"Mister Paul Dampier——"
"You hear, Gwenna? It is your young man," said Miss Baker; Miss Butcher adding, "Hope you had a good look at him and saw if that photo did him justice?"
"From here? Well, how could I? It's not much I could see of him," complained Gwenna, laughing. "He only looked about as big as a knot in a cat's cradle!"
Another roar, another small commotion on the ground. Another of those ramshackle looking giant grasshoppers slid forward and upward into the air. Presently three aeroplanes, then four together were circling and soaring together in the sapphire-blue arena.
Below, a pair of swallows, swift as light, chased each other over the ground, above their own shadows, towards the tea-pavilion.
Yet another flyer winged his tireless way across the aerodrome. He was a droning bee, buzzing and hovering unheeded over a tuft of dusty white clover growing by the rails that were so closely thronged by human beings come to watch and wonder over man's still new miracle of flight.
"Oh, flying! Mustn't it be too glorious!" sighed the Welsh girl, watching the aeroplane that was now scarcely larger than a winged bullet in the blue. "Oh, wouldn't I love to go up! Wouldn't it be Heaven!"
"It's been Heaven for several poor fellows lately," suggested the shrewd, Cockney-voiced little Miss Butcher, grimly, from her right. "What about that poor young What's-his-name, fallen and killed on the spot at twenty-one!"
"I don't call him 'poor,'" declared Gwenna Williams softly. "I should think there could be worse things happen to one than get killed, quickly, right in the middle of being so young and jolly and doing such things——"
"Ah, look! That's it! See that?" murmured a voice near them. "Flying upside down, now, that first one—see him?"