Little Gwenna was experiencing a feeling not unknown among those shortly to be married; namely, that every prospect was pleasing—save that of having to face one's relatives with the affair!
"He was always rather a dret-ful old man," she confided anxiously to Paul, as they paced the sooty flags of the platform. "It's just like him to be sixteen minutes late already just when I want to get this over. He never understands anything about—about people when they're young. And the first thing he's sure to ask is whether you've got any money. Have you, Paul?"
"Stacks," said the Airman, reassuringly. "Old Hugo made it sixty, as a wedding-present. Decent of him, wasn't it?"
They turned by the blackboard with the chalked-up notices of arrivals and departures, and Gwenna ruefully went on with her prophecy of what her Uncle would say.
"He'll say he never heard of anybody marrying an Airman. (I don't suppose he's ever heard of an Airman at all before now!) Ministers, and quarry-managers, and people with some prospects; that's the sort of thing they've always married in Uncle Hugh's family," she said anxiously. "And he'll say we've both behaved awfully badly not to let him know before this. (Just as if there was anything to know.) And he'll say you turned my silly head when I was much too young to know my own mind! And then he's quite, quite sure to say that you only proposed to me because—— Well, of course," she broke off a little reproachfully, "you never even did propose to me properly!"
"Too late to start it now," said her lover, laughing, as the knot of porters surged forward to the side of the platform. "Here's the train coming in!"
Now Gwenna was right about the first thing that Uncle Hugh would ask, when, after a searching glance and a handshake to this tall young man that his niece introduced to him at the carriage-door, he carried off the pair of them to the near-by hotel where the Minister always put up on his few and short visits to London.
"Well, young gentleman," he began, in his crisp yet deliberate Welsh accent. He settled himself on the red plush sofa, and gazed steadily at Paul Dampier on one of the red plush armchairs. "Well! And have you got the money reck-quisite to keep a wife?"
"No. I'm afraid I haven't, sir, really," returned the young man, looking frankly back at him. "Of course I'd my screw. Three pounds ten a week, I was getting as a pilot. But that was only just enough for myself—with what I had to do for the Machine. Of course I'm going to have her—the Flying Machine—taken up now, so——"