welsh girl glanced quickly up into her chum's black eyes.

"Something to tell me?" Gwenna's heart sank.
She didn't want to hear of Leslie having definitely made up her mind at last
to marry a—well, a man who was good-natured and well bred and generous
enough about wedding-presents, but who confessed himself to be of "no
earthly good" when "it came to the real things of life." "Oh, Leslie, is it
——"
"It is that you can congratulate me."
"Oh, dear. I was afraid—You mean you are engaged to him, Leslie. To Mr.
Swayne."
"No," said Leslie, holding her black head high. "No, not to Mr. Swayne.
Why must 'congratulations' always mean 'Mister' Anybody? They don't,
here. I mean you can congratulate me on coming to see reason. I know,
now, that I mustn't think of marrying him."
Gwenna drew a big breath of relief.
She laid her dope-thickened brush carefully down in the tin, and clapped
her little sticky hands.
"I'm so thankful," she cried childishly. "It wouldn't have done, Leslie!"
"No," said Miss Long.
"He wasn't a quarter good enough."
"Pooh. What's that got to do with caring? Nothing," declared Leslie, tilting
her loose-limbed, mauve-clad figure back on the chair that Paul Dampier
had sat in, the day before the Aviation Dinner. "It's caring that counts."
"Haven't I always been saying so?" said Gwenna earnestly as she took up
her brush again. "Not just because I'm a happily-married woman myself,
my dear."
Here she drew herself up with the same little gesture of matronly dignity
that had made Mrs. Crewe smile. It forced Leslie to bite her lips into
gravity. And Paul Dampier's girl concluded innocently, "I've always known
how much Love means. What's money?"

"Nothing to run down, I assure you. Money's gorgeous. Money means
Power," affirmed Leslie. "Apart from the silk-stockinged aspect of it, it lets
you live a much fuller life mentally and spiritually. It can make you almost
everything you want to be, to yourself and to other people, Taff. It's worth
almost anything to get it. But there's one thing it's not worth," said Leslie
Long, really gravely: "It's not worth marrying the wrong person for."
"I don't know why you didn't know that before," said little Gwenna, feeling
for once in her life so much older and much wiser than her chum. "What
makes you know it now, Leslie?"
"The War, perhaps. Everything's put down to the War nowadays.... But it
has simplified things. One knows better what's what. What one must keep,
what one can throw overboard," said Leslie Long. "Everything is changed."
Gwenna thought for a moment of telling her that one thing did not change.
Love!
Then she thought that that was not quite true, either.
In its own way Love, too, was changed by this War.
"There's more of it!" thought Gwenna simply.
For had not her own love to her absent lover burned with more steady a
flame within her ever since the morning when she had seen him depart to
take his own share in the struggle? And so she guessed it must be with
many a girl, less ardently in love than she had been, but now doubly proud
of her man—and her soldier. She thought of the other hurried War-bridals
and betrothals all over the country. She thought of the gentler voice and
manner that she had noticed between the husbands and wives among the
cottagers down here. They realised, perhaps, how many couples were being
swept apart by War. Yes, this thought seemed to give Man and Woman an
added value in the eyes of each other, Gwenna thought. She thought of the
gradual disappearance of the suffragette type with her indictments against
Man. She thought of the new courtesy with which every woman and girl
seemed to be treated in the streets and tubes and omnibuses by every man
who wore the livery of War.

Of the two things greater than all things in this world, one fulfilled the
other. And, because War was in the world again, it was bringing home
undeniably to man and maid alike that "the first is Love."
Then Gwenna sighed from her heart.
How long? How much longer would it be before she could see her own
lover again?

CHAPTER XI
A LOVE LETTER—AND A ROSE

A couple of days after Leslie's visit Gwenna was moving about the bedroom
at Mrs. Crewe's cottage.
It was an old-fashioned, quaintly pretty room. The low ceiling, on which the
lamplight gleamed, was crossed by two sturdy black oak beams. Straw-
matting covered the uneven floor, and the wall-paper was sprinkled with a
pattern of little prim posies in baskets. The chintz of the casement-curtains
showed flowering sprays on which parrots perched; there was a patchwork
quilt on the oaken bed.
Gwenna had come up early; it was only nine o'clock. So, having undressed
and got into her soft white ruffled night-gown and her kimono of pink
cotton-crêpe, she proceeded to indulge in one of those "bedroom potterings"
so dear to girlhood's heart.
First there was a drawer to be tidied in the dressing-table that stood in the
casement-window. Ribbons to be smoothed out and rolled up; white
embroidered collars to be put in a separate heap. Next there was the frilling
to be ripped out of the neck and sleeves of her grey linen dress, that she had
just taken off, and to be rolled up in a little ball, and tossed into the
wastepaper basket. Then, two Cash's marking-tapes with her name, Gwenna
Dampier, to be sewn on to the couple of fine, Irish linen handkerchiefs that
had been brought down to her as a little offering from Leslie. Then there
was her calendar to be brought up to date; three leaves to tear off until she
came to the day's quotation:
"Don't call the score at half-time."
Then there was the last button to sew on to a filmy camisole that she had
found leisure, even with her work and her knitting, to make for herself.
Gradually, young Mrs. Dampier meant to accumulate quite a lot of
"pretties" for the Bottom Drawers, that Ideal which woman never utterly

relinquishes. The house and furniture of married life Gwenna could let go
without a sigh. "The nest"—pooh! But the ideal of "the plumage" was
another matter. Even if the trousseau did have to come after the wedding,
never mind! A trousseau she would have by the time Paul came home again.
Having finished her stitching, she put her little wicker-work basket aside on
the chest-of-drawers and took out the handkerchief-sachet in which she kept
all his letters. She read each one over again.... "I'll finish mine to him to-
night," she decided. "It'll go off before eight in the morning, then; save a
post."
From under her work-basket she took her blotting-pad. The letter to Paul
was between the leaves, with her fountain-pen that she'd used at school. She
sat down in the wicker-seated chair before the dressing-table and leaned her
pad up against the edge of that table, with her brushes and comb, her
wicker-cased bottle of eau-de-Cologne, her pot of skin-cream and her oval
hand-mirror, its silver back embossed by Reynolds' immortal group of
cherubs whose curly heads and soft, tip-tilted faces were not unlike
Gwenna's own as she sat there, reading over what she had already put in
that letter to the Front.
It began in what Gwenna considered an admirably sedate and old-fashioned
style: "My dearest Husband." She thought: "The Censor, whoever he is! that
Paul talks about—when he reads that he'll think it's from somebody quite
old and been married for ten years, perhaps; instead of only just—what is it
—seven weeks!"
It went on to acknowledge the last note from Paul and to ask him if she
should send him some more cigarettes, and to beg that he would, if he could
possibly, possibly manage it, get one of his friends to take a snapshot of him
—Paul—in uniform, as Gwenna had never yet seen him.
Beside the swung oval mirror on the dressing-table there was set up in a
silver frame the only portrait that she possessed of her boy-husband: the
glazed picture postcard that Gwenna had bought that Saturday in May,
when she had gone to see the flying at Hendon with her two friends from
the Westminster Office, Mabel Butcher and Ottilie Becker.

Gwenna's eyes fell on that photograph as she raised them from her pad. Her
thoughts, going back to that afternoon, suggested the next item to be written
to Paul.
And the young girl wrote on, in much the same style as she would have
talked, with few full stops and so much underlining that some words
seemed to have a bar of music below them.
"You remember my telling you about Miss Becker, the German
girl that I used to be at Westminster with, when we used to call
ourselves the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker?
Well, what do you think? She has been taken away from her
boarding-house where she was in Bloomsbury, and interned in
some camp as an alien enemy, although she is a girl, and they
say she nearly was just on trial as a spy!
"Mabel Butcher wrote and told me about it. She (Miss Butcher)
went with Ottilie Baker when she had to register herself as an
alien at Somerset House, just after the War broke out, and she
said it was awful, a great place like six National Galleries rolled
into one, and miles of immense long corridors, and simply
crowds of all kinds of Germans and Austrians, just like a queue
at the theatre, waiting to be registered, and all looking scared to
death, quite a lot of pretty girls among them, too.
"Poor Ottilie Becker cried like anything at having to go, and to
be an enemy alien, you know she'd got such heaps of friends in
England and liked lots of English ways. She used to have a bath
every morning, even. I hate to think of her being a prisoner. Of
course I know one ought to feel that all Germans ought to be
wiped out now," wrote Gwenna, "but it makes you feel sort of
different when it's a girl you've known and had lots of little jokes
with, and I was with her the very first time I heard of you, so I
shan't be able to help always feeling a little kinder about her.
"The reason she was arrested was because they found in her
room at the boarding-house a lot of notes about the engineering-
works, our works, which she had been going to send off to that
soldier-brother of hers, Karl. She declared she didn't know she

wasn't supposed to, and that she hadn't an idea of our going to
War with her country or anything, and I'm sure she didn't mean
any harm at all. She said she'd seen her brother Karl in England
the week before War was declared, and that he hadn't said a
word to her then. And so perhaps he was that waiter all the time.
You know, the one we saw, in the cab that last Sunday of peace-
time. I expect he is fighting us now, isn't it extraordinary?"
This was the end of the sheet. Gwenna took another. Her letters to the Front
were always at least six times as long as the answers that she received to
them, but this was only to be expected. And Paul had said he loved long
letters and that she was to tell him absolutely everything she could. All
about herself.
She went on:
"You tell me to take care of myself and not to work too hard;
well, I am not. And I am quite well and Mrs. Crewe is most
awfully kind to me, and the little maid here spoils me. Every
night when I am in bed she insists on bringing me up a glass of
hot milk and two biscuits, though what for I don't know.
"Is there anything more about your coming back from the Front
to fetch the P.D.Q.? Oh, it would be so lovely to see you even
for a few days. I sometimes feel as if I had never, never seen you
——"
She sighed deeply in the quiet, lamp-lit room, where the chintz-casement
curtains stirred faintly above the open window. It had been so long, so long,
all this time of being without him. Why, she had scarcely had a week of
knowing him hers, before there had come that rushed War-bridal and the
Good-bye! And all she had to live on were her memories and a glazed
picture postcard, and a packet of pencil-scrawled letters of which the folds
were worn into slits. She couldn't even write to him as she would have
wished. Always there brooded over her that spectre "The Censor," who
possibly read every letter that was addressed to a man at the Front. Gwenna
knew that some people at home wrote anything they wished, heedless that a
stranger's eye might see it. Leslie, for instance, wrote to one of her medical
students, now working with the R.A.M.C. in Paris, as "My dear Harry—and

the Censor," adding an occasional parenthesis: "You won't understand this
expression, Mr. Censor, as it is merely a quite silly family joke!" She,
Gwenna, felt utterly unable to write down more than a tithe of the tender
things that she would have liked to say. To-night she had a longing to pour
out her heart to him ... oh, and she would say something! Even if she tore up
that sheet and wrote another. She scribbled down hastily: "Darling boy, do
you know I miss you more every day; nobody has ever missed anybody so
dreadfully."
Here she was wrong, though she did not know it. It was true that she longed
hungrily for the sight of that dear blonde face, with its blue, intrepid eyes,
for the sound of that deep and gentle voice, and for the touch of those
hands, those strongly modelled lips. But all these things had been a new joy,
scarcely realised before it was gone. She would have told you that it made it
worse for her. Actually it meant that she was spared much. Her lover's
presence had been a gift given and snatched away; not the comradeship of
years that, missing, would seem even as the loss of a limb to her. The ties of
daily habit and custom which strengthen that many-stranded cord of Love
had not yet been woven between these two lovers.
"I sometimes think it was really awfully selfish of me to marry
you," Gwenna wrote, thinking to herself, "Oh, bother that old
Censor, just for once." She went on more hurriedly:
"You might have married somebody like that Miss Muriel
Conyers, with those frightfully lovely clothes and all her people
able to help you on in the Army, or somebody very beautiful and
rich, anybody would have been glad to have you, and I know I
am just a little nobody, and not a bit clever and even Leslie used
to say I had a Welshy accent sometimes when I speak, and I
daresay lots of people will think, oh, 'how could he!—why, she
isn't even very pretty!'"
She raised her eyes, deeper and brighter in the lamplight, and gave a
questioning glance at her reflection in the oval, swung mirror on the
dressing-table at which she wrote. It would have been a captious critic
indeed that could have called her anything less than very pretty at that
moment; with her little face flushed and intent, a mixture of child and

woman in the expression of her eyes and about her soft, parted lips. Above
the ruffle of her night-gown her throat rose proudly; thick and creamy and
smooth. She remembered something he'd told her that afternoon at Kew.
He'd said that she always reminded him of any kind of white flower that
was sturdy and sweet; a posy of white clover, a white, night-blooming
stock, some kinds of white roses.... She would like to send him a flower, in
this letter, to remind him.
She glanced towards the open casement, where the curtain waved. Under
the shading foliage of the clematis that grew up to the cottage-roof there
had climbed the spray of a belated rose. "Rose Ménie" was its name. Mrs.
Crewe had said that it would not flower that year. But there was one bud,
half-hidden by leaves, swelling on its sappy twig, close to Gwenna's
window-sill.
"It'll come out in a day or so," Gwenna thought.
"I'll send it to him, if it comes out white.... He was pleased with my looks!"
So, reassured, she turned to the letter again, and added:
"The only thing is, that whatever sort of wife you'd married,
they couldn't have loved you like I do, or been so proud of being
your wife; really sometimes I can hardly believe that I am really
and truly married to——"
She broke off, and again lifted her curly head from bending above the
paper.
There had been a light tap at the door behind her.
"Come in," called Gwenna, writing down as she did so, "here is the little
maid coming to bring me up my hot milk; now, darling, darling boy, I do
hope they give you enough to eat wherever you are——"
Behind her the white door opened and shut. But the maid did not appear at
Gwenna's elbow with the tray that held that glass of hot milk and the plate
of biscuits. The person who had entered gazed silently across the quiet
girlish room at the little lissom figure clad in that soft crumple of pink and

white, sitting writing by the dressing-table, at the cherub's head, backed by
the globe of the lamp that spun a golden aureole into that wreath of curls.
There was a pause so long that Gwenna, wondering, raised her head.
She gave another glance into the oval mirror that stood on the dressing-
table just in front of her.... And there she saw, not the homely, aproned
figure of the little maid that she had expected to see, but the last thing that
she had expected.
It was a picture like, and unlike, a scene she had beheld long, long ago,
framed in the ornate gold-bordered oval mirror in the drawing-room at the
Smiths'. Over her pink-clad shoulder, she saw reflected a broad, khaki-
covered chest, a khaki sleeve, a blonde boy's face that moved nearer to her
own. Even as she sat there, transfixed by surprise, those blue and intrepid
eyes of Icarus looked, laughing joyously, full into hers, and held her gaze as
a hand might have held her own.
"It's only me," said a deep and gentle voice, almost shyly. "I say——"
"You!" she cried, in a voice that rang with amazement, but not with fright;
though he, it seemed, was hurrying out hasty warnings to the Little Thing
not to be frightened.... He'd thought it better than startling her with a wire....
Mrs. Crewe had met him at the door ... he'd come straight up: hoped she
didn't think he was a ghost—— Not for a second had she thought so!
Instantly she had known him for her granted and incarnate heart's desire,
her Flyer, home from the Front, her husband to whom she had that moment
been writing as she sat there.
She sprang to her feet.
She whirled round.
She could not have told whether she had first flung herself into those strong
arms of his, or whether he had snatched her up into them.
All that mattered was that they were round her now, lifting and holding her
as though they would never let her go again.

When Reveillé sounded from the Camp on the plain, the sun was bright on
that clematis-grown wall outside the window of Gwenna's bridal-room.
It gilded the September foliage about the window-sill It also touched a gem
of passionate colour, set among the leaves of the Rose Ménie.
That red rose had broken into blossom in the night.

PART III

SEPTEMBER, NINETEEN-
FOURTEEN

CHAPTER I
A WAR-TIME HONEYMOON

The morning after Paul Dampier's arrival from the Front he and his wife
started off on the honeymoon trip that had been for so many weeks
deferred.
They motored from the Aircraft Works to London, where they stopped to do
a little shopping, and where Gwenna was in raptures of pride to see the
effect produced by the Beloved in the uniform that suited him so well.
For every passer-by in the street must turn to look, with quickened interest
now, at an Army Aviator. Even the young men in their uniforms gave a
glance at the soldier whose tunic buttoned at the side and whose cap had the
tilt that gave to the shape of his blonde head something bird-like, falcon-
like. And every girl in the restaurant where they lunched murmured,
"Look," to her companion, "that's some one in the Royal Flying Corps," and
was all eyes for that kit which, at a time when all khaki was romantic, had a
special, super-glamour of its own.
But the blue eyes of the man who wore it were for no one but the girl with
whom he was taking his first meal alone together since they had been man
and wife.
Her own glance was still hazy with delight. Oh, to see him there facing her,
over the little round table set in a corner!
They ate cold beef and crusty loaf and cheese in memory of their first lunch
together in that field, long ago. They drank cider, touching glasses and
wishing each other all luck and a happy life.
"And fine weather for the whole of our week's honeymoon," added the
bridegroom as he set down his glass. "Lord, I know how it can pour in your
Wales."

For it was to Wales that they went on by the afternoon train from Euston; to
Gwenna's home, arriving late that evening. The Reverend Hugh Lloyd was
away on a round of preaching-visits about Dolgelly. They had his black-
henlike housekeeper to chirp and bustle about them with much adoring
service; and they would have the Chapel House to themselves.
"But we won't be in the house much," Gwenna decided, "unless it pours."
It did not pour the next morning. It was cloudless and windless and warm.
And looking round on the familiar landscape that she had known when she
was a little child, it seemed now to Gwenna as if War could not be. As if it
were all a dream and a delusion. There was no khaki to be met in that little
hillside village of purple slate and grey stone. Only one or two well-known
figures were missing from it. A keeper from one of the big houses on the
other side of the river, and an English chauffeur had joined the colours, but
that nine-days' wonder was over now. Peace had made her retreat in these
mountain fastnesses that had once echoed to the war-shouts and the harp-
music of a race so martial.
It was the music that had survived....
Paul Dampier had put on again that well-known and well-worn grey tweed
jacket of his, so that he also no longer recalled War. He had come right
away from all that, as she had known he would; come safely back to her.
Here he was, with her, and with a miracle between them, in this valley of
crystal brooks and golden bracken and purple slopes. It was meant that they
two should be together thus. Nothing could have stopped it. She felt herself
exulting and triumphing over all the Fates who might have tried to stop it;
and over all the Forces that might have tried to keep him from her. His work
on the Machine? Pooh! That had actually helped to bring them together!
The Great War? Here he was, home from the War!
"I've always, always wanted to be with you in the real country, and I never
have," she told him, as together they ran down the slate steps of Uncle
Hugh's porch after breakfast and turned up a path between the sunny larch-
grown steeps. That path would be a torrent in the winter time. Now the slate
pebbles of it were hot under the sun. "I don't really count that country, that
field, that day——"

"Didn't seem to mind it when we were there," he teased her as he walked
beside her swinging the luncheon basket that Margaret had put up for them.
"I mean of course when I was there."
Gwenna affected to gasp over the conceit of men. "If I've got to be with
one," she told him as if wearily, "I'd rather it was in a nice place for me to
listen to his nonsense."
"Wasn't any 'nonsense,' as you call it, in that field."
"No," agreed Gwenna, "there wasn't."
He looked sideways and down at her as she climbed that hill-path, hatless,
sure-footed and supple. Then a narrow turn in the path made her walk a
little ahead of him. She was wearing a very simple little sheath of a grey
cotton or muslin or something frock, with a white turn-down collar that he
hadn't seen her in before, he thought. Suited her awfully well. (Being a man,
he could not be expected to recognise it for the grey linen that she'd had on
when he'd come upon her that afternoon, high up on the scaffolding at
Westminster.)
"Yes, though, there was 'nonsense,'" he said, now suddenly answering her
last speech. "Fact of the matter is, it was dashed nonsense to waste such a
lot of time."
"Time, how?" asked Gwenna guilelessly, without turning her head.
"Oh! As if you didn't know!" he retorted. "Wasting time talking about the
Machine, to you. Catching hold of your hand, to show you what the camber
was—and then letting it go! Instead of owning up at once, 'Yes. All right.
You've got me. Pax!' And starting to do this——"
He was close up behind her now on the mountain-path, and because of the
steep ground on which they stood, her head was on a higher level than his
own. He drew it downwards and backwards, that brown, sun-warmed head,
to his tweed-clad shoulder.
"You'll break my neck. I know you will, one day. You are so rough,"
complained Gwenna; twisting round, however, and taking a step down to
him.

"I love you to be," she whispered. She kissed his coat-lapel. All the red of
that rose bloomed now on her mouth.... They walked on, with his arm a
close, close girdle about her. The luncheon basket was forgotten on the turfy
slope on which he'd dropped it. So they lunched, late, in the farm-house
four hundred feet above the Quarry village. It was a lonely place enough, a
hillside outpost, fenced by stunted damson trees; a short slate-flagged end
of path led to the open door where a great red baking crock stood, full of
water. Inside, the kitchen was a dark, cool cave, with ancient, smooth-worn
oaken furniture that squeaked on the slate-slabbed floor, with a dresser rich
with willow-pattern and lustre, and an open fire-place, through which,
looking up, they could see through the wood smoke a glimpse of the blue
sky.
And in this sort of place people still lived and worked as if it were
Seventeen Hundred and Something—and scarcely a day's journey away was
the Aircraft Factory where people lived for the work that will remake the
modern world; oh, most romantic of all ages, that can set such sharp
contrasts side by side!
An old Welshwoman, left there by her sheep-farming sons at home in the
chimney corner, set butter-milk before the lovers, and ambrosial home-
churned butter, and a farm-house loaf that tasted of nuts and peatsmoke.
They ate with astonishing appetites; Gwenna sitting in the window-seat
under the sill crowded with flower-pots and a family Bible. Paul, man-like,
stood as near as he could to the comfort of the fire even on that warm day.
The old woman, who wore clumping clogs on her feet and a black mutch-
cap on her head, beamed upon the pair with smiles as toothless and as
irresistible as those of an infant.
"You must have a plenty, whatever," she urged them, bringing out another
loaf, of bara breeth (or currant bread). "Come on, Sir! Come, Miss
Williams, now. Mam, I mean. Yess, yess. You married lady now. Your
husband," with a skinny hand on his grey sleeve, "your husband is not a
minnyster?"
"He's a soldier, Mrs. Jones," explained Gwenna, proudly, and with a
strengthening of her own accent, such as occurs in any of her race when
revisiting their wilds. "He's an Airman."

"Ur?" queried Mrs. Jones, beaming.
"He goes flying. You know. On a machine. Up in the sky."
"Well, oh!" ejaculated the old woman. And laughed shrilly. To her this was
some eccentric form of English joke. Flying? Like the birds! Dear, dear.
"What else does he do, cariad fâch?" she asked of Gwenna.
"He's been over in France, fighting the Germans," said the girl, while the
old woman on her settle by the fire nodded her mutched head with the
intense, delighted expression of some small child listening to a fairy story.
It was indeed no more, to her. She said, "Well, indeed. He took a very kind
one, too." Then she added, "I not much English. Pitty, pitty!" and said
something in Welsh at which Gwenna coloured richly and laughed a little
and shook her head.
"What's she say?" demanded Paul, munching; but his girl-wife said it was
nothing—and turned her tip-tilted profile, dark against the diamond window
panes, to admire one of the geranium plants in the pots.
Afterwards, when the couple were outside again in the fresh sunlight on the
mountain lands, young Dampier persisted with his questioning about what
that old woman had said. He betted that he could guess what it was all
about. And he guessed.
Gwenna admitted that he had guessed right.
"She said," she told him shyly, "that it ought to be 'a very pretty one,
whatever.'"
"I've got a very pretty present for it," Paul whispered presently.
"What?"
"Don't you remember a locket I once took? A little mother-of-pearl heart,"
he said. "That's what I shall keep it for——"
And there fell a little silence between them as they walked on, swinging
hands above the turf, gravely contented.

They had had to spend the day together thus. It seemed to Gwenna that all
her life before had been just a waiting for this day.
Below the upland on which they swung along, grey figures on the green,
there lay other wide hill-spaces, spread as with turf-green carpets, on which
the squares of mellowing, golden-brown autumn woods seemed rugs and
skins cast down; below these again stretched the further valley with the
marsh, with the silver loops and windings of the river, and the little white
moving caterpillar of smoke from the distant train. There was also a blue
haze above the slate roofs of a town.
But here, in this sun-washed loneliness far above, here was their world; hers
and his.
They walked, sometimes climbing a crest where stag's-horn moss branched
and spread through the springy turf beneath their feet, sometimes dipping
into a hollow, for two miles and more. They could have walked there for
half a day and seen no face except that of a tiny mountain sheep, cropping
among the gorse; heard no voice but those of the calling plovers, beating
their wings in the free air. Then, passing a gap in two hills, they came quite
suddenly upon the cottage and the lake.
The sheet of water, silent, deserted, reflected the warm blue of the afternoon
sky and the deep green of the overhanging boughs of great hassock-shaped
bushes that covered two islands set upon its breast.
"Rhododendron bushes. When they're in blossom they're all simply covered
with flowers, pink and rose-colour, and reflected in the water! It is so
lovely," Gwenna told the lover beside her. "Oh, Paul! You must come here
again and see that with me in the spring!"
On the further bank was another jungle of rhododendron and lauristinus,
half-hiding the grey stone walls and the latticed windows of the square
cottage, a fishing box of a place that had evidently been built for some one
who loved solitude.
Paul Dampier peered in through one of the cobwebby lattices. Just inside on
the sill there stood, left there long since, a man's shaving-tackle. Blue
mildew coated the piece of soap that lay in the dish. Further in he caught a
glimpse of dusty furniture, of rugs thrown down on a wooden floor, of a

man's old coat on a peg. A wall was decorated with sets of horns, with a
couple of framed photographs, with old fishing-rods.
"Make a jolly decent billet, for some one, this," said Paul.
Gwenna said, "It belongs to some people.... They're away, I think. It's all
locked up now. So's the boat for the lake, I expect. They used to keep a boat
up here for fishing."
The long flat boat they found moored to one of the stout-trunked
rhododendron bushes that dipped its pointed leaves in the peat-brown water
fringed with rushes.
Paul stepped in, examining her, picking up the oars. "Nice afternoon for a
row, Ma'am?" he said, smiling up at the girl clad in dove-grey on the rushy
bank, with the spongy dark-green moss about her shoes.
"Jump in, Gwenna. I'll row you across the lake."
"You can't row that old tub, boy."
"Can't I?"
"I'll race you round, then!"
"Right you are!"
The girl skipped round the clump of rhodos that hid the last flicker of her
skirt; and the boy bent to the short, home-made sculls.
The boat was a crank, unhandy little craft; and lacked thole-pins on one
side. Therefore Gwenna, swift-footed Little Thing that she was, had as good
a chance of winning as he.
"Like trying to row a bucket!" he laughed, as the boat spun. "Hi, Gwen! I
ought to have some start, you know!"
He rowed. Presently he rested on his oars and called, "Hullo, have you
started?"
"Started—" came back only the echo from the cottage roof. There was no
sign of any grey-frocked running figure on the bank. He scanned it on both

sides of him, gave a look towards each of those shrub-covered islands on
the smooth expanse.
"Gwenna—Why, where are you? What's become of the girl," he muttered.
"Gwen-na!"
She was nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER II
THE SOUL OF UNDINE

"Hul-lo!" he shouted. The echo answered as he sat in the boat staring about
him....
Then he felt a twitch at one of his sculls. It turned in his hand; was
wrenched from him.
"What the deuce——" he began, surprised.
Then he heard a laugh.
"What on earth——"
It was nothing on earth that had greeted him. It was something of the water
that laughed up into his face and called, "Hullo, husband!"
A mermaid, a water-nymph, a little white-shouldered Undine was peeping
up and mocking him! She trod water, turned over on her side, swam with
easy strokes.
For always Gwenna had been proud of her swimming.
She had won a medal for it at that Aberystwith school of hers; but she
wanted more than a mere medal for it now. She wanted her boy to see her
swimming, and to praise her stroke. She had looked forward to that. She
wanted to show him that she could make as graceful movements with her
own body in the water as he could make with his biplane in the air. She
could! He should see! She made these movements. She had thought of
making them—just so—on the morning of her marriage. Only then she had
thought it would be in the sea off Brighton beach, with whole crowds of
other stupid people about in dark-blue or Turkey-red "costumes." Here it
was so much lovelier; a whole mountain-side and a clear lake to herself in
which to show off her pet accomplishment to her lover. She was one
innocent and pretty Vanity incarnate as she glided along beside his boat.

She gave a quick twist. There was a commotion of translucent amber water,
a gleam of coral white that shaded down into peaty brown as she dived,
reappearing on the other side of the boat, looking up at him, blinking as her
curls streamed water into her eyes.
His eyes, blue and direct and adoring, were upon her.
"I say," he said admiringly, "I didn't know you could swim like that. Jolly!"
This moment of achievement was possibly the most exquisite in the whole
of Gwenna's life.
Shaking the wet from her hair, she laughed with pure, completed, rapturous
joy; glorying in her youth, in the life that charged each little blue vein of
her, in this power of swimming that she felt had been given her only to
please him.
"Why, I could swim you to—Oh! Mind you don't upset!" she exclaimed.
For Paul had stooped; leaning over the side of the boat he had passed one
arm beneath her shoulders; he was bending over her to take a kiss, all fresh
with lake-water.
"You'll topple over," she warned him.
"Pooh," he said. "One, Gwenna!"
He always said her name as if it were "darling"—he did not call her "dear"
or "darling" much. She found that she adored him for this, as for everything
that he said or did. Once, in one of those old-time talks of theirs, Leslie had
said, "For every three times a man asks for a kiss refuse him twice. An
excellent plan, Taffy——" The happy girl-wife thought there need be no
use of "plans" with him and her. She teased him—if she wanted to.
Eyes laughed into eyes now. She threw back her head, evading him, but
only for a second. His mouth met hers, dewy as a lotus-bud. The boy and
girl kissed closely. Nothing could come between that kiss, she thought.
Then, sudden as a flash of summer lightning, something came.
A thought; a shadow; a fear at last.

All these halcyon hours she had known no fear. All those weeks that her
husband had been in France she had been certain, at the bottom of her heart,
of his safety. She had known by that queer sense of presentiment she
possessed that he would come back to her. He'd come back to make this
perfect time for which all her unawakened girlhood had been waiting. And
now, by that same queer sixth sense, she suddenly found herself realising
that he would not—No, no! That he might not come back to her the second
time.... Suddenly, suddenly the shadow crept over her, taking the glow and
colour out of their idyll even at this golden moment. With his lips warms on
hers she shivered as if the water in which she swayed had suddenly grown
many degrees colder. Supposing he should not return? In two days' time
now he was leaving her. Supposing that she were never to see him again?
She shut her eyes, felt herself for a horrible second surrounded by darkness,
and alone.... She heard his sharp question, "What's the matter?" and opened
her eyes again.
His head was dark against the blue little ripples of light passed over his
blonde face; ripples cast up from the water. The boat tilted, and his arm held
her more tightly. He said again, "What is it?"
Then, in her own ears, her voice said serenely, "It's all right."
The cloud had passed, as suddenly as it had fallen. She knew, somehow,
that it would be "all right." Whatever happened, this worst catastrophe of all
was not going to fall upon her. She was not going to be left alone and in
darkness, her sun of Love gone down. Such a light could not have been
kindled, just to be put out again. She would not be forced to live without
him. That could not be. Why, the thing was unthinkable. Yet, somehow that
was going to be made "all right."
"You swim back again and get your things on, as quick as you can," he
ordered her. "That was a touch of cramp you got, I expect."
"I'm all right now," she again said.
She sighed when at last they left that lovely Paradise of theirs behind them.
They went down hill at a good swinging pace, his arm again girdling the
dove-grey frock. He said, "We'll get tea and topping light-cakes at one of

those cottages before we come to the village, shall we? Are you starving,
Little Thing? I know I am. Soon be there now."
"I know," she said, "I wasn't sighing because I wanted my tea. Only because
... It seems such a pity that we ever have to come down from here!" she told
him, nestling in his arm.
But she did not tell him of her sudden fear, nor of its sudden passing,
though (in her heart that beat below his hand) the thought of both remained.

CHAPTER III
A LAST FAVOUR

That thought at the heart of Gwenna seemed to grow with every hour that
passed.
And they were passing now so rapidly, the hours that remained to her with
her husband! One more blissful day spent on the mountains (but always
with that growing thought behind it: "He has to go soon. Perhaps he will
not come back this time. The new machine may let him down somehow,
perhaps").
One more train-journey, whizzing through country of twenty different
aspects, just him and her together (but still in her mind that thriving dread:
"Very likely he may not come back. He has had so many narrow escapes!
That time he told me about when he came down from behind the clouds and
the machine was hit on both sides at once: our men firing on him as well,
thinking his was an enemy craft! He got up into the clouds again and
escaped that time. Next time as likely as not....").
One more night they were together in the London hotel where Uncle Hugh
had always put up. Paul slept, with a smile on his face that looked so utterly
boyish while he was asleep: his blonde head nestled into her neck. Gwenna,
waking uneasily once or twice, and with his arms still about her, was
haunted by her fear as by a nightmare. "It's more than likely that he may not
come back this time. This time I feel that he is not going to come back!"
And the feeling grew with the growing light outside the window, until she
told herself: "I know it! I know that I am right——"
Then came the wonder in her mind, "Why am I not wretched about this?
Why do I feel that it's not going to matter after all, and that it's going to be
'all right'?"
Still wondering, she fell asleep again.

But in the morning her presentiment was a thing full-grown.
Paul, off to the Front, would never come back again.
Quite early they were at the Aircraft Works where he was to leave his young
wife and to fetch his machine, the completed P.D.Q. that was to take him
out to France.
He had spoken of her—that machine—in the train coming along. And
Gwenna, the dazed and fanciful, had thought sharply: "Ah! That's her
revenge. That's what's going to be the end of this fight between the Girl and
the Machine. I won. I got him from her. This is how she takes him back, the
fiancée! He will be killed in that machine of his."
Her headstrong, girlish fancy persisted. It was as real to her as any of the
crowd of everyday and concrete realities that they found, presently, at the
bustling Aircraft Works.
When Paul (who was to start at midday, flying across to France) changed
into his uniform and flying-kit, it seemed to her to set the seal upon her
premonition.
He would never wear other kit again now, upon this earth.
The Aeroplane Lady, bracingly cheerful, met them with a sheaf of official
documents for the young Army aviator.
"I'm going to steal him from you for a quarter of an hour, Mrs. Dampier,"
she said with a little nod; and she took the young man into her office.
Gwenna, left alone outside, walked up and down the sunny yard
mechanically.
She could not have said what her thoughts were. Probably she had no
thoughts. Nothing but the steady throb, quiet and reiterated as the pulse of
the machinery in the shops, of that conviction of fatality that she felt.
It seemed to run on in her head as the belting ran on the shaft: "He won't
come back. He won't come back!"

It was in the middle of this monotonous inward muttering that the door of
the office opened, and there came out a shortish figure, leather-jacketed and
with enveloping overalls and wearing a cap with goggles, peak behind. It
was young Mr. Ryan.
He raised his cap and would have passed Gwenna quickly, but she stopped
him.
She didn't know why. Since her marriage she had (ungratefully enough)
almost forgotten the red-haired young man's existence, and perhaps it was
not so much himself as his cap and mufflings that caught her eye now.
"Why, are you going up?" she asked.
"Yes," said young Ryan gloomily.
He seemed to be in the worst of tempers as he went on, grumblingly. He
was going up. Just his luck. Plenty of times he'd wanted to go and hadn't
been allowed. Now he'd got to go, just when he didn't want to.
"You don't want to?" Gwenna repeated.
Mr. Ryan coloured a little. "Well, if I've got to, that doesn't matter."
"Why don't you want to?" Gwenna asked, half indifferent, half surprised. To
her it had always appeared the one thing to want to do. She had been put off
time after time. Now here was he, grumbling that it was just his luck to go.
Then she thought she could guess why he didn't want to go up just now. She
smiled faintly. Was it that Mr. Ryan had—somebody—to see?
Mr. Ryan blushed richly. Probably he did so not on this somebody's
account, but because it was Gwenna who asked the question. One does not
care for the sympathetic questions of the late idol, even when another fills
the shrine. He told Gwenna: "I've got to go with your husband as a
passenger. He's had a wire to bring another man over to one of the repairing
bases; and so he's spotted me."
"To bring over? D'you mean to France?"

"Yes. Not that they want me, of course; but just somebody. So I've got to go,
I suppose."
Gwenna was silent, absorbed. She glanced away across the flat eighty-acre
field beyond the yards, where the planes of Paul's new biplane gleamed like
a parallel ruler in the sun. A ruler marked with inches, each inch being one
of the seams that Gwenna had carefully doped over. About the machine two
or three dark figures moved, giving finishing touches, seeing that all was
right.
And young Ryan was to fly in her, with Paul!
It wasn't Ryan they wanted, but "just somebody." ... And then, all in a
moment, Gwenna, thinking, had a very curious little mental experience. As
once before she had had that "flying dream," and had floated up from earth
and had seen her own body lying inert and soulless on her bed, so now the
same thing happened. She seemed to see herself in the yard. Herself, quite
still and nonchalant, talking to this young man in cap and goggles who had
to go to France just when he particularly wanted to go somewhere else. She
saw all the details, quite clearly: his leather jacket, herself, in her blouse and
skirt, the cylindrical iron, steam chambers where they steamed the skids, the
Wing-room door, and beyond it the new biplane waiting in the field two
hundred yards away.
Then she saw herself put her hand on the young man's leathern sleeve. She
heard her own voice ascending, as it were, to her. It was saying what
seemed to be the most matter-of-fact thing in the world.
"Then don't go. You go later, Mr. Ryan. Follow him on. You go and meet
your girl instead; it will be all right."
He was staring blankly at her. She wondered what he saw to stare at.
"What? What d'you mean, Mrs. Dampier? I'm bound to go. Military
orders."
"Yes; they are for him, not for you. You aren't under military orders." This
was in her own, quite calm and detached little voice with its un-English
accent. "You say anybody'd do. He can take—somebody else."