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: