"Oh, look at the Cherub girl's little shoes! Aren't they sweet? Just like silver minnows peeping out——"
Here Gwenna, standing sedately beside the scintillating, mauve-limbed Nijinski, Leslie, lifted her head in quick attention. She had recognised a voice on the other side of the sheet. A voice deep and gentle and carrying through the clatter of talk and the mad, syncopated music. It protested with a laugh, "But, look here! I can't dance all these weird——" It was the Airman—her Airman.
"Oh, he's just there. He's going to choose. If only he'd choose me," thought Gwenna, breathlessly fluttering where she stood. Then she remembered. "Oh, but he won't know me. He doesn't know I was to have silver shoes. If there was only something! Something to show him which I was, I believe he'd choose me. What could I do?"
Suddenly she thought what she could do.... Yes! Winged feet, of course, for a girl who longed to fly!
Hurriedly she put her hands up to the ruff made of those white wings. Hastily she plucked two of them out. How was she to fasten them to her feet, though? Alas, for the short curls that deprived her of woman's universal tool! She turned to her chum who was impatiently jigging in time to the music, with her long black hair swathed for once securely under that purple casque.
"Leslie, quick, a hairpin! Lend me two hairpins," she whispered and snatched them from her friend's hand. Then, holding on to Leslie's mauve silken shoulder to support herself, Gwenna raised first one small foot, and then the other, fastening to each between the stocking and the silver shoe, one of those tiny wings.
They were the feathered heels of Mercury, the flying-god, that the girl who loved a flying-man allowed to peep under the curtain behind which she stood.
Above the commotion of people laughing and talking all about her and the music she felt that he was close, only just behind that sheet. She could have put out a hand and, through that sheet, have touched his shoulder.... Mustn't, of course.... Must play fair. Would he note the message of the winged feet? Would he stop and choose her?
Or would he pass on?