"Him? Good gracious!" thought the little Welsh girl in consternation to herself. "Colonel Conyers!—oh, no, please—I should be much too frightened——"
But the tall figure had detached itself from a group at a word from Paul Dampier, and Colonel Conyers came up. Gwenna recognised the lean, smiling, half-mischievous face of the soldier who—those ages ago!—had talked to those ladies in the motor-car at Hendon.
This was the man they called "Aircraft Conyers," the man practically at the head of Aeronautics, Paul had, said, the man in whose hands rested (among so many, many other things) the whole career of the inventor of the P.D.Q.! Gwenna, with her curly head whirling, felt inclined to drop a schoolchild's curtsy to this Great One of the Councils of the Earth.
He took her hand into his own long, lean one.
"How d'you do?" he drawled, smiling cheerfully. "Starving, what? I am, I can tell you. Always late here. Won't be long, now. You're at my table, I believe." Then, almost anxiously, "Fond of chocolates? You are? Good. Then I can collect the lot of those little silver dishes around us and pretend it's all for you. It's for me, really."
Gwenna, who was not able to help laughing at this unexpectedness on the part of the great Aircraft Conyers, said: "Are you fond of them?"
"Passionately. Passionately!" said Colonel Conyers with a nod, as he turned to find his own dinner-partner.
"Didn't frighten you much, did he?" laughed Paul Dampier to the Little Thing at his side. "Course he didn't. I'll tell you who most of the others are when we get into the supper-room."
In the great supper-room with its painted ceiling and gilded pillars dinner was laid on a number of small tables for parties of six or eight. Gwenna found herself the only woman at their table, the Aeroplane Lady sitting far down at the other end of the room.
All dazed, the young girl looked about her like a stray bird that has fluttered in through an open window. Beside her, Paul Dampier pointed out to her this celebrity and that at the tables.