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-haired young man's existence, and perhaps it was not so much himself as his cap and mufflings that caught her eye now.
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.
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."
"Yes. Not that they want _me_, 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.