Whatever the Aeroplane Lady thought to herself about the two in the Wing-room, there was no trace of it in her brisk greeting to Paul Dampier.
"I hope you haven't been waiting long?" she said. "I'm ready now."
Then she turned to her girl-assistant, who was once more laying the tacky strips of linen along the seams. "That's right," she said. "You can go straight on with that wing; that will take you some time. One of the wings for your machine," she added to the aviator. "I'm ready, Mr. Dampier."
She and the young man left the Wing-room together and entered the adjoining office, closing the door behind them.
Left alone, Gwenna went on swiftly working, and as swiftly dreaming. Rapidly, but none the less surely, seam after long seam was covered; and the busyness of her fingers seemed to help the fancies of her brain.
"One of the wings for his Machine!" she thought. "And there was I, thinking I should mind working for that--for 'Her,'" she smiled. "I don't, after all. I needn't care, now."
Her heart seemed singing within her. Nothing had happened, really. Only, she was sure of her lover. That was all. All! She worked; and her small feet on the floor seemed set on air, as in that flying dream.
"Such a great, huge wing for 'Her,'" she murmured to herself. "Such a little, little wing for himself that he asked for. My tiny one that I put in my shoe. It was for him I put it there! And now it's begun to bring him to me. It has!" she exulted. "He's begun to care. I know he does."
From the other side of the door came a heightened murmur of voices in the office. Something heavy seemed to be set down on the floor. That sealed box, perhaps, that he'd brought with him in the car. Then came the shutting of the outer door. Mr. Ryan passed the window. Then a sound of hammering in the office, and the long squeak of a nail being prized out of wood. They were opening that mysterious package of his. Gwenna's fingers flew over her own task to the tune of her joyous thoughts.
"I don't care how long it lasts before anything else happens. Don't care how this flying-machine of his does try to keep him from me. She won't. She can't. Nothing can!" triumphed the girl, smoothing the canvas that was her Rival's plumage. "He's going to be mine, with everything that he knows. So much better, and cleverer, and belonging to different sort of people as he is, and yet he's going to have me belonging to him. She's had the last of him putting her always first!"
She heard in the office Paul Dampier's short laugh and his "Oh? you think so?" to the Aeroplane Lady. Gwenna scarcely wondered what this might be about. Some business to do with the Machine; but he would come to an end of that, soon. He'd come back to her, with that look in his blue eyes, that tone in his deep voice. She could wait patiently now for the day, whenever it came, when he should tell her definitely that he loved her and wanted her to be his. There would be that, of course--Gwenna, the inexperienced, still saw "the proposal" as the scene set and prepared; the inevitable milestone beside the course of true love. Never mind that now, though. It didn't matter when. What mattered was that it would come. Then she would always be with him. It would be for ever, like that blissful day in the hayfield, that summer night by the river at the dance, those few bewildering seconds on the Westminster scaffolding. And with no cruelty of separation afterwards to spoil it. Nothing--nothing was going to part them, after all.
She had finished the wing. She looked about for the next thing to do.
There were three wings in the room, and all were finished. A fourth wing still lay, a skeleton of fretted and glued wood, in the workshops; the skin was not yet stretched over it.
And there were no more letters to write for the firm.
Gwenna had nothing to do.
"I shall have to go into the office and ask," she said, admitting to herself that she was glad enough to go. So often she had painted for herself, out of mere memories, the picture of her Airman. He was now in the office, in the flesh! She need not have to satisfy herself with pictures of him. She slipped off her sticky pinafore; the white muslin blouse beneath it was fresh and pretty enough. She moved to the office-door. It was her room; she had never yet had to knock at that door.
She pushed it open and stood waiting. For a moment she only saw the Aeroplane Lady and the tall Aviator. They had their backs to her; they were standing side by side and examining a plan that they had pinned up on the matchboarding wall. Paul Dampier's finger was tracing a little arc on the plan, and he was slowly shaking his head, with the gesture of a man who says that something "won't do." The Aeroplane Lady's fingers were meditatively at her lips, and her attitude echoed that of the young man. Something that they had planned wouldn't do----
Then Gwenna's eyes fell, from these two people, to that "Something." It was something that she had never seen about the Aircraft Works before. Indeed, she did not remember having seen it ever before, anywhere, except in pictures. This object was on the floor, half in and half out of the sealed wooden box that Paul Dampier had brought down with him in the car, and that he wouldn't let the workmen handle.... So this was why....
This was it. Aghast, she stared at it.
It was a long, khaki-painted cylinder, and from one end of it a wicked-looking little nozzle projected for an inch or so. The other end, which disappeared into the box, showed a peep of a magazine and a pistol-grip.
Even to Gwenna's unskilled eyes the thing appeared instantly what it was.
A machine-gun.
"A gun?" she thought, stupefied; "dear me--on an aeroplane?"
"No," said Paul Dampier's voice suddenly, decisively, speaking to the Aeroplane Lady, "it'll have to be a rifle after all."
And with the sudden breaking of his voice upon her ear, there seemed to be torn from before the girl's eyes a corner of some veil.
Quite suddenly (how, she could not explain) she knew what all this meant.
That plan for that new flying-machine. That gun. The whole object of the ambitions of these people with their so romantic profession. Scraps of her Aviator's talk about "scouting," and "the new Arm," and "modern warfare." ...
Just now she had been swept up aloft by his look and tone into the seventh heaven of a woman's delight. That was Love. Here, epitomised in that cylinder with that vicious little nozzle, she saw the Power that could take him from her yet. This was War!
A shudder ran over her.
Her mind took no notice of the facts that there was no War for him to go to, that this grim preparation must be for experimenting only, for manoeuvres, sham fights; that this was July, Nineteen-fourteen, an era of sleepy peace (except for that gossip, half a joke, that we might have civil war in Ireland yet), and that she and he and everybody they had to do with lived in the Twentieth Century, in England....
Perhaps it was because she was not English, but British, Welsh. She entirely lacked that Anglo-Saxon "balance" of which the English are so proud, and that stolidity and that unimaginativeness. Her imagination caught some of those unheard, unsuspected messages with which the air must have been vibrant, all those midsummer weeks.
Her quick, unbalanced Celtic fancy had already shown her as clearly as if she had seen it with her eyes that image of his Aeroplane as a winged and taloned Woman-rival. Now it flashed before her, in a twink, another picture:
Paul Dampier, seated in that Aeroplane, swooping through the air, armed and in danger!
The danger was from below. She did not see that danger. She saw only the image, against grey, scudding clouds, of the Beloved. But she could feel it, that poignant Threat to him, to him in every second of his flight. It was not the mere risk of accident or falling. It was a new peril of which the shadow, cast before, fell upon the receptive fancy of the girl who loved the adventurer. And, set to that shadow-picture in her mind, there rang out to some inner sense of hers a Voice that sounded clear and ominous words.
They called to her: "Fired at both by friend and foe----"
Then stopped.
The young girl didn't remember ever to have heard or even to have read these words. How should she? It was the warning fore-echo of a phrase now historic, but then as yet unuttered, that had transmitted itself to some heightened sense of hers:
"Fired at both by friend and foe!"
This phrase occurred in a despatch from Sir David Henderson.
There! It was gone, the waking vision that left her trembling, with a certainty.
Yes; here was the meaning of the sealed box, of the long confabulation of her Airman with the Aeroplane Lady.... War was coming. And they knew.
Gwenna, standing there in the doorway, drawing a long breath and feeling suddenly rather giddy, knew that she had come upon something that she had not been meant to guess.
What was she to do about it?
Her hand was on the knob of the door.
Must she close it upon herself, or behind her?
Should she come forward and cry, "Oh, if it was a dreadful secret, why didn't you lock the door?"
Or should she go out noiselessly, taking that burden of a secret with her? She might confess to the Aeroplane Lady afterwards....
Here she saw that the Airman had half turned. His boyish, determined profile was dark in shadow against the plan on the wall; the plan of the P.D.Q. Sunlight through the office window touched and gilded the edge of his blonde head.
"Yes; I thought so. Have to be a rifle after all," he repeated in a matter-of-fact tone. Then, turning more round, his glance met the startled eyes of the girl in the doorway.
And that finished the dilemma for Gwenna.
Something rose up in her and was too strong to let her be silent.
"Oh! I've seen it!" she cried sharply. "Paul!"
He took one stride towards her and slipped his arm about her as she swayed. She was white to the lips.
"Is there any water----" began young Dampier, but already the Aeroplane Lady had poured out a glassful.
It was he, however, who put it to Gwenna's lips, holding her still.
"It's all right, darling," he said reassuringly (and the give-away word slipped very easily from his tongue). "Better, aren't you? Frightfully muggy in that room with those radiators! You oughtn't to be---- Here!" He took some of the cold water and dabbed it on her curls.
"I suppose he knew he could trust the child," thought the Aeroplane Lady as she closed the door of the Wing-room between herself and those two in the office, "but I don't know that I should have engaged her if I'd known. I don't want lovers about the place, here. Of course, this explains his Aviation dinner and everything----"
Little Gwenna, standing with her small face buried against the Aviator's tweed jacket, was sighing out that she hadn't meant to come in, hadn't meant to look at that horrible gun....
The girl didn't know what she was saying. The boy scarcely heard it. He was rumpling with his cheek the short, silky curls he had always longed to touch. Presently he tilted her cherub's head back against his shoulder, then put both his hands about that throat of hers.
She gave an unsteady little laugh.
"You'll throttle me," she murmured.
Without loosening his clasp, he bent his fair head further down, and kissed her, very gently, on the mouth.
"Don't mind, do you?" he said, into another kiss. "Do you?"
At that moment the Little Thing in his arms had banished all thought of those Big Things from his mind.
