"Here, are you as hungry as all that?" laughed young Dampier at her side. "We'll feed."
He let Gwenna spread out upon the clean dinner-napkin in which they were wrapped the provisions that he had brought from the inn.
"All I could get. Bread-and-cheese. Couple of hunks of cold beef. Butter—salt," he said, giving her the things as he named them. "Plates I said we wouldn't worry about; chuck the crumbs to the birds. Here's what I got to drink; cider. D'you like it?"
"Love it," said Gwenna, who had never happened to taste it. But she knew that she would love it.
"Good. Oh! Now I've forgotten the glass, though," exclaimed young Dampier, sitting up on his knees on the shaded patch of grass beside her. "We shall both have to use the lower half of my flask. Sorry—hope you don't mind."
Gwenna, taking her first taste of cider in bird-like sips from that oblong silver thing, remembered the old saying, "Drink from my cup and you will think my thoughts." Then he put down upon the dinner napkin the half-loaf and the lump of cheese that he had been munching. He took the half of the flask, simply, out of the girl's hand, poured out more cider, and drank in turn.
"That's better," he said, smiling. She smiled back at him.
She had ceased to feel any shyness of this fair-haired aviator who rested there beside her in this oasis of shade from the elm, while beyond them stretched the wide, dazzlingly bright desert of the flowering meadow, bounded by its hedges. He cut off the crusty part of the loaf for her (since she said she liked it). He sliced for her the damp and pinkish beef, since she would not confide to him her deep and feminine loathing of this fare. The woman is not yet born who can look upon cold meat as a food. And they drank in turn from his silver flask. This was their third meal together; yet Gwenna felt that she had been grown-up and conscious of delight in the world about her only since they had met.
Ease and gaiety rose between them in a haze like that which vibrated over the warm hay-field where they feasted.
"I say, I shall have to give a lunch at the Carlton to everybody I know," he laughed, half to himself, presently, "if I do get Colonel Conyers to make 'em take up the P.D.Q." Then, turning more directly to her. "Sorry—you don't know that joke. It's my Aeroplane, you know."