This time it was not her hand he took as an illustration. He pointed, pipe in hand, to where, above the opposite hedge, a crow was sailing slowly, a vandyke of black across the cloudless blue.
"See that bird? It's that very slight V he makes; now."
"And this machine of yours?" persisted the girl, with a little twitch of her mouth for the rival whom he, it seemed, always thought of as "the P.D.Q." and whom Gwenna must always think of as "the Fiancée." She wondered where it lived, the creature that meant all to him. She said, "Where—where d'you make that machine?"
"Oh, I'm afraid it isn't a machine yet, you see. It's only a model of one, so far. You know, like a model yacht," he explained. "That's the worst of it. You see, you can make a model do anything. It's when you get the thing life-size that the trouble begins. Model doesn't give a really fair idea of what you've got to get. The difficulties—it's never the real thing."
Gwenna thought, "It must be like making love to the person you aren't really in love with!" But what she said, with her hand stripping a spike of flowering grass, was, "I suppose it's like practising scales and all that on a mute piano?"
"Never tried", he said. Then: "The model's at my own place, my rooms in"——here he broke off with a laugh. He looked straight into her face and said, still laughing, and in a more personal tone:
"Not in Victoria Street. I say, you spotted that that place wasn't mine, didn't you?"
"Leslie 'spotted' and said so, afterwards," admitted Gwenna demurely, picking and sniffing at a piece of pink clover before she fastened it into her white blouse. "I did think at the time that it wasn't—wasn't the sort of place where you'd find a man living who did things, like."
"Rather rough on old Hugo."
"Well, but does he do things?"