Before he answered, Gwenna had time to think smartingly, "His fiancee! There! I might have known he was engaged. I might have guessed it! It's nothing to do with me.... Only ... I believe that's what's going to get in the way of my flying with him. She won't let him. I mean he'll always be taking her up! And I know who it is, too. It's sure to be the one called Muriel that I saw go up with him at Hendon with the red hair and the scarf. I sort of guessed when I heard they were going up together that she must be his fiancee."
And all the while her eyes were, apparently, on the silver stand of the spirit-kettle, they watched the young Airman's face (which looked a little sheepish). She listened, tensely, for his reply. Quite shortly Paul Dampier, still munching cake, said, "Who? Oh! Going on as usual, thanks."
"Now I may tell you that that's merely a pose to conceal devotion," laughed his cousin, turning to Gwenna. "Just as if every moment were not grudged that he spends away from HER!"
"Is it?" said the young girl with a smile. There was a bad lump in her throat, but she spoke with her most carefully-fostered "English" accent. "I--I suppose that's natural!" she remarked.
Hugo, fondling his Chopin curl again, went on amusing himself with this chosen subject.
"But, as is so often the case with a young man's fancy," he announced, "nobody else sees anything in 'her'!"
The stricken Gwenna looked quickly at young Dampier, who was cutting the Titan wedges that men call "slices," of cake. How would he take it that it had been said of his adored one that no one saw anything in her?
He only gave a short laugh, a confident nod of his fair head and said, "They will, though."
"Infatuated youth!" commented Hugo Swayne, resignedly, leaning back. "And he tries to cover it up by seeming casual. 'Going on as usual' is said just as a blind. It sounds so much more like a mere wife than a fiancee, don't you think?"
"Ah, but you are cynique, monsieur," protested the young Frenchman, looking mildly shocked. "For you it is not sacred, the love for a wife?"
"Oh, look here! Hadn't you better explain to them," broke in Paul Dampier boyishly, having finished a large mouthful of his cake, "that you're rotting? Fiancee, indeed. Haven't got such a thing in the world, of course."
At this Gwenna suddenly felt as if some crushing weight of disappointment had fallen from her. "It's because I shall be able to go flying with him after all," she thought.
Young Dampier, rising to take her cup, grumbled laughingly, "D'you suppose girls will look at a man nowadays who can't afford to spend the whole of his time gadding about after 'em, Hugo, as you can, or blowing what's my salary for an entire year on their engagement-rings----"
"My dear fellow, no girl in the world exacts as much of a man's time and money as that grande passion of yours does," retorted Hugo Swayne, not ill-naturedly. And turning to Leslie, he explained: "What I call Paul's fiancee is that eternal aeroplane he's supposed to be making."
"Ah!" said Gwenna, and then blushed violently; partly because she hadn't meant to speak, and partly because this had drawn the blue eyes of the Airman quickly upon herself.
"Yes, that incessant flying-machine of his," enlarged Mr. Swayne, lolling back in his chair and addressing the meeting. "She--I believe it's correct to call the thing 'she'?--is more of a nuisance even than any engaged girl I've ever met. She interferes with everything this man does. Ask him to come along to a dance or the Opera or to see some amusing people, and it's always 'Can't; I'm working on the cylinder or the spiral or the Fourth Dimension' or whatever it is he does think he's working on. Practically 'she' spends all the time he's away from her ringing him up, or getting him rung up, on the telephone. 'She' eats all his spare cash, too----"
"In steel instead of chocolate, I suppose?" smiled Leslie. "And must she be humoured? She seems to have every drawback of a young woman with 'a diamond half-hoop.' Is she jealous, as well?"
And then, while taking a cigarette from Hugo's case, the elder girl made, lightly, a suggestion that the listening Gwenna was fated to remember.
"What would happen," asked Leslie dryly, "if a real flesh-and-blood fiancee were to come along as a rival to the one of machinery?"
"Nothing would happen," Hugo assured her, holding out a lighted match. "That's why it would be rather interesting to watch. The complication of the Aeroplane or the Lady. The struggle in the mind of the young Inventor, what? The Girl"--he tossed aside the match and glanced fleetingly at the grave cherub's-face under Gwenna's white-winged hat--"The Girl versus the Flying Machine. I'd lay fifteen to one on the Machine, Miss Long."
"Done," said Leslie, demurely but promptly. "In half-crowns."
"Yes! You'd back your sex, of course," Hugo took up gaily. The young Frenchman murmured: "But the Machine--the Machine is also of the sex of Mademoiselle."
Here, suddenly, the silently listening Gwenna gave a tiny shiver. She turned her head abruptly towards the open windows behind her with the strutting pigeons and the sailing clouds beyond. It had seemed to the fanciful Celt that there in that too dainty room now hazy with cigarette-smoke, in that careless company of two girls and three young men, she had felt the hint of another Presence. It was rather horrid and ghostly--all this talk of a Machine that was made more of than a Woman! A Machine who "clawed" the man that owned her, just like a jealous betrothed who will not let her lover out of her sight! And supposing that Conflict did come, on which Gwenna's chum and Mr. Dampier's cousin had laid their laughing bets? The struggle between the sweetheart of steel springs and the sweetheart of soft flesh and warm blood? For one clear instant Gwenna knew that this fight would, must come. It was coming----
Then she turned her head and forgot her presentiments; coming back to the light-hearted Present. She watched Leslie, to whom the young Frenchman had been talking; he was now fixing dark earnest eyes upon "Mademoiselle Langue" as she, in the rather stilted phraseology with which our nation speaks its own language for the benefit of foreigners, expounded to him an English story.
There was a short pause.
Then the room rang to the laughter of the foreigner. "Ha! Yes! I have understood him! It is very amusing, that! It is good!" he cried delightedly, with a flash of white teeth and dark eyes. "He say, 'There are parts of it that are excellent!' Aha! Tres spirituel," and he laughed again joyously over the story of the Curate's Egg, while Hugo murmured something about how stimulating it was to hear, for once, the Immemorial Anecdote fall upon Virgin Soil.
The young Airman moved nearer to Gwenna, who, still watching Leslie, gave a little start to hear that deep and gentle voice so close beside her as he spoke.
"Look here, we haven't settled up yet," he said, his voice gentle but carrying above the chatter of the others. "About that flying. Sunday this week I have got to be off somewhere. Now, are you free next Saturday?"
Gwenna, eager and tremulous, was just about to say, "Yes." But Hugo Swayne interrupted.
"I say, I hate to make mischief. But if you're talking about Saturday----? D'you remember, Paul? It was the only day I could take you down to Ascot to see Colonel Conyers."
"Oh, Lord, so it was," said the young Airman, turning an apologetic face to the girl. "I'm so sorry," he explained, "but this is a man I've simply got to get hold of if I can. It's the Air-craft Conyers--'Cuckoo' Conyers they call him. And he was a friend of Hugo's father, and what I've been trying to see him about is working the War-office to take up my new Machine----"
"The Fiancee again, you notice," laughed his cousin, with an imperceptible aside to Leslie. "Score to the Aeroplane."
"Yes, I see," said Gwenna, nodding at the Airman. "Of course! I mean of course I don't mind!"
"Then shall we say Saturday week for you to come up with me instead?" suggested young Dampier.
And Gwenna agreed to the date, thinking, "If only nothing stops it again! If only there isn't something else, then, to do with his Machine! That Machine! I----" Here she paused.
After all, it would be too ridiculous to allow oneself even to think that one "hated" a machine!
