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!