She told him, and went on. She found the big central shop in a ferment

of activity. Mr. Ryan, striding out on some hurried errand, nearly

knocked her over. He called an "Awfully sorry, Miss Gwenna--Mrs.

Dampier, I mean," over his shoulder. She saw that his day of dalliance

was past, even had she been still "Miss Gwenna." He had less time for

Girl, nowadays. The frames of no fewer than four aeroplanes were set up

on the stocks; and out of the body of the most nearly completed one

there climbed the slight figure of the Aeroplane Lady. Her blue and

youthful eyes lighted up at the sight of the girl standing in the clear,

diffused light of the many windows and backed by the spinning shafting.

"Ah! You've arrived, Mrs. Dampier," she said briskly, using the new name

without a pause or a smile, for which Gwenna blessed her. "Thank Heaven

I shall have a reliable clerk again.... No end of correspondence now, my

dear. A sheaf of it waiting in the office. Come on and see to it now,

will you? And for goodness' sake remind me that I am 'theirs

obediently,' instead of merely 'truly,' to the Admiralty. I always

forget. If I were left to myself my letters would sound just like the

aviator's who wrote to the POWERS-THAT-BE: '_Commander So-and-So

presents his compliments and begs respectfully to submit that don't you

think it would be a jolly good thing if we started a repairing

shop?_'--somewhere or other. Well! Here we are, you see. Stacks of it!"

she went on as they reached that office where an airman's sweetheart had

first realised the idea that an aeroplane might mean a ship of war--war

in the clouds.

"We shall have as much work as we can get through now," said the

Aeroplane Lady. "Look at this order from the War Office. And this--and

this!"

For to all intents and purposes the War Office and the Admiralty had

"taken over" Mrs. Crewe's Aircraft Factory.

The place rang and echoed, long after the hours of the ordinary working

man's working day, with the clinking and whirring and hammering of those

labours that went to bring forth these great wings of War.

Some of the French mechanics whom Gwenna had known well by sight had

disappeared. They had been served with their mobilisation papers and

were now off to serve under the Tricolour.

One or two of the English fitters, who were Reservists, had rejoined.

One had enlisted.

But now, the Aeroplane Lady explained, the enlisting of any more of her

men had been discouraged. _They_ were too useful where they were. They,

with many other sturdy Britons who fretted because they were not to take

up other, riskier work on the other side of the Channel, were kept busy

enough preparing the arms which those other, envied men were to use.

It was for the encouragement of them and their fellow-workers in

Armament and Ammunition factories that a bundle of blue-lettered posters

came down presently to the Works.

Gwenna, once more arrayed in the grey-blue, dope-stiffened pinafore,

had the job of pinning up here and there, in the shops and sheds, these

notices. They announced to the Man at the Bench that he was as needful

to his country as the Man in the Trench. They gave out:

"YOU CAN HIT THE ENEMY AS HARD WITH

HAMMER AND RIVET AS YOU CAN WITH

RIFLE AND BULLET.

HIT HIM!

HURRY UP WITH THE SHIPS AND GUNS!"

* * * * *

And she, too, little Gwenna Dampier, clerk and odd-job-girl, felt

herself respond to the appeal. As she typed letters and orders, as she

heated dope, as she varnished for the men's handling those huge blue

prints with the white, spider's-web-like "working drawings," or as she

tested square inches of the fine wing-linen, she felt that she, too,

was helping in her way to hurry up with those needed ships and guns.

Was she not lucky in her job?

For always she was buoyed up by the notion that whatever she touched

might be of service, not only to the country which the Beloved was

serving, but to the Beloved himself. Who knew? He himself might have to

fly in any one of these very machines! Every least part, every atom of

metal about them bore the visible, indestructible stamp of the English

War Office. And Gwenna herself bore that unseen but indelible stamp of

her love to her absent lad in every inch of her pliant girl's body, in

every thought of her malleable girl's mind.

So the late summer weeks passed as she worked, glad in the thought that

any or all of it might be for him. She felt sorry for those women who,

when their man is away, have nothing but purely feminine work with which

to fill the empty days. Sewing, household cares, knitting.... She

herself knitted, snatching minutes from the twelve-o'clock dinner-hour

in the cottage with Mrs. Crewe to add rows to the khaki woollen

cap-comforter that she had started for Paul. It was just a detail in her

own busy life. But it struck her that for countless left-behind women

this detail remained all that they had to do; to knit all day, thinking,

wondering, fretting over the Absent.

"That must be so _awful_! I don't think I should want to _live_," she

told the Aeroplane Lady one dinner-hour, "if there wasn't something else

really wanted by the men themselves, that I could have to do with!

Every soldier's wife," said Gwenna, drawing herself up above the table

with a pretty and very proud little gesture which made Mrs. Crewe smile

a little, "I think every soldier's wife ought to have the chance of a

job in some factory of this sort. Or in a shop for soldiers' comforts,

perhaps. Like that woman has in Bond Street where I bought those

extra-nice khaki handkerchiefs for Paul. _She's_ always thinking out

some sort of new 'dodge' for the Front. A new sleeping-rug or

trench-boots or something. A woman can feel she's taking some part in

the actual campaign then. Don't you think so, Mrs. Crewe? But there

aren't many other things she can do," concluded the girl with that soft,

up-and-down accent, "unless she's actually a Red Cross nurse looking

after the wounded. There's nothing else."

"Oh, isn't there? Surely----" began the Aeroplane Lady. Then she

stopped, with a half-humorous, half-sad little smile in her eyes.

She was going to have suggested that the biggest Job that a woman can

achieve has, at the root of things, everything to do with the carrying

on of a campaign. Those English workmen in the shops were responsible

for the perfect and reliable workmanship of the ships and guns. It was

only the women of England who could make themselves responsible for the

soundness and reliability of the men of the next generation, their

little sons now growing up, to be perhaps the soldiers of the next war.

All this flashed through the mind of the Aeroplane Lady, who was also

the mother of a fighting airman.

But, on second thoughts, she decided that she would not say anything

about it. Not to this cherub-headed, guileless girl who bore Paul

Dampier's name, and who wore his glitteringly new wedding-ring on her

finger (that is, when she hadn't forgotten it, where it lay in the

soap-dish in the bathroom or hanging up on a peg in the Wing-room beside

her sunshine-yellow jersey coat. It was, as the newly-married Mrs.

Dampier explained, miles too big for her, and she hated getting it a

mass of dope).

So, instead of saying what she was going to say, the Aeroplane Lady

drank tea out of a workman-like-looking, saucerless Brittany cup with

two handles, and presently asked if there were anything exciting that

she might be allowed to hear out of the letter that had arrived that

morning from Mr. Dampier.

Those eagerly-looked-for, greedily-devoured letters from the young

Airman to his wife were uncertain qualities enough.

Sometimes they came regularly, frequently, even two in a day, for Gwenna

to kiss, and to learn by heart, and to slip under her pillow at night.

Then for days and weeks there would be nothing from him; and Gwenna

would seem to herself to be going about with her flesh holding its

breath in suspense all over her body.

That suspense was not (curiously enough) too agonised for his safety.

She had laughed quite easily the day that one of the older workmen had

said to her kindly, if tactlessly:

"Ah, Miss Williams--or ma'am, as I s'pose I ought to say--I do feel

sorry for you, I do. You here, same as when you was a single young lady.

Your young gentleman God knows where, and you knowing that as likely as

not you never _will_ see him again, p'raps."

"If I were not going to see him again," the girl had said tranquilly, "I

should know. I should feel it. And I haven't that feeling at all, Mr.

Harris. I'm one of those people who believe in presentiments. And I know

I _shall_ see him, though I don't know when."

That was the only trouble! When? _When?_ When would she have something

for her love to live on, besides just messages on lifeless paper?

Paul's letters were sometimes mere hasty scrawls. An "All's well," a

darling or so, and his name on a bit of thin ruled paper torn from a

note-book and scented vaguely with tobacco....

To-day it was a longer one.

"It's dated four days ago only, and it's just headed 'FRANCE,'" said

young Mrs. Dampier, sitting, backed by the cottage window, with the

level Berkshire landscape, flowering now into lines of white tents for

the New Army in training, behind her curly head. "He says:

"'Last week I had a day, if you like! Engaged with two Taubes in the

morning. Machine hit in four places. In the afternoon, as I was up

reconnoitring, I saw below me a railway train, immensely long,

going along as slow as a slug, with two engines. Sent in my report

to Head Quarters, and wasn't believed, if you please. They said

there couldn't be a train there. Line was destroyed. However, they

did condescend to go and look. Afterwards I was told my report was

of the greatest value----'

"There! Think of that," broke off Gwenna, with shining eyes.

"'And it's leaked out now that what I saw was a train crammed with

ammunition. Afterwards (same day) went and dropped bombs on some

works at--I'd better not say where!--and hope I get to know what

damage was done. I know one was a clinking shot. A great game,

isn't it?'

"_Isn't_ it!" murmured the girl who had shuddered so at her first

realisation of her lover as a possible fighter. But now, after these

weeks, she shrank no longer. Gradually she had come to look upon War as

a stupendous Adventure from which it would have been cruelty to shut him

out. She saw it now as the reward of his years of working, waiting,

experimenting. And she said to herself fancifully, "It must be because

I've 'drunk of his cup,' and now I've come to 'think his thoughts.' I

don't care what those suffragettes say about losing one's individuality.

_I_ do think it's a great game!"

She read on:

"'Got three letters and _Punch_ from you in the evening. Thanks

awfully. You will write to me all you can, darling, won't you? The

little wing is quite safe in my tunic-pocket. Give my love to Mrs.

Crewe and to your Uncle and to Leslie Long. Heard from old Hugo

that he was actually going to enlist. Do him lots of good.'

"Then he sort of ends up," said Gwenna, dimpling to herself a little

over the ending:

("'YOUR ALWAYS BOY.'),

"and then there's a postscript:

"'Wouldn't it be top-hole if I could get some leave to come over

and fetch the P.D.Q.? Guess the Censor will be puzzled to know who

_she_ is; who's your lady friend? in fact.

"'P. D.'"

"Thank you, Mrs. Dampier," said the Aeroplane Lady as she rose briskly

to return with her assistant to the Works. "Give him my love, too (if I

may), when you write. And I should like to tell you to write and ask

Leslie Long down to see us one Saturday afternoon," she added as they

came through the gap in the dusty hedge to the entrance road. "But

really we're too rushed to think of such relaxations as visitors!"

For since Gwenna had come back to the Works neither she nor her

employer had taken any sort of holiday. That sacred right of the English

worker, the "Saturday half-day off," existed no more at those busy

Aircraft Works. Just as if it were any ordinary day of the week, the

whistle sounded after the midday rest. And just as if it were any other

day of the week, Mrs. Crewe's men (all picked workers, of whom not one

happened to be a Trades Unionist) stacked up the bicycles on which

they'd ridden back from their meal at home in the near-by town, and

trooped into the shops. They continued to hurry up with those ships and

guns.

Again the whirring and the chinking and the other forge-like noises

would fill the place. Again the quick, achieving movements of clever

hands, black and soaked in oil, would be carried on, sometimes until,

from the training-camps on the surrounding ugly, useful plains, the

bugles had sounded "_Lights Out_." ...

CHAPTER X

LESLIE, ON "THE MOTLEY OF MARS"

Now, as it happened, Miss Leslie Long did not choose to wait for her

invitation to the Aircraft Works. Unasked and unexpected, she turned up

there the very next Saturday afternoon.

She was given a chair in that spacious, white,

characteristically-scented room where Mrs. Crewe and Gwenna were again

busy with the wings. She was told not to expect either of them to stop

work to look at her, but to go on talking and to tell them if there were

anything new going on in London.

"Anything? Why, everything's new," Leslie told them gaily.

She wore the mauve linen frock and the shady hat that had been her

bridesmaid's attire for Gwenna's wedding. And she was looking well,

Gwenna noticed, as she stole a glance at her chum; well, and happier

than she had seen Leslie look since the beginning of this eventful

summer.

Leslie then gossiped to them of the many changes in London. These are

now very ancient history to a whole nation. But at that time (in

September, Nineteen-fourteen) they sounded still strange enough to those

who lived out of town.

She spoke of the darkened streets. The bright, purposely-misleading

lights in the Park. Of the recruiting posters; the recruiting results.

Of the first of the refugees. Leslie's old lady had given hospitality to

two ladies, a mother and a daughter from Brussels, and it was Leslie's

new duty to translate English to them. Also of the departure of

regiments she talked....

"Of course there are only two classes into which you _can_ divide the

young men who aren't getting ready to go out," decreed Leslie, the

whole-hearted. "Either they're Objects of Pity, or else they're Objects

of Contempt."

"Come, come!" put in the Aeroplane Lady, laughing a little, but without

raising her eyes from the stretched canvas on the trestles before her.

"What about my men outside there?"

"I bet they envy the rawest recruit in K.'s Army!" declared Leslie. "The

most anaemic little plucky shop-assistant who's only just scraped through

on his chest-measurement and who's never spent so many consecutive hours

in the open air in his whole life before!" She patted the stately head

of the Great Dane as he stepped up to her from his big wooden kennel in

the corner, and went on to say how she loved the New Armies.

"We see plenty of their doings up at Hampstead now, Taffy," she said.

"'_The Heath has Armies plenty, and semi-warlike bands!_' Queen's

Westminsters coming up in sweaters and shorts to do Physical Ekkers on

the cricket-pitch. Swagger young men, some of them, too. Driving up in

cars. Wearing their Jermyn Street winter-sports kit of last year under

common privates' overcoats."

"Mars in motley!" said the Aeroplane Lady.

Leslie said, "It is a _mixture_! New Army Type Number One, Section A:

the boy who was born to be a soldier and bred to be a clerk. The fighter

who wouldn't have got a chance to _live_ if it hadn't been for this war.

The Dear Duck who's being taken to the water for the first time after

twenty years!... Then, of course, there's the New Army Type Number

Forty-three: the Honest Striver in Khaki, putting his back into learning

a job that wasn't ever meant to be his. Not one bit thrilled by the idea

of a scrap. No fun to him. Civilian down to his bones. But--'_It is his

duty, and he does_.'"

"All the more credit," the Aeroplane Lady reminded her quietly, "to the

born civilian."

"Yes, I know, Mrs. Crewe. One thoroughly respects him for it," agreed

the soldier's daughter warmly.

Adding meditatively, "But it's rather an effort to _like_ him as much as

the other kind!"

"Talking of duty, Mr. Grant has gone," said Gwenna as she worked. "You

know, Leslie: the engineer at our Westminster place who was always

talking to Mabel Butcher and then saying, 'Well! Duty calls. I must

away.' I'm _sure_ he said that before he went off to enlist. He's in the

R.E. And the office-boy that had such an _awful_ accent went with him.

_He's_ in the Halberdiers now; billeted in the country in some garage

with six other men."

"How funny! D'you know who one of the men is? My friend, Monty Scott,

the Dean's son," said Leslie, laughing again. "You remember him, Taffy,

at that dance? He wore that Black Panther get-up.... He came up to see

me, in uniform, last Sunday. I told him he'd only joined the Halberdiers

because he thought the touch of black suited him. Then he told me of his

weird billet in the country with these five other men. Two of them had

lately come out of prison, he said; and they were really awfully

interesting, comparing the grub they'd had there with what was served

out to them here. I asked him (Monty) how he was getting on. He summed

up the lot of the New Ranker rather well, I thought. He said, 'I've

_never_ been so uncomfortable or laughed so much in my life'!"

The Aeroplane Lady, working, said she thought he must be a dear.

"He is, rather," agreed the girl who had thrice refused to marry this

young man.

"Why d'you sigh?" asked Gwenna quickly. A sigh meant, to her, only one

thing. Impatience over the absence of the Beloved!

"I--perhaps I was thinking of Monty Scott's eyes," said Leslie lightly,

bending over to smooth the dog's neck. "They _are_ so absurdly handsome.

_Such_ a pity one can't have them to wear as brooches!" Then, quickly,

she turned from the subject of Monty Scott. She drew something out of

her black silk bag. A picture postcard.

"From one of our Allies," said Leslie, showing it.

It gave a view of a French Regiment, still wearing the picturesque

uniform of Eighteen-seventy, marching down a sunny, chestnut-bordered

boulevard. The soldier in the immediate foreground showed under the

jaunty _kepi_ a dark, intelligent, mobile face that Gwenna recognised.

She sighed and smiled over the card. It brought back to her that tea at

Hugo Swayne's rooms with Leslie, and the tall, blonde Englishman who was

to be her husband, and that dark young French engineer who had said,

"But the Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle!" He had written on

this card in sprawling French writing and blue French ink, "_A

Mademoiselle Langue. Salutation amicale. Remember, please, the private

soldier Gaston, who carries always in his knapsack the memory of the

Curate's Egg!_"

"Fancy, two of the men who were at Mr. Swayne's that afternoon are off

at the Front to-day," said Gwenna Dampier. "That is, all three, perhaps.

Paul said something about his cousin enlisting."

"Poor Hugo Swayne," said Leslie, with a laugh, that she stopped as if

she were sorry she had begun it. "It's too bad, really."

"What is? _Isn't_ he enlisting?"

"Yes. Oh, yes, Taffy, he has. But merely enlisting isn't the whole job,"

said Leslie. "He--to begin with, he could hardly get them to pass

him----"

"Why? Too fat?" asked Gwenna mercilessly.

"Fat--Oh, no. They said three weeks' Swedish exercise _and_ drill would

take that off. He was quite fit, they said, physically. It was his

_mental_ capacity they seemed to doubt," explained Leslie. "Of course

that was rather a shock to Hugo to hear, after the years he's been

looking up to himself as a rather advanced and enlightened and thinking

person. However, he took it very well. He saw what they meant."

"Who were 'they'?" asked Mrs. Crewe.

"The soldier-men he went to first of all, old brother-officers of his

father's, who'd been with his father in Egypt, and whom he asked to find

him a job of some sort. They told him, quite gently, of course, that

they were afraid he was not 'up' to any soldiering job. They said they

were afraid there were heaps of young Englishmen like him, awfully

anxious to 'do their bits,' but simply _not clever enough_! (Rather

nice, isn't it, the revenge, at last, of the Brainless Army Type on the

Cultured Civilian?) And he said to the old Colonel or General or

whatever it was, 'I know, sir. I see, sir. Yes, I suppose I have addled

myself up by too much reading and too much talk. I know I'm a

Stage-Society-and-Cafe-Royal rotter, and no earthly good at this

crisis.' And then he turned round and said quite angrily, 'Why wasn't I

brought up to be some use when the time came?' And the old soldier-man

said quite quietly, 'My dear Swayne, none of you "enlightened" people

believed us that there was any "time" coming. You see now that we were

right.' And Hugo said, 'You ought to have hammered it into me. Isn't

there anything that I can do, sir?' And at last they got him

something."

"What?" demanded Gwenna.

"Well, of course it sounds _rather_ ludicrous when you come to say what

it is," admitted Leslie, her mouth curling into a smile that she could

not suppress. "But it just shows the Philistines that there _is_ some

use (if not beauty) in Futurist painting, after all. One always knew

'_there must be something, if one could but find it out_.'"

"But your friend Mr. Swayne can't do Futurist paintings," objected the

Aeroplane Lady, "at the Front!"

"Well, but that's just what he _is_ doing! He's in France; at Quisait.

Painting motor-buses to be used for transport wagons," explained Leslie.

"You know the most disguising colour for those things at a distance is

said to be not khaki, or feld-grau, or dull green, or any other _single_

colour. You have to have a sort of heather-mixture of all the most

brilliant colours that can be got! This simply makes the thing invisible

a certain way off. It's the idea of the game-feather tweed on the moors,

you know. So Hugo's using his talents by painting emerald-green and

magenta and scarlet and black triangles and cubes and splodges all over

those big Vanguards----"

"Why, _I_ could do that," murmured the girl who was so busy varnishing

the aeroplane wings. "Sure I could."

"Oh, but, Taffy, you haven't been educated up to it," protested Leslie

gravely. "You _couldn't_ get it sufficiently dynamic and simultaneous

and marinetic!"

A message from the Central Shop to the Aeroplane Lady left the two girls

alone presently in the Wing-room. Then Leslie, putting her hand on the

rounded arm below the loose sleeve of Gwenna's working-pinafore, said

softly and quickly, "Look here, I came down because I had something to

tell you, Taffy."

The Welsh girl glanced quickly up into her chum's black eyes.

"Something to tell me?" Gwenna's heart sank.

She didn't want to hear of Leslie having definitely made up her mind at

last to marry a--well, a man who was good-natured and well bred and

generous enough about wedding-presents, but who confessed himself to be

of "no earthly good" when "it came to the real things of life." "Oh,

Leslie, is it----"

"It is that you can congratulate me."

"Oh, dear. I was _afraid_--You mean you _are_ engaged to him, Leslie. To

Mr. Swayne."

"No," said Leslie, holding her black head high. "No, not to Mr. Swayne.

Why must 'congratulations' always mean 'Mister' Anybody? They don't,

here. I mean you can congratulate me on coming to see reason. I know,

now, that I mustn't think of marrying him."

Gwenna drew a big breath of relief.

She laid her dope-thickened brush carefully down in the tin, and clapped

her little sticky hands.

"I'm _so_ thankful," she cried childishly. "It wouldn't have done,

Leslie!"

"No," said Miss Long.

"He wasn't a quarter good enough."

"Pooh. What's _that_ got to do with caring? Nothing," declared Leslie,

tilting her loose-limbed, mauve-clad figure back on the chair that Paul

Dampier had sat in, the day before the Aviation Dinner. "It's caring

that counts."

"Haven't I _always_ been saying so?" said Gwenna earnestly as she took

up her brush again. "Not just because I'm a happily-married woman

myself, my dear."

Here she drew herself up with the same little gesture of matronly

dignity that had made Mrs. Crewe smile. It forced Leslie to bite her

lips into gravity. And Paul Dampier's girl concluded innocently, "_I've_

always known how much Love means. What's _money_?"

"Nothing to run down, I assure you. Money's gorgeous. Money means

_Power_," affirmed Leslie. "Apart from the silk-stockinged aspect of it,

it lets you live a much fuller life mentally and spiritually. It can

make you almost everything you want to be, to yourself and to other

people, Taff. It's worth almost anything to get it. But there's one

thing it's not worth," said Leslie Long, really gravely: "_It's not

worth marrying the wrong person for._"

"I don't know why you didn't know that _before_," said little Gwenna,

feeling for once in her life _so_ much older and much wiser than her

chum. "What makes you know it now, Leslie?"

"The War, perhaps. Everything's put down to the War nowadays.... But it

has simplified things. One knows better what's what. What one must keep,

what one can throw overboard," said Leslie Long. "Everything is

changed."

Gwenna thought for a moment of telling her that one thing did not

change. Love!

Then she thought that that was not quite true, either.

In its own way Love, too, was changed by this War.

"There's _more_ of it!" thought Gwenna simply.

For had not her own love to her absent lover burned with more steady a

flame within her ever since the morning when she had seen him depart to

take his own share in the struggle? And so she guessed it must be with

many a girl, less ardently in love than she had been, but now doubly

proud of her man--and her soldier. She thought of the other hurried

War-bridals and betrothals all over the country. She thought of the

gentler voice and manner that she had noticed between the husbands and

wives among the cottagers down here. They realised, perhaps, how many

couples were being swept apart by War. Yes, this thought seemed to give

Man and Woman an added value in the eyes of each other, Gwenna thought.

She thought of the gradual disappearance of the suffragette type with

her indictments against Man. She thought of the new courtesy with which

every woman and girl seemed to be treated in the streets and tubes and

omnibuses by every man who wore the livery of War.

Of the two things greater than all things in this world, one fulfilled

the other. And, because War was in the world again, it was bringing home

undeniably to man and maid alike that "_the first is Love_."

Then Gwenna sighed from her heart.

How long? How much longer would it be before she could see her own lover

again?

CHAPTER XI

A LOVE LETTER--AND A ROSE

A couple of days after Leslie's visit Gwenna was moving about the

bedroom at Mrs. Crewe's cottage.

It was an old-fashioned, quaintly pretty room. The low ceiling, on which

the lamplight gleamed, was crossed by two sturdy black oak beams.

Straw-matting covered the uneven floor, and the wall-paper was sprinkled

with a pattern of little prim posies in baskets. The chintz of the

casement-curtains showed flowering sprays on which parrots perched;

there was a patchwork quilt on the oaken bed.

Gwenna had come up early; it was only nine o'clock. So, having undressed

and got into her soft white ruffled night-gown and her kimono of pink

cotton-crepe, she proceeded to indulge in one of those "bedroom

potterings" so dear to girlhood's heart.

First there was a drawer to be tidied in the dressing-table that stood

in the casement-window. Ribbons to be smoothed out and rolled up; white

embroidered collars to be put in a separate heap. Next there was the

frilling to be ripped out of the neck and sleeves of her grey linen

dress, that she had just taken off, and to be rolled up in a little

ball, and tossed into the wastepaper basket. Then, two Cash's

marking-tapes with her name, GWENNA DAMPIER, to be sewn on to the couple

of fine, Irish linen handkerchiefs that had been brought down to her as

a little offering from Leslie. Then there was her calendar to be brought

up to date; three leaves to tear off until she came to the day's

quotation:

"Don't call the score at half-time."

Then there was the last button to sew on to a filmy camisole that she

had found leisure, even with her work and her knitting, to make for

herself. Gradually, young Mrs. Dampier meant to accumulate quite a lot

of "pretties" for the Bottom Drawers, that Ideal which woman never

utterly relinquishes. The house and furniture of married life Gwenna

could let go without a sigh. "The nest"--pooh! But the ideal of "the

plumage" was another matter. Even if the trousseau did have to come

after the wedding, never mind! A trousseau she would have by the time

Paul came home again.

Having finished her stitching, she put her little wicker-work basket

aside on the chest-of-drawers and took out the handkerchief-sachet in

which she kept all his letters. She read each one over again.... "I'll

finish mine to him to-night," she decided. "It'll go off before eight in

the morning, then; save a post."

From under her work-basket she took her blotting-pad. The letter to Paul

was between the leaves, with her fountain-pen that she'd used at school.

She sat down in the wicker-seated chair before the dressing-table and

leaned her pad up against the edge of that table, with her brushes and

comb, her wicker-cased bottle of eau-de-Cologne, her pot of skin-cream

and her oval hand-mirror, its silver back embossed by Reynolds' immortal

group of cherubs whose curly heads and soft, tip-tilted faces were not

unlike Gwenna's own as she sat there, reading over what she had already

put in that letter to the Front.

It began in what Gwenna considered an admirably sedate and old-fashioned

style: "_My dearest Husband._" She thought: "The Censor, whoever he is!

that Paul talks about--when he reads that he'll think it's from somebody

quite old and been married for ten years, perhaps; instead of only

just--what is it--seven weeks!"

It went on to acknowledge the last note from Paul and to ask him if she

should send him some more cigarettes, and to beg that he would, if he

could possibly, possibly manage it, get one of his friends to take a

snapshot of him--Paul--in uniform, as Gwenna had never yet seen him.

Beside the swung oval mirror on the dressing-table there was set up in a

silver frame the only portrait that she possessed of her boy-husband:

the glazed picture postcard that Gwenna had bought that Saturday in May,

when she had gone to see the flying at Hendon with her two friends from

the Westminster Office, Mabel Butcher and Ottilie Becker.

Gwenna's eyes fell on that photograph as she raised them from her pad.

Her thoughts, going back to that afternoon, suggested the next item to

be written to Paul.

And the young girl wrote on, in much the same style as she would have

talked, with few full stops and so much underlining that some words

seemed to have a bar of music below them.

"You remember my telling you about Miss Becker, the German girl

that I used to be at Westminster with, when we used to call

ourselves the Butcher, the Baker, and the Candlestick-maker? Well,

what _do_ you think? She has been _taken away_ from her

boarding-house where she was in Bloomsbury, and interned in some

camp as an alien enemy, although she is a girl, and they say she

_nearly_ was just on trial _as a spy_!

"Mabel Butcher wrote and told me about it. She (Miss Butcher) went

with Ottilie Baker when she had to register herself as an alien at

Somerset House, just after the War broke out, and she said it was

_awful_, a great place like six National Galleries rolled into one,

and _miles_ of immense long corridors, and _simply crowds_ of all

kinds of Germans and Austrians, just like a queue at the theatre,

waiting to be registered, and all looking scared to _death_, quite

a lot of pretty girls among them, too.

"Poor Ottilie Becker cried like anything at having to go, and to be

an enemy alien, you know she'd got such heaps of friends in England

and liked lots of English ways. She used to have a bath every

morning, even. I hate to think of _her_ being a prisoner. Of course

I know one ought to feel that all Germans ought to be wiped out

now," wrote Gwenna, "but it makes you feel sort of different when

it's a girl you've _known_ and had lots of little jokes with, and I

was with her the very first time I heard of _you_, so I shan't be

able to help always feeling a little kinder about her.

"The reason she was arrested was because they found in her room at

the boarding-house a lot of notes about the engineering-works, our

works, which she had been going to send off to that soldier-brother

of hers, Karl. She declared _she_ didn't know she wasn't supposed

to, and that she hadn't an _idea_ of our going to War with her

country or anything, and I'm _sure_ she didn't _mean_ any harm at

all. She said she'd seen her brother Karl in England the week

before War was declared, and that _he_ hadn't said a word to her

then. And so perhaps he _was_ that waiter all the time. You know,

the one we saw, in the cab that last Sunday of peace-time. I expect

_he_ is fighting us now, isn't it _extraordinary_?"

This was the end of the sheet. Gwenna took another. Her letters to the

Front were always at least six times as long as the answers that she

received to them, but this was only to be expected. And Paul had said he

loved long letters and that she was to tell him absolutely everything

she could. All about herself.

She went on:

"You tell me to take care of myself and not to work too hard; well,

I am not. And I am quite well and Mrs. Crewe is most _awfully_

kind to me, and the little maid here _spoils_ me. Every night when

I am in bed she _insists_ on bringing me up a glass of hot milk and

two biscuits, though what for I don't know.

"_Is_ there anything more about your coming back from the Front to

fetch the P.D.Q.? Oh, it _would_ be so lovely to see you even for a

_few days_. I sometimes feel as if I had _never, never_ seen

you----"

She sighed deeply in the quiet, lamp-lit room, where the chintz-casement

curtains stirred faintly above the open window. It had been so long, so

long, all this time of being without him. Why, she had scarcely had a

week of knowing him hers, before there had come that rushed War-bridal

and the Good-bye! And all she had to live on were her memories and a

glazed picture postcard, and a packet of pencil-scrawled letters of

which the folds were worn into slits. She couldn't even write to him as

she would have wished. Always there brooded over her that spectre "The

Censor," who possibly read every letter that was addressed to a man at

the Front. Gwenna knew that some people at home wrote anything they

wished, heedless that a stranger's eye might see it. Leslie, for

instance, wrote to one of her medical students, now working with the

R.A.M.C. in Paris, as "My dear Harry--and the Censor," adding an

occasional parenthesis: "_You won't understand this expression, Mr.

Censor, as it is merely a quite silly family joke!_" She, Gwenna, felt

utterly unable to write down more than a tithe of the tender things that

she would have liked to say. To-night she had a longing to pour out her

heart to him ... oh, and she would say _something_! Even if she tore up

that sheet and wrote another. She scribbled down hastily: "Darling boy,

do you know I miss you more _every day_; nobody has _ever_ missed

anybody _so dreadfully_."

Here she was wrong, though she did not know it. It was true that she

longed hungrily for the sight of that dear blonde face, with its blue,

intrepid eyes, for the sound of that deep and gentle voice, and for the

touch of those hands, those strongly modelled lips. But all these things

had been a new joy, scarcely realised before it was gone. She would have

told you that it made it worse for her. Actually it meant that she was

spared much. Her lover's presence had been a gift given and snatched

away; not the comradeship of years that, missing, would seem even as the

loss of a limb to her. The ties of daily habit and custom which

strengthen that many-stranded cord of Love had not yet been woven

between these two lovers.

"I sometimes think it was really _awfully selfish_ of me to _marry_

you," Gwenna wrote, thinking to herself, "Oh, bother that old

Censor, just for once." She went on more hurriedly:

"You might have married somebody like that Miss Muriel Conyers,

with those frightfully lovely clothes and _all_ her people able to

help you on in the Army, or somebody very beautiful and _rich_,

anybody would have been glad to have you, and I _know_ I am just a

little _nobody_, and not a bit clever and even Leslie used to say

I had a Welshy accent sometimes when I speak, and I daresay _lots_

of people will think, oh, 'how _could_ he!--why, she isn't even

very _pretty_!'"

She raised her eyes, deeper and brighter in the lamplight, and gave a

questioning glance at her reflection in the oval, swung mirror on the

dressing-table at which she wrote. It would have been a captious critic

indeed that could have called her anything less than very pretty at that

moment; with her little face flushed and intent, a mixture of child and

woman in the expression of her eyes and about her soft, parted lips.

Above the ruffle of her night-gown her throat rose proudly; thick and

creamy and smooth. She remembered something he'd told her that afternoon

at Kew. He'd said that she always reminded him of any kind of white

flower that was sturdy and sweet; a posy of white clover, a white,

night-blooming stock, some kinds of white roses.... She would like to

send him a flower, in this letter, to remind him.

She glanced towards the open casement, where the curtain waved. Under

the shading foliage of the clematis that grew up to the cottage-roof

there had climbed the spray of a belated rose. "Rose Menie" was its

name. Mrs. Crewe had said that it would not flower that year. But there

was one bud, half-hidden by leaves, swelling on its sappy twig, close to

Gwenna's window-sill.

"It'll come out in a day or so," Gwenna thought.

"I'll send it to him, if it comes out white.... _He_ was pleased with my

looks!"

So, reassured, she turned to the letter again, and added:

"The only thing is, that whatever sort of wife you'd married, they

_couldn't_ have loved you like I do, or been so proud of being your

wife; _really_ sometimes I can _hardly believe_ that I am really

and truly married to----"

She broke off, and again lifted her curly head from bending above the

paper.

There had been a light tap at the door behind her.

"Come in," called Gwenna, writing down as she did so, "here is the

little maid coming to bring me up my hot milk; now, darling, darling

boy, I _do hope_ they give you enough to eat wherever you are----"

Behind her the white door opened and shut. But the maid did not appear

at Gwenna's elbow with the tray that held that glass of hot milk and the

plate of biscuits. The person who had entered gazed silently across the

quiet girlish room at the little lissom figure clad in that soft crumple

of pink and white, sitting writing by the dressing-table, at the

cherub's head, backed by the globe of the lamp that spun a golden

aureole into that wreath of curls.

There was a pause so long that Gwenna, wondering, raised her head.

She gave another glance into the oval mirror that stood on the

dressing-table just in front of her.... And there she saw, not the

homely, aproned figure of the little maid that she had expected to see,

but the last thing that she had expected.

It was a picture like, and unlike, a scene she had beheld long, long

ago, framed in the ornate gold-bordered oval mirror in the drawing-room

at the Smiths'. Over her pink-clad shoulder, she saw reflected a broad,

khaki-covered chest, a khaki sleeve, a blonde boy's face that moved

nearer to her own. Even as she sat there, transfixed by surprise, those

blue and intrepid eyes of Icarus looked, laughing joyously, full into

hers, and held her gaze as a hand might have held her own.

"It's only me," said a deep and gentle voice, almost shyly. "I say----"

"_You!_" she cried, in a voice that rang with amazement, but not with

fright; though he, it seemed, was hurrying out hasty warnings to the

Little Thing not to be frightened.... He'd thought it better than

startling her with a wire.... Mrs. Crewe had met him at the door ...

he'd come straight up: hoped she didn't think he was a ghost---- Not for

a second had she thought so!

Instantly she had known him for her granted and incarnate heart's

desire, her Flyer, home from the Front, her husband to whom she had that

moment been writing as she sat there.

She sprang to her feet.

She whirled round.

She could not have told whether she had first flung herself into those

strong arms of his, or whether he had snatched her up into them.

All that mattered was that they were round her now, lifting and holding

her as though they would never let her go again.

When Reveille sounded from the Camp on the plain, the sun was bright on

that clematis-grown wall outside the window of Gwenna's bridal-room.

It gilded the September foliage about the window-sill It also touched a

gem of passionate colour, set among the leaves of the Rose Menie.

That red rose had broken into blossom in the night.

PART III

_SEPTEMBER, NINETEEN-FOURTEEN_

CHAPTER I

A WAR-TIME HONEYMOON

The morning after Paul Dampier's arrival from the Front he and his wife

started off on the honeymoon trip that had been for so many weeks

deferred.

They motored from the Aircraft Works to London, where they stopped to do

a little shopping, and where Gwenna was in raptures of pride to see the

effect produced by the Beloved in the uniform that suited him so well.

For every passer-by in the street must turn to look, with quickened

interest now, at an Army Aviator. Even the young men in their uniforms

gave a glance at the soldier whose tunic buttoned at the side and whose

cap had the tilt that gave to the shape of his blonde head something

bird-like, falcon-like. And every girl in the restaurant where they

lunched murmured, "Look," to her companion, "that's some one in the

Royal Flying Corps," and was all eyes for that kit which, at a time when

all khaki was romantic, had a special, super-glamour of its own.

But the blue eyes of the man who wore it were for no one but the girl

with whom he was taking his first meal alone together since they had

been man and wife.

Her own glance was still hazy with delight. Oh, to see him there facing

her, over the little round table set in a corner!

They ate cold beef and crusty loaf and cheese in memory of their first

lunch together in that field, long ago. They drank cider, touching

glasses and wishing each other all luck and a happy life.

"And fine weather for the whole of our week's honeymoon," added the

bridegroom as he set down his glass. "Lord, I know how it _can_ pour in

your Wales."

For it was to Wales that they went on by the afternoon train from

Euston; to Gwenna's home, arriving late that evening. The Reverend Hugh

Lloyd was away on a round of preaching-visits about Dolgelly. They had

his black-henlike housekeeper to chirp and bustle about them with much

adoring service; and they would have the Chapel House to themselves.

"But we won't be _in_ the house much," Gwenna decided, "unless it

pours."

It did not pour the next morning. It was cloudless and windless and

warm. And looking round on the familiar landscape that she had known

when she was a little child, it seemed now to Gwenna as if War could not

be. As if it were all a dream and a delusion. There was no khaki to be

met in that little hillside village of purple slate and grey stone. Only

one or two well-known figures were missing from it. A keeper from one of

the big houses on the other side of the river, and an English chauffeur

had joined the colours, but that nine-days' wonder was over now. Peace

had made her retreat in these mountain fastnesses that had once echoed

to the war-shouts and the harp-music of a race so martial.

It was the music that had survived....

Paul Dampier had put on again that well-known and well-worn grey tweed

jacket of his, so that he also no longer recalled War. He had come right

away from all that, as she had known he would; come safely back to her.

Here he was, with her, and with a miracle between them, in this valley

of crystal brooks and golden bracken and purple slopes. It was meant

that they two should be together thus. Nothing could have stopped it.

She felt herself exulting and triumphing over all the Fates who might

have tried to stop it; and over all the Forces that might have tried to

keep him from her. His work on the Machine? Pooh! That had actually

helped to bring them together! The Great War? Here he was, home from the

War!

"I've always, always wanted to be with you in the real country, and I

never have," she told him, as together they ran down the slate steps of

Uncle Hugh's porch after breakfast and turned up a path between the

sunny larch-grown steeps. That path would be a torrent in the winter

time. Now the slate pebbles of it were hot under the sun. "I don't

really count that _country_, that field, that day----"

"Didn't seem to mind it when we were there," he teased her as he walked

beside her swinging the luncheon basket that Margaret had put up for

them. "I mean of course when _I_ was there."

Gwenna affected to gasp over the conceit of men. "If I've _got_ to be

with one," she told him as if wearily, "I'd rather it was in a nice

place for me to listen to his nonsense."

"Wasn't any 'nonsense,' as you call it, in that field."

"No," agreed Gwenna, "there wasn't."

He looked sideways and down at her as she climbed that hill-path,

hatless, sure-footed and supple. Then a narrow turn in the path made her

walk a little ahead of him. She was wearing a very simple little sheath

of a grey cotton or muslin or something frock, with a white turn-down

collar that he hadn't seen her in before, he thought. Suited her awfully

well. (Being a man, he could not be expected to recognise it for the

grey linen that she'd had on when he'd come upon her that afternoon,

high up on the scaffolding at Westminster.)

"Yes, though, there was 'nonsense,'" he said, now suddenly answering her

last speech. "Fact of the matter is, it was dashed nonsense to waste

such a lot of time."

"Time, how?" asked Gwenna guilelessly, without turning her head.

"Oh! As if you didn't know!" he retorted. "Wasting time talking about

the Machine, to you. Catching hold of your hand, to show you what the

camber was--and then letting it go! Instead of owning up at once, '_Yes.

All right. You've got me. Pax!_' And starting to do this----"

He was close up behind her now on the mountain-path, and because of the

steep ground on which they stood, her head was on a higher level than

his own. He drew it downwards and backwards, that brown, sun-warmed

head, to his tweed-clad shoulder.

"You'll break my neck. I know you will, one day. You are so _rough_,"

complained Gwenna; twisting round, however, and taking a step down to

him.

"I love you to be," she whispered. She kissed his coat-lapel. All the

red of that rose bloomed now on her mouth.... They walked on, with his

arm a close, close girdle about her. The luncheon basket was forgotten

on the turfy slope on which he'd dropped it. So they lunched, late, in

the farm-house four hundred feet above the Quarry village. It was a

lonely place enough, a hillside outpost, fenced by stunted damson trees;

a short slate-flagged end of path led to the open door where a great red

baking crock stood, full of water. Inside, the kitchen was a dark, cool

cave, with ancient, smooth-worn oaken furniture that squeaked on the

slate-slabbed floor, with a dresser rich with willow-pattern and lustre,

and an open fire-place, through which, looking up, they could see

through the wood smoke a glimpse of the blue sky.

And in this sort of place people still lived and worked as if it were

Seventeen Hundred and Something--and scarcely a day's journey away was

the Aircraft Factory where people lived for the work that will remake

the modern world; oh, most romantic of all ages, that can set such sharp

contrasts side by side!

An old Welshwoman, left there by her sheep-farming sons at home in the

chimney corner, set butter-milk before the lovers, and ambrosial

home-churned butter, and a farm-house loaf that tasted of nuts and

peatsmoke. They ate with astonishing appetites; Gwenna sitting in the

window-seat under the sill crowded with flower-pots and a family Bible.

Paul, man-like, stood as near as he could to the comfort of the fire

even on that warm day. The old woman, who wore clumping clogs on her

feet and a black mutch-cap on her head, beamed upon the pair with smiles

as toothless and as irresistible as those of an infant.

"You must have a plenty, whatever," she urged them, bringing out another

loaf, of _bara breeth_ (or currant bread). "Come on, Sir! Come, Miss

Williams, now. Mam, I mean. Yess, yess. You married lady now. Your

husband," with a skinny hand on his grey sleeve, "your husband is _not_

a minnyster?"

"He's a soldier, Mrs. Jones," explained Gwenna, proudly, and with a

strengthening of her own accent, such as occurs in any of her race when

revisiting their wilds. "He's an Airman."

"Ur?" queried Mrs. Jones, beaming.

"He goes flying. You know. On a machine. Up in the sky."

"Well, _oh_!" ejaculated the old woman. And laughed shrilly. To her this

was some eccentric form of English joke. Flying? Like the birds! _Dear_,

dear. "What else does he do, _cariad fach_?" she asked of Gwenna.

"He's been over in France, fighting the Germans," said the girl, while

the old woman on her settle by the fire nodded her mutched head with

the intense, delighted expression of some small child listening to a

fairy story. It was indeed no more, to her. She said, "Well, indeed. He

took a very _kind_ one, too." Then she added, "I not much English.

Pitty, pitty!" and said something in Welsh at which Gwenna coloured

richly and laughed a little and shook her head.

"What's she say?" demanded Paul, munching; but his girl-wife said it was

nothing--and turned her tip-tilted profile, dark against the diamond

window panes, to admire one of the geranium plants in the pots.

Afterwards, when the couple were outside again in the fresh sunlight on

the mountain lands, young Dampier persisted with his questioning about

what that old woman had said. He betted that he could guess what it was

all about. And he guessed.

Gwenna admitted that he had guessed right.

"She said," she told him shyly, "that it ought to be 'a very pretty one,

whatever.'"

"I've got a very pretty present for it," Paul whispered presently.

"What?"

"Don't you remember a locket I once took? A little mother-of-pearl

heart," he said. "That's what I shall keep it for----"

And there fell a little silence between them as they walked on, swinging

hands above the turf, gravely contented.

They had _had_ to spend the day together thus. It seemed to Gwenna that

all her life before had been just a waiting for this day.

Below the upland on which they swung along, grey figures on the green,

there lay other wide hill-spaces, spread as with turf-green carpets, on

which the squares of mellowing, golden-brown autumn woods seemed rugs

and skins cast down; below these again stretched the further valley with

the marsh, with the silver loops and windings of the river, and the

little white moving caterpillar of smoke from the distant train. There

was also a blue haze above the slate roofs of a town.

But here, in this sun-washed loneliness far above, here was their world;

hers and his.

They walked, sometimes climbing a crest where stag's-horn moss branched

and spread through the springy turf beneath their feet, sometimes

dipping into a hollow, for two miles and more. They could have walked

there for half a day and seen no face except that of a tiny mountain

sheep, cropping among the gorse; heard no voice but those of the calling

plovers, beating their wings in the free air. Then, passing a gap in two

hills, they came quite suddenly upon the cottage and the lake.

The sheet of water, silent, deserted, reflected the warm blue of the

afternoon sky and the deep green of the overhanging boughs of great

hassock-shaped bushes that covered two islands set upon its breast.

"Rhododendron bushes. When they're in blossom they're all simply

_covered_ with flowers, pink and rose-colour, and reflected in the

water! It _is_ so lovely," Gwenna told the lover beside her. "Oh, Paul!

You _must_ come here again and see that with me in the spring!"

On the further bank was another jungle of rhododendron and lauristinus,

half-hiding the grey stone walls and the latticed windows of the square

cottage, a fishing box of a place that had evidently been built for some

one who loved solitude.

Paul Dampier peered in through one of the cobwebby lattices. Just inside

on the sill there stood, left there long since, a man's shaving-tackle.

Blue mildew coated the piece of soap that lay in the dish. Further in he

caught a glimpse of dusty furniture, of rugs thrown down on a wooden

floor, of a man's old coat on a peg. A wall was decorated with sets of

horns, with a couple of framed photographs, with old fishing-rods.

"Make a jolly decent billet, for some one, this," said Paul.

Gwenna said, "It belongs to some people.... They're away, I think. It's

all locked up now. So's the boat for the lake, I expect. They used to

keep a boat up here for fishing."

The long flat boat they found moored to one of the stout-trunked

rhododendron bushes that dipped its pointed leaves in the peat-brown

water fringed with rushes.

Paul stepped in, examining her, picking up the oars. "Nice afternoon for

a row, Ma'am?" he said, smiling up at the girl clad in dove-grey on the

rushy bank, with the spongy dark-green moss about her shoes.

"Jump in, Gwenna. I'll row you across the lake."

"You can't row that old tub, boy."

"Can't I?"

"I'll race you round, then!"

"Right you are!"

The girl skipped round the clump of rhodos that hid the last flicker of

her skirt; and the boy bent to the short, home-made sculls.

The boat was a crank, unhandy little craft; and lacked thole-pins on one

side. Therefore Gwenna, swift-footed Little Thing that she was, had as

good a chance of winning as he.

"Like trying to row a bucket!" he laughed, as the boat spun. "Hi, Gwen!

I ought to have some start, you know!"

He rowed. Presently he rested on his oars and called, "Hullo, have you

started?"

"Started--" came back only the echo from the cottage roof. There was no

sign of any grey-frocked running figure on the bank. He scanned it on

both sides of him, gave a look towards each of those shrub-covered

islands on the smooth expanse.

"Gwenna--Why, where are you? What's become of the girl," he muttered.

"Gwen-na!"

She was nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER II

THE SOUL OF UNDINE

"Hul-lo!" he shouted. The echo answered as he sat in the boat staring

about him....

Then he felt a twitch at one of his sculls. It turned in his hand; was

wrenched from him.

"What the deuce----" he began, surprised.

Then he heard a laugh.

"What on earth----"

It was nothing on earth that had greeted him. It was something of the

water that laughed up into his face and called, "Hullo, husband!"

A mermaid, a water-nymph, a little white-shouldered Undine was peeping

up and mocking him! She trod water, turned over on her side, swam with

easy strokes.

For always Gwenna had been proud of her swimming.

She had won a medal for it at that Aberystwith school of hers; but she

wanted more than a mere medal for it now. She wanted her boy to see her

swimming, and to praise her stroke. She had looked forward to that. She

wanted to show him that she could make as graceful movements with her

own body in the water as he could make with his biplane in the air. She

could! He should see! She made these movements. She had thought of

making them--just _so_--on the morning of her marriage. Only then she

had thought it would be in the sea off Brighton beach, with whole

crowds of other stupid people about in dark-blue or Turkey-red

"costumes." Here it was so much lovelier; a whole mountain-side and a

clear lake to herself in which to show off her pet accomplishment to her

lover. She was one innocent and pretty Vanity incarnate as she glided

along beside his boat. She gave a quick twist. There was a commotion of

translucent amber water, a gleam of coral white that shaded down into

peaty brown as she dived, reappearing on the other side of the boat,

looking up at him, blinking as her curls streamed water into her eyes.

His eyes, blue and direct and adoring, were upon her.

"I say," he said admiringly, "I didn't know you could _swim_ like that.

Jolly!"

This moment of achievement was possibly the most exquisite in the whole

of Gwenna's life.

Shaking the wet from her hair, she laughed with pure, completed,

rapturous joy; glorying in her youth, in the life that charged each

little blue vein of her, in this power of swimming that she felt had

been given her only to please him.

"Why, I could swim you to--Oh! Mind you don't upset!" she exclaimed.

For Paul had stooped; leaning over the side of the boat he had passed

one arm beneath her shoulders; he was bending over her to take a kiss,

all fresh with lake-water.

"You'll topple over," she warned him.

"Pooh," he said. "One, Gwenna!"

He always said her name as if it were "darling"--he did not call her

"dear" or "darling" much. She found that she adored him for this, as for

everything that he said or did. Once, in one of those old-time talks of

theirs, Leslie had said, "For every three times a man asks for a kiss

refuse him twice. An excellent plan, Taffy----" The happy girl-wife

thought there need be no use of "plans" with him and her. She teased

him--if she wanted to.

Eyes laughed into eyes now. She threw back her head, evading him, but

only for a second. His mouth met hers, dewy as a lotus-bud. The boy and

girl kissed closely. Nothing could come between that kiss, she thought.

Then, sudden as a flash of summer lightning, _something came_.

A thought; a shadow; a fear at last.

All these halcyon hours she had known no fear. All those weeks that her

husband had been in France she had been certain, at the bottom of her

heart, of his safety. She had known by that queer sense of presentiment

she possessed that he would come back to her. He'd come back to make

this perfect time for which all her unawakened girlhood had been

waiting. And now, by that same queer sixth sense, she suddenly found

herself realising that he would not--No, no! _That he might not come

back to her the second time...._ Suddenly, suddenly the shadow crept

over her, taking the glow and colour out of their idyll even at this

golden moment. With his lips warms on hers she shivered as if the water

in which she swayed had suddenly grown many degrees colder. Supposing he

should not return? In two days' time now he was leaving her. Supposing

that she were never to see him again? She shut her eyes, felt herself

for a horrible second surrounded by darkness, and alone.... She heard

his sharp question, "What's the matter?" and opened her eyes again.

His head was dark against the blue little ripples of light passed over

his blonde face; ripples cast up from the water. The boat tilted, and

his arm held her more tightly. He said again, "What is it?"

Then, in her own ears, her voice said serenely, "It's all right."

The cloud had passed, as suddenly as it had fallen. She knew, somehow,

that it would be "all right." Whatever happened, this worst catastrophe

of all was not going to fall upon her. She was not going to be left

alone and in darkness, her sun of Love gone down. Such a light could not

have been kindled, just to be put out again. She would not be forced to

live without him. _That_ could not be. Why, the thing was unthinkable.

Yet, somehow that was going to be made "all right."

"You swim back again and get your things on, as quick as you can," he

ordered her. "That was a touch of cramp you got, I expect."

"I'm all right now," she again said.

She sighed when at last they left that lovely Paradise of theirs behind

them.

They went down hill at a good swinging pace, his arm again girdling the

dove-grey frock. He said, "We'll get tea and topping light-cakes at one

of those cottages before we come to the village, shall we? Are you

starving, Little Thing? I know I am. Soon be there now."

"I know," she said, "I wasn't sighing because I wanted my tea. Only

because ... It seems such a pity that we _ever_ have to come down from

here!" she told him, nestling in his arm.

But she did not tell him of her sudden fear, nor of its sudden passing,

though (in her heart that beat below his hand) the thought of both

remained.

CHAPTER III

A LAST FAVOUR

That thought at the heart of Gwenna seemed to grow with every hour that

passed.

And they were passing now so rapidly, the hours that remained to her

with her husband! One more blissful day spent on the mountains (but

always with that growing thought behind it: "_He has to go soon. Perhaps

he will not come back this time. The new machine may let him down

somehow, perhaps_").

One more train-journey, whizzing through country of twenty different

aspects, just him and her together (but still in her mind that thriving

dread: "_Very likely he may not come back. He has had so many narrow

escapes! That time he told me about when he came down from behind the

clouds and the machine was hit on both sides at once: our men firing on

him as well, thinking his was an enemy craft! He got up into the clouds

again and escaped that time. Next time as likely as not...._").

One more night they were together in the London hotel where Uncle Hugh

had always put up. Paul slept, with a smile on his face that looked so

utterly boyish while he was asleep: his blonde head nestled into her

neck. Gwenna, waking uneasily once or twice, and with his arms still

about her, was haunted by her fear as by a nightmare. "_It's more than

likely that he may not come back this time. This time I feel that he is

not going to come back!_" And the feeling grew with the growing light

outside the window, until she told herself: "_I know it! I know that I

am right_----"

Then came the wonder in her mind, "_Why am I not wretched about this?

Why do I feel that it's not going to matter after all, and that it's

going to be 'all right'?_"

Still wondering, she fell asleep again.

But in the morning her presentiment was a thing full-grown.

Paul, off to the Front, would never come back again.

Quite early they were at the Aircraft Works where he was to leave his

young wife and to fetch his machine, the completed P.D.Q. that was to

take him out to France.

He had spoken of her--that machine--in the train coming along. And

Gwenna, the dazed and fanciful, had thought sharply: "_Ah! That's her

revenge. That's what's going to be the end of this fight between the

Girl and the Machine. I won. I got him from her. This is how she takes

him back, the fiancee! He will be killed in that machine of his._"

Her headstrong, girlish fancy persisted. It was as real to her as any of

the crowd of everyday and concrete realities that they found, presently,

at the bustling Aircraft Works.

When Paul (who was to start at midday, flying across to France) changed

into his uniform and flying-kit, it seemed to her to set the seal upon

her premonition.

He would never wear other kit again now, upon this earth.

The Aeroplane Lady, bracingly cheerful, met them with a sheaf of

official documents for the young Army aviator.

"I'm going to steal him from you for a quarter of an hour, Mrs.

Dampier," she said with a little nod; and she took the young man into

her office.

Gwenna, left alone outside, walked up and down the sunny yard

mechanically.

She could not have said what her thoughts were. Probably she had no

thoughts. Nothing but the steady throb, quiet and reiterated as the

pulse of the machinery in the shops, of that conviction of fatality that

she felt.

It seemed to run on in her head as the belting ran on the shaft: "He

won't come back. He won't come back!"

It was in the middle of this monotonous inward muttering that the door

of the office opened, and there came out a shortish figure,

leather-jacketed and with enveloping overalls and wearing a cap with

goggles, peak behind. It was young Mr. Ryan.

He raised his cap and would have passed Gwenna quickly, but she stopped

him.

She didn't know why. Since her marriage she had (ungratefully enough)

almost forgotten the red-haired young man's existence, and perhaps it

was not so much himself as his cap and mufflings that caught her eye

now.

"Why, are you going up?" she asked.

"Yes," said young Ryan gloomily.

He seemed to be in the worst of tempers as he went on, grumblingly. He

was going up. Just his luck. Plenty of times he'd wanted to go and

hadn't been allowed. Now he'd got to go, just when he didn't want to.

"You don't want to?" Gwenna repeated.

Mr. Ryan coloured a little. "Well, if I've got to, that doesn't matter."

"Why don't you want to?" Gwenna asked, half indifferent, half surprised.

To her it had always appeared the one thing to want to do. She had been

put off time after time. Now here was he, grumbling that it was just his

luck to go.

Then she thought she could guess why he didn't want to go up just now.

She smiled faintly. Was it that Mr. Ryan had--somebody--to see?

Mr. Ryan blushed richly. Probably he did so not on this somebody's

account, but because it was Gwenna who asked the question. One does not

care for the sympathetic questions of the late idol, even when another

fills the shrine. He told Gwenna: "I've got to go with your husband as a

passenger. He's had a wire to bring another man over to one of the

repairing bases; and so he's spotted me."

"To bring over? D'you mean to France?"

"Yes. Not that they want _me_, of course; but just somebody. So I've got

to go, I suppose."

Gwenna was silent, absorbed. She glanced away across the flat

eighty-acre field beyond the yards, where the planes of Paul's new

biplane gleamed like a parallel ruler in the sun. A ruler marked with

inches, each inch being one of the seams that Gwenna had carefully doped

over. About the machine two or three dark figures moved, giving

finishing touches, seeing that all was right.

And young Ryan was to fly in her, with Paul!

It wasn't Ryan they wanted, but "just somebody." ... And then, all in a

moment, Gwenna, thinking, had a very curious little mental experience.

As once before she had had that "flying dream," and had floated up from

earth and had seen her own body lying inert and soulless on her bed, so

now the same thing happened. She seemed to see herself in the yard.

Herself, quite still and nonchalant, talking to this young man in cap

and goggles who had to go to France just when he particularly wanted to

go somewhere else. She saw all the details, quite clearly: his leather

jacket, herself, in her blouse and skirt, the cylindrical iron, steam

chambers where they steamed the skids, the Wing-room door, and beyond it

the new biplane waiting in the field two hundred yards away.

Then she saw herself put her hand on the young man's leathern sleeve.

She heard her own voice ascending, as it were, to her. It was saying

what seemed to be the most matter-of-fact thing in the world.

"Then don't go. You go later, Mr. Ryan. Follow him on. You go and meet

your girl instead; it will be all right."

He was staring blankly at her. She wondered what he saw to stare at.

"What? What d'you mean, Mrs. Dampier? I'm bound to go. Military orders."

"Yes; they are for him, not for you. _You_ aren't under military

orders." This was in her own, quite calm and detached little voice with

its un-English accent. "You say anybody'd do. He can take--somebody

else."

"Isn't anybody else," she heard young Ryan say. Then she heard from her

own lips the most surprising thing of all.

"Yes, there's somebody. You give me those things of yours. I'm going

instead of you."

Then Mr. Ryan laughed loudly. He seemed to see a joke that Gwenna did

not see. "Well, for a film-drama, that takes it!" he laughed.

She did not laugh. She heard herself say, softly, earnestly, swiftly:

"Listen to me. Paul is going away and I have never been up with him yet.

I was always promised a flight. And always something got in the way of

it. And now he's going. He will never----"

Her voice corrected itself.

"He _may_ never come back. I may never get another chance of flying with

him. Let me--let me have it! Say you will!"

But Mr. Ryan, instead of saying he would, became suddenly firm and

peremptory. Perhaps it was the change in his voice that brought Gwenna

Dampier, with a start, back to herself. She was no longer watching

herself. She was watching young Ryan's face, intently, desperately. But

she was still quite calm. It seemed to her that since an idea and a plan

had come to her out of nowhere, it would be mad to throw them away again

untried.

"Let me go; it will be all right! Let me get into your things."

"Quite out of the question," said young Ryan, with growing firmness--the

iron mask of the man who knows himself liable to turn wax in the hands

of a woman. "Not to be thought of."

She set her teeth. It was life and death to her now, what he refused.

She could have flown at him like a fury for his obstinacy. She knew,

however, that this is no road to a woman's attainment of her desires.

With honeyed sweetness, and always calmly, she murmured: "You were

always so nice to me, Mr. Ryan. I liked you so!"

"I say, don't----"

"I am sure that girl must be devoted to you. Isn't she? The one you want

to see? Oh, yes! Well, think if it were _she_ who begged to be with

_you_," pleaded Gwenna softly and deadly calm. Her knuckles were white

on the hands that she held clasped against her breast. "Think if she

begged for one last, last little time!"

"Look here; it's imposs----"

"I never begged for any one anything before, in my whole life. Never!

Not even my husband. Only you! It's the first--the last favour, Mr.

Ryan! You used to say you'd do anything----"

"No, please; I say----!"

"He's always said he would take me. You can follow us on. Yes, indeed it

will be all right----"

Here Paul, passing with the Aeroplane Lady at the end of the yard, on

his way to the machine in the field, saw by the steam reservoir his

young wife talking earnestly to the red-haired Ryan chap, who was to be

his passenger. He heard her say: "You must, Peter, you _must_!"

He hadn't known that the Little Thing called that fellow by his

Christian name, but he thought he knew the kind of thing that she would

be saying to Ryan; begging him to keep an eye upon her husband, to do

anything he could for him (Paul) since they were both going over to

France together.

"It will be all right," repeated Gwenna to young Ryan in a settled kind

of tone. "You'll give me your things, and then you'll stay here, out of

the way until we've gone. You will!"

Thereupon Mr. Ryan became firmer than ever.

"Can't be done, Mrs. Dampier," he said curtly. "Afraid that ends it!"

* * * * *

In the meantime Paul was making a last tour of the P.D.Q.

"Just start her, will you?" he said to one of his mechanics.

A harsh roar rattled out over the countryside. Paul touched parts here

and there.

"All right," he said; and the engine was shut off again. Then he turned

to Mrs. Crewe.

"Well," he said, "if you don't mind----" He glanced first at his

wrist-watch and then in the direction of the buildings. The Aeroplane

Lady smiled.

"I think you'll find her in the office," she replied.

He crossed the field and walked straight into the office, but Gwenna was

not there. He passed into the Wing-room where he had seen her at work.

She was not there, either; only two of the lads in blue overalls were

bringing in a wing. He said to them: "Is Mrs. Dampier in the central

shop? Just tell her I'm here, will you? I shall have to be off very

soon." In a moment one of the lads returned to say that Mrs. Dampier was

not in the shops.

"Go out that way and find her, will you, then?" he said. "I'll go out

the other way; ask her to wait for me in the Wing-room if you find her

first." He went out to search for his wife. He sought her in the shops

and in the sheds. She was not to be found. He came back to the

Wing-room; it was empty, except for the Great Dane, lying in his corner

blinking wisely, with his head on his paws. Dismayed (for he would have

not more than a moment to spare with her now) young Dampier came out and

sent a lad on a bicycle up to Mrs. Crewe's cottage to find out if his

wife were there. Perhaps the Little Thing had forgotten the

cap-comforter she was going to give him, and had gone to fetch that.

Mrs. Crewe herself walked back from the field, and found him almost

running about the yards again.

"What, haven't you found her? Isn't she anywhere about?" cried the

Aeroplane Lady in astonishment. "This is most extraordinary. She must be

here somewhere----"

"I've been and I've sent all over the place," said the young aviator,

distressed. "Here, I've got to start in a minute, and she isn't here to

see me before I go. I can't imagine what's become of her!"

The Aeroplane Lady could imagine. She had had the quick thought that

Gwenna Dampier, at the last moment, had gone away, hidden herself from

that ordeal of last farewells. "Perhaps the little creature couldn't

stand it," she thought. It was, when all was said, a heart-breaking

moment....

The Aeroplane Lady said softly: "Perhaps your wife's one of the people

who don't want to say any good-bye, Mr. Dampier. Like some people

thinking it's unlucky to watch people out of sight!"

"Well, I've hunted all over the place," he said, turning away, agitated

and dismayed. "Tell her, will you, Mrs. Crewe, I shan't be able to wait

any longer. I was to start at midday. I shall be late. You explain to

her, please. Where's Ryan--ah, there he is."

For across the field he saw a short, muffled-up, brown figure, climbing,

rather hurriedly, into the passenger's seat. It sat, waiting without

looking round.

The last stroke of twelve sounded from the clock of the factory. The

whistle blew. The men trooped out of the works; every one of them cast a

glance towards the field where the biplane was ready. Several of them in

a group turned off there to watch the start.

Paul joined them and walked across the field.

His brows were knitted; it was dashed hard lines that he couldn't see

_her_ for good-bye. His wife! She ought to have seen him off.... Poor

Little sweet Thing, she thought she couldn't stick it---- He wondered

where on earth she'd gone and hidden herself.

CHAPTER IV

THE DEPARTURE FOR FRANCE

Gwenna sat, for the first time in her life, in an aeroplane.

She had very little actual notion of how she came to be there. It was

all confused in her mind, that which had happened between Mr. Ryan's so

resolute "Can't be done, Mrs. Dampier," and its having been "done." What

had prevailed? Her own begging? Mr. Ryan's wish to see his girl? Or her,

Gwenna's, calm assurances, repeated from that day in Wales, that it

would be "all right"? She wasn't sure which of all these things had

brought her here safely where she was, in the passenger-seat of Paul's

biplane. She hardly remembered putting on the rough and voluminous brown

clothes while Mr. Ryan mounted guard over the little stokehole of the

steam chambers.

She only knew that she had walked, easily and undiscovered, across the

field before the whistle blew. That she'd climbed unassisted into that

small wicker seat, and that she was now waiting there, muffled up to the

tip of her nose, the edge of the cap almost meeting the muffler, goggles

down, and gloves hiding her little hands. She was no more to be

distinguished from a man than if she had been a diver encased for a

descent into the sea.

She did not even trouble to wonder at her own wonderful luck in the

affair.

A thousand little accidents might have betrayed her--and and she had

escaped them all. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to her.

Once or twice one of the men had spoken to her, but a wave of the hand

had been answer enough for him. It had been all right. And of course

everything was going to be all right.

She was not going to be put off by pretexts any longer.

And she was not going to be left behind, without him. In another

minute--two minutes--they would be off, he and she!

Furtively she glanced round.

Paul was holding both the Aeroplane Lady's small, capable hands in those

big boy's paws of his.

"Good-bye," he was saying. "So long, I mean. I say, you'll----"

"I'll look after _her_," promised the Aeroplane Lady, very brightly.

"Thanks awfully. You would," said Paul. "Bless you."

"My dear boy----" began the Aeroplane Lady as if she were going to say

something grave, but she ended lightly, "Well, you've a glorious day for

it. The best of luck!--And to you, Mr. Ryan!"

Again the passenger waved a gloved hand in reply.

Then Gwenna felt the tip and creak of the machine, as Paul climbed into

his place behind her.

Andre dashed up to grasp his hand, calling "_Bonne chance!_"

"Thanks!" said Paul. "Right away."

Then, as the propeller pulsed like an angry nerve, Gwenna gave a start.

An appalling roar and wind seemed all about her. Faintly, very faintly,

the noise of the good-bye cheer rose through it. The hat-waving group of

men with wide-open mouths seemed to slide back. The Aeroplane bumped

over the rough field. And then it ceased to bump. Gwenna drew in her

breath, sharply. To right of her, to left of her, the horizon seemed to

sway ever so gently. She thought, but was not sure, that she heard

Paul's voice behind her, bawling, "Trim."

As she settled herself in her seat, the horizon fell away altogether....

All was sunlit blue! The swiftest run in the motor down the smoothest

bit of hill had been nothing to this that was coming; faster, faster....

"There's only one pity," she thought hastily. "He's thinking now that I

let him go without saying good-bye!"

Here she had a glimpse of the khaki-green earth far below, as blurred

with height and speed as was the raving invisible propeller itself.

For at last--at last--it was flight!

CHAPTER V

THE NUPTIAL FLIGHT

Yes; at last it was flight.

She now, too, was perched up on this structure that had tucked those

little bicycle wheels and skids underneath it, as a bird tucks its no

longer required feet; she, too, was being borne up aloft on those vast

cambered pinions that let the sunlight half through, like the roof of a

transparent marquee. In this new machine of Paul's, the passenger-seat

was set on a slightly projecting platform, with aluminium-like uprights

of a peculiar section. At first, all that Gwenna knew of this easy

balancing and dipping and banking of the machine, was that there was a

bright triangle of sunlight about her feet, and that this triangle grew

sometimes small, sometimes large, and sometimes spread so that half of

her was sitting in the warm September sunlight; presently to swerve into

the shadow again.

Mechanically tightening her grip on one or other of the aluminium stays,

instinctively yielding her body to this unexpected angle or that, she

watched that triangle of sunlight. She was not giddy or breathless; she

felt no fear at all, only a growing triumph and delight as the soaring

biplane sped on--on----

Once she gave a little "Oh, look!" lost in the hum of the engine. It was

when a tiny flicker of shadow fell upon her patch of sunlight and was

gone; the shadow of some bird flying higher than they, a crow, perhaps.

It was just after this that she noticed, near that advancing and

retiring wedge of sunlight at her feet, something else. This was a

little oval hole in the floor of the platform. A hole for observation.

It brought home to her how frail a floor supported her weight and his;

still she felt no terror; only wonder. She smiled under her mufflings,

thinking that hole was like a knot-hole in a wooden bridge over the

river at home. As a small child she had always been fascinated by that

hole, and had gazed down through it at the rushing bottle-green water

and the bubbles and the boulders below. She glanced down this one, but

her unaccustomed eyes could hardly see anything. She leaned forward and

looked down below the machine, but still could distinguish little.

Woods, roads, meadows, or whatever they were crossing, were still only a

warm and moving blur. Once they passed, quickly, a big patch of pink and

purple, she thought it might be a town, but wasn't sure.

She sat up again in her seat, giving herself up to her own feelings in

this new and breathless experience; her feelings, that were as

undistinguishable as the landscape over which the biplane swept--a warm

blur of delights.

She gripped the stays; she laughed happily to herself behind the

mufflings, she even sang aloud, knowing that it was drowned in the noise

of the engine. She hummed the sheerest medley of scraps of things, tags

of Musical Comedy picked up at Westminster--some verses out of Leslie's

love-songs. Once it was the then universal "Tipperary." And presently it

resolved itself into a Welsh folk-song that the singing-class at her

school had practised over and over again--"The Rising of the Lark," a

blithely defiant tune that seemed best to match her mood as the biplane

sped.

Yes! All the bird-like, soaring spirit in her had come to its own.

Everything else was cast behind her.... She'd always felt, dimly and

uncomfortably, that a great part of herself, Gwenna, was just an

uninteresting, commonplace little girl.... That part had gone! It had

been left behind her, just as her bodily form had been left sleeping on

her bed, that midsummer night, while her soul flew through dreams.

"Dreams!" she thought incoherently. "It's _not_ true what people say

about the dream-come-true, and how one's always disappointed in it. I'm

not--ah, I'm not! This flying! This is more glorious than I

expected--even with _him_----!"

Then came a thought that checked her singing rapture.

"If only _he_ knew! But he doesn't."

Behind her, Paul, driving, had made no sign to the passenger. She could

guess at the busyness of him. His dear, strong hands, she knew, were on

the wheel. They were giving a touch to the throttle here and there. His

feet, too, must be vigilantly busy; now this one doing something

essential, now that. She supposed his whole body must be dipping from

time to time, just as that triangle of sunlight dipped and crept. It

was all automatic to him, she expected. He could work that machine

while he was thinking, just as she herself could knit and think.

"He's thinking of me," she told herself with a rueful little pang. "He's

wondering about my not saying good-bye. He must have minded that.

That'll be all right, though. I'll let him know, presently; I'll pull

down my muffler and look round. Presently. Not yet. Not until it's too

late for him to turn back or set me down----"

And again she hummed to herself in her little tune; inaudible, exultant.

The shining triangle of sunlight disappeared from the platform. All

became level light about her. It seemed growing colder. And beyond her,

far ahead, she spied a sweep of monotonous grey.

She guessed what that meant.

"The sea!" she told herself, thrilled. "We'll be flying over the sea

soon. _Then_ he can't do anything about sending me back. Then I shall

put up these goggles and push this cap off my curls. Then he'll see.

He'll know that it's me that's flying with him!" And she held away from

herself that thought that even so this flight could not last for ever,

there would be the descent in France, the good-bye that she had

evaded--No! It must last!

Again she forgot all else in the rushing joy of it.

Suddenly she felt something jolt hard against her left arm, for the

first time Paul was trying to attract his passenger's attention. Twice

her arm was jolted by something. Then she put out her brown gloved hand

to it, grasping what had jolted her. She drew it forward as he loosed it

to her clutch.

It was a gun; a carbine.

What--Why----?

She remembered something that she had heard Paul say, dim ages ago, when

she had watched him in the office, consulting with the Aeroplane Lady

over that machine-gun with that wicked-looking little nozzle that he had

decided not to mount upon the P.D.Q.

"_It'll have to be a rifle after all._"

Little Gwenna in her brown disguise sat with this rifle across her

knees, wondering.

Why did Paul wish Mr. Ryan to be armed with this? Why hadn't he handed

over that carbine just when they were about to start? Why only now, just

when they had got as far as the sea?

For she was certain now that what was below them was the sea. There was

a bright, silvery glitter to the right, but the floating floor of the

biplane shut that out again. To the left all was of a slaty grey. The

sun's level rays shot along the length of the biplane as if it were down

a gallery.

Gwenna sat there, holding that carbine across her brown wrapped knees,

and still puzzling over it. Why had Paul handed the thing over, so

suddenly? She could not see the reason.

Even when it appeared she did not at first see the reason.

Paul Dampier had been quicker to see it than she.

Of a sudden there broke out--there is no other word for it--a silence

more startling than all that harsh raving of the propeller that had been

stopped. At the same instant Gwenna felt the floor fall away suddenly on

her left and mount as dizzily on her right. The biplane was tilted up in

the air just as a ladder is tilted against the side of the house. And

the engine was giving short staccato roars into the silences as Paul

kept her going. He had shut off, and was making a giddy swoop down, down

to the left. She heard his voice. Sharply he cried out:

"There! Out to the left! The Taube! There he is!"

The next moment the engine was roaring again. The biplane had lifted to

the opposite curve of a swooping figure eight.

And now the girl in the passenger-seat saw in the air beside them,

scarcely two hundred yards away, what the pilot had seen.

It was another aeroplane; a monoplane.

CHAPTER VI

THE WINGED VICTORY

Now Gwenna, although she'd been clerk and assistant to the Aeroplane

Lady herself, and although she loved the idea of aeroplanes as other

girls have loved the idea of jewels, scarcely knew one pattern of

monoplane from another.

They were all the same to her as far as overlapping the seams with the

doped strips was concerned. Nevertheless, in this machine that seemed

suddenly to have appeared out of nowhere, there struck her something

that was quite unfamiliar. Never before had she seen that little

blade-shaped drag from the tips of the wings. It gave to this machine

the look of a flying pigeon.... She had only noticed it for a moment, as

the monoplane had lurched, as it were, into view over the edge of their

own lower plane. Then it lurched out of sight again.

Again their engine was shut off; and again she heard Paul's voice,

excited, curt.

"Can you get him, do you think?"

Get him? Bewilderingly she wondered what Paul could mean. Then came

another staccato rush of sound. Then another silence, and Paul's voice

through it.

"All right. I'll get above him; and you can shoot through the floor."

The engine brayed again, this time continuously.

"Shoot!" gasped Gwenna.

Shoot at that machine through the hole in the floor of this one? It was

a German craft, then? And Paul meant Mr. Ryan to shoot whoever was in

that machine. And she, Gwenna, who had never had a gun in her hands

before in her life, found herself in the midst of War, told to shoot----

Hardly knowing one end of the thing from the other, she grasped the

carbine. She guessed that the flyer in the other machine must have

realised what Paul meant to do.

They were rising; he was rising too.

And suddenly she became aware that there was sunlight about them no

longer. All was a dun and chilly white. Paul, trying to get above the

other, and the other trying to prevent him, had both run up together

into a cloud. Once before the Welsh girl had had this experience. On a

rocky mountain-path up Cader Idris she had walked into a thick mist that

wrapped her from seeing anything in front of her, even though she could

hear the voices of tourists just a little ahead.

And now here they saw nothing, but they could hear.

Even through the noise of their propeller Gwenna's ears caught a smaller

noise. It seemed to come from just below.

She had got the muzzle of the carbine through the hole at her feet.

Desperately, blindly she fumbled at what she thought must be the

trigger. Behind her goggles, she shut her eyes tightly. The thing went

off before she knew how it had done so.

Then, nothing....

Then the propeller had stopped again. She felt her shoulder touched

from behind. Paul's voice called, "Got him, Ryan?"

"I--I don't know," she gasped, turning. "I--_Paul! It's me!_"

It was a wonder that the biplane did not completely overturn.

Paul Dampier had wrenched himself forward out of the straps and had

taken one hand from the wheel. His other clutched Gwenna's shoulder, and

the clutch dragged away the muffler at her white throat and her goggles

slipped aside. Aghast he glared at her. The Little Thing herself? Here?

"Good---- here, keep still. Great----! For Heaven's sake, don't move.

I'll run for it. He can't catch me. I was trying to catch him. He can't

touch us---- We'll race--hold tight, Gwen--ready." He opened the throttle

again; while Gwenna, white-faced, took in the tornado of wind with

parted lips and turned sideways to stare with wide-open eyes.

Then a number of things seemed to happen very quickly.

The first of these was a sharp "Ping!" on one of the aluminium stays.

Gwenna found herself gazing blankly at the round hole in the wing a yard

to the right of her. The next thing was that the fog--mist--or cloud,

had disappeared. All was clear sky about them once more. The third thing

was that, hardly a stone's toss away, and only missed by a miracle in

the cloud, they saw the monoplane and the aviator in her.

He was bareheaded, for that blind, wild shot of the British girl's had

stripped away his head-covering, and there was a trickle of scarlet down

his cheek. His hair was a gilded stubble, his eyes hard and blue and

Teutonic. His flying-gear was buttoned plastron-wise above his chest,

just as that white linen jacket of his had been; and Karl Becker,

waiter, spy and aviator, gave a little nod, as much as to say that he

recognised that they were meeting not for the first time....

One glimpse showed all this. The next instant both German and Englishman

had turned to avoid the imminent collision. But the German did more than

turn.

He had been fired on and hit; now was his shot. Dampier, with no thought

now but to get his wife out of danger, crowded the biplane on. As the

machines missed one another by hardly ten feet, she heard the four

cracks of Paul's revolver.

Little Gwenna thought she had never heard anything so fascinating,

horrible, and sweet. He was fighting not for his own life only. And he

was not now being fired at, far from her, hoping that she need never

know. For she also, she was in danger with him; she who did not want to

die before him but who would not wish to live for one moment after him.

Moments? When every moment was a whole life, what could be more

perilously, unimaginedly sweet than this?

"I knew I had to come," she gasped to herself. "Never away from him

again! Never----"

Her heart was racing like the propeller itself with just such speed,

such power. More love than it could bear was crowded into every throb of

it. For one more of those moments that were more than years she must

look at him and see him look at her....

One look!

As they tore through the air she turned in her straps, pushing the curls

back from her brow. Her eyes met his, set and intent over the wheel.

She smiled at him.

Up out of the depths of his intentness she saw the answering smile come

into his own eyes. He nodded. He meant that it was all right. His lips

moved.

"He can't--touch--us!" he was shouting. His girl threw back her head as

far as it would go, offering her face for the kiss that she knew he

could not give. He nodded again, laughed outright, and stretched his own

head forward. It was all a kiss, despite the constraining straps--or

almost all.

More of a kiss than many lovers know, more of a marriage!

For then it was that the German's shot rang out, completing their

caress. Never was dearer nor more precious union, never less pain, so

lost was it in rapture. As gently as if he had only just said Good-night

the boy's head sank on the wheel; as for hers, it never moved. She still

lay, leaning back with lips parted, as if to-morrow would see her kissed

awake again.... His hands twitched once only. That movement cut off the

throttle. Again, for the last time, the propeller stopped.

The Taube was already a vanishing speck in the distance....

The P.D.Q. yawed, hung poised, began to slide tail first, and gathered

speed.

Up, up came the silver waves of the English Channel.

POSTSCRIPT

MYRTLE AND LAUREL LEAF

It was the week before Christmas, Nineteen-fourteen.

London wore her dreariest winter livery of mud-brown and fog-yellow, and

at three o'clock on such an afternoon there would have been brilliant

lights everywhere ... any other, ordinary year.

This year, Londoners had to find their way as best they could through

the gloom.

Across a wide Square with a railed and shrubberied garden in the centre

of it, there picked her way a very tall girl in furs that clung about

her as bushy ivy hangs about some slender tree. She wore a dark velvet

coat broadly belted over her strait hips, and upon her impish head there

was perched one of the little, back velvet, half-military caps that were

still the mode. This girl peered up at the numbers of the great houses

at the side of the Square; finally, seeing the gilt-lettered inscription

that she sought above one of the doors,

"ANNEXE TO THE CONVALESCENT HOME

FOR WOUNDED OFFICERS,"

she rang the bell.

The door was opened to her by a small trim damsel in the garb of the

Girl-Guides, who ushered her into a large and ornate hall, and into the

presence of a fresh-coloured, fair-haired Personage--she was evidently

no less--in nurse's uniform.

This Personage gazed upon the visitor with a suspicious and disapproving

look.

"I wonder why? It isn't because I'm not blamelessly tidy for once in my

life, and she can't guess that the furs and the brown velvet suit are

cast-offs from the opulent," thought the visitor swiftly. Aloud she

added in her clear, nonchalant tone: "I have come to see Mr. Scott,

please."

"There is the visiting-hour. It is not quite three yet," said the nurse

forbiddingly.

"I'll wait, then," said the visitor. For two minutes she waited. Then

the nurse approached her with a note-book and a pencil.

"Will you write your name down here?" she said austerely. And upon a

page inscribed "_Mr. M. Scott_" the visitor wrote her name, "Miss Leslie

Long."

"Will you come up?" the nurse said reluctantly. And Leslie ascended a

broad red-carpeted stairway, and was shown into a great room of parquet

floors and long windows and painted panels that had been a drawing-room,

and that was now turned by a row of small beds on great castors and by

several screens into a hospital-ward.

A blonde youth in a pink pyjama jacket, and with his arm in a black

silken sling, was sitting up in bed and chatting to a white-moustached

gentleman beside him; another of the wounded was sitting by one of the

great fire-places, reading; a couple were playing picquet in a corner,

under a smiling Academy portrait of the mistress of the mansion.

"Mr. Scott is sitting up to-day, in the ante-room," vouchsafed the

nurse. And Leslie Long entered, through a connecting door, a small room

to the right.

One wall of it was hung with a drapery of ancient brown tapestry,

showing giant figures amidst giant foliage; beneath it was a low couch.

Upon this, covered with a black, panther-skin rug, there lay, half

sitting up, supported on his elbow, the young wounded officer whom

Leslie had come to see.

"Frightfully good of you, this," he said cheerfully, as she appeared.

She looked down at him.

For the moment she could not speak. She set down on his couch the sheaf

of golden chrysanthemums that she had brought, and the copy of the

_Natal Newsletter_ that she had thought might cheer him. She found

herself about to say a very foolish thing: "So they left you your

handsome eyes, Monty."

The face in which those eyes shone now was thin and drawn; and it seemed

as if all the blood had been drained from it. His crutches stood in the

corner at the foot of the couch. He was Monty Scott, the Dean's son,

once a medical student and would-be sculptor. Yes; he had been a

dilettante artist once, but he looked a thorough soldier now. The small

moustache and the close-cropped hair suited him well. He had enlisted in

the Halberdiers at the beginning of the War. He had got his commission

and had lost his leg at Ypres.

Not again would he wear that Black Panther get-up to any fancy-dress

dance.... Never again.

This was the thought, trivial and irrelevant enough, that flashed

through Leslie's mind, bringing with it a rush of tears that she had to

bite her lips to check. She had to clench her nails into her palms, to

open her black eyes widely and smilingly, and to speak in the clearest

and most flippant tone that she could summon.

"Hullo, Monty! Nice to see you again; now that I _can_ see you. You

wounded warriors _are_ guarded by a dragon!--thanks, I'll sit down

here." She turned the low chair by the couch with its back to the light.

"Yes, I could hardly get your Ministering-Angel-Thou to let me through.

Glared at me as if she thought I was after the spoons. (I suppose that's

exactly what some of them _are_ after," suggested Miss Long, laughing

quite naturally.) "She evidently took me for just another predatory

feline come to send the patient's temperature soaring upwards. It's not

often I'm crushed, but----"

"Oh, Nurse Elsa is all right," said the patient, laughing too. "You

know, I think she feels bound to be careful about new people. She seems

to have a mania for imagining that everybody fresh may be a German spy!"

"A _German_? Why should she think that?"

"Oh, possibly because--well----" Young Scott lowered his voice and

glanced towards that connecting door. But it had been shut. "Because she

happens to be 'naturalised' herself, you know!"

They talked; Leslie ever more lightly as she was more deeply touched by

the sight of the young man on his couch. So helpless, he who had been so

full of movement and fitness and supple youth! So pluckily, resolutely

gay, he who had been so early put out of the fun!

Lightly he told Leslie the bare details of his wound. It had been in a

field of beet that he had been pipped; when he had been seeing to some

barbed wire with a sergeant and a couple of his men, at nightfall. One

of those snipers had got him.

"And I was downed in a second," he said ruefully. "_I_ couldn't get the

beggar!"

Leslie thought of the young, mortally-wounded Mercutio and his impatient

cry of "_What! Is he gone, and hath nothing?_" It was the only complaint

at his lot that was ever to pass the lips of this other fighter.

She looked at him, and her heart swelled with pride for him. It sank

with shame for herself. She had always held him--well, not as lightly as

she said she had. There had been always the sneaking tenderness for the

tall, infatuated boy whom she'd laughed at. But why "sneaking"? Why had

she laughed? She had thought him so much less than herself. She said she

knew so much more. What vanity and crass, superficial folly! A new

thrill took her suddenly. Could it be that War, that had cut everybody's

life in two, had worked another wonder?

Presently he remarked, "I say, your friends, the poor Dampiers! I

suppose nothing's ever been heard of them, after that day that they

found out at the Works that his wife had started with him, when he set

off for France, and disappeared?"

"Nothing," said Leslie quietly, "Whether it was an accident with his new

engine, or whether they were killed by a shot from a German aeroplane

they met, we shan't ever know now. It must have been over the sea....

Nothing has ever been found. Much the best way, I think. I said so to

poor young Mr. Ryan, the man who let her take his place. He was beside

himself when he turned up at the Aircraft place again and found that

nothing had been heard. He said he'd killed her. I told him she would

think he'd done more for her than anybody she knew. The best time to go

out! No growing old and growing dull and perhaps growing ill and being

kept half alive by bothering doctors, for years.... No growing out of

love with each other, ever! They, at least, have had something that

nothing can spoil."

Monty Scott, turning his small, close-cropped head of a soldier and his

white face towards the tapestry, blurted out: "Well! At all events

they've _had_ it. But even having it 'spoilt' is better than never

having had any----"

He checked himself abruptly.

He was not going to whine now over his own ill-luck in love to her, to

Leslie, who had turned him down three times. Not much.

In the suddenly tense atmosphere of the little room overlooking the

wide, dim Square, the girl felt the young man's resolution--a

resolution that he would keep. He would never ask her for another

favour.

He cleared his throat and spoke in an altered tone, casual,

matter-of-fact.

"Awfully pretty, the little girl that Dampier married, wasn't she?

Usen't she to live at that Club of yours? I think I saw her once,

somewhere or other----"

"Yes. You did," said Leslie quickly, and a little breathlessly as though

she, too, had just taken a resolution. "At that dance. That river dance.

She was the Cherub-girl. And I wore my mauve Nijinski things. You

remember that time, Monty?"

"Oh, yes," said the wounded man shortly, "I remember."

There was a slight, uneasy movement under the panther-skin rug.

He hadn't thought that Leslie would have reminded him of those times.

Not of that dance, when, with his hands on her hips and her hands

clasped at the back of his neck, he had swung round with her in the

maddest of waltzes.... He wouldn't have expected her to _remind_ him!

Nor was he expecting the next thing that Leslie did. She slipped from

that low chair on to her knees by the couch. Her furs touched his hand,

delicate and whiter now than a woman's, and he took it quickly away. He

could not look at the vivid, impish face with the black, mocking eyes

and the red, mocking mouth that had always bewitched him. Had he looked,

he would have seen that the mockery was gone from both. It was gone,

too, from Leslie's voice when she next spoke, close to him.

"Monty! At that dance---- Have you forgotten? We were walking by the

river--and you said--you asked----"

"Yes, yes; all right. Please don't mind," muttered the man who had been

the Black Panther hastily. It was pretty awful, having girls _sorry_ for

one!

She went on kneeling by him. "I told you that I wasn't in the mood!"

"Yes; but--I say, it doesn't matter one scrap, thanks," declared Monty

Scott, very hoarsely.

This was the hardest thing he'd ever yet had to bear; harder than lying

out wounded in that wet beetroot-field for nine hours before he could be

picked up; harder than the pain, the agonising, jolting journeys; harder

even than the sleepless nights when he had tossed and turned on his bed,

next to the bed where a delirious man who had won the D.S.O. cried out

in his nightmare unceasingly: "Stick it, boys! Stick it, boys! Stick it,

boys!" He (Monty) didn't think he could stick this. There could never be

any one in the world but Leslie for him, that laughing, devil-may-care

Leslie at whom "nice" girls looked askance. Leslie who didn't care.

Leslie who _pitied_ him! Ghastly! Desperately he wished she'd get up and

go--_go_----

Suddenly her voice sounded in his ear. Far from being pitying it was so

petulant as to convince even him. It cried: "Monty! I said then that

you were an infant-in-arms! If you weren't an infant you could _see_!"

He turned his head quickly on the couch-cushion. But even then he didn't

really see. Even then he scarcely took in, for the moment, what he

heard.

For the kneeling, radiant girl had to go on, laughing shakily: "I always

liked you.... After everything I said! After everything I've thought, it

comes round to this. _It's better to have loved and settled down than

never to have loved at all.... Oh!_ I've got my head into as bright a

rainbow as any of them!..." scolded Leslie, laughing again as

flutteringly as Paul Ethampier's sweetheart might have done. "Oh, I

thought that just because one liked a man in the kind of way I liked

you, it was no reason to accept him ... _fool_ that I was----"

"Leslie!" he cried very sharply, scarcely believing his ears. "Could you

have?--_could_ you? And you tell me _now_! When it's too late----"

"Too _late_? _Won't_ you have me? Can't you see that I think you so much

more of a man when you're getting about as well as you can on one leg

than I did when you were just dancing and fooling about on two? As for

me----"

She turned her bright face away.

"It's the same old miracle that never stops happening. I shan't even be

a woman, ever," faltered Leslie Long, "unless you help to make me one!"

"You can't mean it? You can't----"

"Can't I? I am 'in the mood' _now_, Monty!" she said, very softly.

"Believe me!"

And her long arm was flung, gently and carefully, about her soldier's

neck; her lips were close to his.

* * * * *

When at last she left her lover, Leslie Long walked down the darkened

streets near Victoria, quietly and meditatively. And her thoughts were

only partly with the man whom she had left so happy. Partly they were

claimed by the girl-friend whose marriage morning wish had been for her,

Leslie, to be happy in the same way.

It seemed to Leslie that she was very near her now.

Even as she walked along the tall girl was conscious, in a way not to be

described, of a Presence that seemed to follow her and to beset her and

to surround her with a sense of loving, laughing, girlish pleasure and

fellowship. She saw, _without seeing_, the small, eager, tip-tilted face

with bright eyes of river-green and brown, crowned by the wreath of

short, thick curls. _Without hearing_, she caught the tone of the soft,

un-English, delighted voice that cried, "Oh, _Les_--lie----!"

"Little Taffy! She'd be so full of it, of course.... Of _course_ she'd

be glad! Of _course_ she'd know; I can't think she doesn't. Not she, who

was so much in love herself," mused Leslie, putting up her hand with her

characteristic gesture to tuck in the stray tress of black hair that had

come loose under her trim velvet cap.

"And the people we've loved can't forget at once, as soon as they've

left us. I don't believe that. _She knows._ If _I_ could only say

something--send some sort of message! Even if it were only like waving a

hand! If _I_ could make some sign that I shall always care----"

As she thought of it she was passing a row of shops. The subdued light

from one of them fell upon swinging garlands of greenery festooned

outside; decorations ready for Christmas.

On an impulse Leslie Long turned into this florist's shop. "I want one

of those wreaths you have, please," she said.

"Yes, Madam; a holly-wreath?"

"No. One of those. Laurel."

And while the man fetched down the wreath of broad, dark, pointed

leaves, Leslie Long took out one of her cards and a pencil, and

scribbled the message that she presently fastened to the wreath. She

would not have it wrapped up in paper, but carried it as it was. Then

she turned down a side-street to the Embankment, near Vauxhall Bridge.

She leaned over the parapet and saw the black, full tide, here and there

only jewelled with lights, flowing on, on, past the spanning bridges and

the town, away to the sea that had been at last the great, silver,

restless resting-place for such young and ardent hearts....

There was a soft splash as she flung the laurel wreath into the flowing

water.

Leslie glanced over and watched it carried swiftly past. In a patch of

light she saw the tiny white gleam of the card that was tied to the

leaves of victory.

This was what she had written upon it:

"For Gwenna and Paul.

'_Envy, ah, even to tears!

The fortune of their years,

Which, though so few, yet so divinely ended._'"

THE END

* * * * *

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=Happy Island= (Sequel to Uncle William). By Jeannette Lee.

=Havoc.= By E. Phillips Oppenheim.

=Heart of Philura, The.= By Florence Kingsley.

=Heart of the Desert, The.= By Honore Willsie.

=Heart of the Hills, The.= By John Fox, Jr.

=Heart of the Sunset.= By Rex Beach.

=Heart of Thunder Mountain, The.= By Elfrid A. Bingham.

=Heather-Moon, The.= By C. N. and A. M. Williamson.

=Her Weight in Gold.= By Geo. B. McCutcheon.

=Hidden Children, The.= By Robert W. Chambers.

=Hoosier Volunteer, The.= By Kate and Virgil D. Boyles.

=Hopalong Cassidy.= By Clarence E. Mulford.

=How Leslie Loved.= By Anne Warner.

=Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker.= By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D.

=Husbands of Edith, The.= By George Barr McCutcheon.

=I Conquered.= By Harold Titus.

=Illustrious Prince, The.= By E. Phillips Oppenheim.

=Idols.= By William J. Locke.

=Indifference of Juliet, The.= By Grace S. Richmond.

=Inez.= (Ill. Ed.) By Augusta J. Evans.

=Infelice.= By Augusta Evans Wilson.

=In Her Own Right.= By John Reed Scott.

=Initials Only.= By Anna Katharine Green.

=In Another Girl's Shoes.= By Berta Ruck.

=Inner Law, The.= By Will N. Harben.

=Innocent.= By Marie Corelli.

=Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, The.= By Sax Rohmer.

=In the Brooding Wild.= By Ridgwell Cullum.

=Intrigues, The.= By Harold Bindloss.

=Iron Trail, The.= By Rex Beach.

=Iron Woman, The.= By Margaret Deland.

=Ishmael= (Ill.) By Mrs. Southworth.

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

1. Passages in italics are surrounded by _underscores_ and the ones in

bold are indicated by =bold=.

2. Obvious punctuation errors have been silently closed, while those

requiring interpretation have been left as such.

3. The word manoeuvres uses an oe ligature in the original.

4. The following misprints have been corrected:

"kimona" corrected to "kimono" (page 21)

"beseiged" corrected to "besieged" (page 62)

"Esctasy" corrected to "Ecstasy" (page 242)

"ass" corrected to "as" (page 277)

"husabnd" corrected to "husband" (page 353)

5. Other than the corrections listed above, printer's inconsistencies in

spelling, hyphenation, and ligature usage have been retained.