"He goes flying. You know. On a machine. Up in the sky."
"Well, _oh_!" ejaculated the old woman. And laughed shrilly. To her this was some eccentric form of English joke. Flying? Like the birds! _Dear_, dear. "What else does he do, _cariad fâch_?" she asked of Gwenna.
"He's been over in France, fighting the Germans," said the girl, while the old woman on her settle by the fire nodded her mutched head with the intense, delighted expression of some small child listening to a fairy story. It was indeed no more, to her. She said, "Well, indeed. He took a very _kind_ one, too." Then she added, "I not much English. Pitty, pitty!" and said something in Welsh at which Gwenna coloured richly and laughed a little and shook her head.
"What's she say?" demanded Paul, munching; but his girl-wife said it was nothing--and turned her tip-tilted profile, dark against the diamond window panes, to admire one of the geranium plants in the pots.
Afterwards, when the couple were outside again in the fresh sunlight on the mountain lands, young Dampier persisted with his questioning about what that old woman had said. He betted that he could guess what it was all about. And he guessed.
Gwenna admitted that he had guessed right.
"She said," she told him shyly, "that it ought to be 'a very pretty one, whatever.'"
"I've got a very pretty present for it," Paul whispered presently.
"Don't you remember a locket I once took? A little mother-of-pearl heart," he said. "That's what I shall keep it for----"
And there fell a little silence between them as they walked on, swinging hands above the turf, gravely contented.
They had _had_ to spend the day together thus. It seemed to Gwenna that all her life before had been just a waiting for this day.
Below the upland on which they swung along, grey figures on the green, there lay other wide hill-spaces, spread as with turf-green carpets, on which the squares of mellowing, golden-brown autumn woods seemed rugs and skins cast down; below these again stretched the further valley with the marsh, with the silver loops and windings of the river, and the little white moving caterpillar of smoke from the distant train. There was also a blue haze above the slate roofs of a town.