But hardly had she cried out before there was the dash of a tall man's figure across the planks from the trap-door.
"It's all right—I've got you," said Paul Dampier, and caught her up from the edge, in his arms.
They held her. That armful of a girl, soft and warm as one of the grey pigeons, was crushed for a moment against the boy's chest. She was closer to him than she had been in any of those waltzes. Yet it seemed no strangeness to be so near—feeling his heart beat below hers, feeling the roughness of his tweed jacket through the thin linen of her frock. She felt as she'd felt about flying, in that dream of hers. "I must have known it all before."
Then, dazed but happy, resting where she seemed to belong, she thought in a twink, "I shall have to let go. Why can't I stay like this?... Oh, it's very cruel. There! Now I have let go. But he won't.... He's getting his balance."
He had taken a step backwards.
Then she slid through his arms. She slipped, lightly as a squirrel slips down the length of a beech, to the wooden floor of the platform.
Cruel; yes, cruel! And to add to the cruelty that such a moment must end, the Airman, when she left his enforced clasp, scarcely looked at her. He barely returned her greeting. He did not answer her breathless thanks. He turned away from her—whom he had saved. Yes! He left her to the meaningless babble of the others (she recognised now, in a dazed way, that there were other men with him on the scaffolding). He left her to the politenesses of his cousin Hugo and of that young French engineer (Mr. Grant's "Comp" who had come up to inspect the crane). He never looked again as Miss Williams was guided down the trap-door and the ladders by the scolding Yorkshire foreman, who didn't leave her until she was safely at the bottom.
She was met by the two other typists who had, from the office window, seen her perched up, small as a bird, on the heights. Both girls had been terrified. Miss Butcher now brought lavender salts. Miss Becker's pink moon of a face was blanched with horror over her colleague's danger.
"Do you know what could have happened, Candlesticks-maker, my dear?" cried the German girl with real emotion, as they all made tea together in the varnished, stifling office. "You could have been killed, you!"
Gwenna thought, "That would have been too bad. Because then—then I shouldn't have known when he held me!"