This remark of the young man's, and that which followed it, surprised and puzzled Gwenna even more than his curious remark about draughts. Who was he? What sort of a young man was this who always sat in draughts and who could catch the sound of a baby's cry when even its own mother hadn't heard it through the thick portière, the doors, the walls and that high-pitched buzz of conversation round about the table?
For Mrs. Smith had fled from the table with a murmured word of apology, and had presently returned just as the ornate fruit-and-jelly mould was being handed round, and Gwenna heard her saying to Mrs. Rose-colour, "Yes, it was. He's off again now. He simply won't go down for Nurse—I always have to rush——"
Gwenna turned to her companion, whose collar was now well up over the back of his neck. Wondering, she said to him, "Fancy your hearing that, through all this other noise!"
"Ah, one gets pretty quick at listening to, and placing, noises," he told her, helping himself to the jelly and shrugging his shoulders and that collar at the same time. "It's being accustomed to notice any squeak that oughtn't to be there, you know, in the engines. One gets to hear the tiniest sound, through anything."
Gwenna, more puzzled than before, turned from that delectable pudding on her plate, to this strangely interesting young man beside her. She said: "Are you an engineer?"
"I used to be," he said. "A mechanic, you know, in the shops, before I got to be a pilot."
"A pilot?" She wondered if he thought it rude of her, if it bothered him to be asked questions about himself like this, by just a girl? And still she couldn't help asking yet another question.
She said, "Are you a sailor, then?"
"Me?" he said, as if surprised. "Oh, no——"
And then, quite simply and as if it were nothing, he made what was to Gwenna an epic announcement.