Paul joined them and walked across the field.
His brows were knitted; it was dashed hard lines that he couldn't see her for good-bye. His wife! She ought to have seen him off.... Poor Little sweet Thing, she thought she couldn't stick it—— He wondered where on earth she'd gone and hidden herself.
CHAPTER IV
THE DEPARTURE FOR FRANCE
Gwenna sat, for the first time in her life, in an aeroplane.
She had very little actual notion of how she came to be there. It was all confused in her mind, that which had happened between Mr. Ryan's so resolute "Can't be done, Mrs. Dampier," and its having been "done." What had prevailed? Her own begging? Mr. Ryan's wish to see his girl? Or her, Gwenna's, calm assurances, repeated from that day in Wales, that it would be "all right"? She wasn't sure which of all these things had brought her here safely where she was, in the passenger-seat of Paul's biplane. She hardly remembered putting on the rough and voluminous brown clothes while Mr. Ryan mounted guard over the little stokehole of the steam chambers.
She only knew that she had walked, easily and undiscovered, across the field before the whistle blew. That she'd climbed unassisted into that small wicker seat, and that she was now waiting there, muffled up to the tip of her nose, the edge of the cap almost meeting the muffler, goggles down, and gloves hiding her little hands. She was no more to be distinguished from a man than if she had been a diver encased for a descent into the sea.
She did not even trouble to wonder at her own wonderful luck in the affair.