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——