CHAPTER III
A LAST FAVOUR
That thought at the heart of Gwenna seemed to grow with every hour that passed.
And they were passing now so rapidly, the hours that remained to her with her husband! One more blissful day spent on the mountains (but always with that growing thought behind it: "He has to go soon. Perhaps he will not come back this time. The new machine may let him down somehow, perhaps").
One more train-journey, whizzing through country of twenty different aspects, just him and her together (but still in her mind that thriving dread: "Very likely he may not come back. He has had so many narrow escapes! That time he told me about when he came down from behind the clouds and the machine was hit on both sides at once: our men firing on him as well, thinking his was an enemy craft! He got up into the clouds again and escaped that time. Next time as likely as not....").
One more night they were together in the London hotel where Uncle Hugh had always put up. Paul slept, with a smile on his face that looked so utterly boyish while he was asleep: his blonde head nestled into her neck. Gwenna, waking uneasily once or twice, and with his arms still about her, was haunted by her fear as by a nightmare. "It's more than likely that he may not come back this time. This time I feel that he is not going to come back!" And the feeling grew with the growing light outside the window, until she told herself: "I know it! I know that I am right——"
Then came the wonder in her mind, "Why am I not wretched about this? Why do I feel that it's not going to matter after all, and that it's going to be 'all right'?"
Still wondering, she fell asleep again.