Mother and daughter had listened upon the relay and “loud-speaker” of the wireless telephone to the Air Ministry at Croydon, Pulham, and Lympe, and to the Morse signals from Newfoundland, Cairo, Madrid, and other cities, until the girl, with whom he was secretly in love, had declared herself quite fascinated by the most modern of sciences.
Indeed, it was this fascination which had first held the two young people in a common bond. On board the liner, though as an engineer of the Marconi Company he was constantly in and out of the wireless cabin because the operator was having some trouble with his spark transmission, it had never occurred to him to invite the girl in to listen. It was, indeed, not until a few hours before they reached Southampton that he had explained his profession to her.
The pair had, on the voyage, fallen very much in love with each other, and now, thoroughly understanding each other, they were carefully preserving their secret from Mrs. Beverley, whose great ambition, like that of many South American mothers, was to marry her daughter into the British Peerage.
As a matter of fact, the real object of her lavish entertaining at Upper Brook Street was to find a suitable husband for Sylvia, a peer of wealth, no matter his age or past record.
In Geoffrey Falconer, Sylvia had found a clever, good-looking, unassuming man, whose ideals coincided with her own, even though she naturally viewed England and English ways through South American spectacles. Yet for three years she had been at school at Versailles, and mixing with English girls as she had done, she had lost much of her American intonation of speech.
The pair were genuinely attached to each other. The only third person who knew of this was the old Professor himself. Though thin and white-haired he was a genial old fellow, who dearly loved a joke, and who, when at Oxford, had been regarded by all the undergraduates as a real good sort. Many of his students had made their name in the world of politics and law, while one was now Governor of one of Britain’s most important colonies.
Like father, like son. Geoffrey, though he had for four years been associated with those young men of the Air Force who, though so many of them had never flown a yard, considered themselves vastly superior to all others who trod the earth, had never imitated the “wrist-watch swank,” nor the drawl of that grey-uniformed genus who, during the war, brought personal egotism to such a fine art. He was quiet, unassuming, studious, yet a firm-hearted, bold, and fearless Englishman.
Sylvia, thanks to her mother’s sly machinations, met numbers of eligible young men, many of whom had great fortunes looming in the future. But in the whirl of London society, with its dressing, dancing and dressmakers’ lure, she passed them all by, her only thought being of the young man whom she had met on board the liner.
That night they had danced together several times, when suddenly, as they crossed the ballroom, the girl exclaimed:
“Look! Why there’s Mr. Glover! You surely recollect him? He came over with us. I thought he was in Paris.”