"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 mostawfullykind to me, and the little maid herespoilsme. Every night when I am in bed sheinsistson bringing me up a glass of hot milk and two biscuits, though what for I don't know."Isthere anything more about your coming back from the Front to fetch the P.D.Q.? Oh, itwouldbe so lovely to see you even for afew days. I sometimes feel as if I hadnever, neverseen you——"
"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 mostawfullykind to me, and the little maid herespoilsme. Every night when I am in bed sheinsistson bringing me up a glass of hot milk and two biscuits, though what for I don't know.
"Isthere anything more about your coming back from the Front to fetch the P.D.Q.? Oh, itwouldbe so lovely to see you even for afew days. I sometimes feel as if I hadnever, neverseen 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 herheart to him ... oh, and she would saysomething! Even if she tore up that sheet and wrote another. She scribbled down hastily: "Darling boy, do you know I miss you moreevery day; nobody hasevermissed anybodyso 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 reallyawfully selfishof me tomarryyou," 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 andallher people able to help you on in the Army, or somebody very beautiful andrich, anybody would have been glad to have you, and IknowI am just a littlenobody, and not a bit clever and even Leslie used to say I had a Welshy accent sometimes when I speak, and I daresaylotsof people will think, oh, 'howcouldhe!—why, she isn't even verypretty!'"
"I sometimes think it was reallyawfully selfishof me tomarryyou," 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 andallher people able to help you on in the Army, or somebody very beautiful andrich, anybody would have been glad to have you, and IknowI am just a littlenobody, and not a bit clever and even Leslie used to say I had a Welshy accent sometimes when I speak, and I daresaylotsof people will think, oh, 'howcouldhe!—why, she isn't even verypretty!'"
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 Ménie" 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....Hewas 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, theycouldn'thave loved you like I do, or been so proud of being your wife;reallysometimes I canhardly believethat I am really and truly married to——"
"The only thing is, that whatever sort of wife you'd married, theycouldn'thave loved you like I do, or been so proud of being your wife;reallysometimes I canhardly believethat 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, Ido hopethey 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 thatstood 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 Reveillé 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 Ménie.
That red rose had broken into blossom in the night.
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, tosee 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 itcanpour 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 beinthe 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 onceechoed 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 thatcountry, 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 whenIwas there."
Gwenna affected to gasp over the conceit of men."If I'vegotto 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 theystood, 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 sorough," 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-milkbefore 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, ofbara 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 isnota 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 fâch?" she asked of Gwenna.
"He's been over in France, fighting the Germans," said the girl, while the old woman on her settle by thefire 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 verykindone, 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 hadhadto spend the day together thus. Itseemed 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 simplycoveredwith flowers, pink and rose-colour, and reflected in the water! Itisso lovely,"Gwenna told the lover beside her. "Oh, Paul! Youmustcome 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 rushybank, 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.
"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—justso—on the morning of her marriage. Only then she had thought it wouldbe 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 couldswimlike 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 shiveredas 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.Thatcould 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 weeverhave 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.
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, andwith 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 fiancée! 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, flyingacross 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-hairedyoung 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 wantme, 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.Youaren'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.
"Hemaynever 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 wereshewho begged to be withyou," 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, youmust!"
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 seeherfor 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.
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—andand 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 afterher," 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.
André 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!
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 shadowfell 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—someverses 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'snottrue 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 withhim——!"
Then came a thought that checked her singing rapture.
"If onlyheknew! 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 wasall 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.Thenhe 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 glovedhand 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.
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 floorof 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 hershoulder 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 theBritish 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 withjust 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.