"Ah!" said Gwenna, and then blushed violently; partly because she hadn't meant to speak, and partly because this had drawn the blue eyes of the Airman quickly upon herself.
"Yes, that incessant flying-machine of his," enlarged Mr. Swayne, lolling back in his chair and addressing the meeting. "She—I believe it's correct to call the thing 'she'?—is more of a nuisance even than any engaged girl I've ever met. She interferes with everything this man does. Ask him to come along to a dance or the Opera or to see some amusing people, and it's always 'Can't; I'm working on the cylinder or the spiral or the Fourth Dimension' or whatever it is he does think he's working on. Practically 'she' spends all the time he's away from her ringing him up, or getting him rung up, on the telephone. 'She' eats all his spare cash, too——"
"In steel instead of chocolate, I suppose?" smiled Leslie. "And must she be humoured? She seems to have every drawback of a young woman with 'a diamond half-hoop.' Is she jealous, as well?"
And then, while taking a cigarette from Hugo's case, the elder girl made, lightly, a suggestion that the listening Gwenna was fated to remember.
"What would happen," asked Leslie dryly, "if a real flesh-and-blood fiancée were to come along as a rival to the one of machinery?"
"Nothing would happen," Hugo assured her, holding out a lighted match. "That's why it would be rather interesting to watch. The complication of the Aeroplane or the Lady. The struggle in the mind of the young Inventor, what? The Girl"—he tossed aside the match and glanced fleetingly at the grave cherub's-face under Gwenna's white-winged hat—"The Girl versus the Flying Machine. I'd lay fifteen to one on the Machine, Miss Long."
"Done," said Leslie, demurely but promptly. "In half-crowns."
"Yes! You'd back your sex, of course," Hugo took up gaily. The young Frenchman murmured: "But the Machine—the Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle."
Here, suddenly, the silently listening Gwenna gave a tiny shiver. She turned her head abruptly towards the open windows behind her with the strutting pigeons and the sailing clouds beyond. It had seemed to the fanciful Celt that there in that too dainty room now hazy with cigarette-smoke, in that careless company of two girls and three young men, she had felt the hint of another Presence. It was rather horrid and ghostly—all this talk of a Machine that was made more of than a Woman! A Machine who "clawed" the man that owned her, just like a jealous betrothed who will not let her lover out of her sight! And supposing that Conflict did come, on which Gwenna's chum and Mr. Dampier's cousin had laid their laughing bets? The struggle between the sweetheart of steel springs and the sweetheart of soft flesh and warm blood? For one clear instant Gwenna knew that this fight would, must come. It was coming——
Then she turned her head and forgot her presentiments; coming back to the light-hearted Present. She watched Leslie, to whom the young Frenchman had been talking; he was now fixing dark earnest eyes upon "Mademoiselle Langue" as she, in the rather stilted phraseology with which our nation speaks its own language for the benefit of foreigners, expounded to him an English story.