"Only," decided Gwenna, in the uttermost depths of her shy and daring heart, "only he's got to like me, some day, better than Leslie ever could. He must. Yes; he must!"
And she thought it so ardently that she almost expected him, catching her thought, to answer it in words. She looked—no, he had caught nothing. But, meeting his eyes again, her own read a message that her fluttered mind had been told before this, but would scarcely let her believe. He thought she was pretty to look at. She had taken off her hat now, as she liked to do in the open air, and the light breeze tossed her short locks about.
"I believe he thinks," Gwenna told herself, "that my hair's nice."
As a matter of fact she was right. If she could have read her companion's thoughts at the moment she would have known of a quite foolish but recurrent wish on his part. A wish that he might just run his fingers through all those brown and thickly-twisting curls, to find out if they felt as silky as they looked.
A lark was carolling over her head, soaring, poising, poising, soaring, and singing all the while....
"That's what we can't do, even yet; hover," he said. And again he went on talking to the Little Thing (in his mind this babyish-faced but quite quick-witted girl was now always to be "the Little Thing") about the chance of getting Colonel Conyers to take up that invention of his.
"I'm to go to spend the week-end at Ascot with him and have another talk about it," he said. "I know he's dead keen. He knows that it's aeroplanes that are going to make all the difference; simply knock out, under some conditions, any other form of scouting. In modern warfare, you know—it's bound to come, some time—anybody with any sense knows that——"
"Yes, of course," agreed Gwenna, watching him as he stretched himself lazily out, chest downwards, elbows in, on the grass, chin propped in his hands, talking (all about the Machine).
"If he gave me a chance to build Her—make trial flights in the P.D.Q.! If he'd only back me——"
"Oh, he will, surely!" said Gwenna, her whole small face brightening or sobering in response to every modulation of his voice.