THE BOY
WITH WINGS

Berta Ruck

THE BOY WITH WINGS

The
Boy With Wings

By BERTA RUCK
(MRS. OLIVER ONIONS)

AUTHOR OF
"His Official Fiancée,"
"The Wooing of Rosamond Fayre,"
"In Another Girl's Shoes," Etc.

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

Published by arrangement with Dodd, Mead & Company

Copyright, 1915,
By DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
Published in England under the title of
"The Lad With Wings."

DEDICATED, WITH AFFECTION
TO THAT BRAINLESS ARMY TYPE.
MY YOUNGEST BROTHER

CONTENTS

PART I
MAY, JUNE, JULY, 1914

CHAPTER I

AERIAL LIGHT HORSE

Hendon!

An exquisite May afternoon, still and sunny. Above, a canopy of unflecked sapphire-blue. Below, the broad khaki-green expanse of the flying-ground, whence the tall, red-white-and-blue pylons pointed giant fingers to the sky.

Against the iron railings of the ground the border of chairs was thronged with spectators; women and girls in summery frocks, men in light overcoats with field-glasses slung by a strap about them. The movement of this crowd was that of a breeze in a drift of coloured petals; the talk and laughter rose and fell as people looked about at the great sheds with their huge lettered names, at the big stand, at the parked-up motors behind the seats; at the men in uniform carrying their brass instruments slowly across to the bandstand on the left.

At intervals everybody said to everybody else: "Isn't this just a perfect afternoon for the flying?"

Presently, there passed the turnstile entrance at the back of the parked motor-cars a group of three young girls, chattering together.

One was in pink; one was in cornflower-blue. The girl who walked between them wore all white, with a sunshine-yellow jersey-coat flung over her arm. Crammed well down upon her head she wore a shady white hat, bristling with a flight of white wings; it seemed to overshadow the whole of her small compact, but supple little person, which was finished off by a pair of tiny, white-canvas-shod feet. She was the youngest as well as the smallest of the trio standing at the turnstile. (Observe her, if you please; then leave or follow her, for she is the Girl of this story.)

"This is my show!" she declared. Her softly-modulated voice had a trace of Welsh accent as she added, "I'm paying for this, indeed!"

"No, you aren't, then, Gwenna Williams!" protested the girl in pink (whose accent was Higher Cockney). "We were all to pay for ourselves!"

"Yes; but wasn't it me that made you come into the half-crown places because I was so keen to see a flying-machine close?... I'll pay the difference then, if you must make a fuss. We'll settle up at the office on Monday," said the girl who had been addressed as Gwenna Williams.

With a girlish, self-conscious little gesture she took half a sovereign out of her wash-leather glove and handed it to the tall, be-medalledd commissionaire.

"Come on, now, girls," she said. "This is going to be lovely!" And she led the way forward to that line of seats, where there were just three green chairs vacant together.

Laughing, chattering, gay with the ease of Youth in its own company, the three, squeezed rather close together by the press, sat down; Gwenna, the Welsh girl, in the middle. The broad brim of her hat brushed against the roses of the pink-clad girl's cheaper hat as Gwenna leaned forward.

"Sorry, Butcher," she said. She moved.

This time one of the white wings caught a pin in the hat of the plump blonde in blue, who exclaimed resignedly and in an accent that was neither of Wales nor of England, "Now komm I also into this hat-business of Candlestick-maker. It is a bit of oll right!"

"So sorry, Baker," apologised the girl in white again, putting up her hands to disengage the hat. "I'll take it off, like a matinée. Yes, I will, indeed. We shall all see better." She removed the hat from a small head that was very prettily overgrown with brown, thick, cropped curls. The bright eyes with which she blinked at first in the strong sunlight were of the colour of the flying-ground before them: earth-brown and turf-green mixed.

"I will hold your hat, since it is for me that you take him off," said the girl whom they called Baker.

Her real name was Becker; Ottilie Becker. She worked at the German correspondence of that London office where the other two girls, Gwenna Williams and Mabel Butcher, were typists. It was one of the many small jokes of the place to allude to themselves as the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker.

All three were excellent friends....

The other two scarcely realised that Gwenna, the Celt, was different from themselves; more absent-minded, yet more alive. A passer-by might have summed her up as "a pretty, commonplace little thing;" a girl like millions of others. But under the ready-made muslin blouse of that season's style there was ripening, all unsuspected, the dormant bud of Passion. This is no flower of the commonplace. And her eyes were full of dreams, innocent dreams. Some of them had come true already. For hadn't she broken away from home to follow them? Hadn't she left the valley where nothing ever went on except the eternal Welsh rain that blurred the skylines of the mountains opposite, and that drooped in curtains of silver-grey gauze over the slate roofs of the quarry-village, set in that brook-threaded wedge between wooded hillsides? Hadn't she escaped from that cage of a chapel house sitting-room with its kitchen-range and its many bookshelves and its steel print of John Bunyan and its maddening old grandfather-clock that always said half-pastt two and its everlasting smell of singeing hearthrug, and never a window open? Yes! she'd given her uncle-guardian no peace until he'd washed his hands over Gwenna's coming up to London. So here she was in London now, making fresh discoveries every day, and enjoying that mixture of drudgery and frivolling that makes up the life of the London bachelor-girl. She was still "fancy-free," as people say of a girl who loves and lives in fancies, and she was still at the age for bosom-friendships. One sincerely adored girl-chum had her confidence. This was a young woman at the Residential Club, where Gwenna lived; not one of these from the office.

But the office trio could take an occasional Saturday jaunt together as enjoyingly as if they never met during the week.

"Postcards, picture postcards!" chanted a shrill treble voice above the buzz of the talking, waiting crowds.

Before the seats a small boy passed with a tray of photographs. These showed views of the hangars and of the ground; portraits of the aviators.

"Postcards!" He paused before that cluster of blue and white and pink frocks. "Any picture postcards?"

"Yes! Wait a minute. Let's choose some," said Miss Butcher. And three heads bent together over the display of glazed cards. "Tell you what, Baker; we'll send one off to your soldier-brother in Germany. Shall we? All sign it, like we did that one to your mother, from the Zoo."

"Ah, yes. A bier-karte!" said the German girl, with her good-natured giggle. "Here, I choose this one. View of Hendon. We write 'Es lassen grüssen unbekannter Weise'—'there send greeting to Karl, the Unknown.'"

"Oh, but hadn't we better send him this awfully nice-looking airman, just as a sort of example of what a young man really can do in the way of appearance, what?" suggested Miss Butcher, picking out another card. "Peach, isn't he? Look! He's standing up in the thingamagig just like an archangel in his car; or do I mean Apollo?—Gwenna'd know.... Which are you going to choose, Gwenna?"

Gwenna had picked out three cards. A view of the ground, a picture of a biplane in mid-air, and a portrait of one of the other airmen.

He had been taken in his machine against the blank background of sky. The big, boyish hands gripped the wheel, the cap, goggles in front, peak behind, was pushed back from the careless, clean-shaven lad's face, with its cheeks creased with deep dimples of a smile.

"This one," said Gwenna Williams. And there was no whisper of Fate at her heart as she announced lightly, "This is my love." (She did not guess, as you do, that here was the portrait of the Boy of this story.)

The other girls leaned across her to look as she added: "He's the most like Icarus, I think."

"Who's Icarus, when he's at home?" inquired Miss Butcher. And Gwenna, out of one of her skimmed books, gave a hurried explanation of Icarus, the first flying-man, the classic youth who "dared the sun" on wings of wax.... Together the girls inspected the postcard of his modern type, the Hendon aviator. They laughed; they read aloud the name "P. Dampier;" they compared his looks with those of other airmen, treating the whole subject precisely as they would have treated the dancing or singing of their favourite actresses in the revues....

For it was still May, Nineteen-fourteen in England. The feeling of warm and drowsy peace in the air was only intensified by the brisk, sharp strains of the military band on the left of the flying-ground, playing the "Light-Cavalry" march....

"Dear me! Are we going on like this for ever?" remonstrated Gwenna presently. "Aren't they ever going up?"

She was answered by a shattering roar from the right.

It ceased. Then, on the field before her excited eyes, there was brought out of one of the hangars by a cluster of mechanics in khaki-brown overalls the Winged Romance that came into this tired and blasé world with that most wondrous of all Ages—the Twentieth Century. At first only a long gleaming upper plane, jolting over the uneven ground, could be seen over the heads of the watchers. Then it reached the enclosure. For the first time in her life Gwenna beheld a Maurice Farman biplane.

And for the moment she was a little disappointed, for she had said it was "going to be so lovely!"

She had expected—what? Something that would look more like what it was, the new Bird of man's making. Here the sunlight gleamed on the taut, cambered wings, on the bamboo spars, the varnished blade of the motionless propeller, all shiny as a new toyshop. But the girl saw no grace in it. Its skids rested on the sunburned grass like a couple of ski in the Sketch photographs of winter sports. It had absurd little wheels, too, looking as if, when it had finished skiing, the machine might take to roller-skating. The whole thing seemed gaunt and cumbrous and clogged to the earth. Gwenna did not then know that, unlike Antæus, this half-godlike creature only awoke to life and beauty when it felt the earth no more.

Then, as she watched, a mechanic, the Dædalus who strapped on the wings for the Icarus seized the propeller, which kicked thrice, rebelliously, and then, with another roar, dissolved into a circle of mist. Other brown figures were clinging to the under parts of the structure, holding it back; Gwenna did not see the signal to let go. All that she saw was the clumsy forward run of the thing as, like a swan that tries to clear its feet of the water, the biplane struggled to free itself from the drag of Earth....

Then, as the wonder happened, the untried and imaginative little Welsh country-girl, watching, gave a gasp. "Ah——!"

The machine was fettered no longer.

Suddenly those absurd skids and wheels had become no more than the tiny feet that a seagull tucks away under itself, and like a gull the biplane rose. It soared, its engine shouting triumph as it sped. Gwenna's heart beat as tensely as that engine. Her eyes sparkled. What they saw was not now a machine, but the beauty of those curves it cut in the conquered air. It soared, it banked, it swayed gently as if on a keel. Swiftly circling, up and up it went, until it seemed to dwindle to something not even larger than the seagull it resembled; then it was a flying-fish, then a dragonfly wheeling in the blue immensity above.

Suddenly, like a fog-signal, there boomed out the voice of the man with the megaphone, the man who made from the judges' stand, behind the committee-enclosure all announcements for the meeting:

"Ladies and gentul MEN," it boomed.
"Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi plane!"

The huge convolvulus-trumpet of the megaphone swung round. The announcement was made from the other side of the stand; the sound of that booming voice being subdued as it reached the group of three girls.

"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?"

And now Gwenna, at gaze, watched breathlessly the wonder that seemed already natural enough to the multitude; the swoop and curve, the loop and dash and recover of the biplane that seemed for the moment a winged white quill held in a hand unseen, writing its challenge on the blue wall of Heaven itself.

Again the megaphone boomed out through the still and soft June air:

"Ladies and gentul MEN! Pass enger flights from this aer riodrome may now be booked at the office un der this Stand!"

"Two guineas, my dears, for the chance of breaking your necks," commented Miss Butcher. "Three guineas for a longer flight, I believe; that is, a better chance. Well, I bet that if I did happen to have two gleaming golden jimmyohgoblins to my name, I'd find something else to spend 'em on, first!"

"I also!" agreed Miss Baker.

Gwenna moved a little impatiently. She hadn't two guineas, either, to spend. She still owed a guinea, now, for that unjustifiable extravagance, that white hat with the wings. In spite of earning her own living, in spite of having a little money of her own, left her by her father who had owned shares in a Welsh quarry, she never had any guineas! But oh, if she had! Wouldn't she go straight off to that stand and book for a passenger-flight!...

While her covetous eyes were still on the biplane, her ears caught a stir of discussion that came from the motor nearest to the chairs.

A lady was speaking in a softly dominant voice, the voice of a class that recognises no overhearing save by its chosen friends.

"My dear woman, it's as safe as the Tubes and the motor-buses. These exhibition passenger-flights aren't really flying, Cuckoo said. Didn't you, Cuckoo?"

A short deep masculine laugh sounded from behind the ladies, then a drawled "What are they then, what? Haw? Flip-flap, White City, what?"

"Men always pretend afterwards that they've never said anything. Cuckoo told me that when these people 'mean business' they can fly millions of times higher and faster than we ever see them here. He said there wasn't the slightest reason why Muriel shouldn't——"

Here the sound, hard and clear as an icicle, of a very young girl's voice, ringing out:

"And anyhow, mother, I'm going to!"

Glancing round, Gwenna saw a lanky girl younger than herself spring down from the big, dove-grey car, and stride, followed by a tall man wearing a top-hat, to the booking-office below the stand. This girl wore a long brown oilskin coat over her white sweater and her short, admirably-cut skirt; a brown chiffon veil tied over her head showed the shape and the auburn gleam of it without giving a hair to the breeze.

"Lovely to be those sort of people," sighed the enviously watching Gwenna, as other girls from the cars strolled into the enclosure with the notice "COMMITTEE ONLY," and seemed to be discussing, laying bets, perhaps, about the impending race for machines carrying a lady-passenger. "Fancy, whenever any of them want to do or to see or even to be anything, they've only got to say, 'Anyhow, I'm going to!' and there they are! That's the way to live!"

Presently the three London typists were sitting at a table under the green awning and the hanging flower-baskets; one of a score of tables where folk sat and chattered and turned their eyes ceaselessly upwards to the blue sky, pointed at by those giant pylon-fingers, invaded by those soaring, whirring, insolent, space daring creatures of man.

The first biplane had been preparing for the Ladies' Race. Now came the start; with the dropped white flag the announcement from that dominating magnified voice:

"Mis ter Damp ier on a Maurice Far man bi plane ac companied by Miss Mu riel Con yers——"

The German girl put in, "Your man again, Gwenna!"

"My man indeed. And I haven't seen him, even yet," complained the Welsh girl again, laughing over her cup of cooling tea, "only in the photograph! Don't suppose I ever shall, either. It's my fate, girls. Nothing really exciting ever happens to me!" She sighed, then brightened again as she remembered something. "I must be off now.... I've got to go out this evening."

"Anywhere thrilling?" asked Miss Butcher.

"I don't know what it'll be like. It's Leslie Long; it's my friend at the Club's married sister somewhere in Kensington, giving a dinner-party," Gwenna answered in the scrambling New English in which she was learning to disguise her Welshiness, "and there's a girl fallen through at the last minute. So she 'phoned through this morning to ask if this girl could rake any one up."

"How mouldy for you, my dear," said Mabel Butcher in her sympathetic Cockney as the Welsh girl rose, took up her sunshine-yellow coat from the back of her chair and chinked down a shilling upon her thick white plate. "Means you'll have to sit next some youth who only forced himself into his dress-suit for the sake of taking that 'fallen through' girl into dinner. He'll be scowling fit to murder you, I expect, for being you and not her. (I know their ways.) Never mind. Pinch a couple of liqueur-choc'lates off the table for me when the Blighted Being isn't looking, will you? And tell us what he's like on Monday, won't you?"

"All right," promised the Welsh girl, smiling back at her friends. She threaded her way through the tables with the plates of coloured cakes, the brown teapots, the coarse white crockery. She passed behind that park of cars with that leisured, well-dressed, upward-gazing throng. She turned her back on the glimpse beyond them of the green field where the brown-clad mechanics ran up towards the slowly downward swooping biplane.

As she reached the entrance she caught again the announcement of that distant megaphone:

"Ladies and gentul men Pass enger flights may now be booked——"

The band in the distance was playing the dashing tune of the "Uhlanenritt."

Gwenna Williams passed out of the gates beside the big poster of the aeroplane in full flight carrying a girl-passenger who waved a scarf. It was everywhere, that Spring. So was the other notice:

"An afternoon in the country is always refreshing! Flying is always interesting to watch!"

In the dusty bit of lane mended by the wooden sleepers a line of grass-green taxis was drawn up.

Gwenna hesitated.

Should she——? Taxi all the way home to the Ladies' Residential Club in Hampstead where she lived?

Four shillings, perhaps.... Extravagance again! "But it's not an everyday sort of day," Gwenna told herself as she hailed the taxi. "This afternoon, the flying! This evening, a party with Leslie! Oh, and there was I saying to the other girls that nothing exciting ever happened to me!"

For even now every day of her life seemed to this enjoying Welsh ingénue, packed with thrills. Thrills of anticipation, of amusement—sometimes of disappointment and embarrassment. But what did those matter? Supreme through all there glowed the conviction of youth that, at any moment, Something-More-Exciting still might happen....

It might be waiting to happen, waiting now, just round the corner....

All young people know that feeling. And to many it remains the most poignant pleasure that they are to know—that thought of "the party to-night," that wonder "what may happen at it!"

CHAPTER II

THE BOSOM-CHUMS

Through leafy side-streets and little squares of Georgian houses, Gwenna's taxi took her to a newer road that sloped sharply from the Heath at the top to the church and schools at the bottom.

The taxi stopped at the glass porch of the large, red-brick building with the many casement-windows, out of which some enterprising committee had formed the Ladies' Residential Club. It was a place where a mixed assembly of young women (governesses, art-students, earnest suffrage workers, secretaries and so on) lived cheaply enough and with a good deal of fun and noise, of feud and good-fellowship. The head of it was a clergyman's widow and the sort of lady who is never to be seen otherwise than wearing a neat delaine blouse of the Edwardian era, a gold curb tie-pin, a hairnet and a disapproving glance.

Gwenna passed this lady in the tessellated hall; she then almost collided with the object of the lady's most constant disapproval.

This was a very tall, dark girl with an impish face, a figure boyishly slim. She looked almost insolently untidy, for she wore a shabby brown hat, something after the pattern of a Boy Scout's, under which her black hair was preparing to slide down over the collar of a rain-coat which (as its owner would have told you) had seen at least two reigns. It was also covered with loose white hairs, after the fashion of garments whose wearers are continually with dogs.

Gwenna caught joyously at the long arm in the crumpled sleeve.

"Oh, Leslie!" she cried eagerly.

For this was the bosom-chum.

"Ha, Taffy-child! Got back early for this orgie of ours? Good," exclaimed Leslie Long in a clear, nonchalant voice. It was very much the same voice, Gwenna noticed now, as those people's at the flying-ground, who belonged to that easy, lordly world of which Gwenna knew nothing. Leslie, now, did seem to know something about it. Yet she was the hardest-up girl in the whole club. She had been for a short time a Slade student, for a shorter time still a probationer at some hospital. Now all her days were given up to being paid companion to an old lady in Highgate who kept seventeen toy-Poms; but her evenings remained her own.

"Afraid this party isn't going to be much of a spree for you," she told Gwenna as they went upstairs. "I don't know who's going, but my brother-in-law's friends seldom are what you could describe as 'men.' Being a stockbroker and rich, he feels he must go in heavily for Art and Music. Long hair to take you in, probably. Hope you don't awfully mind coming to the rescue——"

"Don't mind what it is, as long as I'm going out somewhere, and with you, Leslie!" the younger girl returned blithely. "Will you do me up the back, presently?"

"Rather! I'm dressing in your room. There's a better light there. Hurry up!"

Gwenna's long, narrowish front bedroom at the club was soon breathing of that characteristic atmosphere that surrounds the making of a full-dress toilette; warm, scented soap-suds, hot curling-irons, powder, Odol, perfume. The room possessed a large dressing-table, a long wardrobe, and a fairly spacious chest-of-drawers. But all this did not prevent the heaping of Gwenna's bed with the garments, with the gilded, high-heeled cothurns and with the other gauds belonging to her self-invited guest.

That guest, with her hair turbaned in a towel and her lengthy young body sheathed in tricot, towered above the toilet-table like some modern's illustration of a genie in the Arabian Nights. The small, more closely-knit Welsh girl, who wore a kimono of pink cotton crêpe slipping from shoulders noticeably well modelled for so young a girl, tried to steal a glimpse at herself from under her friend's arm.

"Get out, Taffy," ordered the other coolly. "You're in my way."

"I like that," remonstrated Gwenna, laughing. "It's my glass, Leslie!"

But she was ready to give up her glass or any of her belongings to this freakish-tongued, kind-hearted, unconventional Leslie Long. Nearly everybody at the club, whether they were of the advanced suffrage party or the orthodox set, were "shocked" at her. Gwenna loved her. Leslie had taken a very homesick little Welsh exile under her wing from her first night at the club; Leslie had mothered her with introductions, loans, advice. Leslie had bestowed upon her that last favour which woman shows to sister-woman when she tells her "at which shops to buy what." Leslie had, practically, dressed her. And it was thanks to this that Gwenna had all the freshness and bloom of the country-girl without any of the country-girl's all-concealing frumpiness.

Leslie talked an obligato to everything that Leslie did.

"I must dress first. I need it more, because I'm so much plainer than you," said she. "But never mind; it won't take me more than half an hour to transform myself into a credit to my brother-in-law's table. 'I am a chrysoberyl, and 'tis night.' The Sometimes-Lvely Girl, that's the type I belong to. I was told that, once, by one of the nicest boys who ever loved me. Once I get my hair done, I'll show you. In the meantime you get well out of my way on the bed, Taffy, like a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft. And then I'll explain to you why Romance is dead—oh, shove that anywhere; on the floor—and what the matter is with us modern girls. Fact is, we're losing our Femininity. We're losing the power, dear Miss Williams, to please Men."

She took up a jar of some white paste, and smeared it in a scented mask above her features. As she did so she did not for one moment cease to rattle.

"Men—that is, Nice Men," she gave out unctuously, as she worked the paste with her palms over her Pierrot-like face, "detest all this skin-food—and massage. It's Pampering the Person. No nice girl would think of it. As for this powder-to-finish business, it's only another form of make-up. They always see through it. (Hem!) And they abhor anything that makes a girl—a nice girl—look in the least——" The mocking voice was lowered at the word—"Actressy ...! This is what I was told to-day, Taff, dear, by my old lady I take the Poms and Pekes out for. I suppose she's never heard of any actress marrying. But she's a mine of information. Always telling me where I've missed it, and how."

Here the tall girl reached for the silver shoe-horn off Gwenna's dressing-table, and proceeded to use it as the Greek youth used his strigil, stripping the warmed unguent from her face and neck. She went on talking while Gwenna, putting a gloss on her short curls with a brush in each hand, listened and laughed, and watched her from the bed with greeny-brown eyes full of an unreserved admiration. So far, Leslie Long's was the society in which Gwenna Williams most delighted. The younger, less sophisticated girl poured out upon her chum that affection which is not to be bribed or begged. It is not even to be found in any but a heart which is yet untouched, save in its dreams, by Love.

"No Charm about us modern girls. No Mystery," enlarged Miss Long. "No Glamour. (What is glamour? Is it a herb? State reasons for your answer.) What Nice Men love to see in a girl is The Being Apart. (Gem of Information Number Sixty-three.) Sweet, refined, modest; in every look and tone the gentlewoman. Not a mere slangy imitation of themselves. (Chuck us that other towel.) Not a creature who makes herself cheap, calls out 'Hi!' and waves to them from the top of omnibuses. Ah, no, my dear; the girl who'll laugh and 'lark' with men on equal terms may seem popular with them in a way, but"—here the voice was again lowered impressively—"that's not the girl they marry. She's just 'very good fun,' 'a good sort,' a 'pal.' She's treated just as they'd treat another young man. (I'd watch it!) Which is the girl with whom they fall in love, though? The shrinking, clinging, feminine creature who is all-wool—I mean all-woman, Taffy. She"—with enormous expression—"is never left long without her mate!"

"But," objected Gwenna doubtfully, "she—this old lady of yours—wasn't married ever?"

"Oh, never. Always lets you know that she has 'loved and lost.' Whether that means 'Killed at the Battle of Waterloo' or merely 'Didn't propose' I couldn't say.... Poor old dear, she's rather lonely, in spite of the great cloud of Poms," said the old lady's paid "daily companion," dropping the mockery for the moment, "and I believe she's thankful to have even me to talk to and scold about the horrid, unsexed girl of To-day.... Our lack of ... everything! Our clothes! Why, she, as a girl, would have sunk into the ground rather than be seen in—you know the kind of thing. Our general shapelessness!—Well, of course," turning to meet that adoring glance from the little heroine-worshipper on the bed, "you never see a young woman nowadays with what you could call a figure!"

Here Leslie, reaching for the giant powder-puff she had flung on to the foot of the bed, gave a backward bend and a "straighten" that would not have disgraced an acrobat.

"No waists! Now if there is a feature that a man admires in a girl it's her tiny, trimly-corseted waist. My old lady went to a fancy-dress dance once, in a black-and-yellow plush bodice as 'A Wasp,' and everybody said how splendid. She never allowed herself to spread into anything more than Eighteens until she was thirty! But now the girls are allowed to slop about in these loud, fast-looking, golf-jackets or whatever they call them, made just like a man's—and the young men simply aren't marrying any more. No wonder!"

"Oh, Leslie! do you think it's true?" put in Gwenna, a trifle nervously.

"So she told me, my dear. Told Bonnie Leslie, whose bag had been two proposals that same week," said Miss Long nonchalantly. "One of 'em with me in the act of wearing that Futurist Harlequin's get-up at the Art Rebel's Revel. You know; the one I got the idea of from noticing the reflections of the ground-glass diamond patterns on me through the bath-room window. I say! she'd have sunk pretty well through into the Antipodes at the sight of me in that rig, what? Yet here was an infatuated youth swearing that:

'He would like to have the chance
All his life with me to dance,
For he liked his partner best of all!'"

Leslie hummed the old musical-comedy tune. "Son of a Dean, too!"

Gwenna looked wistfully thrilled. "Wasn't he—nice enough?"

"Oh, a sweet boy. Handsome eyes. (I always want to pick them out with a fork and put them into my own head.) But too simple for me, thanks," said Leslie lightly. "He was rather cut up when I told him so."

"Didn't you tell your old lady—anything about it, Leslie?"

"Does that kind of woman ever get told the truth, Gwenna? I trow not. That's why the dear old legends live on and on about what men like and who they propose to. Also the kind old rules, drawn up by people who are past taking a hand in the game."

Again she mimicked the old lady's voice: "Nice men have one standard for the women they marry, and another (a very different standard!) for the—er—women they flirt with. (So satisfactory, don't you know, for the girl they marry. No wonder we never find those marriages being a complete washout!) But supposing that a sort of Leslie-girl came along and insisted upon Marriage being brought up to the flirtation standard—hein?"

"But your old lady, Leslie? D'you mean you just let her go on thinking that you've never had any admiration, and that you've got to agree with everything she says?"

"Rather!" said Miss Long with her enjoying laugh. "I take it in with r-r-rapt attention, looking my worst, as I always do when I'm behaving my best. Partly because one's bound to listen respectfully to one's bread-and-butter speaking. And partly because I am genuinely interested in her remarks," said Leslie Long. "It's the interest of a rather smart young soldier—if I may say so—let loose in a museum of obsolete small-arms!"

Even as she spoke her hands were busy with puff and brush, with hair-pad, pins, and pencil. Gwenna still regarded her with that full, discriminating admiration which is never grudged by one attractive girl to another—of an opposite type.

With the admiration for this was mixed a tiny dread, well known to the untried girl—"If she is what They like, they won't like me!" ... Also a wonder, "What in the world would Uncle have said to her?"

And a mental picture rose before Gwenna of the guardian she had left in the valley. She saw his shock of white, bog-cotton hair, his face of a Jesuit priest and his voice of a Welsh dissenting minister. She heard that much-resented voice declaiming slowly. "Yes, Yes. I know the meaning of London and self-respect and earning one's own living. I know all about these College girls and these girls going to business and working same as the men, 'shoulder to shoulder'—Indeed, it's very likely! 'Something better to do, nowadays, than sit at home frowsting over drawn-thread work until a husband chooses to appear'—All the same thing! All the same thing! As it was in the beginning! 'A wider field'—for making eyes! And only two eyes to make them with. Oh, forget-ful Providence, not to let a modern girl have four! 'Larger opportunities'—more chance of finding a young man! Yes, yes. That's it, Gwenna!"

Gwenna, at the mere memory of it, broke out indignantly, "Sometimes I should like to stab old people!"

"Meaning the celebrated Uncle Hugh? Too wise, isn't he?" laughed Leslie lightly, with her hands at her hair. "Too full of home-truths about the business girl's typewriter, and the art-student's palette and the shilling thermometer of the hospital nurse, eh? He knows that they're the modern girl's equivalent of the silken rope-ladder—what, what? And the chaise to Gretna Green! This Way Out. This Way—to Romance. Why not? Allow me, Madam——"

Here she took up an oval box of eighteenth-century enamel, picked out a tiny black velvet patch and placed it to the left of a careless red mouth.

"Effective, I think?"

"Yes; and how can you say there's such a thing as 'obsolete' in the middle of all this?" protested Gwenna. "Look, how the old fashions come up again!"

"Child, curb your dialect. 'Look,'" Leslie mimicked the Welsh girl's rising accent. "'The old fashshons.' Of course we modify the fashions now to suit ourselves. My old lady had to follow them just as they were. We," said this twentieth-century sage, "are just the same as she was in lots of ways. The all-important thing to us is still what she calls the Mate!"

"M'm,—I don't believe it would be to me," said Gwenna simply. And thinking of the other possibilities of Life—fresh experiences, work, friendship, adventure (flying, say!)—she meant what she said. That was the truth.

Side by side with this, not contradicting but emphasising it, was another truth.

For, as in a house one may arrange roses in a drawing-room and reck nothing of the homely business of the kitchen—then presently descend and forget, in the smell of baking bread, the flowers behind those other doors, so divided, so uncommunicating, so pigeon-holed are the compartments, lived in one at a time, of a young maid's mind.

Clearer to Gwenna's inner eyes than the larch green and slate purple of her familiar valley had been the colours of a secret picture; herself in a pink summer frock (always a summer frock, regardless of time, season or place) being proposed to by a blonde youth with eyes as blue as lupins....

Mocking Leslie was urging her, again in the old lady's tone, to "wait until Mr. Right came along. Jewelled phrase! Such an old world fragrance about it; moth powder, I suppose. Yet we know what it means, and they didn't. We know it isn't just anybody in trousers that would be Mr. Right. (My dear! I use such strange expressions; I quite shock me sometimes)," she interpolated; adding, "It's a mercy for us in some ways; so good if we do get the right man. Worse than it used to be if we don't. Swings and roundabouts again. But it's still true that

Two things greater than all things are,
The first is Love and the second is War."

"I can't imagine such a thing as war, now," mused Gwenna on the bed. "Can you?"

"Oh, vaguely; yes," said Leslie Long. "You know my people, poor darlings, were all in the Army. But the poisonously rich man my sister married says there'll never be any war again, except perhaps among a few dying-out savage races. He does so grudge every ha'penny to the Navy Estimates; and he's quite violent about these useless standing armies! You know he's no sahib. 'His tongue is like a scarlet snake that dances to fantastic tunes.' However, never mind him. I'm the central figure. Which is to be my frock of fascination to-night? 'The White Hope?' or 'The Yellow Peril?' You're wearing your white, Taffy. Righto, then I'll put on this," decided the elder girl.

She stepped into and drew up about her a moulding sheath of amber-coloured satin that clung to her limbs as a wave clings to a bather—such was the fleeting fashion now defunct! There was a corolla of escholtzia-yellow about the strait hips, a heavy golden girdle dangling.

"There! Now! How's the Bakst view?" demanded Leslie.

She turned slowly, rising on her toes, lifting the glossy black head above a generous display of creamy shoulder-blades; posing, laughing while Gwenna caught her breath.

"Les-lie!... And where did you get it?"

"Cast-off from an opulent cousin. What I should do if I didn't get a few clothes given me I don't know; I should be sent back by the policeman at the corner, I suppose. One can't live at fancy dances at the Albert Hall," said Miss Long philosophically. "Don't I look like a Rilette advertisement on the end page of Punch? Don't I vary? Would anybody think I was the same wispy rag-bag you met in the hall? Nay. 'From Slattern to Show-girl,' that's my gamut. But you, Taff, I've never seen you look really plain. It's partly your curls. You've got the sort of hair some boys have and all women envy. Come here, now, and let's arrange you. I've already been attending to your frock."

The frock which Gwenna was to wear that evening at the dinner-party was one which she had bought, without advice, out of an Oxford Street shop window during a summer sale. It was of satin of which the dead-white gleam was softened by a misty over-dress. So far, so good; but what of the heavy, expensive-looking garniture—sash, knots, and what-nots of lurid colour—with which the French artist's conception had been "brightened up" in this English version?

"Ripped off," explained Leslie Long, firmly, as its owner gazed in horror at a mutilated gown. "No cerise—it's a 'married' colour—No mural decorations for you, Taffy, my child. 'Oh, what a power has white simplicity.' White, pure white, with these little transparent ruffles that kind Leslie has sewn into the sleeves and round the fichu arrangement for you; and a sash of very pale sky-blue."

"Shan't I look like a baby?"

"Yes; the sweetest portrait of one, by Sir Joshua Reynolds."

"Oh! And I'd bought a cerise and diamanté hair-ornament."

"Quite imposs. A hair-ornament? One of the housemaids will love it for her next tango tea in Camden Town. As for you, don't dare to touch your curls again—no, nor to put anything round your neck! Take away that bauble!"

"Aren't I even to wear my gold Liberty beads?"

"No! you aren't. Partly because I am, in my hair. Besides, what d'you want them for, with a throat like that? Necklaces are such a mistake," decreed Leslie. "If a girl's got a nice neck, it hides the line; if she hasn't, it shows the defect up!"

"Well," protested Gwenna doubtfully, "but mightn't you say that of anything to wear?"

"Precisely. Still, you can't live up to every counsel of perfection. Not in this climate!"

"You might let me have my thin silver chain, whatever, and my little heart that my Auntie Margie gave me—in fact, I'm going to. It's a mascot," said Gwenna, as she hung the little mother-o'-pearl pendant obstinately about her neck. "There!"

"Very well. Spoil the look of that lovely little dimply hollow you've got just at the base there if you must. A man," said Gwenna's chum with a quick, critical glance, "a man would find that very easy to kiss."

"Easy!" said Gwenna, with a quicker blush of anger. "He wouldn't then, indeed!"

"Oh, my dear, I didn't mean that," explained Leslie as she caught up her gloves and wrap and prepared to lead the way out of the room and downstairs to the hall. They would walk as far as the Tube, then book to South Kensington. "All I meant was, that a man would—- that is, might—er—possibly get the better—ah—of his—say, his natural repugnance to trying——"

A little wistfully, Gwenna volunteered: "One never has."

"I know, Taffy. Not yet," said Leslie Long. "But one will. 'Cheer up, girls, he is getting on his boots!' Ready? Come along."

CHAPTER III

THE EYES OF ICARUS

Gwenna, who was always bubbling over with young curiosity about the fresh people whom she was to meet at a party, had never taken overmuch interest in the places where the party might be held.

She had not yet reached the age when, for information about new acquaintances, one glances first at their background.

To her the well-appointed though slightly "Art"-y Smith establishment where her friend was taking her to dine was merely "a married house." She took for granted the arrangements thereof. She lumped them all—from the slim, deferential parlour-maid who ushered them through a thickly-carpeted corridor with framed French etchings into a spacious bedroom where the girls removed their wraps, down to the ivory, bemonogrammed pin-tray and powder-box in front of the big mirror—she lumped these all together as "things you have when you're married."

It never struck her—it never strikes eight out of ten young girls—that Marriage does not necessarily bring these "things" with their subtle assurance of ease, security, and dignity in its train. She never thought about it. Marriage indeed seemed to her a sort of dullish postscript to what she imagined must be a thrilling letter.

Why must nearly all married people become so stodgy? Gwenna simply couldn't imagine herself getting stodgy—or fat, like this married sister of Leslie Long's, who was receiving her guests in the large upstairs drawing-room into which the two girls were now shown.

This room, golden and creamy, seemed softly aglow. There were standard lamps with huge amber crinolines, bead-fringed; and flowers—yellow roses and white lilies—seemed everywhere.

Leslie Long drew one of the lilies out of a Venetian vase and held it out, like an usher's rod, towards Gwenna as she followed her into the bright, bewildering room, full of people. She announced, "Maudie, here's the stop-gap. Taffy Williams, your hostess."

Her hostess was a version of Leslie grown incredibly matronly. Her auricula-coloured velvet tea-gown looked as if it had been clutched about her at the last moment. (Which in point of fact it had. Mrs. Smith was quite an old-fashioned mother.) Yet from her eyes smiled the indestructible Girl that is embedded in so many a respectable matron, and she looked down very kindly at Gwenna, the cherub-headed, in her white frock.

Mr. Smith, who had a large smooth face and a bald head, gave Gwenna a less cordial glance. Had the truth been known, he was sulking over the non-appearance of the intelligent young woman (from the Poets' Club) whose place was taken by this vacuous-looking flapper (his summing-up of Miss Gwenna Williams). For Gwenna this bald and wedded patriarch of forty-five scarcely existed. She glanced, nervous and fluttered and interested, towards the group of other guests gathered about the nearer of the two flower-filled fireplaces; a pretty woman in rose-colour and two men of thirty or thereabouts, one of whom (rather stout, with an eye-glass, a black stock-tie, and a lock of brown hair brought down beside his ear like a tiny side-whisker) made straight for Leslie Long.

"Now don't attempt to pretend we haven't met," Gwenna heard him say in a voice of flirtatious yearning. "Last time you cut my dance——"

Here the maid announced, from the door, some name.... Gwenna, standing shyly, as if on the brink of the party, heard the hostess saying: "We hardly hoped you'd come ... we know you people always are besieged by invitations——"

"Dear me! All these people seem dreat-fully grand," thought the Welsh girl hastily to herself. "I wonder if it wouldn't have been better, now, if Leslie had left that cerise velvet trimming as it was on my dress?"

Instinctively she glanced about for the nearest mirror. There was a big oval gilt-framed one over the yellow brocaded Empire couch near which Gwenna stood. Her rather bewildered brown eyes strayed from the stranger faces about her to the reflection of the face and figure that she best knew. In the oval of gilded leaves she beheld herself framed. She looked small and very young with her cherub's curls and her soft babyish white gown and that heaven-coloured sash. But she looked pretty. She hoped she did....

Then suddenly in that mirror she caught sight of another face, a face she saw for the first time.

She beheld, looking over her white-mirrored shoulder, the reflection of a young man. Clear-featured, sunburnt but blonde, he carried his fair head tilted a little backward, and his eyes—strange eyes!—were looking straight into hers. They were clear and blue and space-daring eyes, with something about them that Gwenna, not recognising, would have summed up vaguely as "like a sailor's." ... They were eyes that seemed to have borrowed light and colour from long scanning of far horizons. And now all that keenness of theirs was turned, like a searchlight, to gaze into the wondering, receptive glance of a girl....

Who was this?

Before Gwenna turned to face this stranger who had followed their hostess up to her, his gaze seemed to hold hers, as a hand might have held her own, for longer than a minute....

Afterwards she told herself that it seemed, not a minute, but an age before that first look was loosed, before she had turned round to her hostess's, "I want to introduce Mr.——"

(Something or other. She did not catch the name.)

"He's nice!" was the young girl's pristine and uncoloured first impression.

Then she thought, "Oh, if it's this one who's going to take me in to dinner, I am glad!"

It was he who was to take her in.

For Mr. Smith took the pretty lady whose name, as far as Gwenna was concerned, remained "Mrs. Rose-colour." Her husband, a neutral-tinted being, went in with Mrs. Smith. The man with the side-whisker (who, if he'd been thinner, certainly might have looked rather like the portrait of Chopin) laughed and chattered to Leslie as they went downstairs together. Gwenna, falling to the lot of the blue-eyed young man as a dinner-partner, altered her mind about her "gladness" almost before she came to her third spoonful of clear soup.

For it seemed as if this young man whose name she hadn't caught were not really "nice" after all! That is, of course, he wasn't "not nice." But he seemed stupid! Nothing in him! Nothing to say! Or else very absent-minded, which is just as bad as far as the other people at a party are concerned. Or worse, because it's rude.

Gwenna, taking in every detail of the pretty round table and the lights under the enormous parasol of a pink shade, approving the banked flowers, the silver, the glass, those delicious-looking chocolates in the filigree dishes, the tiny "Steinlen-kitten" menu-holders, Gwenna, dazed yet stimulated by the soft glitter in her eyes, the subdued buzz of talk in her ears, stole a glance at Leslie (who was looking her best and probably behaving her worst) and felt that every prospect was pleasing—except that of spending all this time beside that silent, stodgy young man.

"Perhaps he thinks it's me that's too silly to talk to. I knew Leslie'd made me look too young with this sash! Yes! indeed I look like some advertisement for Baby's Outfitting Department," thought Gwenna, vexed. "Or is it because he's the kind of young man that just sits and eats and never really sees or thinks about anything at all?"

Now, had she known it at the time, the thoughts of the blonde and blue-eyed youth beside her were, with certain modifications, something on these lines.

"Dash that stud! Dash the thing. This pin's going into the back of my neck directly. I know it is. That beastly stud must have gone through a crack in the boards.... I shall buy a bushel of 'em to-morrow. Why a man's such a fool as to depend upon one stud.... I know this pin's going into the back of my neck when I'm not thinking about it. I shall squawk blue murder and terrify 'em into fits.... What have we here?" (with a glance from those waking eyes at the menu). "Good. Smiths always do themselves thundering well.... Now, who are all these frocks? The Pink 'Un. That's a Mrs.... Damsel in the bright yellow lampshade affair about six foot high, that old Hugo's giving the glad eye to. Old Hugo weighs about a stone and a half too much. Does himself a lot too well. Revolting sight. I wonder if I can work the blood-is-thicker-than-water touch on him for a fiver afterwards?... This little girl I've got to talk to, this little thing with the neck and the curly hair. Pretty. Very pretty. Knocks the shine out of the others. I know if I turn my head to speak to her, though, that dashed pin will cut adrift and run into the back of my neck. Dash that stud. Here goes, though——"

And, stiffly and cautiously moving his head in a piece with his shoulders, he turned, remarking at last to Gwenna in a voice that, though deep-toned and boyish, was almost womanishly gentle, "You don't live in town, I suppose?"

The girl from that remote Welsh valley straightened her back a little. "Yes, I do live in town, indeed!" she returned a trifle defensively. "What made you think I lived in the country?"

"Came up yesterday, I s'pose," the young man told himself as the soup-plates were whisked away.

Gwenna suspected a twinkle in those unusual blue eyes as he said next, "Haven't you lived in Wales, though?"

"Well, yes, I have," admitted Gwenna Williams in her soft, quaint accent, "but how did you know?"

"Oh, I guessed. I've stayed there myself, fishing, one time and another," her neighbour told her. "Used to go down to a farmhouse there, sort of place that's all slate slabs, and china dogs, and light-cakes for tea; ages ago, with my cousin. That cousin," and he gave a little jerk of his fair head towards the black-stocked, Trelawney-whiskered young man who was engrossed with Miss Long. "We used to—Ah! Dash!" he broke off suddenly and violently. "It's gone down my back now."

Gwenna, startled, gazed upon this stranger who was so good to look at and so extremely odd to listen to. Gone down his back? She simply could not help asking, "What has?"

"That pin," he answered ruefully.

Then he tilted back his fair head and smiled, with deep dimples creasing his sunburnt cheeks and a flash of even white showing between his care-free, strongly-modelled lips. And hereupon Gwenna realised that after all she'd been right. He was "nice." He began to laugh outright, adding, "You must think me an absolute lunatic: I'd better tell you what it's all about——"

He took a mouthful of sole and told her, "Fact is, I lost my collar-stud when I was dressing, the stud for the back of my collar; and I had to fasten my collar down at the last minute with a pin. It's been getting on my nerves. Has, really. I've been waiting for it to run into the back of my neck——"

"So that was why he seemed so absent-minded!" thought Gwenna, feeling quite disproportionately glad and amused over this trifle. She said, "I thought you turned as if you'd got a stiff neck! I thought you'd been sitting in a draught."

He made another puzzling remark.

"Draught, by Jove!" he laughed. "It's always fairly draughty where I have to sit!"

He went on again to mourn over his collar. "Worse than before, now," he said. "It's going to hitch up to the back of my head, and I shall have to keep wiggling my shoulder-blades about as if I'd got St. Vitus's dance!"

Gwenna felt she would have liked to have taken a tiny safety-pin that there was hidden away under her sky-blue sash, and to have given it to him to fasten that collar securely and without danger of pricking. Leslie, she knew, would have done that. She, Gwenna, would have been too shy, with a perfect stranger—only, now that he'd broken the ice with that collar-stud, so to speak, she couldn't feel as if this keen-eyed, deep-voiced young man were any longer quite a stranger. In her own dialect, he seemed, now, "so homely, like——"

And over the next course he was talking to her about home, about the places where he'd fished in Wales.

"There was one topping little trout-stream," he told her in that deep and gentle voice. "Bubbly as soda-water, green and clear as bottle-glass. Awfully jolly pools under the shade of the branches. You look right down and it's all speckly at the bottom, with brown-and-grey stones and slates and things, under the green water. It's like——"

He was looking straight at her, and suddenly he stopped. He had caught her eyes, full; as he had caught them before dinner in that mirror. Now that he was so close to them he saw that they were clear and browny-green, with speckles of slate-colour. They were not unlike those pools themselves, by Jove.... Almost as if he had been fishing for something out of those depths he still looked down, hard into them.... He forgot that he had stopped talking. And then under his own eyes he saw the little thing begin to colour up; blushing from that sturdy white throat of hers to the brow where those thick brown cherub's-curls began to grow. He looked away, hastily. Hastily he said, "It—er—it had a pretty name, that stream. Quite a pronounceable Welsh name, for once: The Dulas."

"Oh, dear me! Do you know the Dulas?" cried Gwenna Williams in delight, forgetting that she had just been feeling acutely conscious and shy under the fixed stare of a pair of searching blue eyes. "Why! It's not very far from there that's my home!"

They went on talking—about places. Unconsciously they were leading the whole table after them; the jerkiness went out of sentences; the pitch of the talk rose. It was all a buzz to Gwenna; but when, at the joint, her neighbour turned at last to answer a comment of the rose-coloured lady on his other hand, she amused herself by seeking to find out what all the others were talking about.

"I like some of his things very much. Now, his water-colours at the——" This was Mr. Smith, holding forth about pictures.... There appeared to be a good deal of it. Ending up with, "And I know for a fact that he only got two hundred guineas for that; two hundred! Incredible!"

It certainly did seem to Gwenna an incredible amount of money for a picture, a thing you just hang on a wall and forgot all about. Two hundred guineas! What couldn't she, Gwenna, do with that! Travel all over the place for a year! Go flying every week, at Hendon!

"What an experience! What a change it's made in the whole of English thought!" the pretty, rose-coloured lady was saying earnestly. "We can never be the same again now. It's set us, as a nation, such an entirely new and higher standard——"

This was very solemn, Gwenna thought. What was it about?

"I can't imagine, now, how we can have existed for so long without that point of view," went on Mrs. Rose-colour. "As I say, the first time I ever saw the Russian Ballet——"

The Russian Ballet—Ah! Gwenna had been with Leslie to see that; she had thought herself in a fairyland of dazzling colour, and of movement as wonderful as that of the flying biplanes. It had been a magic world of enchanted creatures that seemed half-bird, half-flower, who whirled and leaped, light as blown flame, to strangest music.... Gwenna had been dazed with delight; but she could not have talked about it as these people talked. "Mr. Rose-colour," Mr. Smith, and Leslie's whiskered young man were all joining in together now.

"You won't deny that a trace of the Morbid——"

"But that hint of savagery is really the attraction," Mr. Smith explained rather pompously. "We over-civilised peoples, who know no savagery in modern life, who have done with that aspect of evolution, I suppose we welcome something so——"

"Elemental——"

"Primitive——"

"Brutal?" suggested Mrs. Rose-colour, appreciatively.

"And that infinitude of gesture——" murmured the whiskered man, eating asparagus.

"Yes, but Isadora——"

"Ah, but Karsavina!"

"You must admit that Nijinski is ultra-romantic——"

"Define Romance!"

"Geltzer——"

"Scheherazade——"

Utterly bewildered by the strange words of the language spoken by half London in early summer, Nineteen-fourteen, the young girl from the wilds sought a glimpse of her friend's black-swathed head and vivid, impish face above the banked flowers of the table-centre. Did Leslie know all these words? Was she talking? She was laughing flippantly enough; speaking as nonchalantly.

"Yes, I'm going to the next Chelsea Arts Ball in that all-mauve rig he wears in the 'Spectre de la Rose.' I am. Watch the effect. 'Oh, Hades, the Ladies! They'll leave their wooden huts!' You needn't laugh, Mr. Swayne"—this to the Chopin young man. "Anybody would be taken in. I can look quite as much of a man as Nijinski does. In fact, far——"

Here suddenly Gwenna's neighbour leaned forward over the table towards his hostess and broke in, his deep, gentle voice carrying above the buzz.

"Mrs. Smith! I say! I beg your pardon," he exclaimed quickly, "but isn't that a baby crying like anything somewhere?"

This remark of the young man's, and that which followed it, surprised and puzzled Gwenna even more than his curious remark about draughts. Who was he? What sort of a young man was this who always sat in draughts and who could catch the sound of a baby's cry when even its own mother hadn't heard it through the thick portière, the doors, the walls and that high-pitched buzz of conversation round about the table?

For Mrs. Smith had fled from the table with a murmured word of apology, and had presently returned just as the ornate fruit-and-jelly mould was being handed round, and Gwenna heard her saying to Mrs. Rose-colour, "Yes, it was. He's off again now. He simply won't go down for Nurse—I always have to rush——"

Gwenna turned to her companion, whose collar was now well up over the back of his neck. Wondering, she said to him, "Fancy your hearing that, through all this other noise!"

"Ah, one gets pretty quick at listening to, and placing, noises," he told her, helping himself to the jelly and shrugging his shoulders and that collar at the same time. "It's being accustomed to notice any squeak that oughtn't to be there, you know, in the engines. One gets to hear the tiniest sound, through anything."

Gwenna, more puzzled than before, turned from that delectable pudding on her plate, to this strangely interesting young man beside her. She said: "Are you an engineer?"

"I used to be," he said. "A mechanic, you know, in the shops, before I got to be a pilot."

"A pilot?" She wondered if he thought it rude of her, if it bothered him to be asked questions about himself like this, by just a girl? And still she couldn't help asking yet another question.

She said, "Are you a sailor, then?"

"Me?" he said, as if surprised. "Oh, no——"

And then, quite simply and as if it were nothing, he made what was to Gwenna an epic announcement.

"I'm an airman," he said.

She gasped.

He went on. "Belong to a firm that sends me flying. Taking up passengers at Hendon, that sort of thing."

"An airman? Are you?" was all that Gwenna could for the moment reply. "Oh ... Oh!"

Perhaps her eyes, widening upon the face above her, were more eloquent of what she felt.

That it was to her a miracle to find herself actually sitting next to him! Actually speaking to one of these scarcely credible beings whom she had watched this afternoon! An airman.... There was something about the very word that seemed mysterious, uncanny. Was it because of its comparative newness in the speech of man? Perhaps, ages ago, primitive maids found something as arresting in the term "A seaman"? But this was an airman! It was his part to ride the Winged Victory, the aeroplane that dared those sapphire heights above the flying-ground. Oh! And she had been chattering to him about the slate-margined brooks and the ferny glens of her low-lying valley, just as if he'd been what this ingenuous maid called to herself "Any young man" who had spent holidays fishing in Wales? She hadn't known. That was why he had those queer, keen eyes: blue and reckless, yet measuring.

Not a sailor's, not a soldier's ... but the eyes of Icarus!...

"I—I never heard your name," said Gwenna, a little breathless, timid. "Which is it, please?"

For reply he dabbed a big, boyish finger down on the slender name-card among the crumbs of his bread. "Here you are," he said, "Dampier; Paul Dampier."

So whirling and bewildered was Gwenna's mind by this time that she scarcely wondered over the added surprise. This, she just realised, was the name she had first heard bellowed aloud through the megaphone from the judges' stand. She hardly remembered then that a photograph of this same aviator was tossed in among her wash-leather gloves, velvet hair-bands, and her handkerchief-sachet in the top right-hand drawer of her dressing-table at the Club. Certainly she did not remember at this minute what she had said, laughing, over that portrait, to her two friends on the flying-ground.

There, she had admired the machine; that un-Antæus-like thing that was not itself until it had shaken off the fetters of Earth from its skids and wheels. Here, she marvelled over the man; for he was part of it. He was its skill and its will. He was the planner of those curves and bankings and soarings, those vol-planés that had left, as it were, their lovely lines visible in the air. His Icarian mind had determined—his large but supple body had executed them.

A girl could understand that, without understanding how it was all done. Those big, boyish hands of his, of course, would grasp certain mechanisms; his feet, too, would be busy; his knees—every inch of his lithe length and breadth—every muscle of him; yes! even to the tiny muscles that moved his wonderful eyes.

"I saw you, then," she told him, in a dazed little voice. "I was at Hendon this afternoon! It was the first time in my life...."

"Really?" he said. "What did you think of it all?"

"Oh, splendid!" she said, ardently, though vaguely.

How she longed to be able to talk quickly and easily to anybody, as Leslie could! How stupid he—the Airman—must think her! A little shakily she forced herself to go on: "I did think it so wonderful, but I can't explain, like. Ever. I never can. But——"

Perhaps, again, she was explaining better than she knew, with that small, eager face raised to his.

"Oh!" she begged. "Do tell me about it!"

He laughed. "Tell you what? Isn't much to tell."

"Oh, yes, there must be! You tell me," she urged softly, unconscious that her very tone was pure and concentrated flattery. "Do!"

And with another short, deprecating laugh, another shrug to his collar, the boy began to "tell" her things, though the girl did not pretend to understand. She listened to that voice, strong and deep, but womanishly gentle. She forgot that by rights she ought to pay some attention to her neighbour, the imitation Chopin. She listened to this other.

Words like "controls," "pockets," "yawing," went in at one of the ears under her brown curls and out at the other, leaving nothing but a quivering atmosphere of "the wonderfulness" of it all. Presently she saw those hands of his, big, sensitive, clever, arranging forks and spoons upon the sheeny tablecloth before her.

"Imagine that's your machine," he said. "Now you see there are three possible movements. This"—he tilted a dessert-knife from side to side—"and this"—he dipped it—"and this, which is yawing—you understand?"

"No!" she confessed, with the quickest little gesture. "I couldn't understand those sort of things. I shouldn't want to. What I really want to know is—well, about it, like!"

"About what?"

"About flying!"

He laughed outright again. "But, that is flying!"

She shook her head. "No, not what I mean. That's all—machinery!" She pronounced the word "machinery" with something almost like disdain. He looked at her as if puzzled.

"Sorry you aren't interested in machinery," he said quite reprovingly, "because, you know, that's just what I am interested in. I'm up to my eyes in it just now, pretty well every minute that I can spare. In fact I've got a machine—only the drawings for it, of course, but——"

"Do you mean you've invented one?"

"Oh, I don't know about 'invent.' Call it an improvement. It should be about as different from the lumbering concern you saw me go up in to-day as that's different from—say from one of those old Cambrian Railway steam engines," he declared exultantly. "It's——"

Here, he plunged into another vortex of mysterious jargon about "automatic stability," about "skin friction," and a hundred other matters that left the listening girl as giddy as a flight itself might have done.

What she did understand from all this was that here, after all, in the Machine, must be the secret of all the magic. This was what interested the Man. An inventor, too, he talked as if he loved to talk of it—even to her; his steel-blue eyes holding her own. Perhaps he didn't even see her, she thought; perhaps he scarcely remembered there was a girl there, leaving strawberries and cream untasted on an apple-green plate, listening with all her ears, with all of herself—as he, with all of himself, guided a machine. Ah, he talked of a just-invented machine as in the same tone Gwenna had heard young mothers talk of their new-born babies.

This was what he lived for!

"Yes," concluded the enthusiast with a long sigh, "if I could get that completed, and upon the market——"

"Well?" Gwenna took up softly; ignorant, but following his every change of tone. "Why can't you?"

"Why not? For the usual reason that people who are keen to get things done can't do 'em," the boy said ruefully, watching that responsive shadow cloud her face as he told her. "It's a question of the dashed money."

"Oh!" said the girl more softly still. "I see."

So he, too, even he knew what it was to find that fettering want of guineas clog a soaring impulse? What a shame, she thought....

He thought (as many another young man with a Subject has thought of some rapt and girlish listener!) that the little thing was jolly intelligent, for a girl, more so than you were supposed to expect of such a pretty face—— Pretty? Come to look at her she was quite lovely. Made that baggage in the yellow dress and the Mrs. in the Pink look like a couple of half-artificial florists' blooms by the side of a lily-of-the-valley freshly-plucked from some country garden, sappy and sturdy, and sweet. And her skin was like the bit of mother-of-pearl she was wearing as a heart-shaped locket.

Quite suddenly he said to her: "Look here! Should you care to go up?"

Gwenna gasped.

The whole room, the bright table and the chattering guests seemed now to whirl about her in a circle of shiny mist—as that aeroplane propeller had whirled.... Care to go up? "Care!" Would she? Would she not?

"Oh——" she began.

But this throbbing moment was the moment chosen by her hostess to glance smilingly at Mrs. Rose-colour and to rise, marshalling the women from the room.

CHAPTER IV

THE SONG OF ALL THE AGES

"Now isn't life extraordinary?" thought Gwenna Williams, incoherently in the drawing-room as she sat on the yellow Empire sofa under the mirror, holding a tiny coffee-cup and answering the small-talk of kindly Mrs. Smith. "Fancy, before this afternoon I'd never seen any flying! And now on the very same evening I'm asked to go flying myself! Me! Just like that girl who was with him in the race! (I wonder is she a great friend of his.) I wonder when he'll take me? Will he come and settle about it—oh, I do hope so!—before we all have to go away?"

But there was no chance of "settling" this for some time after the door opened to a little commotion of bass laughter, a trail of cigar-scent, and the entrance of the man.

Mrs. Rose-colour, with some coquettish remark that Gwenna didn't catch, summoned the tall airman to the yellow-brocaded pouffe at her feet. Her husband crossed over to Gwenna (who suddenly discovered that she hated him) and began talking Welsh folk-songs. Whereupon Hugo Swayne, fondling his Chopin curl, asked Leslie, who towered above him near the piano, if she were going to sing.

"I'm in such a mood," he told her, "to listen to something rawly and entirely modern!"

"You shall, then," agreed Miss Long, suddenly demure. "D'you know the—er—Skizzen Macabres, those deliciously perverse little things of Wedekind's? They've been quite well translated.... Righto, my dear"—in answer to a nervous glance from her sister, "I'll only sing the primmer verses. The music is by that wonderful new Hungarian person—er—Sjambok."

Her tall golden figure reflected itself in the ebony mirror of the piano as Leslie, with a malicious gleam in the tail of her eye, sat down.

"I shan't sing for him, all the same," she thought. "I shall sing for Taffy and that Air-boy. I bet I can hit on something that they'll both like.... Yes...."

And she struck the first chords of her accompaniment.

And what was it, this "crudely modern" song that Leslie had chosen for the sake of the two youngest people present at that party?

There is a quintette of banjo-players and harpists who are sometimes "on" at the Coliseum in London, but who are more often touring our Colonies from Capetown to Salter, Sask. And wherever they may go, it seems, they bring down the house with that same song. For, to the hearts of exiled and homesick and middle-aged toilers that simple tune means England, Home and Beauty still. They waltzed to it, long ago in the Nineteenth Century. They "turned over" for some pretty girl who "practised" it. So, when they hear it, they encore it still, with a lump in their throats....

It was the last verse of this song that drifted in Leslie's deep contralto, across this more enlightened drawing-room audience of Nineteen-fourteen. Softly the crooning, simply phrased melody stole out:

"Even to-day we hear Love's song of yore!
Low in our hearts it rings for evermore.
Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,
Still we can hear it at the close of day!"

—"and it's at least as pleasant as any of their beastly 'artistic' music," thought Leslie, rebelliously, as she sang:

"Still to the end," (chord) "while Life's dim shadows fall,
Love will be found the sweetest song of all!"

She ended in a ripple of arpeggios, triumphantly, for she had glanced at the two youngest people in the room. Little Gwenna's eyes were full of the facile tears of her race; and the Dampier boy's face was grave with enjoyment. Alas, for the musical taste of these two! They had liked the old song....

The enlightened others were puzzled for a moment. What was that thing——?

Mr. Swayne explained languidly. "Priceless old ditty entitled 'Love's Old Sweet Song.' A favourite of the dear late Queen's, long before any of US were thought of. Miss Long has been trying to pull our legs with it!"

"Oh, Leslie, dear, you are so amusing always," said Mrs. Rose-colour, turning with her little superior smile to the singer. "But won't you sing something really?"

Leslie's quick black eyes caught a glance of half-conscious, half-inarticulate sympathy that was passing between the youngest girl in the room and the man who had taken her in to dinner. It was as if they'd said, together, "I wish she'd sing again. I wish she'd sing something like that again...."

They were alone in their wish!

For now Mrs. Smith sat down and played something. Something very long....

And still what Gwenna longed to happen did not happen. In spite of that glance of sympathy just now, it did not happen.

The Airman, sitting there on that brocaded pouffe, his long legs stretched out over the soft putty-coloured carpet, did not come up to her to speak again of that so miraculously proffered flight in his aeroplane. He went on being talked to by Mrs. Rose-colour.

And when that pretty lady and her husband rose to go, the young girl in her corner had a very blank and tense moment. For she heard those people offer to take Mr. Dampier with them and drop him at his rooms. Oh, that would mean that she, Gwenna, wouldn't have another word with him! He'd go! And his invitation had been unanswered!

"Care to go up?" he'd said—and Gwenna hadn't even had time to tell him "Yes!"

Ah, it would have been too good to be true!——

Very likely he'd forgotten what he'd said at, dinner....

He hadn't meant it....

He'd thought she'd meant "No."

He was going now——

But no. To her unspeakable relief she heard his deep "Thanks awfully, but I'm going on with Hugo presently. Taking him to meet some people at the Aero Club."

Now, just imagine that! thought the country girl. Here it was already half-past ten at night; but he was going on to meet some more people somewhere else. This wonderful party, which had marked an epoch in her life, was nothing to him; it was just the beginning of the evening. And, after days in the skies, all his evenings were like this! Hadn't Mrs. Smith said when he came in, "We know you are besieged with invitations?" Oh, the inconceivably interesting life that was his! Why, why was Gwenna nothing but a girl, a creature who, even nowadays, had to stay within the circumscribed limits where she was put, who could not see or be or do anything, really! Might as well be born a tortoise....

Here the voice of Mr. Hugo Swayne (to which she'd paid scant attention so far) said something about taking Miss Long and her friend up to Hampstead first, and that Paul could come along.

Gwenna, enraptured, discovered that this meant in his, Mr. Swayne's, car. The four of them were to motor up to her and Leslie's Club together. All that lovely long drive?

But though "lovely," that journey back to Hampstead, speeding through the broad, uncrowded streets that the lights showed smooth and polished as a ballroom floor, with the giant shadows of plane-tree leaves a-dance upon the pavement—that journey was unbelievably, relentlessly short.

Mr. Swayne seemed to tear along! He was driving, with Leslie, gay and talkative and teasing, beside him in front. The younger girl sat behind with his cousin. The Airman was hatless; and he wore a light loose overcoat of which the big sleeve brushed the black satin of Gwenna's wrap.

"Warm enough?" he asked, gently, and (as carefully as if she'd been some old invalid, she thought) he tucked a rug about her. Eagerly Gwenna longed for him to return to that absorbing question he'd put to her at the dinner-table. But there seemed scarcely time to say a single word before, with a jarring of brakes, the car drew up in the slanting road before the big square block of the Club. The arc-lights blazed into the depths of the tall chestnut-trees beside the street, while the four young people stood for a moment clustered together on the asphalt walk before the glass-porch.

"All over now," thought Gwenna with quite a ridiculously sharp little pang as good-nights and good-byes were said.

Oh! Wasn't he going to say anything else? About the flying? She couldn't!

He was holding her hand (for good-night) while Mr. Swayne still laughed with Leslie.

"Look here," the Airman said abruptly. "About that flying——"

"Yes! Oh, yes!" Gwenna returned in a breathless little flurry. There mustn't be any mistake about what she wished. She looked up into his holding eyes once more, and said quiveringly, "I would so love it!"

"You would. Right," he said, and seemed to have forgotten that they had shaken hands, and that he had not yet loosed her fingers from his large and hearty grip. He shook hands again. "Then I'll come round And fix it up——"

And the next instant, it seemed, he was whirled away from her again, this Stranger who had dropped into the middle of her life as it were from the skies which were his hunting-ground. There was the noise of a retreating car droning down the hill (not unlike the receding drone of a biplane in full flight), then the grating of a key in the lock of the Club door....

Gwenna sighed. Then she went upstairs, humming softly, without knowing what the tune was, Leslie's song:

"Once in the dear, dead days beyond recall——"

Leslie followed her into her room where she turned up the gas.

"I'll undo you, Taffy, shall I?... Enjoyed yourself rather, after all, didn't you?" said the elder girl, adding quickly, "What's the matter?"

For Gwenna before the glass stood with a dismayed look upon her face. Her hand was up to her round white throat, touching the dimpled hollow where there had rested—where there rested no longer—that mother-of-pearl pendant.

"It's gone," she exclaimed ruefully.

"What has, child? What have you dropped?"

Gwenna, still with her hand at her throat, explained, "I've lost my heart".

CHAPTER V

THE WORKADAY WORLD

The day after the dinner-party was spent by Gwenna metaphorically, at least, in the clouds.

By her vivid day-dreams she was carried off, as Ganymede was carried by the eagle, sky-high; she felt the rush of keen air on her face; she saw the khaki-green flying-ground beneath her with the clustered onlookers, as small as ants. And—thus she imagined it—she heard that megaphone announcement:

"Ladies and gentul MEN! Mis ter Paul Dampier on a Maurice Farman bi plane ac companied by Miss Williams!"

with the sound of it dying down, faintly, below her.

Then in her musing mind she went over and over what had already happened. Those throbbing moments when her new friend had said, "Look here! Would you care to come up?" and, "Then I'll come up here and fix it——"

Would he? Oh, when would he? It was of course hardly to be thought that this flying-man ("besieged with invitations" as he was) would come to ratify his offer on Sunday, the very day after he'd made it. Too much to expect....

Therefore that Sunday Gwenna Williams refused to go out, even on the Heath for the shortest loitering stroll. Leslie Long, with an indescribable look that the younger girl did not catch, went out without her. Gwenna stayed on the green bench in the small, leafy garden at the back of the Club, reading and listening, listening for the sound of the bell at the front door, or for the summons to the telephone.

None came, of course.

Also, of course, no note to make an appointment to go flying appeared at that long, crowded breakfast-table of the Club on Monday morning for Miss Gwenna Williams.

That, too, she could hardly have expected.

Quite possibly he'd forgotten that the appointment had ever been made. A young man of that sort had got so many things to think about. So many people to make appointments with. So many other girls to take up.

"I wonder if he's promised to go up again soon with that girl called Muriel," she thought. "Sure to know millions of girls——"

And it was in a very chastened mood of reaction that Gwenna Williams, typist—now dressed in the business-girl's uniform of serge costume, light blouse, and small hat—left her Club that morning. She walked down the sunny morning road to the stopping-place of the motor-omnibuses and got on to a big scarlet "24" bus, bound for Charing Cross and her day's work.

The place where she worked was a huge new building in process of construction on the south side of the Embankment near Westminster Bridge.

Above the slowly sliding tides of the river, with its barges and boats, there towered several courses of granite blocks, clean as a freshly-split kernel. In contrast to them were the half demolished, dingy shells of houses on either side, where the varied squares of wallpaper and the rusting, floorless fireplaces showed where one room had ended and the next begun. The scaffolding rose above the new pile like a mighty web. Above this again the enormous triangular lattice rose so high that it seemed like a length of ironwork lace stretched out on two crochet-needles against the blue-grey and hot vault of the London sky.

As she passed the entrance Gwenna's eyes rose to this lattice.

"It looks almost as high up in the air as one could fly in that biplane," she thought. "Oh, to be right up! Looking down on everything, with the blue beneath one instead of only above!"

She crossed the big yard, which was already vocal with the noises of chipping and hammering, the trampling and the voices of men. Two of them—the genial young electrician called Grant and the Yorkshire foreman who was a regular father to his gang, nodded good-morning to the youngest typist as she passed. She walked quickly past the stacks of new timber and the gantries and travelling cranes (plenty of machinery here; it ought to please Mr. Dampier, since he'd said that was what he was interested in!). One great square of the hewn granite was swinging in mid-air from a crane as she left the hot sunlight and noise outside and entered the door of the square, corrugated iron building that held the office where she worked.

To reach it she had to pass through the clerk-of-the-works' offices, with long drawing-benches with brass handled drawers beneath, full of plans, and elevations. These details seemed mysteriously, tantalisingly incomprehensible and yet irritating to Gwenna's feminine mind. She was imaginative enough to realise that all these details, these "man's-things," from the T-squares on the benches to the immense iron safe in the corner, seemed to put her, Gwenna, "in her place." She was merely another detail in the big whole of man's work that was going on here. The place made her feel tiny, unimportant. She went on to the light and airy room, smelling of new wood and tracing-paper, the extension of the clerk-of-the-works' office that she shared with her two colleagues.

In the centre of this room there was a large square table with a telephone, a telephone-book, various other books of reference and a shallow wicker basket for letters. Besides this there were the typing tables for each of the three girl-clerks. Gwenna's and Miss Baker's were side by side. The German girl sat nearest to the window that gave the view up the river, with Lambeth Bridge and the Houses of Parliament looming grey and stately against the smiling June sky, and a distant glimpse of Westminster Abbey. On the frame of the pane just above her Miss Baker had fastened, with drawing-pins, two photographs. One was a crude coloured postcard of a red-roofed village among pine-forests. The other was a portrait of a young man, moustached and smiling under a spiked German helmet; across this photograph ran the autograph, "Karl Becker." Thus the blue and guileless eyes of this young foreigner in our midst could rest upon mementoes of her Fatherland and her family any time she raised her blonde head from bending over her work. Both girls looked up this morning as Gwenna, the last arrival, came in. They scolded her good-naturedly because she'd brought none of those chocolates she'd promised from the dinner-table. They asked how she'd enjoyed herself at that party.

It would have been presumably natural to the young Welsh girl to have broken out into a bubblingly excited—"And, girls! Who d'you suppose I sat next. A real live airman! And, my dears!" (with a rapturous gasp), "who should it be but the one I bought the photo of on Saturday! You know; the one you called my young man—Mr. Dampier—Paul Dampier—Yes, but wait; that isn't all. Just fancy! He talked to me yards and yards about his new aeroplane, and I say, what do you think! This was the best. He's asked me to come up one day—yes, indeed! He's going to take me flying—with him!"

But, as it was, Gwenna said not one word of all this. She could not have explained why, even to herself. Only she replied to Miss Butcher's, "What was the party like?" with a flavourless, "Oh, it was all right, thanks."

That sounded so English, she thought!

She had a dull day at the office. Dry-as-dust letters and specifications, builders' quantities, and so on, to type out. Tiresome calls on the telephone that had to be put through to the other office....

Never before had she seemed to mind the monotony of those clicking keys and that "I'll inquire. Hold the line, please." Never before had she found herself irritated by the constant procession of men who were in and out all day; including Mr. Grant, who sometimes seemed to make errands to talk to Miss Butcher, but who never stayed for more than a moment, concluding invariably with the cheerful remark, "Well! Duty calls, I must away." Men seemed actually to enjoy "duty," Gwenna thought. At least the men here did. All of them, from Mr. Henderson in the other office to the brown-faced men in the yard with their shirt-sleeves rolled up above tattooed arms, seemed to be "keen" on the building, on the job in hand. They seemed glad to be together. Gwenna wondered how they could....

To-day she was all out of tune. She was quite cross when, for the second time, Albert, the seventeen-year old Cockney office-boy, bustled in, stamping a little louder than was strictly necessary on the echoing boards. He rubbed his hands together importantly, demanding in a voice that began in a bass roar and ended in a treble squeak, "Those specifications, miss. Quick, too, or you'll hear about it!"

"Goodness me, what an ugly way you London boys do have of talking!" retorted the Welsh girl pettishly. "Sut-ch an accent!"

The rebuked Albert only snorted with laughter as he took her sheaf of papers. Then, looking back over his shoulder at the pretty typist perched on the edge of the centre table to refill her fountain pen, he added in his breaking treble, "Don't you sit on that tyble, Miss! Sittin' on the tyble's s'posed to mean you want to be kissed, and it looks so bad! Don't it, Miss Butcher? There's other ways of gittin' orf than that, isn't there?"

"Outside!" snapped Miss Butcher, blushing, as the boy stumped away.

Gwenna sighed angrily and longed for lunch-time, so that she could get out.

At one o'clock, an hour after the buzzer had sounded for the mid-day meal of the yard-men, the other two girls in the office would not even come out for a breath of air. They had brought fruit and cake. They made Bovril (with a kettle of hot water begged from the fatherly foreman) and lunched where they'd sat all the morning. Miss Butcher, munching, was deep in a library-book lent to her by the young electrician. Miss Baker counted stitches in a new pattern for a crochet-work Kante, or length of fine thread insertion. It was not unlike the pattern of the iron trellis above the scaffolding, that tapered black against the sky; man's fancy-work.

What hideously tame things women had to fill their lives with, Gwenna thought as she sat in the upper window of her tea-shop at the corner of the Embankment. She watched the luncheon-time crowd walking over Westminster Bridge. So many of these people were business-girls just like herself and the Butcher and the Baker! Would anything more amusing ever happen to them, or to her?

But that German girl, Gwenna thought, would stare to hear her work called "hideous" or "tame." It was her greatest interest. Already, she'd told Gwenna, her bottom drawer at her boarding-house was crammed with long, rolled-up crochet-work strips of white or creamy lace. There were also her piles of tray-cloths, petticoat flounces and chemise-tops, all hand-embroidered and bemonogrammed by Miss Baker herself. She was not engaged to be married, but, as she'd artlessly said, "Something a young girl can have always ready."

Day-dreams in crochet!

"I'd rather never fall in love than have it all spoilt by mixing it up with such a lot of sewing and cookery that it wouldn't get disentangled, like," thought the dreamy, impatient Gwenna. She returned, to find the German girl measuring her crochet lace against her arm and crying, "Since Saturday I have made till there." ...

Then Miss Baker turned to her German version of an English trade firm's letter. Miss Butcher unfastened another packet of stationery. Miss Williams fetched a number of envelopes from the inner office to be addressed....

Would the afternoon never come to an end?

CHAPTER VI

THE INVITATION

At last six o'clock found her, released from the day's work and back at her Club.

But still, still there was no envelope addressed to Miss Gwenna Williams stuck up in the criss-cross tapes of the green-baize-covered letter-board in the hall.

She went upstairs rather slowly to take off her hat. On the landing the voice of Leslie Long called to her from the bathroom.

"Come in here, Taffy. I'm washing blouses. I want to tell you some news."

Gwenna entered the steamy bathroom, to find her chum's tall figure bent in two over the bath and up to its bare elbows in suds of Lux.

"I say, child, you know your locket that you lost at my sister's?" announced Leslie. "It's all right. It's been found."

"Has it?" said Gwenna, not very enthusiastically. "Did I leave it in Mrs. Smith's room?"

"You didn't. You left it in Hugo Swayne's car," said Leslie, wringing out the wet handful of transparent net that would presently serve her as a garment. "That young man came up about half an hour ago to tell you."

"Mr. Swayne did? How kind of him."

"Yes, wasn't it? But not of Mr. Swayne," said Leslie, wringing. "It was—just let out the water and turn me on some fresh hot, will you?—It was the other one that came: the aviator boy."

"What?" cried Gwenna sharply. "Mr. Dampier?"

"Yes. Your bird-man. He came up here—in full plumage and song! Nice grey suit—rather old; brown boots awfully well cleaned—by himself; blue tie, very expensive Burlington Arcade one—lifted from his cousin Hugo, I bet," enlarged Leslie, spreading the blouse out over the white china edge of the bath. "I met him at the gate just as I got back from my old lady's. He asked for my friend—meaning you. Hadn't grasped your name. He came in for ten minutes. But he couldn't wait, Taffy, so——"

Here, straightening herself, Leslie suddenly stopped. She stopped at the sight of the small, blankly dismayed face with which her chum had been listening to this chatter.

And Gwenna, standing aghast against the frosted glass panes of the bathroom door, pronounced, in her softest, most agitated Welsh accent, an everyday Maid's Tragedy in just six words:

"He came! When I was out!"

"He was awfully sorry——"

But Gwenna, seeming not to hear her friend, broke out: "He said he'd come and settle about taking me flying, and there was I think-ing he'd forgotten all about it, and then he did come after all, and I wasn't here! Oh, Leslie!—--"

Leslie, sitting on the edge of the bath, gave her a glance that was serious and whimsical, rueful and tender, all at once.

"Yes, you can't understand," mourned Gwenna, "but I did so want to go up in an aeroplane for once in my life! I'd set my heart on it, Leslie, ever since he said about it. It's only now I see how badly I wanted it," explained the younger girl, flushed with emotion, and relapsing into her Welshiest accent, as do all the Welsh in their moments of stress. "And now I shan't get another chance. I know I shan't——"

And such was the impetus of her grief that Leslie could hardly get her to listen to the rest of the news that should be balm for this wound of disappointment; namely, that Mr. Dampier was going to make an appointment with both girls to come and have tea with him at his rooms, either on Saturday or Sunday.

"He'll write to you," concluded Leslie Long, "and let you know which. I said we'd go either day, Taffy."

Gwenna, caught up into delight again from the lowest depths of disappointment, could hardly trust herself to speak. Surely Leslie must think her a most awful baby, nearly crying because she'd had an outing postponed! So the young girl (laughing a little shakily) put up quite a plucky fight to treat it all as quite a trifle....

Even the next morning at breakfast she took it quite casually that there was a note upon her plate stamped with the address of the Aero Club. She even waited a moment before she opened it and read in a handwriting as small as if it had been traced by a crow-quill:

"Monday night.

"Dear Miss Williams,

"Will you and Miss Long come to tea with me at my place about 4.30 on Sunday? I find I shall not have to go to Hendon on that day. I'll come and call for you if I may.

"Yours sincerely,
"P. Dampier."

"At last!" thought Gwenna to herself, rather breathlessly, as she put the note back into the envelope. "Now he'll settle about when I'm to go flying with him. Oh! I do, do hope there's nothing going to get in the way of that!"

CHAPTER VII

A BACHELOR'S TEA-PARTY

The first of a series of "things that got in the way" of Gwenna's making an appointment to go flying occurred on that Sunday afternoon, when Leslie and she were to have tea at Paul Dampier's place.

"A mixture of chaos and comfy chairs, I expect; ash everywhere, and beastly cakes. (I know these bachelor tea-parties.) That," Leslie said, "is what his 'place' will be like."

Gwenna, as usual, hadn't wasted any thoughts over this. She had been too full of what their host himself would say and do—about the flying. She was all ready, in the white dress, the white hat with the wings, half an hour after Sunday mid-day dinner at the Ladies' Club. But it was very nearly half-past four by the time Mr. Dampier did come, as he had promised, to fetch the two girls.

He came in the car that had driven them back on the night of the dinner-party.

And he was hurried, and apologetic for his lateness. He even seemed a little shy. This had the effect of making Gwenna feel quite self-possessed as she took the seat beside him ("I hate sitting by the driver, really. Makes me so nervous!" Leslie had declared) and inquired whether he borrowed his cousin's car any time he had visitors.

"Well, but Hugo's got everything," he told her, with a twinkle, "so I always borrow anything of his that I can collar!"

"Studs, too?" asked Gwenna, quickly.

"Oh, come! I didn't think it of you. What a pun!" he retorted.

She coloured a little, shy again, hurt. But he turned his head to look at her, confided to her: "It was on the chest-of-drawers, all the time!"

And, as the car whizzed westwards, they laughed together. That dinner-table incident of the collar—or collared—stud brought, for the second time, a sudden homely glow of friendly feeling between this boy and girl.

She thought, "He's just as easy to get on with as if he were another girl, like Leslie——"

For always, at the beginning of things, the very young woman compares her first man-friend with the dearest girl-chum she has known.

—"Or as if he were just nobody, instead of being so wonder-ful, and an airman, good gracious!"

Appropriately enough for an airman, his place seemed to be nearly on the house-tops of a block of buildings near Victoria Street.

The lift carried them up past six landings and many boards inscribed with names of firms. It stopped at the seventh story, almost directly opposite a cream-coloured door with a small, old-fashioned brass knocker, polished like gold.

Paul Dampier tapped sharply at it.

The door was opened by a thick-set man in an excellent suit of clothes and with the face of a wooden sphinx.

"Tea as soon as you can, Johnson," said the young Airman over his shoulder, as the trio passed in.

The long sitting-room occupied half the flat and its windows took up the whole of one side. It was to these open windows that Gwenna turned.

"Oh, what a view!" she cried, looking out, enraptured at the height and airiness, looking past the leads, with their wooden tubs of standard laurel-bushes, among which pigeons were strutting and bridling and pecking crumbs. She looked down, down, at the bird's-eye view of London, spread far below her in a map of grey roofs and green tree-tops under a soft mist of smoke that seemed of the clouds themselves.

"Oh, can't you see for miles!" exclaimed Gwenna. "There's St. Paul's, looks like a big grey soap-bubble, coming up out of the mist! Oh, you can see between a crack in the houses, our place at Westminster! It's like a cottage from here! Oh, and that iron lacey thing on the roof! Even this must be something like being up in an aeroplane, I should think! Look, Leslie!"

Miss Long seemed more engrossed in looking round Mr. Dampier's bachelor sitting-room. It was incredibly luxurious compared to what she'd expected. The polished floor was black and shiny as the wood of the piano at the further end, the Persian rugs softly brilliant. In the middle of the Adams mantelpiece simpered an exquisite Chelsea shepherdess; to the left and right of her there stood squat toys in ivory, old slender-stalked champagne-glasses holding sweet-peas. And upon the leaf-brown walls were decorations that seemed complacently to draw attention to the catholic taste of their owner. A rare eighteenth-century print of Tom Jones upon his knees, asking "forgiveness" of his Sophia, hung just above a Futurist's grimace in paint; and there was a frieze of ultra-modern French fashion-designs, framed in passe-partout, from the "Bon Ton."

"What a—what a surprising number of pictures you have, Mr. Dampier," said Leslie, mildly. "Hasn't he, Taffy?"

Gwenna, turning at last from the window, realised dimly that this sophisticated room did seem somehow out of keeping as an eyrie for this eagle. The view outside, yes! But these armchairs? And she wouldn't have thought that he would have bothered to have things pretty, like this——

"And what a lot of books you've got," she said. For the wall opposite to the windows was taken up by bookshelves, set under a trophy of swords of out-of-date patterns, and arranged with some thought.

The top shelves held volumes of verse, and of plays, from Beaumont and Fletcher to Galsworthy. The Russian novelists were ranged together; also the French. There was a corner for Sudermann and Schnitzler. A shelf further down came all the English moderns, and below that all the Yellow Books, a long blue line of all the English Reviews, from the beginning; a stack of The New Age, and a lurid pink-covered copy of Blast.

But before Gwenna could wonder further over these possessions of this young man, more incongruous possessions were brought in by the Sphinx-faced man-servant; a tea-table of beaten copper, a peasant-embroidered cloth, a tea-service of old Coalport; with a silver spirit-kettle, with an iced cake, with toast, and wafer, bread-and-butter and cress-sandwiches and Parisian petits-fours that all seemed, as the young girl put it simply to herself, "So unlike him!"

Her chum had already guessed the meaning of it all.

The Dampier boy's rooms? His library and ornaments? Ah, no. He'd never read one of all those books there. Not he! And these were not the type of "things" he'd buy, even if he'd had the money to throw away, thought Leslie. It was no surprise to that young woman when the legitimate owner of this lavishly appointed garçonnière made his sudden appearance in the middle of tea.

The click of a latchkey outside. Two masculine voices in the hall. Then the door was thrown open.

There walked in a foreign-looking young man, with bright dark eyes and a small moustache, followed by Mr. Hugo Swayne, attired in a Victorian mode that, as Leslie put it afterwards, "cried 'Horse, horse!' where there was no horse." His tall bowler was dove-grey; his black stock allowed a quarter-inch of white collar to appear; below his striking waistcoat dangled a bunch of seals and a fob. This costume Leslie recognised as a revival of the Beggarstaff Touch. Gwenna wondered why this young man seemed always to be in fancy dress. Leslie could have told her that Mr. Swayne's laziness and vanity had led him to abandon himself on the coast of Bohemia, where he had not been born. His father had been quite a distinguished soldier in Egypt. His father's son took things more easily at the Grafton Gallery and the Café Royal and Artists' Clubs. He neither painted, wrote, nor composed, but his life was set largely among flatterers who did these things—after a fashion.

He came in saying, "Now this is where I live when I'm——"

He broke off with a start at the sight of the party within. The girls turned to him with surprised and smiling greeting.

Paul Dampier, fixing him with those blue eyes, remarked composedly, "Hullo, my dear chap. Have some tea, won't you? I'll ring for Johnson to bring in two more cups."

"That will be very nice," said Hugo Swayne, rising to the occasion with all the more grace because he was backed up by a tiny understanding glance from Miss Long. And he introduced his young Frenchman by a name that made Leslie exclaim, "Why! You are that Post-Impressionist painter, aren't you?"

"Not I, mademoiselle, but my brother," returned Hugo's French friend, slowly and very politely. His dark face was simple and intelligent as that of a nice child; he sat up as straight in his chair as he talked. "It is for that Mr. Swayne, who is admirer of my brother's pictures, is so amiable for to show me London. Me, I am not artiste. I am ingénieur only."

"'Only'!" thought Gwenna over her teacup.

Surely any one should be proud of being an engineer, considering that Mr. Dampier had thus begun his career; he who was now in what the romantic girl considered the First of All Professions? Perhaps her attitude towards the Airman as such was noted by the Airman's cousin. Hugo, who had dropped a little heavily into the softest chair near Miss Long, turned his Chopinesque profile against a purple cushion to shoot a rather satirical glance at the cleaner-built youth in the worn grey suit.

"Now, how like a man! He doesn't admire Taffy particularly, but he's piqued to see her admire another type." Leslie summed this up quickly to herself. "Not really a bad sort; he behaved well about the invasion of these rooms. But he's like all these well-off young men who potter about antique shops when they ought to be taking exercise—he's plenty of feminine little ways. Since they call spitefulness 'feminine'!"

There was a distinctly spiteful note in the young man's voice as he made his next remark to his cousin.

This remark surprised even Leslie for a moment.

And to Gwenna's heart it struck with a sudden, unreasonable shock of consternation.

For Mr. Swayne inquired blandly across the tea-table:

"Well, Paul; how's your fiancée?"

CHAPTER VIII

LAUGHING ODDS

Before he answered, Gwenna had time to think smartingly, "His fiancée! There! I might have known he was engaged. I might have guessed it! It's nothing to do with me.... Only ... I believe that's what's going to get in the way of my flying with him. She won't let him. I mean he'll always be taking her up! And I know who it is, too. It's sure to be the one called Muriel that I saw go up with him at Hendon with the red hair and the scarf. I sort of guessed when I heard they were going up together that she must be his fiancée."

And all the while her eyes were, apparently, on the silver stand of the spirit-kettle, they watched the young Airman's face (which looked a little sheepish). She listened, tensely, for his reply. Quite shortly Paul Dampier, still munching cake, said, "Who? Oh! Going on as usual, thanks."

"Now I may tell you that that's merely a pose to conceal devotion," laughed his cousin, turning to Gwenna. "Just as if every moment were not grudged that he spends away from HER!"

"Is it?" said the young girl with a smile. There was a bad lump in her throat, but she spoke with her most carefully-fostered "English" accent. "I—I suppose that's natural!" she remarked.

Hugo, fondling his Chopin curl again, went on amusing himself with this chosen subject.

"But, as is so often the case with a young man's fancy," he announced, "nobody else sees anything in 'her'!"

The stricken Gwenna looked quickly at young Dampier, who was cutting the Titan wedges that men call "slices," of cake. How would he take it that it had been said of his adored one that no one saw anything in her?

He only gave a short laugh, a confident nod of his fair head and said, "They will, though."

"Infatuated youth!" commented Hugo Swayne, resignedly, leaning back. "And he tries to cover it up by seeming casual. 'Going on as usual' is said just as a blind. It sounds so much more like a mere wife than a fiancée, don't you think?"

"Ah, but you are cynique, monsieur," protested the young Frenchman, looking mildly shocked. "For you it is not sacred, the love for a wife?"

"Oh, look here! Hadn't you better explain to them," broke in Paul Dampier boyishly, having finished a large mouthful of his cake, "that you're rotting? Fiancée, indeed. Haven't got such a thing in the world, of course."

At this Gwenna suddenly felt as if some crushing weight of disappointment had fallen from her. "It's because I shall be able to go flying with him after all," she thought.

Young Dampier, rising to take her cup, grumbled laughingly, "D'you suppose girls will look at a man nowadays who can't afford to spend the whole of his time gadding about after 'em, Hugo, as you can, or blowing what's my salary for an entire year on their engagement-rings——"

"My dear fellow, no girl in the world exacts as much of a man's time and money as that grande passion of yours does," retorted Hugo Swayne, not ill-naturedly. And turning to Leslie, he explained: "What I call Paul's fiancée is that eternal aeroplane he's supposed to be making."

"Ah!" said Gwenna, and then blushed violently; partly because she hadn't meant to speak, and partly because this had drawn the blue eyes of the Airman quickly upon herself.

"Yes, that incessant flying-machine of his," enlarged Mr. Swayne, lolling back in his chair and addressing the meeting. "She—I believe it's correct to call the thing 'she'?—is more of a nuisance even than any engaged girl I've ever met. She interferes with everything this man does. Ask him to come along to a dance or the Opera or to see some amusing people, and it's always 'Can't; I'm working on the cylinder or the spiral or the Fourth Dimension' or whatever it is he does think he's working on. Practically 'she' spends all the time he's away from her ringing him up, or getting him rung up, on the telephone. 'She' eats all his spare cash, too——"

"In steel instead of chocolate, I suppose?" smiled Leslie. "And must she be humoured? She seems to have every drawback of a young woman with 'a diamond half-hoop.' Is she jealous, as well?"

And then, while taking a cigarette from Hugo's case, the elder girl made, lightly, a suggestion that the listening Gwenna was fated to remember.

"What would happen," asked Leslie dryly, "if a real flesh-and-blood fiancée were to come along as a rival to the one of machinery?"

"Nothing would happen," Hugo assured her, holding out a lighted match. "That's why it would be rather interesting to watch. The complication of the Aeroplane or the Lady. The struggle in the mind of the young Inventor, what? The Girl"—he tossed aside the match and glanced fleetingly at the grave cherub's-face under Gwenna's white-winged hat—"The Girl versus the Flying Machine. I'd lay fifteen to one on the Machine, Miss Long."

"Done," said Leslie, demurely but promptly. "In half-crowns."

"Yes! You'd back your sex, of course," Hugo took up gaily. The young Frenchman murmured: "But the Machine—the Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle."

Here, suddenly, the silently listening Gwenna gave a tiny shiver. She turned her head abruptly towards the open windows behind her with the strutting pigeons and the sailing clouds beyond. It had seemed to the fanciful Celt that there in that too dainty room now hazy with cigarette-smoke, in that careless company of two girls and three young men, she had felt the hint of another Presence. It was rather horrid and ghostly—all this talk of a Machine that was made more of than a Woman! A Machine who "clawed" the man that owned her, just like a jealous betrothed who will not let her lover out of her sight! And supposing that Conflict did come, on which Gwenna's chum and Mr. Dampier's cousin had laid their laughing bets? The struggle between the sweetheart of steel springs and the sweetheart of soft flesh and warm blood? For one clear instant Gwenna knew that this fight would, must come. It was coming——

Then she turned her head and forgot her presentiments; coming back to the light-hearted Present. She watched Leslie, to whom the young Frenchman had been talking; he was now fixing dark earnest eyes upon "Mademoiselle Langue" as she, in the rather stilted phraseology with which our nation speaks its own language for the benefit of foreigners, expounded to him an English story.

There was a short pause.

Then the room rang to the laughter of the foreigner. "Ha! Yes! I have understood him! It is very amusing, that! It is good!" he cried delightedly, with a flash of white teeth and dark eyes. "He say, 'There are parts of it that are excellent!' Aha! Très spirituel," and he laughed again joyously over the story of the Curate's Egg, while Hugo murmured something about how stimulating it was to hear, for once, the Immemorial Anecdote fall upon Virgin Soil.

The young Airman moved nearer to Gwenna, who, still watching Leslie, gave a little start to hear that deep and gentle voice so close beside her as he spoke.

"Look here, we haven't settled up yet," he said, his voice gentle but carrying above the chatter of the others. "About that flying. Sunday this week I have got to be off somewhere. Now, are you free next Saturday?"

Gwenna, eager and tremulous, was just about to say, "Yes." But Hugo Swayne interrupted.

"I say, I hate to make mischief. But if you're talking about Saturday——? D'you remember, Paul? It was the only day I could take you down to Ascot to see Colonel Conyers."

"Oh, Lord, so it was," said the young Airman, turning an apologetic face to the girl. "I'm so sorry," he explained, "but this is a man I've simply got to get hold of if I can. It's the Air-craft Conyers—'Cuckoo' Conyers they call him. And he was a friend of Hugo's father, and what I've been trying to see him about is working the War-office to take up my new Machine——"

"The Fiancée again, you notice," laughed his cousin, with an imperceptible aside to Leslie. "Score to the Aeroplane."

"Yes, I see," said Gwenna, nodding at the Airman. "Of course! I mean of course I don't mind!"

"Then shall we say Saturday week for you to come up with me instead?" suggested young Dampier.

And Gwenna agreed to the date, thinking, "If only nothing stops it again! If only there isn't something else, then, to do with his Machine! That Machine! I——" Here she paused.

After all, it would be too ridiculous to allow oneself even to think that one "hated" a machine!

CHAPTER IX

A DAY IN THE COUNTRY

Eagerly as Gwenna longed to fly, she was not to do so even yet.

After that appointment made at Hugo Swayne's rooms she lived through a fortnight of dreaming, tingling anticipation. Then came another of those brief direct notes from "hers, P. Dampier." The girl jumped for joy. It was not to be at Hendon this time, but at Brooklands. Was she not rapidly gaining experiences? First Hendon, then Brooklands; at this rate she would soon know all the flying-grounds—Shoreham, Eastchurch, Farnborough, all of them!

"I'll call for you," the note said, "in the car."

"'The' car is good," commented Leslie, arranging a mist-blue scarf over Gwenna's small hat just before she started off on this expedition. "In the Army all things are in common, including money and tobacco but the Dampier boy isn't in the Army."

"Why shouldn't he?" took up Gwenna, ungrammatically and defiantly. She considered Mr. Swayne's motor was honoured by this other young man who condescended to drive it, to fetch and whirl away with him a girl who felt herself a nymph about to be swept up and up above the clouds to some modern version of Elysium.

So twelve o'clock that Saturday morning (Gwenna having obtained special leave of absence from the office) found the young man and the girl speeding through Kensington and Hammersmith, on the Woking Road.

The sun was hot above them; the road white; the hedges so dusty that they seemed grey ribbons streaming past. Gwenna scarcely realised how they went. She sat there beside him, thrilled and breathless, hardly knowing to which delight to give herself up, that of the coming flight, that of the present swift drive in the fresh breeze, or that of the companionship of this Demigod of Modern Times, whose arm almost touched hers sometimes as he moved or turned, or put on the brake.

Except for an occasional remark to the car: "Come on, don't be funny, old lady, don't be funny," or "Now for the hills; watch her sit down and laugh at 'em!" he spoke little; Gwenna didn't particularly want him to speak. The girl was in a golden and moving dream, and scarcely knew where it carried her.

She came out of that dream, not with a shock, but gradually. Was the car slowing down? It stopped; stopped in a wide part of that dust-white road between the tall, dust-grey hedges, opposite to a creosoted telegraph-pole spiked with nails. Through a gap in the hedge Gwenna caught sight of a moon-daisied field, with a dark hedge and trees beyond. Not a house, not a cottage in sight. This couldn't be Brooklands?

"Hul-lo," the boy was muttering. "What's up now?"

"What is it?" she asked.

He did not reply. This was not rudeness, as she guessed, but intentness; he took it for granted that she would not understand the mechanical explanation. Resignedly she said to herself, "Machinery gone wrong? Sometimes it really seems as if that were all machinery ever did do! Yet that's what he said he was interested in, more than anything!"

He was out of the car and had flung back the bonnet. Then he took off his coat and hung it up on one of the nails on that telegraph-pole. He pushed up his shirt-sleeves and bent over the tool-box on the step.

Sitting there on the hot leather, Gwenna watched him, she heard the chinking of wrenches and spanners. Then he returned to the bonnet again, fumbling, handling, burrowing, grunting at things.... Ten minutes elapsed....

He then broke out emphatically: "Oh, Lord! I have done it now!"

"Done what?" asked the girl anxiously.

In tightening a nut with a spanner the spanner had slipped. He had broken the porcelain insulation of the plug controlling the current.

And now, good-humouredly smiling at his guest, he leaned on the door of the car with his brown forearms crossed and said, "Short circuited. Yes. I'm afraid that's killed it."

"Killed what?" asked little Gwenna, in affright.

"Our flying for to-day," he said.

He went on to speak about "spare parts," and how it would be necessary to send some one back to fetch—something—Gwenna didn't care what it was. Her heart sank in dismay. No flying? Must they go back after all, now?

"Can't we get on?" she sighed.

He shook his shining head.

"We can make a picnic of it, anyhow," he said more encouragingly. "Shall you be all right here if I run back to that inn we passed just now with the bit of green outside? I shan't be ten minutes. Send some one off on a bicycle, and bring some grub back here."

He jerked on his coat and was off.

Little Gwenna, sitting there waiting in the useless car—her small, disconsolate face framed in the gauze scarf with which she'd meant to bind her curls for the flying—was passed by half a dozen other motors on the road to Brooklands. It did not strike her, dreamily downcast as she was, that surely what the messenger from the inn was being despatched to fetch might have been borrowed from one of these other motorists? Some of them, surely, would be men who knew young Paul Dampier quite well. Any of them might have come to the rescue?

This, as a matter of fact, had struck Paul Dampier at once. But he didn't want to go on to Brooklands! Brooklands? Beastly hot day; crowds of people; go up in an affair like an old Vanguard?

What he wanted, after a hard day's work yesterday on his own (so different) Machine, was a day's peace and quiet and to think things a bit over about her (the Machine) lying on his back somewhere shady, with a pipe. Actually, he would rather have been alone. But this little girl, Miss Williams.... She was all right. Not only pretty ... but such a quiet, sensible sort of little thing. He'd take her up another time, since she was keen. He certainly would take her up. Not to-day. To-day they'd just picnic. She wouldn't want to be giggling and chattering about herself the whole time, and all that sort of thing, like some of them. She liked to listen.

She'd be interested to hear what he'd been doing lately, about the Machine. For a girl, she was pretty bright, and even if she didn't grasp things at once, she evidently liked hearing about the Machine; besides which, it often cleared one's own ideas to one's self, to have to set 'em out and explain about the machinery very simply, to some one who was keen, but who hadn't a notion. They'd have a nice, peaceful time, this afternoon; somewhere cool, instead of Brooklands. And a nice long talk—all about the Machine.

He returned to the girl waiting in the car. Gwenna, cheering up at the sight of him, saw that his pockets were bulging with bottles, and that he carried a square, straw basket.

"There. I might have taken Hugo's luncheon-basket and filled that while I was about it; only I forgot there was one," he said, standing on the road and screwing up his eyes a little in the midday sun as he faced the car. "It's nicer eating out of doors, when you get a chance. Beastly dusty on the road here, though, and things going by all the time and kicking up clouds of it all over you. We'll find a pitch in that field."

So she jumped down from her seat and the two left the glaring road and got through that gap in the hedgerow where maybush and blackberry trail and grass and campion alike were all thickly powdered and drooping with dust.

The boy and girl skirted another hedge that ran at right angles to the road. Half-way up that field a big elm tree spread a patch of shade at its base like a dark-green rug for them to sit on. Paul Dampier put his coat down also. They sat, with moon-daisies and branching buttercups, and cow-parsley all sweet and clean about them.

Here the country-bred girl, forgetting her disappointment, gave a quick little sigh of content. She glanced about her at the known faces of flower-friends in the grass; a diaper of colours. Each year she had loved the time when white daisies and red sorrel and yellow rattle flaunted together over the heads of the lower-growing clovers and speedwells and potentillas. This year it seemed lovelier than ever. She put out her hand and pulled up a lance of jointed grass, nibbling the soft, pale-green end of it.

"Here, are you as hungry as all that?" laughed young Dampier at her side. "We'll feed."

He let Gwenna spread out upon the clean dinner-napkin in which they were wrapped the provisions that he had brought from the inn.

"All I could get. Bread-and-cheese. Couple of hunks of cold beef. Butter—salt," he said, giving her the things as he named them. "Plates I said we wouldn't worry about; chuck the crumbs to the birds. Here's what I got to drink; cider. D'you like it?"

"Love it," said Gwenna, who had never happened to taste it. But she knew that she would love it.

"Good. Oh! Now I've forgotten the glass, though," exclaimed young Dampier, sitting up on his knees on the shaded patch of grass beside her. "We shall both have to use the lower half of my flask. Sorry—hope you don't mind."

Gwenna, taking her first taste of cider in bird-like sips from that oblong silver thing, remembered the old saying, "Drink from my cup and you will think my thoughts." Then he put down upon the dinner napkin the half-loaf and the lump of cheese that he had been munching. He took the half of the flask, simply, out of the girl's hand, poured out more cider, and drank in turn.

"That's better," he said, smiling. She smiled back at him.

She had ceased to feel any shyness of this fair-haired aviator who rested there beside her in this oasis of shade from the elm, while beyond them stretched the wide, dazzlingly bright desert of the flowering meadow, bounded by its hedges. He cut off the crusty part of the loaf for her (since she said she liked it). He sliced for her the damp and pinkish beef, since she would not confide to him her deep and feminine loathing of this fare. The woman is not yet born who can look upon cold meat as a food. And they drank in turn from his silver flask. This was their third meal together; yet Gwenna felt that she had been grown-up and conscious of delight in the world about her only since they had met.

Ease and gaiety rose between them in a haze like that which vibrated over the warm hay-field where they feasted.

"I say, I shall have to give a lunch at the Carlton to everybody I know," he laughed, half to himself, presently, "if I do get Colonel Conyers to make 'em take up the P.D.Q." Then, turning more directly to her. "Sorry—you don't know that joke. It's my Aeroplane, you know."

"Oh, yes, the one Mr. Swayne calls your Fiancée!" took up Gwenna quickly. Then she wished she hadn't said that. She reddened. She turned her supple little body to toss crumbs to a yellow-hammer that was eyeing them from a branch in the hedge behind her. And then she asked. "Why 'the P.D.Q.'?"

"Because she will be the Paul Dampier One, I hope," explained the young inventor, "and I always think of her as that other because it means 'Pretty Dam—Dashed Quick.'"

"Oh, is that it?" said Gwenna.

She echoed crossly to herself, "'I always think of her' indeed! It sounds like——"

And she finished her thought with the hardest-working word in her native tongue; the Welsh for sweetheart.

"It does sound just as if he were talking about his cariad."

Absently she brushed more crumbs off her side of the dinner-napkin.

For one-half only of Gwenna now seemed to note that they were eating crusty loaf and drinking cider out of doors between a lupin-blue sky and a flowerful meadow; the other was conscious of nothing but her companion; of the clear friendliness of his eyes, those eyes of Icarus! Of his deep and gentle voice saying, "Mind if I smoke? You don't, I know," of those brown hard-looking forearms from which he had not troubled to pull down the sleeves, of his nearness.

Suddenly he came nearer still.

He had not stopped talking of his aeroplane, but she hardly remembered that she had asked him the meaning of one of the expressions that he had used.

He was repeating it.

"'Camber?' ... Well, it's a curve. A curve like——" He glanced about for an example of the soft, end-wise curve on the great wings of an aeroplane; his eyes passing quickly from the green hedge to the ground, to the things on the picnic cloth, to Gwenna Williams's small hand as it rested in the grass.

She wondered, thrilled, if the young Airman were actually going to take hold of her hand.

He did take her hand, as simply as he had taken the silver cup from it. He bent it over so that her wrist made a gentle curve. He passed his own large fingers across it.

"Yes; there—that's the curve," he said. "Almost exactly."

It might have been a caress.

But, done as he did it, the light movement was nothing of the kind. Instinct told the girl that. It wasn't her small and soft and pink-palmed hand that he was thinking of holding. She looked at him as he said, "That's the curve," and she caught a gleam of quickened interest in his eyes. But in one mortified flash she knew that this had nothing to do with her. She guessed that at this moment he'd forgotten that there was a girl sitting there beside him at all.

And she knew why.

Angrily she said to herself, "He's thinking of nothing but that old machine of his! And I do—yes, I do, do hate her!"

Then she sat for a moment still as the elm-trunk against which she'd been leaning.

She had been struck thus motionless by a thought.

Something had been brought home to her by that sharp and sudden twinge of—Jealousy!

Yes! She knew now! What she felt, and must have been feeling for days past, was what they meant by falling in love.

"That's what I've done!" she thought rapidly; half in consternation, half in delight. "It's beginning to happen what Mr. Swayne was talking about at that tea: the Girl or the Flying Machine!"

She glanced towards the gap in the hedge as if to look at the car that had brought them, motionless by the road-side; she turned her face away from the Airman, who sat lighting a pipe with the shadows of the elm-branches dappling his fair head and shirt-sleeved shoulders.

She was blushing warmly at her own thoughts.

"It's only the flying-machine he cares about! He does like me, too; in a way.... If only he'd forget that other for a minute! But if he won't," thought Gwenna, happening upon an ancient piece of feminine philosophy, "I'd rather have him talking about her than not talking to me at all!"

She spoke aloud, sedately but interestedly.

"Oh, is that a camber?" That light touch of his seemed still upon her wrist, though he had withdrawn it carelessly at once. She paused, then said, "And what was that other thing, Mr. Dampier? Something about an angle?"

"A dihedral angle?" he said, drawing at that pipe. "Oh, that's the angle you see from the front of the thing. It's—look, it's like that."

This time it was not her hand he took as an illustration. He pointed, pipe in hand, to where, above the opposite hedge, a crow was sailing slowly, a vandyke of black across the cloudless blue.

"See that bird? It's that very slight V he makes; now."

"And this machine of yours?" persisted the girl, with a little twitch of her mouth for the rival whom he, it seemed, always thought of as "the P.D.Q." and whom Gwenna must always think of as "the Fiancée." She wondered where it lived, the creature that meant all to him. She said, "Where—where d'you make that machine?"

"Oh, I'm afraid it isn't a machine yet, you see. It's only a model of one, so far. You know, like a model yacht," he explained. "That's the worst of it. You see, you can make a model do anything. It's when you get the thing life-size that the trouble begins. Model doesn't give a really fair idea of what you've got to get. The difficulties—it's never the real thing."

Gwenna thought, "It must be like making love to the person you aren't really in love with!" But what she said, with her hand stripping a spike of flowering grass, was, "I suppose it's like practising scales and all that on a mute piano?"

"Never tried", he said. Then: "The model's at my own place, my rooms in"——here he broke off with a laugh. He looked straight into her face and said, still laughing, and in a more personal tone:

"Not in Victoria Street. I say, you spotted that that place wasn't mine, didn't you?"

"Leslie 'spotted' and said so, afterwards," admitted Gwenna demurely, picking and sniffing at a piece of pink clover before she fastened it into her white blouse. "I did think at the time that it wasn't—wasn't the sort of place where you'd find a man living who did things, like."

"Rather rough on old Hugo."

"Well, but does he do things?"

"He doesn't have to. He'd be all right if he did. Sweat some of that beef off him, give him something to think about," averred his cousin, carelessly knocking out his pipe against the heel of his shoe. "But, you know, my place is in Camden Town; most inferior. Three rooms over a paper shop; two small cubby-holes where I sleep and eat, and a rather bigger one where I keep the 'P.D.Q.' stuff. I couldn't have you there that Sunday."

"Why not?" Gwenna asked sharply, and jealous again. It was almost as if the Fiancée had said to him, "No, not here!"

"Because," he said with a chuckle, "because at the last moment, when I'd got the tea ready and everything"—he tossed his fair head back—"a fall of soot down the chimney! Everything in the most ghastly mess! Pitch black wherever you put a finger. I simply couldn't—it was four o'clock then; I expect you both thought it rotten of me. Still," he concluded, rather ruefully, "I couldn't give you the sort of polite tea Hugo can, anyhow."

"I don't want polite teas!" Gwenna protested, looking round at the field where she had feasted as if in Elysium. "You don't suppose I care for things all grand like that, do you?"

He responded, "Would you care to see my Camden Town place, then, and the model? You and Miss Long. It's quite near you, you know."

"Yes, I should," said Gwenna quietly, stripping her grass.

How could he, she wondered, ask if she "cared" for these things that opened out new worlds to her? If he only knew, just to be with him was part of that new, soaring freedom which to her was summed up in the idea of flying! This, she felt, was flying. She didn't care, after all, if there were no other flying that afternoon. Care? She wouldn't mind sitting there until the sun slipped slowly downwards towards the western hedge and the moon-daisies closed in the tall grass, and clouds of other tiny flying creatures poised and hovered above them. She wasn't sorry that the mechanic did not return in haste to minister to that broken-down car. When she did remember about it, it was almost to hope that he would not be back! Not just yet! Not to put an end to this golden afternoon of talk that, trivial as it was, seemed to her to be the endowment of a new faculty, and of comradeship that was as beguiling and satisfying as that of her bosom-chum, Leslie. Only newer, only more complete. So it seemed to Gwenna, as the shadows moved further up the grass where she sat with her new boy-friend.

For it is a commonplace that in all comradeship between man and woman passionate love claims a share. But also in all passionate love there is more comradeship than the unimaginative choose to admit; there is a happy inner meaning to the cottage phrase, "To keep company with."

What he thought about it she did not know. Except that he surely must like talking to her? He could not go on like this out of politeness.

Ah, besides—! Besides, she knew, without reasoning about it, that, even with that absorbing interest of the aeroplane in the background, he did like her. Just as Leslie, her other friend, who also knew so much more than she did, had liked her at once.

"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.

It was jolly, he thought, to find a girl who wasn't in the least bored by "Shop." She was a very jolly Little Thing. So sensible. No nonsense about her, thought the boy.

And she, when at last they rose and left the place, threw a last look back at that patch of sky above the hedge, where the black crow had made a dihedral angle, at that brooding elm, at that hay field, golden in the level rays, at that patch of dusty road where the car had pulled up, at that black telegraph-pole where he had hung up his coat. That picture was graven, as by a tool, into the very heart of the girl.

At the end of an expedition that a young woman of more experience and less imagination would have pronounced "tame enough," Gwenna, bright-eyed and rosy from her day in the sunshine, could hardly believe that a whole lifetime had not elapsed since last she'd seen the everyday, the humdrum and incredibly dull Club where she lived.

She burst into her chum's bedroom as Leslie was going to bed.

"Taffy—back at last?" smiled Leslie, between the curtains of black hair on either side of her nightgown. "How's flying?—What?" she exclaimed, "you didn't go up at all? Broke down on the way to Brooklands? I say! How rotten for you, my poor lamb. Had anything to eat?"

"I think so—I mean, rather! He gave me a lovely lunch on the road while we were waiting for the man to mend the car—and then we'd tea at a cottage while he was doing it—and then there wasn't time to do anything but come back to town," explained Gwenna breathlessly, untying her scarf; "and then we'd sort of dinner at the inn before we started back; they brought out a table and things into the garden under the trees."

"What did you have for dinner?"

"I don't know. Oh, there were gooseberries," said Gwenna vaguely, "and a lamp. And the moths all came. Oh, Leslie! It's been so splendid!" She caught her breath. "I mean, it was dreatful about no flying, but——"

"Glad the afternoon wasn't entirely a washout," said Miss Long, in an even voice as she plaited her hair.

"By the way, did the Dampier boy give you back that locket of yours?"

"I forgot all about it," said Gwenna, picking up the head of pink clover that had fallen out of her blouse. "I'll ask him next time. He's going to take me up soon, you know, again."

Just as an alarm is "set" to sound at some given hour, so the whole of the girl's innocent being was set, to wait and wait for that "next time" of meeting him—whenever it should be.

CHAPTER X

LESLIE, ON "THE ROOTS OF THE ROSE"

Leslie Long was lounging in a rickety deck-chair under the acacia tree that overshadowed the small lawn behind the Ladies' Residential Club. Miss Long looked nonchalantly untidy and her hair was coming down again. But she had an eye to an occasion on which she meant to shine. She was carefully darning a pair of silk stockings, stockings she was to wear with her all-mauve Nijinski rig at a costume dance in a week's time. She was looking forward to that dance.

It was a late Saturday afternoon, a fortnight after that Saturday that Gwenna Williams had spent in the country with the Dampier boy. Most of the girls in the Club were out somewhere now. Only one of the students from the College of Music was practising Liszt's "Liebestraum." Presently however, a sunshine-yellow jersey coat appeared on the steps at the back entrance of the Club. Gwenna Williams was looking out. She saw her chum in the garden and ran down to her; dropping upon the lawn at her feet, and nestling her curly head down upon the lengthy knee that supported the darning-basket.

Gwenna's small face looked petulant, miserable. She felt it. Leslie, to whom, of course, the other girl was as an open book, asked no question. She left that to Gwenna, who had never, so far, made any spoken admission of what had happened—or not happened—since the evening when they had dressed together to go to that dinner-party at the Smiths'. It was Gwenna who asked the first question.

With a stormy and troubled sigh, she broke out, à propos of nothing: "How is one to make him? I mean how is one ever to get a young man to like one if he hardly ever sees one?"

Leslie looked down at her over the second mauve stocking that she was drawing over a yellow wooden darning mushroom.

"Tut," said Leslie, with her usual mock unction. "What is all this about 'getting' a young man to like one? What an expression, my love. And, worse; what a sentiment! Surely you know that men (nice men) think very lightly of a girl who does not have to be wooed. With deference, Taffy. With reverence. With hovering uncertainty and suspense and—er—the rest of that bag of tricks."

The soft, persistent notes of the "Liebestraum" coming through the open Club windows filled a short pause. Leslie threaded her needle with mauve silk, then took up her mushroom—and her theme—once more.

"Men care little for the girl who drops like a ripe plum (unripe fruit being obviously so much sweeter) into their mouths. (Query, why go about with their mouths open?) Not so. The girl who pleases is the girl who is hard to please."

A small discouraged sigh from Gwenna, as she sat there with her yellow jersey coat spread round her like a great dandelion in the grass.

"Oh, but supposing she isn't hard to please?" she faltered. "Supposing somebody pleased her awfully? If he'd let her, I mean—oh, I daresay you think I'm dreadful?"

"You outrage my most sacred what's-their-names—convictions, Taffy," declared Leslie, solemnly running her needle in and out of the stretched silk. "How many times must you be told that the girl a man prizes is she who knows how to set the very highest Value upon herself? The sweetly reserved Girl who keeps Him Guessing. The ter-ruly maidenly type who puts a Barrier about herself, and, as it were, says, 'Mind the barbed wire. Thus far—unless it's going to be made worth my while, for good.' Haggling little Hebrew!" concluded Miss Long.

For the girl at whom everybody is shocked has standards of her own. Yes! There are things at which she, even she, is shocked in turn.

Leslie, speaking of that other, belauded type, quoted:

"'Oh, the glory of the winning when she's won!'

(per-haps!)."

And in her voice there was honest disgust.

"No, but Leslie! Stop laughing about it all! And tell me, really, now—" appealed the younger girl, leaning an arm upon her friend's knee and looking up with eyes imploring guidance. "You've known lots of men. You've had them—well, admiring you and telling you so?"

"Thank you, yes," said Leslie, demurely darning. "You mightn't think it, to look at me in this blouse, but I have been—er—stood plenty of emotional drinks of that kind."

"Then you know. You tell me—" pleaded Gwenna, pathetically earnest. "Is it true that men don't like you if they think you like them very much?"

Leslie's impish face peeped at her over the silk stocking held up over the mushroom. And Leslie's mouth was one crooked scarlet curve of derision.

But it straightened into gravity again as she said, "I don't know, Taffy. Honest injun! One woman can't lay down rules for another woman. She's got to reckon with her own type—just pick up that hairpin, will you—and his. I can only tell you that what is one man's meat is—another man's won't meet."

Gwenna, at her knee, sighed stormily again.

Leslie, rearranging herself cautiously in the insecure deck-chair, put a finger through one of Gwenna's curls, and said very gently, "Doesn't the Dampier boy come to meet it, then?"

Gwenna, carnation red, cried, "Oh no! Of course not. I wasn't thinking of him."

In the same breath she added shamefacedly, "How did you know, Leslie? You are clever!" And then, in a soft burst of confidence, "Oh, I have been so worrying! All these days and days, Leslie! And to-day I felt I simply had to tell you about it—or burst! I haven't really been able to think of anything but him. And he—he hates me, I know."

She used that word to console herself. Hate is so infinitely less discouraging than polite indifference!

Leslie glanced very kindly at the flushed face, at the compact yet lissom little body sitting up on its heels on the Club lawn. She asked, "Doesn't the creature look at you? The other day when he took you out and broke down the motor? Didn't he then?"

"Yes, he did," admitted Gwenna, "a little."

"That's a start, then. So 'Cheer up, Taff, don't let your spirits go down,'" hummed Leslie. "Ask your Fräulein at the works if she knows an excellent slang German phrase for falling in love. 'Der hat sich aber man ordentlich verguckt?' 'He's been and looked himself well into it'—I am glad the Dampier boy did look. It is engendered in the eyes, as poor old Bernard Shaw used to say. It will be all right."

"Will it, d'you think? Will it?"

Gwenna, kneeling beside the dishevelled, graceful figure with its long limbs stretched out far beyond the deck-chair, gazed up as if into the face of an oracle.

"What do I do," she persisted innocently, "to make him look—to make him like me?"

"You don't 'do.' You 'be,' and pretty hard too. You, my child, sit tight. It's what they call the Passive Rôle of Woman," explained Leslie, with a twinkle. "Like this." And she drew out of her darning-basket a slender horseshoe-shaped implement such as workwomen use to pick up a dropped needle, painted scarlet to within half an inch of its end. She held it motionless a little away from her darning. There was a flash in the sunlight and a sharp little "click" as the needle flew up and clung to the magnet.

"D'you see, Turtle-dove?"

"Yes; but that isn't what you seemed to be talking about just now," objected Gwenna. "You seemed to think that a girl needn't mind 'doing' something about it. Letting a person see that she liked him."

"That isn't 'doing.' A girl can get in such a lot of useful execution—excuse my calling spade work spade work—all the time she is going on being as passive as—as that magnet," pronounced the mentor. "Of course you've got to take care to look as nice as you know how to all the time.

"And here you score, Miss Williams. Allow a friend to say that you're not only as pretty as they make 'em, but you know how to take care that you're as pretty as they're made!"

The younger girl, puzzled, asked the difference.

"I mean that you've cultivated the garden, and haven't got to start digging up the weeds and sweeping the lawn five minutes before you expect the garden-party," explained Leslie, in the analogies that she loved. "Some girls don't seem to think of 'making the most of themselves' until the man comes along that they want to make much of them. Then it's so often a scramble. You've had the instinct. You haven't got your appearance into any of the little ways that put a man off without his knowing quite what he's been put off by. One excellent thing about you——"

"Yes?" said Gwenna, rapt, expectant.

The particular unsolicited testimonial that followed was unexpected enough.

"For one thing, Taffy, you're always—washed!"

"Why, of course. But, Leslie—surely—so's everybody!"

"Are they?" ejaculated Miss Long darkly. "They think they are. They simply haven't grasped how much soap and water and loofah go to that, in big towns. Half the girls aren't what I call tubbed. How many of them, with bathrooms a yard from their bedrooms, bother to have a scrub at night as well as in the mornings? It's at night they're grimy, Taff. It's at night they leave it on, powder and all, to work into themselves until that 'unfresh' look gets chronic. My dear, I tell you that the two-bath-a-day rule would give us much less of the Lonely-and-Neglected Women Problem. There!"

Gwenna Williams, twisting between finger and thumb the stalk of a daisy she had picked off the lawn, murmured something about it's being funny, love having anything to do with how often a girl washed!

"Of course you think Leslie is revoltingly unpoetic to suggest it. But it's sound enough," declared the elder girl. "Flowers don't look as if 'anything to do with' earth had ever touched them, do they? But aren't their roots bedded deep down in it right enough? All these hints I give you about Health and Body-culture, these are the Roots of the Rose. Some of them, anyhow. Especially washing. I tell you, Taff"—she spoke sepulchrally—"half the 'nice' girls we know don't wash enough. That's why they don't get half the attention they'd like. Men like what they call a 'healthy-looking' girl. As often as not it simply means the girl happens to be specially clean. Beauty's skin-deep; moral, look after your skin. Now, you do. No soap on your face, Taff?"

"No; just a 'clean' after washing, with Oatine and things like that."

"Right. Costs you about fourpence a week. It might cost four guineas, to judge from the economical spirit of some girls over that," said Leslie. "Then, to go on with this grossly material subject that is really the root of Poetry, do you shampoo your hair nice and often? It looks thick and soft and glossy and with the curls all big, as if you did."

"Oh, yes, I do. But then that's easy for me; it's short."

"Mine's long enough, but I do it religiously every fortnight. Pays me," said Miss Long candidly as she went on working. "Untidy it may be, but it does feel and smell all right. One of my medical students at the hospital where I trained for five minutes—the boy Monty, the Dean's son—he said once that the scent of my hair was like cherry-wood. 'Course I didn't confide in him that I watered it well with bay rum and rosemary every night. Better than being like Miss Armitage, the suffragette-woman here, who's so nice-minded that she's 'above' pampering the body. What's the consequence? She, and half the girls here, go about smelling—to put it plainly—like cold grease and goloshes! Can they wonder that men don't seem to think they'd be—be very nice to marry?"

"Some suffragettes, and sort of brainy women," hesitated Gwenna, "are married."

"Yes; and have you observed the usual type of their husbands?" scoffed Leslie. "Eugh!"

Gwenna, set upon her own subject, drew her back with innocent directness to the matter in hand.

"What else ought one to do? Besides lots of washing, besides taking care of one's hair and skin?"

"One's shape, of course," mused Leslie. "There you're all right. Thank goodness—and me—that you've left off those weird, those unearthly stays you came up to town in. My dear, they were like a hamper strapped round the middle of you and sending your shoulders up, squared, into your ears! You've got a pretty slope there now, besides setting free all your 'lines.' I suppose elastic has pretty well solved the great corset question at last."

"Thirty shillings was a dreat-ful lot to give for just an elastic belt," murmured Gwenna, with her little hand at her supple waist. "Still, you said I must, even if I didn't have a new blouse over it for eighteen months." Again she looked up for guidance. "What else? What's a good thing, Leslie? About clothes and that?"

"Oh, child, you know it all now, practically. Let's see—shoes"—she glanced at the tiny brown one half-tucked under Gwenna's knee. "Boots and shoes men seem to notice as much as any other part of your get-up. Attractive shoes, even with an unfashionable skirt, will pull you through, when shabby shoes would ruin the look of the smartest rig. They see that, even when they've no idea what colour you've got on."

She went on to another hole in the stocking and continued: "As for colours, a man does seem to notice 'a girl in black,' or all-white, or pale blue. I read once that pale blue is 'the sex colour'—couldn't tell you, never worn it myself. Managed well enough without it, too!" mused Leslie. "Then 'a girl in pink' is very often a success in the evening. Men seem to have settled vaguely that pink is 'the pretty girl's colour.' So then they fondly imagine that anything that dares to wear it must be lovely. You needn't yet. Keep it for later. Pink—judicious pink—takes off ten years, Taffy!"

"I—I suppose I shall still care what I look like," murmured the young girl wistfully, "at thirty-two...."

"Pearl of Wisdom Number Forty-eight: When in doubt, wear the coat-and-skirt (if it's decently cut) rather than the frock," decreed Leslie. "White silk shirts they seem to like, always. (I'm glad I weaned you of the pin-on tie, Taffy. It always looked like 'sixpence-three-farthings.' Whereas you buy a piece of narrow ribbon for 'six-three,' you tie it, you fasten it with a plain silver brooch to your shirt, and it looks good.)"

"I'll remember," murmured Gwenna devoutly, from the grass.

Leslie said, "One of the housemaids here—(never stoop to gossip with the servants, dearest. It is so unhelpful and demoralising to both classes)—one of the housemaids once told me that her young man had told her that 'nothing in the wide world set a young woman off like a nice, fresh, clean, simple shirt blouse, same as what she was wearing then!' Of course, he was a policeman. Not an aviator or a dean's son. But when it comes to a girl in the case, I expect they're 'brothers under their skins,'" said Leslie Long.

Husky with much talking, she cleared her throat.

"Pearl of Wisdom Number Forty-nine: Be awfully careful about your collar, the ends of your sleeves and the hem of your skirt. (Keeping a strong force on the Frontier; that is always important.) Don't ever let your clothes be 'picturesque,' except for indoors. A man loathes walking along beside anything that flaps in the wind, or anything that looks like what he calls 'fancy dress.' Outside, don't wear anything that you can't skip easily on to the last bus in. Don't have 'bits' of anything about you. Try to be as neat as the very dowdiest girl you know, without the dowdiness. Neatness, my belovèd sisters, is the—— (Here am I talking like this; but why," she interrupted herself, laughing, "why aren't I neater myself when in mufti? I mean, when there's nobody about? 'In time of Peace, prepare for War.' It would be better. Might get my hair out of its habit of descending at the wrong moment.) And then, then, when all your good points are mobilised, you wait for the Enemy."

"The enemy?" said little Gwenna, doubtfully.

"Yes. The Man. The opposing force, if you like. You can think and think and wish and wish about him then until the whole air about you goes shivery-quivery with it. 'Creating an atmosphere' is what they call it, I believe. And get him well into the zone of that," advised Leslie. "For it's no use the magnet being a magnet if it doesn't allow itself to get within miles of a needle, is it? Might as well be any old bit of scrap-iron. Plenty of girls—nice girls, I mean—not like that deplorably vulgar Miss Long. What she's doing in a Club that's supposed to be for ladies I don't know. The horrid things she says! Bad! Bad form! And I'm sure if she says those here, she must have heaps of other worse things she could say, and probably does, to some people! Er—oh, where was I? Ah, yes!" rattled on Leslie, with her black head flung against the striped canvas back of the chair, her eyes on her surprisingly neat darning. "I was going to say—plenty of nice girls muff everything by putting too much distance that doesn't lend enchantment to the view between themselves and the men that aren't often sharp enough to deserve being called 'the needle.' Don't you make the mistake of those nice girls, Taffy."

"Well, do I want to? But how can I help it? How can I even try to 'be' anything, if he isn't there to know anything at all about it? I don't see him! I don't meet him!" mourned the Welsh girl in the soft accent that was very unmistakable to-day. "It's a whole fortnight, Leslie, since that lovely day in the fields. It seems years. He hasn't written or anything. I've waited and waited.... And sometimes I feel as if perhaps I shouldn't ever see him again. After all, I never did see him properly before we went to your sister's that night. Oh, isn't it awful to think what little chances make all the difference to who one sees or doesn't see? I can't know for certain that I shall ever see him again. Oh, Leslie!"

Leslie cut her last needleful of lilac silk and answered in the most reassuringly matter-of-fact tone:

"But of course you will. If you want to enough. For instance—should you like to see him at this dance?"

"Dance?" inquired Gwenna, dazed.

"Yes. This fancy-dress affair that I'm doing these stockings for. (I won these in a bet from one of my Woolwich cadets.) This tamasha next week?"

"But—he isn't going, is he? And I'm not even asked."

"And can't these things ever be arranged?" demanded her chum, laughing. "Can do, Taffy. Leslie will manage."

"Oh—but that's so kind!" murmured the younger girl, overcome.

"Do you expect me not to be 'kind'? To another girl, in love? Nay, oh Taffy! I leave that to the 'nicest' of the girls who think it 'horrid' to think about young men, even. Gem of Truth Number Eighty: It isn't the little girl who's had plenty to eat who's ready to snatch the bun out of the hand of the next little girl," said Leslie. She rolled the silk stockings into a ball, and rose in sections from that sagging chair. "Leslie will see you're done all right. All that remains to be discussed is the question of what you're to wear at the dance."

This question Leslie settled as the two girls went for an after-supper stroll. They went past the summer crowd patrolling the Spaniards Road, past the patch of common and the benches and the pond by the flagstaff that make that part of Hampstead so like a bit of the seaside. It was a golden evening. In the hazy distance a small, greyish, winged object rose above the plane which was Hendon, and moved to the left towards the blue taper of Harrow Church, then sank out of sight again.

"There's one," sighed Gwenna, her eyes on the glowing sky, where the biplane had been circling. "He's in it, perhaps."

"Little recking what plans are now being made for his welfare by me," observed Miss Long, as the two girls descended the hill and found at last a birch thicket that was not held by Cockney lovers. She let herself down cross-legged into the bracken. The Welsh girl perched herself on a branch of the birch tree that was polished smooth as an old bench. Thus she sat among the stirring leaves, head on one side, listening, her babyish face looking down intent against the sky.

"Ah! That's you! 'A Cherub.' That's what your fancy dress is to be," pronounced the elder girl. "Just your own little crop-curled head with nothing on it; and a ruff of cherub's wings up to your chin. Those little wings off your hat will do beautifully. Below the ruff, clouds. Appropriate background for cherubs. Your misty-white frock with no sash this time, and one of those soap-bubble coloured scarves of Liberty gauze draped over it to represent a rainbow. Little silver shoes. Strictly speaking, cherubs don't have those, of course. But if you can't become a Queen of Spain—if you can't be realistic, be pretty. Your own, nearly-always expression of dreamy innocence will come in nicely for the costume," added Leslie. "Quite in keeping."

"I'm sure I'm not that," protested the Welsh girl, piqued. "I'm not what they call 'innocent.'"

"No, I don't think you are. 'What they call innocent' in a girl is such a mixture. It means (a) no sense of humour at all; (b) the chilliest temperament you can shiver at, and (c) a complete absence of observation. But I believe you have 'beneath your little frostings the brilliance of your fires,' Taffy. Yours is the real innocence."

"It isn't, indeed," protested the girl, who was young enough to wish to be everything but what she was. "Why, look at the way you say anything to me, Leslie!"

Leslie laughed, with a remoter glance. Then suddenly she dropped her black head and put a light caress on the corner of the sunshine-yellow jersey coat.

"Be as sweet always," she said, lightly too. "Look as sweet—at the dance!"

CHAPTER XI

THE HEELS OF MERCURY

This injunction Gwenna carried out to the letter a week later. Never had she looked so pretty as when she smiled at her own reflection in her bedroom mirror above the cherub's ruff of wings on the evening of the dance.

It was given by some wealthy theatrical people whose "set" often intermingled with that to which Hugo Swayne belonged. And it was held in a couple of big marquees that had been set up on the lawn behind their house; a lawn of which the banks sloped down to the willows that fringed the river. There was a houseboat as buffet. There were Japanese lanterns and fairy-lights. Red carpet had been put down to save costumes from dewy grass or gravel.

For this dance was held at the height of that brief and grotesque period in the English history when dancing and costume—more particularly when the two were combined—became an affair of national moment. That was the time when tickets for an Artists' Ball were gambled with even as stocks and shares; when prizes for costume were given of which the value ran into hundreds of pounds. When columns of responsible newspapers were given up to descriptions of some "brilliant carnival." When Society, the Arts, Commerce, the Stage and the Middle Class joined hands to dance the maddest ring-o'-roses round some mulberry bush rooted in Heaven knew what soil of slackness. That was the time when women who were mothers and able-bodied men were ready to fritter away the remnant of their youth on what could be no longer pleasure, since they chased it with such deadly ardour, discussing the lightest types of merrymaking as if thereupon hung the fate of an empire!

Even little cherub-headed Gwenna Williams found something disquieting about the sight of this throng as she scanned it with anxious eyes, for—no, HE hadn't come! He was late. Not here. Perhaps it was merely this that caused her to dislike the look of some of these other people? That buxomly-formed young woman of twenty-five tricked out in the costume of a child of three! That tall, fragile youth in black grave-clothes, mouthing falsetto patter! That pretty "lady" in spreading Georgian brocade and a white wig, from whose crimsoned lips there came presently a robust masculine shout! That Madame Potiphar in the—Good gracious!—it was another boy! No! Gwenna didn't like them, somehow.... Perhaps it was just because they were here and he, the only partner she wished for, had not arrived. Oh, supposing he were not coming, after all?

Under the canvas roof where garlands swung and an installation of electric light had been improvised, the crowd eddied and chattered and laughed from one end to the other of the marquee where the long tables were laid out. For it was a theatrical ball, late in beginning. Supper was to come first. Gwenna, sitting beside a Futurist Folly whom her friend Leslie had introduced vaguely as "one of my medical students," watched that supper-crowd (still he did not come), as they feasted, leaning across the tables to laugh and shriek to acquaintances. It was not the girls or the younger men who seemed most boisterous, but those well over thirty. This surprised her. And even when they were most unrestrained "they seemed," as the Welsh girl put it, "to be making themselves do it, like." ...

Then she saw, by an opening in the canvas of the marquee, the apparition of a steady man's figure, dead-white against the purple gloom outside. A figure erect and neatly-shouldered under the close linen jacket of a Continental waiter. Gwenna wondered where she had seen him before? In a photograph? Or perhaps attending to one of the tables at Appenrodt's, when she and Leslie had had tea after a matinée somewhere? She had seen that young waiter, whose appearance was in such arresting contrast to the bizarre costumes and painted faces of the noisy, laughing rabble about him. His face was restrained and grave as that of some very young Daniel at the feast of some modern Belshazzar.

Suddenly besides that still, watching apparition there came up another boyish figure—typically English, in ordinary evening dress, and tall, towering above the young German waiter of whom he was making some inquiry. For a second they stood so; the waiter glancinc up, the newcomer, Paul Dampier, with his blonde head tilted a little back, his eyes raking the crowd.

"Ah! he's come," cried Gwenna aloud, but unheard in the universal clatter. Her heart leaped....

But Paul Dampier, the airman, was swallowed up again almost directly in a forest of odd, luridly-coloured head-dresses. He had not seen her.

And she did not see him again until some time after supper was ended, and the throng was whirling and writhing in one-step and ragtime in the other marquee.

Gwenna had danced with an Apache, with a Primitive Man, with Mr. Hugo Swayne (in a mask and crazy-work domino as a Simultaneous Dynamism of Something), and she was standing waiting, one of a figure in a revived cotillon.

While the Viennese band swooped and tore through the waltz "Nights of Gladness" a sheet had been fetched and was held up at the end of the ballroom between a Morris-dancer and an incredibly handsome "Turco" (who presently revealed himself as Mr. Swayne's French engineer), as a screen before six of the girls. Six men were to be led up to it in turn; each to choose his partner by the feet that were just allowed to show below the sheet.

Soft laughter and twittering went on at the side where the half-dozen girls stood.

"I say," exclaimed a damsel dressed as an Austrian Peasant to her crinolined neighbour, "now we see why you were so anxious to explain why you were wearing scarlet——"

"Of course he'd know yours anywhere," retorted the next girl.

"Ssh! Play fair!" protested the next. "Mustn't be recognised by your voice!"

"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?

CHAPTER XII

THE KISS WITHHELD

He did not pass.

He stopped—Gwenna felt the touch of his finger on the silver tip of her shoe. All a-tremble with delight she moved aside, and stepped from behind the screen to face the partner who had chosen her.

"Hullo!" exclaimed Paul Dampier, with real surprise in his smile. "I didn't know it was you!"

Gwenna felt a little dashed, even as he slipped his arm about her and they began to waltz. She looked up into the blonde face that seemed burned so very brown against his dress-shirt, and she ventured, "You didn't know it was me? I thought that was why you chose me—I mean, I thought because I was somebody you knew——"

"Didn't know you were here. I never thought those were your feet!" he said in that adorably deep and gentle voice of his. Adding, as they turned with the turning throng, something that lifted her heart again, "I chose them because they were the prettiest, I thought."

It was simply stated, as a fact. But this, the first compliment he'd paid her, kept her silent with delight. Even as they waltzed, his arm about her rainbow scarf, the girl felt the strongest wish—the wish that the dance were at an end and she back in her bedroom at the Club, alone, so that she might think and think again over what he had said. He'd thought she had the prettiest feet!

"D'you think you could manage to spare me some others?" he asked at the end of that waltz. "You know, you're about the only girl here that I know except Miss Long."

"Leslie would introduce you to anybody you liked"—suggested little Gwenna, feeling very good for having done so. And virtue brought its reward. For with a glance about him at that coloured noisy crowd that seemed a handful of confetti tossed by a whirlwind, he told her he didn't think he wanted to be introduced, much. He wasn't really keen on a lot of people he'd never seen. But if she and Miss Long would give him a few dances——?

The girl from the country thought it almost too good to be true that she need not share him with any of these dangerously fascinating London people here, except Leslie!

In a pause they went up to where Leslie was standing near the band. Close beside her the Morris-dancer was wrangling with Hugo Swayne in his crazy-work domino, who declared, "Miss Long promised me every other dance. A week ago, my dear man. Ten days ago——"

Yes; Leslie seemed to be engaged for every dance and every extra. She tossed a "so sorry, Mr. Dampier!" over her shoulder, following it with an imperceptible feminine grimace for Gwenna's benefit. With the first bars of the next waltz she was whirled away by a tall youth garbed, becomingly enough, as a Black Panther. The room was still clear. The Black Panther and the boyishly slim girl in mauve tunic and tights waltzed, for one recurrence of the tune, alone....

Gwenna, looking after that shapely couple, knew who he was; Monty Scott, the Dean's son who had been a medical student when Leslie was at the Hospital. He had followed her to the Slade to study sculpture, and already he had proposed to her twice.

The tall and supple youth held Leslie, now, by his black-taloned gloves on her strait hips. Leslie waltzed with hands clasped at the back of his neck. Then, with a backward fling of her head and body, she twisted herself out of his hold. She waltzed, holding the flat palms of her hands pressed lightly to the palms of his. The music altered; Leslie varying her step to suit it. She threw back her head again. Round and round her partner she revolved, undulating from nape to heels, not touching him, not holding him save by the attraction of her black eyes set upon his handsome eyes, and of her red lips of a flirt, from which (it was evident!) the boy could not take his gaze. Once more she shook her purple-casqued head; once more she let him catch her about the hips. Over the canvas floor they spun, Leslie and Monty, black-and-mauve, moving together with a voluptuous swing and zest that marked them as the best-matched dancers in the room. Well-matched, perhaps, for life, thought Leslie's chum.... But no; as they passed Gwenna saw that the black eyes and the red mouth were laughing cynically together; she caught, through the music, Leslie's clear "Don't talk! don't talk when you're dancing, my good boy.... Spoils everything.... You can waltz.... You know you've never anything to say, Mont!"

"I have. I say——"

Leslie waltzed on unheeding. Whatever he had to say she did not take it seriously. She laughed over his shoulder to little Gwenna, watching....

Couple after couple had joined in now, following the swift tall graceful black shape and the light-limbed mauve one as they circled by. A flutter of draperies and tinsel, a toss and jingle of stage accoutrements; the dancers were caught and sped by the music like a wreath of rainbow-bubbles on the rise and fall of a wave.

Gwenna, the Cherub-girl, was left standing for a wistful moment by the side of the tall Airman in evening dress.

He said, through the music, "Who's your partner for this?"

She had forgotten. It was the Futurist Folly again. He had to find another partner. Gwenna danced with her Airman again ... and again....

Scarcely realising how it happened—indeed, how do these arrangements make themselves?—this boy and girl from a simpler world than that of this tinsel Bohemia spent almost the whole of the rest of that evening as they had spent that day in the country, as she would have asked to spend the rest of their lives together.

Some of the time they danced in the brilliant, heated marquee under the swinging garlands and the lamps. Then again they strolled out into the Riverside garden. Here it was cool and dewy and dim except where, from the tent-openings, there was flung upon the grass a broad path of light, across which flitted, moth-like, the figures of the dancers. Above the marquee the summer night was purple velvet, be-diamonded with stars. At the end of the lawn the river whispered to the willows and reflected, here the point of a star, there the red blot of a lantern caught in a tree.

Hugo Swayne went by in this bewildering stage, light-and-shade with a very naughty-looking lady who declared that her white frock was merely "'Milk,' out of 'The Blue Bird.'" In passing he announced to his cousin that the whole scene was like a Conder fan that he had at his rooms. Groups of his friends were simply sitting about and making themselves into quite good Fragonards. Little Gwenna did not even try to remember what Fragonard was. None of these people in this place seemed real to her but herself and her partner. And the purple dusk and velvet shadows, the lights and colours, the throb and thrill of the music were just the setting for this "night of gladness" that was only a little more substantial than her other fancies.

More quickly it seemed to be passing! Every now and again she exultantly reminded herself, "I am here, with him, out of all these people! He is only speaking to me! I have him to myself—I must feel that as hard as I can all the time now, for we shall be going home at the end of this Ball, and then I shall be alone again.... If only I could be with him for always! How extraordinary, that just to be with one particular person out of all the world should be enough to make all this happiness!"

With her crop-curled head close against his shoulder as they danced, she stole at her boyish partner the shy, defiantly possessive glance that a child gives sometimes to the favourite toy, the toy that focusses all his dreams. This was "the one particular person out of all the world" whose company answered every conscious and unconscious demand of the young girl's nature even as his waltz-step suited her own.

Yet she guessed that this special quiet rapture could not last. Even before the end of the dance the end of this must surely come.

It must have been long hours after the waltz-cotillon that they strolled down to a sitting-out arbour that had been arranged at the end of the path nearest the river. It was softly lighted by two big Chinese lanterns, primrose-coloured, ribbed like caterpillars, with a black base and a splash of patterned colour upon each; a rug had been thrown on the grass, and there were two big white-cane chairs, with house-boat cushions.

Here the two sat down, to munch sandwiches, drink hock-cup.

"I remembered to bring two glasses, this time," said Paul Dampier.

Gwenna smiled as she nodded. Her eyes were on those silver white-finned minnows of her feet, that he had called pretty.

He followed her glance as he took another sandwich. "Rather a good idea, wings to your shoes because you're supposed to be a cherub."

"Oh, but that's not what the wings were supposed to be for," she said quickly. "I only put those in at the waltz-cotillon so that——"

Here she stopped dead, wishing that the carpeted grass might open at those winged feet of hers and swallow her up!

How could she have given herself away like this? Let him know how she had wanted him to choose her! when he hadn't even known she was there; hadn't been thinking about her!

She flurried on: "S-so that they should look more like fancy-dress shoes instead of real ones!"

He turned his head, dark and clean-cut against the lambent swaying lantern. He said, out of the gloom that spared her whelming blush, "Oh, was that it! I thought," he added with a teasing note in his voice, "I thought you were going to say it was to remind me that I'd promised to take you flying, and that it's never come off yet!"

Gwenna, hesitating for a moment, sat back against the cushions of the wicker-chair. She looked away from him, and then ventured a retort—a tiny reproach.

"Well—it hasn't come off."

"No, you know—it's too bad, really. I have been most frightfully busy," he apologised. "But we'll fix it up before you go to-night, shall we? You must come." At this he was glad to see that the Little Thing looked really pleased.

She was awfully nice and sensible, he thought for the severalth time. Again the odd wish took him that had taken him in that field. Yes! He would like to touch those babyish-looking curls of hers with a finger. Or even to rumple them against his cheek.... Another most foolish and incomprehensible wish had occurred to him about this girl, even in her absence. Apropos of nothing, one evening in his rooms he had remembered the look of that throat of hers; round and sturdy and white above her low collar. And he had thought he would rather like to put his own hands about it, and to pretend—quite gently, of course—to throttle the Little Thing. To-night she'd bundled it all up in that sort of feather boa.... Pity.... She was ever so much prettier without.

Fellow can't say that sort of thing to a girl, though, thought the simple Paul.

So he merely said, instead, "Let me stick that down for you somewhere," and he leant forward and took from her the plate that had held her cress-and-chicken sandwiches. Then he crossed his long legs and leant back again. It was jolly and restful here in the dim arbour with her; the sound of music and laughter came, much softened, from the marquee. Nearer to them, on the water below the willows, there was a little splashing and twittering of the moor-hen, roused by something, and the scarcely audible murmur of the Thames, speeding past House-boat Country to London ... the workaday Embankment.... It was jolly to be so quiet....

Then, into the happy silence that had fallen between them, there came a sound—the sound of the crunching of gravel. Gwenna looked up. Two figures sauntered past down the path; both tall and shapely and black against the paling, star-sprinkled sky above the frieze of sighing willows. Then Leslie's clear, careless voice drifted to their ears.

"Afraid not.... Anyhow, what on earth would be the good of caring 'a little'?... I look upon you as such an infant—in arms——"

Here there was a bass mutter of, "Make it your arms, and I don't mind!"

Then Leslie's insouciant: "I knew you'd say that obvious thing. I always do know what you're going to do or say next ... fatal, that.... A girl can't want to marry a man when——"

Apparently, then, the Dean's son was proposing again?

As the couple of free-limbed black shadows passed nearer, Paul Dampier kicked his heel against his chair. He moved in it to make it creak more noisily.

Good manners wasted!

For Leslie, as she afterwards told her chum, took for her motto upon such occasions, "And if the others see, what matter they?"

Her partner seemed oblivious that there were any "others" sitting in the shadows. The couple passed, leaving upon the night-breeze a trail of cigarette-smoke (Leslie's), and an indistinguishable growl, presumably from the Black Panther.

Leslie's voice floated back, "Not in the mood. Besides! You had, last time, 'to soften the edges,' as you call it."

More audibly her partner grumbled, "What's a kiss you've had? About as satisfying as last summer's strawberry-ice——"

A mere nothing—the incident.

Yet it brought (or hastened) a change into the atmosphere of that arbour where, under the giant glowworms of lights swinging above them, two young people sat at ease together without speaking.

For Gwenna, envious, thought, "Leslie can make a man think of nothing but her, even when she's 'not in the mood!' I can't. Yet I believe I could, but for one thing. Even now I don't know that he isn't thinking about That Other——"

"That Other" was her rival, that machine of his that Gwenna had not mentioned all the evening....

It had come, she knew, that duel between the Girl and the Aeroplane for the first place in the heart of a Flying Man. A duel as old as the world, between the thing a man greatly loves, and that which he loves more greatly still. She thought of Lovelace who "loved Honour more." She thought of the cold Sea that robs the patient, warm-hearted women ashore, of the icy Pole whose magnetism drew men from their wives. The work that drew the thoughts of her Airman was that Invention that was known already as his Fiancée....

"Leslie says it's not as bad as if it were another woman, but I see her as a woman," thought the silent, fanciful girl, "I see her as a sort of winged dragon with a figure-head—aeroplanes don't have figure-heads, but this one seems to me to have, just like some of those vessels that come into the harbour at Aberdovey. Or like those pictures of harps that are half a woman. Smooth red hair she has, and a long neck stretched out, and a rather thin, pale, don't-care sort of face like that girl called Muriel. And—and eagle's talons for hands. That's how I see that Fiancée of his, with claws for hands that won't, won't ever let him go...."

A puff of wind knocked one of the lanterns above their heads softly against the other; the willows rustled silkily outside. Gwenna sat motionless, holding her breath. Suddenly her reverie had broken off with an abrupt, unspoken—"but it's me he's thinking of now...."

Paul Dampier had been lightly amused by that passing of the other couple. That friend of hers, Miss Long, was more than a bit of a flirt, he considered. This Little Thing wasn't. Couldn't imagine her giving a kiss as some girls give a dance; or even to "soften" a refusal.... Her mouth, he found himself noticing, was full and curly and exactly the colour of the buds of those fox-gloves that grew all over the shop at her place in Wales. It was probably softer than those curls of hers that he would (also) like to touch.

Idiotic idea, though——

But an idea which is transmittable.

Gwenna, thrilled by this message which she had caught by a method older and less demonstrable than Marconi's, realised: "He heard that, just now; that boy wanting to kiss Leslie.... He's thinking, now, that he might kiss me."

The boy scarcely at arm's length from her thought a little confusedly, "I say, though.... Rotten thing to do...."

The girl thought, "He would like to. What is he waiting about? We shall have to go directly——"

For the sky outside had been swiftly paling. Now that pure pallor was changing to the glow of Abyssinian gold. Dawn! From the marquee came a louder blare of music; two long cornet notes and then a rollicking tune—The old "Post Horn" Galop—the last dance. Presently a distant noise of clapping and calls for "Extra"! There would be no time for extras, she'd heard. They would have to go after this. People were beginning to go. Already they had heard the noise of a car. His chair creaked as he moved a little sidewards.

He told himself, more emphatically, "Beastly rotten thing to do. This Little Thing would never speak to me again——"

And the girl sat there, without stirring, without glancing at him. Yet every curve of her little body, every eyelash, every soft breath she drew was calling him, was set upon "making" him. What could she do more to make herself, as Leslie called it, a magnet? Love and innocent longing filled her to the eyes, the tender fox-glove buds of lips that could have asked for nothing better. Even if this were the only time! Even if she never saw him again!

Wasn't he going to set the crown upon her wonderful dream of a summer night?

"No, look here," the boy remonstrated silently with something in himself; something that seemed to mock him. He lifted his fair head with a gleam of that pride that goes so often before a fall. "Dash it all——"

"He will!" the girl thought breathlessly. And with her thought she seemed to cast all of her heart into the spell....

And then, quite suddenly, something happened whereby that spell was snapped. Even as she thought "he will," he rose from his chair.

He took a step to the entrance of their arbour, his shoulders blotting out the glowing light.

"Listen," he said.

And Gwenna, rising too, listened, breathlessly, angrily. He would not—she had been cheated. What was it that had—interfered? Presently she heard it, she heard what she would have taken for the noise of another of the departing motors.

Through the clatter from the last galop it was like, yet unlike, the noise of a starting car. But there was in it an angrier note than that.

It is angry for want of any help but its own. A motor-car has solid earth against which to drive; a steamship has dense water. But the Machine that caused this noise was beating her metal thews against invisible air.

It was an aeroplane.

"Look!" said Paul Dampier.

Far away over the still benighted land she rose, and into that glory of Abyssinian gold beyond the river. Gwenna, moving out on to the path, watched the flight. Before, she had wondered that these soaring things didn't come down. Now, she would have wondered if they had done so.

Steady as if running on rails, the aeroplane came on overhead; her sound as she came now loud, now soft, but always angry, harsh—harshness like that of a woman who lives to herself and her strivings, with no comradeship of Earth on which to lean. Against the sky that was her playground she showed as a slate-coloured dragonfly—a purple Empress of the Air soaring on and on into the growing dazzle of the day.

"Oh, it is beautiful, though," cried the girl on the path, looking up, and losing for that moment the angry sense that had fallen upon her of pleasure past, of the end of the song. "It is wonderful."

"Pooh, that old horse-bus," laughed Paul Dampier above her shoulder, and mentioned the names of the machine, the flyer in her. He could pick them out of the note of her angry song.

"That will be nothing to my P.D.Q.," he declared exultantly as they walked on up the path towards the marquee. "You wait until I've got my aeroplane working! That'll be something new in aviation, you know. Nearest thing yet to the absolute identity of the Man with the Machine."

He yawned a little with natural sleepiness, but his interest was wide-awake. He could have gone on until breakfast-time explaining some fresh point about his invention, while the girl in those little silver-heeled shoes paced slowly up the path beside him.... He was going on.

"Make all those other types, English or foreign, as clumsy as the old-fashioned bone-shake bicycle. Fact," he declared. "Now, take the Taube—Hullo——"

"Bitte," said a voice.

The German word came across a pile of plates deftly balanced upon a young man's forearm. That arm was clad in the sleeve of a trim white jacket, buttoned over a thick and compact little chest. The waiter's hair was a short, upright golden stubble, and another little stubble of gold sprouted upon his steady upper lip. He had come up, very softly, behind them.

He spoke again in excellent English.

"By your leave, sir."

Dampier made way for him, and he passed. Gwenna, with a little shiver, looked after him. The sight of the young waiter whom she had noticed at the beginning of the evening had given her an unreasonable little chill.... Perhaps it was because his softly-moving, white figure against those willows had loomed so like a ghost....

Dampier said, "Rotten job for a man, I always think, hanging about and picking up things for other people like that."

"Yes," said Gwenna, absently, sadly. It was the end now. Quite the end. They'd got to go home. Back to everyday life. The Club, the Works. Nothing to live for, except—Ah, yes! His promise that he would take her flying, soon....

Above in the glowing sky the aeroplane was dwindling—to disappear. The waiter, turning a corner of the dark shrubbery, had also disappeared as they passed. From behind the shelter of the branches he was watching, watching....

He was looking after Paul Dampier, the Airman—the inventor of the newest aeroplane.

CHAPTER XIII

THE FLYING DREAM

"Those dreams come true that are dreamed on Midsummer night!"

This saying Gwenna had read somewhere. But she had forgotten all about it until, on the night of June 24th, 1914, she dreamed the most vivid dream of all her twenty-two years.

Many people have that same dream—or versions of it—often in a lifetime. Scientists have written papers on the whys and hows of it. They tack a long name to it. But little Gwenna Williams had never heard of "levitation." To herself she called it afterwards "that flying dream."

It seemed to her that when it began she was still half-awake, lying in her narrow white bed with the blankets tossed on to the floor of her Club bedroom, for it was a sultry night and close, in spite of her window on to the garden being wide open and allowing what breeze there was to blow full upon the girl's face, stirring her curls on the pillow, the ruffle of her night-gown as she lay.

Suddenly a violent start ran over the whole of her body. And with that one jerk she seemed to have come out of herself. She realised, first, that she was no longer lying down, curled up in the kitten-like ball which was her attitude for sleeping. She was upright as if she were standing.

But she was not standing. Her feet were not resting on anything. Looking down, she found, without very much surprise, that she was poised, as a lark is poised, in mid-air, at some immeasurable height. It was night, and the earth—a distant hassock of dim trees and fields—was far, far below her.

She found herself moving downwards through the air.

She was flying!

Gently, gently, she sped, full of a quiet happiness in her new power, which, after all, did not seem to be something new, but something restored to her.

"Dear me, I've flown before, I know I have," said Gwenna to herself as she swooped downwards in her dream, with the breeze cool on the soles of her little bare feet. "This is as lovely as swimming! It's lovelier, because one doesn't have to do anything. So silly to imagine that one has to have wings to fly!"

Now she was nearer to earth, she was hovering over a dark stream of water with reflections that circled and broke. And beside it she saw something that seemed like a huge lambent mushroom set in the dim fields below her. This was a lighted tent, and from it there floated up to her faintly the throb and thrill of dance-music, the two long-drawn-out notes of the "Post Horn" Galop, the noise of laughter and clapping.... She wondered whom she would see, if she were to alight. But the Force in her dream bore her up again, higher, and away. She found presently that she had left the dancing-tent far behind, and that what streamed below her was no longer a river with reflections, but a road, white with dust, and by the side of it a car was standing idle by the dusty hedge. On the other side of the hedge, as she flew over, the grass was clean and full of flowers, and half-way up the field stood a brooding elm that cast a patch of shadow.

"Sunshine, now!" wondered Gwenna. "How quickly it's changed from night!"

She felt from head to foot her body light and buoyant as a drifting thistle-down as on she went through the air. Close beside her, against a bank of cloud, she noticed some black V-shaped thing that slanted and flapped slow wings, then planed downwards out of her sight. "That's that crow. A dihedral angle, they call it," said the dreaming girl. Her next downward glance, as she sped upwards now, without effort, above the earth, showed her a map of distant grey roofs and green trees, and something that looked like a giant soap-bubble looming out of the mist.

"St. Paul's! London!" thought Gwenna. "I wonder shall I be able to look down on our Westminster place."

Then, glancing about her, she saw that the scene had suddenly changed. She was no longer in the free air with clouds about her as she flew like a little white windblown feather with the earth small as a toy puzzle below. She was between walls, with her feet not further than her own height from the ground. Night again in a room. A long, narrowish room with an open window through which came the light of a street-lamp that flung a bright patch upon the carpet, the edge of a dressing-table, the end of a white bed. Upon the bed, from which the coverings had been flung down, there lay sleeping, curled up like a kitten, a figure in a white, ruffled night-gown, with a cherub's head thrown backwards against the pillow. Gwenna, looking down, thought, "Where have I seen her?"

In the next flash she had realised.

Herself!... Her own sleeping body that her dreaming soul had left for this brief flight....

A start more violent than that with which her dream had begun shook the dreamer as she came to herself again.

She woke. With a pitiful little "Oh," sounding in her own ears, she sat up in bed and stared about her Club bedroom with its patches of light from the street-lamp outside. She was trembling from head to foot, her curls were wet with fright, and her first thought as she sprang out of bed and to the door of that ghostly room was "I must go to Leslie."

But Leslie's bedroom was a story higher. Gwenna paused in the corridor outside the nearest bedroom to her own. A thread of light showed below the door. It was a Miss Armitage's, and she was one of the Club members, who wrote pamphlets on the Suffrage, and like topics, far into the night. Gwenna, feeling already more normal and cheered by the sense of any human nearness, decided, "I won't go to her. She'll only want to read aloud to me.... She laughed at me because I said I adored 'The Forest Lovers,' but what books does she like? Only those dreat-ful long novels all about nothing, except the diseases of people in the Potteries. Or else it'll be one of her own tracts.... Somehow she does make everything she's interested in sound so ugly. All those intellectual ones here do! Whether it's Marriage or Not-getting-married, you really don't know which would be the most dull, from these suffragettes," reflected the young girl, pattering down the corridor again. "I'll go back to bed."

She went back, snuggling under the clothes. But she could not go to sleep again for some time. She lay curled up, thinking.

She had thought too often and too long of that dance now three whole weeks behind her. She had recalled, too many times! every moment of it; every word and gesture of her partner's, going over and over his look, his laugh, the tone in which he'd said, "Give me this waltz, will you?" All that memory had had the sweetness smelt out of it like a child's posy. By this time it was worn thin as heirloom silver. She turned from it.... It was then she remembered that saying about the Midsummer Night's Dream. If that were true, then Gwenna might expect soon to fly in reality.

For after all her plans and hopes, she had not even yet been taken up by Paul Dampier in an aeroplane!

In that silent, unacknowledged conflict between the Girl and the Machine, so far scarcely a score could have been put down to the credit of the Girl. It was she who had always found herself put back, disappointed, frustrated. This had been by the merest accidents.

First of all, the Airman hadn't been able to ask her and Miss Long to his rooms in Camden Town to look at his model aeroplane. He had been kept hanging on, not knowing which Saturday-to-Monday Colonel Conyers ("the great Air-craft Conyers") was going to ask him down to stay at that house in Ascot, to have another talk over the subject of the new Machine. ("A score for the Machine," thought the girl; wakeful, tossing on her bed.)

She did not even know that the week after, on a glorious and cloudless Saturday, young Dampier, blankly unaware that there was any conflict going on in his world! had settled to ask "the Little Thing" to Hendon. On the Friday afternoon, however, his firm had sent him out of town, down to the factory near Aldershot. Here he had stayed until the following Tuesday, putting up at the house of a kindred soul employed at that factory, and wallowing in "Shop." ... Another win for the Machine!

The following Sunday the cup had been almost to Gwenna's lips. He had called for her. Not in the car, this time. They had taken the Tube to Golders Green; the motor-bus to Hendon Church; and then the path over the fields together. Ah, delight! For even walking over the dusty grass beside that swinging boy's figure in the grey tweed jacket was a joyous adventure. It had been another when he had presently stooped and said, "Shoelace come untied; might trip over that. I'll do it up," and had fastened her broad brown shoe-ribbon securely for her. Her shoes had been powdered white. He had taken his handkerchief out of his pocket and had flicked the dust off, saying, as he did so, in a tone of some interest, "I say, what tiny feet girls do have!"

("Pie for you, Taffy, of course," as Leslie had said later, when she'd heard of this. "Second time he'd noticed them.")

Gwenna, in a tone half pleased, half piqued, had told him, "All girls don't have them so small! And yet you don't seem to notice anything about people but their feet." She had walked on, delightedly conscious of his laugh, his amused, "Oh, don't I?" and his downward glance.... Wasn't this, she had thought, something of a score at last for the Girl!

But hadn't even that small score been wiped out on the flying-ground? There Gwenna had stood, waiting, gleeful and agitated; her mist-blue scarf aflutter in the brisk breeze, but not fluttering as wildly as her heart....

And then had come frustration once again! Paul Dampier's deep and womanishly-soft tone saying, "I say, I'm afraid it's going to be a bit too blowy, after all. Wind's rising all the time;" and that other giant voice from the megaphone announcing:

"Ladies and gentul Men! As the wind is now blowing forty miles an hour it will be im possible to make passenger flights!"

Oh, bitter defeat for the Girl! For, this time, there had been no idyllic picnic à deux to console her for any disappointment. There had been nothing but a rather noisy tea in the Pavilion, with a whole chattering party of the young Airman's acquaintances; with another young woman who had meant to fly, but who had seemed resigned enough that it was "not to be, this afternoon," and with half a dozen strange, irrelevant young men; quite silly, Gwenna had thought them. Two of them had given Gwenna a lift back to Hampstead in their car afterwards, since Paul Dampier had explained that he "rather wanted to go on with one of the other fellows"—somewhere! Gwenna didn't know where. Only, out of her sight! Out of her world! And she was quite certain, even though he hadn't said so, that he had been bent on some quest that had something to do with the Fianceé of his, the "P.D.Q.," the Machine!

CHAPTER XIV

AN AWAKENING

The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turned her pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after the starlings had been twittering and the milk-carts rattling by in the suburban road outside. She awoke, dispirited. She came down late for breakfast; Leslie had already gone off to her old lady in Highgate. Over the disordered breakfast-table Miss Armitage was making plans, with some of the other Suffrage-workers, to "speak" at a meeting of the Fabian Nursery. Those young women talked loudly enough, but they didn't pronounce the ends of any of their words; hideously slipshod it all sounded, thought the Welsh girl fretfully. Her world was a desert to her, this fine June morning. For at the Westminster office things seemed as dreary as they had at the Club. She began to see what people meant when they said that on long sea-voyages one of the greatest hardships was never to see a fresh face, but always the same ones, day after day, well-known to weariness, all about one. It was just like that when one was shut up to work day after day in an office with the same people. She was sick to death of all the faces of all the people here. Miss Butcher with her Cockney accent! Miss Baker with her eternal crochet! The men in the yards with their awful tobacco and trousers! Nearly all men, she thought, were ugly. All old men. And most of the young ones; round backs, horrid hands, disgusting skins—Mr. Grant, for instance! (with a glance at that well-meaning engineer, when he brought in some note for Mabel Butcher). Those swarthy men never looked as if they had baths and proper shaves. He'd a head like a black hatpin. And his accent, thought the girl from the land where every letter of a word is pronounced, his accent was more excruciating than any in Westminster.

"Needn't b'lieve me, if you don't want. But it's true-oo! Vis'ters this aft'noon," he was saying to Miss Butcher. "Young French Dook or Comp or something, he is; taking out a patent for a new crane. Coming in early with some swagger friends of his. Wants to be shown the beauties of the buildin', I s'pose. Better bring him in here and let him have a good look at you girls first thing, hadn't I? S'long! Duty calls. I must away."

And away he went, leaving Miss Butcher smiling fondly after him, while Miss Williams wondered how on earth any girl ever managed to fall in love, considering there was nothing but young men to fall in love with. All ordinary young men were awful. And all young men were ordinary.... Except, now and again, one ... far away ... out of reach.... Who just showed how different and wonderful a thing a lover might be! If one could only, only ever get near him!—instead of being stuck down here, in this perfectly beastly place——

As the morning wore on, she found herself more and more dissatisfied with all her surroundings. And for a girl of Gwenna's sort to be thoroughly dissatisfied predicts one thing only. She will not long stay where she is.

Impatiently she sighed over her typing-table. Irritably she fidgeted in her chair. This was what jerked the plump arm of Ottilie Becker, who was passing behind her, and who now dropped a handful of papers on to the new boards.

"Zere! Now see what you have made me do," said the German girl good-naturedly enough. "My letter! Pick him up, Candlesticks-maker."

"Oh, pick him up yourself," retorted Gwenna school-girlishly, crossly. "It wasn't my fault."

At this tone from a colleague of whom she was genuinely fond, tears rose to Miss Becker's blue eyes. Miss Butcher, coming across to the centre table, saw those tears.

"Well, really, anybody might apologise," she remarked reproachfully, "when they've upset anybody."

At this rebuke Gwenna's strained nerves snapped.

An Aberystwith Collegiate School expression rose naturally to her lips—"Cau dy gêg!" She translated it: "Shut up!" she said, quite rudely.

Then, the moment after she had given way to this little outburst of temper she felt better. She was ready to be on the best of terms again with her fellow-typists. They, as Miss Butcher would have said, "weren't having any." They turned offended backs upon her. They talked pointedly to each other, not to her.

"That's a precious long letter you've got written there, Baker," said Miss Butcher, helping to gather up the half-dozen thin foreign sheets, covered with neat, pointed German writing. "Is that to the beloved brother?"

Miss Becker nodded her plait-wreathed head as she put the letter that began: "Geliebter Karl!" into the grey-lined envelope.

"He likes to hear what they make—do—at the works. Always he ask," she said, "after what they do. And who come hier; and where everythings is kept."

"Gracious! I do believe he's a regular German spy, like in the magazines, this brother of yours," smiled Miss Butcher lightly. "Don't you give away any of our State secrets, Baker, will you? We'd be having the authorities, whoever they are, poking round and inquiring. Awful if England and your country went to war, wouldn't it?—and you were supposed to be 'the Enemy'!"

She spoke as if of something that was more fantastic than Gwenna's flying dream of the night before. The German typist answered in the same strain.

"If it was war, I would speak to Karlchen's regiment that your house in Clapham and your people should be saved," she promised. "But he is not thinking now of war; he interests himself very much for buildings (because our father is architect). And for maps of the river, and such. So I must write on him every week a long letter.... We go out to-day to have our lunch, yes?"

The two went out together towards Whitehall. The Welsh girl was left in Coventry—and the deserted offices.

She didn't want any lunch. She drank a glass of tepid tap-water from the dressing-room. She ate some strawberries, bought in their little flat basket as she had come along. Then, hatless, and in her thin, one-piece dress of grey linen, she strolled out into the yard for a breath of air.

It was empty and hot and sunny. Gwenna looked up from the wood-littered ground where the ubiquitous London pigeons strutted and flirted and "Croo—croo—do—I—do"-ed about her feet. Overhead, that giant lacework on its iron crochet-hooks looked as if its pattern had been drawn with a pen and black ink against the opaque blue-grey sky. The sight of that far-off pinnacle put into her head again the thought of flying.

"I don't believe that I shall ever be as high up as that, with the blue beneath me, like I've always wanted!" reflected the young girl, dolefully looking up. "I believe that last night in my dream is all the flying I'm ever going to have had!"

And again that longing took her. That pure longing to be high; above the Law that clogs the children of Man to the Earth from which he came. To feel the unfettered air above and below and about her all at once!... But what could she do to gratify the impulse even a little?

Only one thing.

She might climb.

The idea with which she started off on her mad prank was to climb up to that iron lattice of lacework; to run up that as a sailor climbs the rope-ladders of his masts, and thence from the very highest peak attainable to look down on London, even as last night she had looked down on it from her dream.

Her start was not in the open air at all, but from the bottom of the scaffolding inside, where it was all beams and uprights and floors of planks. It reminded Gwenna of being underneath the old wooden pier at Aberdovey, and looking up. She went up ladders, through trap-doors, walked over wooden floors to other ladders until she got up to the last trap-door and through it out of the shadow and the stuffiness to the sunshine and the fresh air again. She stood on the top platform of the gantry which supported that engine and the wheels that worked (she supposed) the iron lattice that was still far above her head.

Presently she would climb that. She knew that she could. She was never afraid of heights. Her head was steady enough. Her feet in their brown shoes were as sure as the feet of the tiny sheep that picked their way up the rocky steeps of her Welsh mountains. She could climb as well as any of the men ... but for the moment she rested, standing by the platform hand-railing, breathing in the freshened breeze.

The birds of the City—pigeons and sparrows—were taking their short flights far beneath her perch. All London was spread below her, as it had been in that flying dream, and with as strong a sense of security as in the dream she looked down upon it.

There, between the forests of chimney-pots, gleamed that highway of the Thames, blue-grey now as it reflected the sky, winding out of the distance that meant the clean, green country and the willows below the lawns where people had danced; flowing on into London that sullied it, and burdened it with her barges, and spanned it with her bridges, but could not stay it; on and out its waters passed towards Greenwich and the Docks and the tall ships and the North Sea!

And there on its bank was the office, the dwindled yard from which Gwenna had started. The men returning....

The whole place looked nothing more than a hen-run full of fowls. Their voices ascended, more loudly than she would have expected to hear from their diminished figures. How funny to see what midgets the creatures looked from here, and to remember how majestically important each considered himself! thought little Gwenna, forgetting that from the yard she herself, with her grey linen frock, her brown feet and ankles, must look no larger than a roosting pigeon.

She looked down, past the railing and the ends of timbers, feeling immeasurably aloof from everybody in her world. She wished she need never go down to it again.

"I've a good mind to give notice at the office, whatever, and go somewhere quite different!" she thought defiantly, and immediately she felt elated. A weight of depression seemed to have dropped from her already. Up, up went the feather-weight spirits of Youth. She had forgotten for this moment the longing and frustration of the last weeks, the exasperations of this morning, her squabble with those other girls. She had climbed out of all that....

Now, before she left this place, she would do something that none of the girls she knew would dare. She'd climb further.

She turned to take a step towards the crane.

Then something gave her a start as violent as that in which she had, that night before, been jerked out of her dream.

For now, into her absorbed musing there had broken without warning the sound of a voice. It had seemed to have come out of nothing, from behind her, and it had said, with a laugh deep and soft at once, "My machine? Oh, yes.... Good of you to remember her——"

Paul Dampier's voice!

Little Gwenna, with her back to the trap-door, and wrapped in her own thoughts, had heard nothing of the steps of five pairs of feet coming up the way that she had come. In the violence of her surprise of hearing a voice, so often heard in her daydreams now, here, in this unexpected place between sky and ground, she started so that she lost her balance.

The girl's foot slipped. She fell. She was half over the platform—one small foot and ankle stretched out over the giddy height as that crane was stretched. She clutched on the crook of a slender grey arm, the railing of the platform—So, for an agonised moment, she hung.

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!"

As it was, there were several things about that incident that the young girl—passionate and infatuated and innocent—did not know.

For one thing, there was the resolution that Paul Dampier took just after he had turned abruptly from her, had taken short leave of the others, and when he was striding down Whitehall to the bus that went past the door of his Camden Town rooms. And for another thing, there was the reason for that resolution.

Now, in the fairy-stories of modern life, it is (of the two principals) not always the Princess who has to be woken by a kiss, a touch, from the untroubled sleep of years. Sometimes it is the Prince who is suddenly stirred, jarred, or jolted broad awake by the touch, in some form or other, of Love. In Paul Dampier's case the every-day miracle had been wrought by the soft weight of that dove-breasted girl against his heart for no longer than he could count ten, by her sliding to the earth through an embrace that he had not intended for an embrace at all.

It hadn't seemed to matter what he had intended!

In a flock as of homing pigeons there flew back upon the young aviator all at once his thoughts of the Little Thing ever since he'd met her.

How he'd thought her so jolly to look at ("So sensible"—this he forgot). How topping and natural it had seemed to sit there with her in that field, talking to her, drinking with her out of one silver cup. How he'd found himself wanting to touch her curls; to span and squeeze her throat with his hands. How he'd been within an inch of summarily kissing that fox-glove pink mouth of hers, that night at the Dance....

And to-day, when he'd come to Westminster for another talk with that rather decent young Frenchman of Hugo's, when he hadn't thought of seeing the girl at all, what had happened? He'd actually held her clasped in his arms, as a sweetheart is clasped.

Only by a sheer accident, of course.

Yes, but an accident that had left impressed on every fibre of him the feeling of that warm and breathing burden which seemed even yet to rest against his quickened heart.

In that heart there surged up a clamorous impulse to go back at once. To snatch her up for the second time in his arms, and not to let her go again, either. To satisfy that hunger of his fingers and lips for the touch of her——

"Hold hard!" muttered the boy to himself. "Hang it all, this won't do."

For he had found himself actually turning back, his face set towards the Abbey.

He spun round on the hot pavement towards home again.

"Look here; can't have this!" he told himself grimly as he walked on, swinging his straw hat in his hand, towards Trafalgar Square. "At this rate I shall be making an ass of myself before I know where I am; going and falling in—going and getting myself much too dashed fond of the Little Thing."

Yes! He now saw that he was in some danger of that.

And if it did come to anything, he mused, walking among the London summer crowd, it wouldn't be one of these Fancy-dress-dance flirtations. Not that sort of girl. "Nor was he; really." Not that sort of man, he meant. Sort of thing never had amused him, much; not, he knew, because he was cold-blooded ("Lord, no!") but partly because he'd had such stacks of other things to do, partly because—because he'd always thought it ought to be (and could be) so much more—well, amusing than it was. This other. This with the Little Thing—he somehow knew that it would have to be "for keeps."

And that he couldn't have. Good Lord, no! There could be no question—Great Scott!

For yes, if there was anything between him and the Little Thing, it would have to be an engagement. Marriage, and all that.

And Paul Dampier didn't intend to get married. Out of the question for him.

He'd only just managed to scrape through and make "some sort of a footing" for himself in the world as it was. His father, a hard-up Civil engineer, and his mother (who had been looked askance at by her people, the Swaynes, for marrying the penniless and undistinguished Paul Dampier, senior)—they'd only just managed to give their boy "some kind of an education" before they pegged out. Lessons at home when he'd been a little fellow. Afterwards one of the (much) smaller public-schools. For friends and pleasures and holidays he had been dependent on what he could "pick up" for himself. Old Hugo had been decent enough. He'd asked his cousin to fish with him in Wales, twice, and he hadn't allowed Paul to feel that he was—the poor relation.

Only Paul remembered the day that Hugo was going back to Harrow for the last time. He, Paul, had then been a year in the shops, to the day. He remembered the sudden resentment of that. It was not snobbery, not envy. It was Youth in him crying out, "I will be served! I won't be put off, and stopped doing things, and shoved out of things for ever, just because I'm poor. If being poor means being 'out of it,' having no Power of any kind, I'm dashed if I stay poor. I'll show that I can make good——"

And, gradually, step by step, the young mechanic, pilot, aero-racer and inventor had been "making good."

He'd made friends, too. People had been decent. He'd been made to feel that they felt he was going to be a useful sort of chap. He'd quailed a bit under the eyes of butlers in these houses where he'd stayed, but he'd been asked again. That Mrs. What's-her-name (the woman in the pink frock at the Smiths) had been awfully kind. Introducing him to her brothers with capital; asking him down to the New Forest to meet some other influential person; and knowing that he couldn't entertain in return. (He'd just sent her some flowers and some tickets for Brooklands.) Then there was Colonel Conyers. He'd asked whether he (Dampier) were engaged. And, at his answer, had replied, "Good. Much easier for a bachelor, these days."

And now! Supposing he got married?

On his screw? Paul Dampier laughed bitterly.

Well, but supposing he got engaged; got some wretched girl to wait for——

Years of it! Thanks!

Then, quite apart from the money-question, what about all his work?

Everything he wanted to do! Everything he was really in earnest about.