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, and with 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'?_"
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, flying across 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.