Gwenna, as usual, hadn't wasted any thoughts over this. She had been too full of what their host himself would say and do--about the flying. She was all ready, in the white dress, the white hat with the wings, half an hour after Sunday mid-day dinner at the Ladies' Club. But it was very nearly half-past four by the time Mr. Dampier did come, as he had promised, to fetch the two girls.
He came in the car that had driven them back on the night of the dinner-party.
And he was hurried, and apologetic for his lateness. He even seemed a little shy. This had the effect of making Gwenna feel quite self-possessed as she took the seat beside him ("I hate sitting by the driver, really. Makes me _so_ nervous!" Leslie had declared) and inquired whether he borrowed his cousin's car any time he had visitors.
"Well, but Hugo's _got_ everything," he told her, with a twinkle, "so I always borrow anything of his that I can collar!"
"Oh, come! I didn't think it of you. _What_ a pun!" he retorted.
She coloured a little, shy again, hurt. But he turned his head to look at her, confided to her: "It was _on_ the chest-of-drawers, all the time!"
And, as the car whizzed westwards, they laughed together. That dinner-table incident of the collar--or collared--stud brought, for the second time, a sudden homely glow of friendly feeling between this boy and girl.
She thought, "He's just as easy to get on with as if he were another girl, like Leslie----"
For always, at the beginning of things, the very young woman compares her first man-friend with the dearest girl-chum she has known.
--"Or as if he were just nobody, instead of being so wonder-ful, and an airman, good gracious!"
Appropriately enough for an airman, his place seemed to be nearly on the house-tops of a block of buildings near Victoria Street.
The lift carried them up past six landings and many boards inscribed with names of firms. It stopped at the seventh story, almost directly opposite a cream-coloured door with a small, old-fashioned brass knocker, polished like gold.
The door was opened by a thick-set man in an excellent suit of clothes and with the face of a wooden sphinx.
"Tea as soon as you can, Johnson," said the young Airman over his shoulder, as the trio passed in.