"I'm an airman," he said.
She gasped.
He went on. "Belong to a firm that sends me flying. Taking up passengers at Hendon, that sort of thing."
"An airman? Are you?" was all that Gwenna could for the moment reply. "Oh ... Oh!"
Perhaps her eyes, widening upon the face above her, were more eloquent of what she felt.
That it was to her a miracle to find herself actually sitting next to him! Actually speaking to one of these scarcely credible beings whom she had watched this afternoon! An airman.... There was something about the very word that seemed mysterious, uncanny. Was it because of its comparative newness in the speech of man? Perhaps, ages ago, primitive maids found something as arresting in the term "A seaman"? But this was an airman! It was his part to ride the Winged Victory, the aeroplane that dared those sapphire heights above the flying-ground. Oh! And she had been chattering to him about the slate-margined brooks and the ferny glens of her low-lying valley, just as if he'd been what this ingenuous maid called to herself "Any young man" who had spent holidays fishing in Wales? She hadn't known. That was why he had those queer, keen eyes: blue and reckless, yet measuring.
Not a sailor's, not a soldier's ... but the eyes of Icarus!...
"I—I never heard your name," said Gwenna, a little breathless, timid. "Which is it, please?"
For reply he dabbed a big, boyish finger down on the slender name-card among the crumbs of his bread. "Here you are," he said, "Dampier; Paul Dampier."
So whirling and bewildered was Gwenna's mind by this time that she scarcely wondered over the added surprise. This, she just realised, was the name she had first heard bellowed aloud through the megaphone from the judges' stand. She hardly remembered then that a photograph of this same aviator was tossed in among her wash-leather gloves, velvet hair-bands, and her handkerchief-sachet in the top right-hand drawer of her dressing-table at the Club. Certainly she did not remember at this minute what she had said, laughing, over that portrait, to her two friends on the flying-ground.