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.