"Draught, by Jove!" he laughed. "It's always fairly draughty where I have to sit!"
He went on again to mourn over his collar. "Worse than before, now," he said. "It's going to hitch up to the back of my head, and I shall have to keep wiggling my shoulder-blades about as if I'd got St. Vitus's dance!"
Gwenna felt she would have liked to have taken a tiny safety-pin that there was hidden away under her sky-blue sash, and to have given it to him to fasten that collar securely and without danger of pricking. Leslie, she knew, would have done that. She, Gwenna, would have been too shy, with a perfect stranger—only, now that he'd broken the ice with that collar-stud, so to speak, she couldn't feel as if this keen-eyed, deep-voiced young man were any longer quite a stranger. In her own dialect, he seemed, now, "so homely, like——"
And over the next course he was talking to her about home, about the places where he'd fished in Wales.
"There was one topping little trout-stream," he told her in that deep and gentle voice. "Bubbly as soda-water, green and clear as bottle-glass. Awfully jolly pools under the shade of the branches. You look right down and it's all speckly at the bottom, with brown-and-grey stones and slates and things, under the green water. It's like——"
He was looking straight at her, and suddenly he stopped. He had caught her eyes, full; as he had caught them before dinner in that mirror. Now that he was so close to them he saw that they were clear and browny-green, with speckles of slate-colour. They were not unlike those pools themselves, by Jove.... Almost as if he had been fishing for something out of those depths he still looked down, hard into them.... He forgot that he had stopped talking. And then under his own eyes he saw the little thing begin to colour up; blushing from that sturdy white throat of hers to the brow where those thick brown cherub's-curls began to grow. He looked away, hastily. Hastily he said, "It—er—it had a pretty name, that stream. Quite a pronounceable Welsh name, for once: The Dulas."
"Oh, dear me! Do you know the Dulas?" cried Gwenna Williams in delight, forgetting that she had just been feeling acutely conscious and shy under the fixed stare of a pair of searching blue eyes. "Why! It's not very far from there that's my home!"
They went on talking—about places. Unconsciously they were leading the whole table after them; the jerkiness went out of sentences; the pitch of the talk rose. It was all a buzz to Gwenna; but when, at the joint, her neighbour turned at last to answer a comment of the rose-coloured lady on his other hand, she amused herself by seeking to find out what all the others were talking about.
"I like some of his things very much. Now, his water-colours at the——" This was Mr. Smith, holding forth about pictures.... There appeared to be a good deal of it. Ending up with, "And I know for a fact that he only got two hundred guineas for that; two hundred! Incredible!"
It certainly did seem to Gwenna an incredible amount of money for a picture, a thing you just hang on a wall and forgot all about. Two hundred guineas! What couldn't she, Gwenna, do with that! Travel all over the place for a year! Go flying every week, at Hendon!