"Why don't you want to?" Gwenna asked, half indifferent, half surprised. To her it had always appeared the one thing to want to do. She had been put off time after time. Now here was he, grumbling that it was just his luck to go.
Then she thought she could guess why he didn't want to go up just now. She smiled faintly. Was it that Mr. Ryan had—somebody—to see?
Mr. Ryan blushed richly. Probably he did so not on this somebody's account, but because it was Gwenna who asked the question. One does not care for the sympathetic questions of the late idol, even when another fills the shrine. He told Gwenna: "I've got to go with your husband as a passenger. He's had a wire to bring another man over to one of the repairing bases; and so he's spotted me."
"To bring over? D'you mean to France?"
"Yes. Not that they want me, of course; but just somebody. So I've got to go, I suppose."
Gwenna was silent, absorbed. She glanced away across the flat eighty-acre field beyond the yards, where the planes of Paul's new biplane gleamed like a parallel ruler in the sun. A ruler marked with inches, each inch being one of the seams that Gwenna had carefully doped over. About the machine two or three dark figures moved, giving finishing touches, seeing that all was right.
And young Ryan was to fly in her, with Paul!
It wasn't Ryan they wanted, but "just somebody." ... And then, all in a moment, Gwenna, thinking, had a very curious little mental experience. As once before she had had that "flying dream," and had floated up from earth and had seen her own body lying inert and soulless on her bed, so now the same thing happened. She seemed to see herself in the yard. Herself, quite still and nonchalant, talking to this young man in cap and goggles who had to go to France just when he particularly wanted to go somewhere else. She saw all the details, quite clearly: his leather jacket, herself, in her blouse and skirt, the cylindrical iron, steam chambers where they steamed the skids, the Wing-room door, and beyond it the new biplane waiting in the field two hundred yards away.
Then she saw herself put her hand on the young man's leathern sleeve. She heard her own voice ascending, as it were, to her. It was saying what seemed to be the most matter-of-fact thing in the world.
"Then don't go. You go later, Mr. Ryan. Follow him on. You go and meet your girl instead; it will be all right."