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.