"Yes! Oh, yes!" Gwenna returned in a breathless little flurry. There mustn't be any mistake about what she wished. She looked up into his holding eyes once more, and said quiveringly, "I would so love it!"
"You would. Right," he said, and seemed to have forgotten that they had shaken hands, and that he had not yet loosed her fingers from his large and hearty grip. He shook hands again. "Then I'll come round And fix it up——"
And the next instant, it seemed, he was whirled away from her again, this Stranger who had dropped into the middle of her life as it were from the skies which were his hunting-ground. There was the noise of a retreating car droning down the hill (not unlike the receding drone of a biplane in full flight), then the grating of a key in the lock of the Club door....
Gwenna sighed. Then she went upstairs, humming softly, without knowing what the tune was, Leslie's song:
"Once in the dear, dead days beyond recall——"
Leslie followed her into her room where she turned up the gas.
"I'll undo you, Taffy, shall I?... Enjoyed yourself rather, after all, didn't you?" said the elder girl, adding quickly, "What's the matter?"
For Gwenna before the glass stood with a dismayed look upon her face. Her hand was up to her round white throat, touching the dimpled hollow where there had rested—where there rested no longer—that mother-of-pearl pendant.
"It's gone," she exclaimed ruefully.
"What has, child? What have you dropped?"