Dampier made way for him, and he passed. Gwenna, with a little shiver, looked after him. The sight of the young waiter whom she had noticed at the beginning of the evening had given her an unreasonable little chill.... Perhaps it was because his softly-moving, white figure against those willows had loomed so like a ghost....
Dampier said, "Rotten job for a man, I always think, hanging about and picking up things for other people like that."
"Yes," said Gwenna, absently, sadly. It _was_ the end now. Quite the end. They'd got to go home. Back to everyday life. The Club, the Works. Nothing to live for, except--Ah, yes! His promise that he _would_ take her flying, soon....
Above in the glowing sky the aeroplane was dwindling--to disappear. The waiter, turning a corner of the dark shrubbery, had also disappeared as they passed. From behind the shelter of the branches he was watching, watching....
He was looking after Paul Dampier, the Airman--the inventor of the newest aeroplane.
"_Those dreams come true that are dreamed on Midsummer night!_"
This saying Gwenna had read somewhere. But she had forgotten all about it until, on the night of June 24th, 1914, she dreamed the most vivid dream of all her twenty-two years.
Many people have that same dream--or versions of it--often in a lifetime. Scientists have written papers on the whys and hows of it. They tack a long name to it. But little Gwenna Williams had never heard of "_levitation_." To herself she called it afterwards "_that flying dream_."
It seemed to her that when it began she was still half-awake, lying in her narrow white bed with the blankets tossed on to the floor of her Club bedroom, for it was a sultry night and close, in spite of her window on to the garden being wide open and allowing what breeze there was to blow full upon the girl's face, stirring her curls on the pillow, the ruffle of her night-gown as she lay.
Suddenly a violent start ran over the whole of her body. And with that one jerk she seemed to have come out of herself. She realised, first, that she was no longer lying down, curled up in the kitten-like ball which was her attitude for sleeping. She was upright as if she were standing.
But she was not standing. Her feet were not resting on anything. Looking down, she found, without very much surprise, that she was poised, as a lark is poised, in mid-air, at some immeasurable height. It was night, and the earth--a distant hassock of dim trees and fields--was far, far below her.