He was repeating it.
"'Camber?' ... Well, it's a curve. A curve like——" He glanced about for an example of the soft, end-wise curve on the great wings of an aeroplane; his eyes passing quickly from the green hedge to the ground, to the things on the picnic cloth, to Gwenna Williams's small hand as it rested in the grass.
She wondered, thrilled, if the young Airman were actually going to take hold of her hand.
He did take her hand, as simply as he had taken the silver cup from it. He bent it over so that her wrist made a gentle curve. He passed his own large fingers across it.
"Yes; there—that's the curve," he said. "Almost exactly."
It might have been a caress.
But, done as he did it, the light movement was nothing of the kind. Instinct told the girl that. It wasn't her small and soft and pink-palmed hand that he was thinking of holding. She looked at him as he said, "That's the curve," and she caught a gleam of quickened interest in his eyes. But in one mortified flash she knew that this had nothing to do with her. She guessed that at this moment he'd forgotten that there was a girl sitting there beside him at all.
And she knew why.
Angrily she said to herself, "He's thinking of nothing but that old machine of his! And I do—yes, I do, do hate her!"
Then she sat for a moment still as the elm-trunk against which she'd been leaning.