"How should I know, my _dear_ child?" retorted the young Airman. "Why didn't you ask Lord Thingummy, or Conyers at the Club just now?" he laughed. "Good speech of his, wasn't it?"
"Does _he_ know?" persisted Gwenna, paling. "About the war coming, I mean?"
"More likely to know than I am, those people. Not that they'd give it away if they did. It won't be to-morrow, anyway. To-morrow; that's Sunday. _Our_ holiday. Another day we shall have all to ourselves. Tell me what time I'm to call for you at the Club."
Not to be put off, she retorted, timid, persistent, "Tell me when _you_ think it would come. Soon?"
Half laughing, half impatient, he said, "I _don't_ know. Soon enough for it to be in my time, I hope."
"But--" she said, with a little catch in her voice, "you're not a soldier?"
An aviator; yes. That was what she meant. He belonged to the most daring and romantic of professions; the most dangerous, but not _that_ danger. An inventor, part of his time; the rest of his time an airman at Hendon who made flights above what the man with the megaphone called the "Aer-rio-drome" above the khaki-green ground with the pylons and the border of summer-frocked spectators. _Her_ boy! An aviator.... Would that mean presently a man flying above enemy country, to shoot and be shot at? ("_Fired at by both friend and foe._"). She said quiveringly: "_You_ wouldn't have to fight?"
"Oh, Paul!" she cried, aghast, her hands on his arm. "Just when--when I've only just _got_ you! To lose you again so soon----! Oh, no----!"
"Oh, I say, darling, don't be so silly," he said briskly and reassuringly. He patted the little hands. "We're not going to talk about this sort of thing, d'you hear? There's nothing to talk _about_. Actually, there's nothing. Understand?"
"Yes," she murmured slowly. She thought, "Actually, 'there's nothing to talk about' in what's between him and me. _But it's there all the time._"
And then, gradually, that presentiment of War began to fade in the reality of her joy at being with him now, with him still....
They turned up the Hampstead Road, flaring with naphtha-lights above the stalls, noisy with shouts of costers, crowded with the humble shoppers of Saturday night.
"Well, and what about to-morrow?" Dampier took up.