The Boy with Wings

Now Gwenna, although she'd been clerk and assistant to the Aeroplane Lady herself, and although she loved the idea of aeroplanes as other girls have loved the idea of jewels, sc...

Gwenna, who was always bubbling over with young curiosity about the fresh _people_ whom she was to meet at a party, had never taken overmuch interest in the _places_ where the p...

"Which machine, madame?" the man asked. He was a big fellow, dark and thick-haired and floridly handsome in his blue overalls; and his bright eyes were fixed interestedly upon h...

After that appointment made at Hugo Swayne's rooms she lived through a fortnight of dreaming, tingling anticipation. Then came another of those brief direct notes from "_hers, P...

Into the small hours she had crouched in her kimono on the edge of Leslie's camp bedstead in the light that came from the street lamp outside the window; and she had talked and...

The sore of that jealousy still smarted in the girl's mind as she turned her pillow restlessly.... She could not sleep until long after the starlings had been twittering and the...

He stopped--Gwenna felt the touch of his finger on the silver tip of her shoe. All a-tremble with delight she moved aside, and stepped from behind the screen to face the partner...

Leslie Long was lounging in a rickety deck-chair under the acacia tree that overshadowed the small lawn behind the Ladies' Residential Club. Miss Long looked nonchalantly untidy...

Through leafy side-streets and little squares of Georgian houses, Gwenna's taxi took her to a newer road that sloped sharply from the Heath at the top to the church and schools...

An exquisite May afternoon, still and sunny. Above, a canopy of unflecked sapphire-blue. Below, the broad khaki-green expanse of the flying-ground, whence the tall, red-white-an...

The Reverend Hugh Lloyd, who was Gwenna Williams' only relative and guardian and therefore the person from whom consent might be asked if ever the girl wished to be engaged, sat...

"Can it be true?... War?... Nowadays?... Good gracious!... D'you suppose it means we shall really have to send an army of ours--an English Army--over to France?... What do you t...

A hundred yards before they reached the portals of the Club in Pall Mall that car stopped. Then it began to advance again a yard or two at a time. A long row of other cars and t...

It was an old-fashioned, quaintly pretty room. The low ceiling, on which the lamplight gleamed, was crossed by two sturdy black oak beams. Straw-matting covered the uneven floor...

And they were passing now so rapidly, the hours that remained to her with her husband! One more blissful day spent on the mountains (but always with that growing thought behind...

Now, as it happened, Miss Leslie Long did not choose to wait for her invitation to the Aircraft Works. Unasked and unexpected, she turned up there the very next Saturday afternoon.

They motored from the Aircraft Works to London, where they stopped to do a little shopping, and where Gwenna was in raptures of pride to see the effect produced by the Beloved i...

For on the evening of the day of her climb up the scaffolding she met the tall, sketchily-dressed figure of her chum coming down the hill that she was ascending on her way to th...

She told him, and went on. She found the big central shop in a ferment of activity. Mr. Ryan, striding out on some hurried errand, nearly knocked her over. He called an "Awfully...

Then she turned to her girl-assistant, who was once more laying the tacky strips of linen along the seams. "That's right," she said. "You can go straight on with that wing; that...

On the Saturday morning after that walk and talk she took that long dull train-journey. The only bright spot on it was the passing of Hendon Flying Ground. Over an hour afterwar...

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.

By her vivid day-dreams she was carried off, as Ganymede was carried by the eagle, sky-high; she felt the rush of keen air on her face; she saw the khaki-green flying-ground ben...

The first of a series of "things that got in the way" of Gwenna's making an appointment to go flying occurred on that Sunday afternoon, when Leslie and she were to have tea at P...

"Now isn't life _extraordinary_?" thought Gwenna Williams, incoherently in the drawing-room as she sat on the yellow Empire sofa under the mirror, holding a tiny coffee-cup and...

She'd said, "Supposing the moon _did_ fall into your lap, Taffy? Suppose that young Cloud-Dweller of yours did (a) take you flying, and (b) propose to you?" and she'd recited so...

Gwenna Dampier was always to be truly thankful that at that thunderbolt moment of parting at the church door from the lover who had only been her husband for the last quarter of...

Before he answered, Gwenna had time to think smartingly, "His _fiancee_! There! I might have _known_ he was engaged. I might have guessed it! It's nothing to do with me.... Only...

She now, too, was perched up on this structure that had tucked those little bicycle wheels and skids underneath it, as a bird tucks its no longer required feet; she, too, was be...

This injunction Gwenna carried out to the letter a week later. Never had she looked so pretty as when she smiled at her own reflection in her bedroom mirror above the cherub's r...

In the great hall young Dampier had turned to the Aeroplane Lady with his offer of motoring her to her Hotel first. She had good-naturedly laughed at him and said, "No. I'm goin...

The very next Saturday after that Aviation Dinner was that not-to-be-forgotten day in England, when this country, still uncertain, weighed the part that she was to play in the G...

She had won a medal for it at that Aberystwith school of hers; but she wanted more than a mere medal for it now. She wanted her boy to see her swimming, and to praise her stroke...

"You didn't. You left it in Hugo Swayne's car," said Leslie, wringing out the wet handful of transparent net that would presently serve her as a garment. "That young man came up...

She had very little actual notion of how she came to be there. It was all confused in her mind, that which had happened between Mr. Ryan's so resolute "Can't be done, Mrs. Dampi...

In the afternoon they walked again, aimlessly. She felt that she was only living until Monday, until his return to tell her something. In the evening the two girls sat out on a...

CHAPTER PAGE I AERIAL LIGHT HORSE 3 II THE BOSOM-CHUMS 19 III THE EYES OF ICARUS 34 IV THE SONG OF ALL THE AGES 54 V THE WORKADAY WORLD 62 VI THE INVITATION 71 VII A BACHELOR'S...

I THE AVIATION DINNER 223 II THE WHISPER OF WAR 235 III THE LAST SUNDAY OF PEACE 241 IV THAT WEEK-END 259 V THE DIE IS CAST 265 VI HER GUARDIAN'S CONSENT 267 VII HASTE TO THE WE...

I A WAR-TIME HONEYMOON 335 II THE SOUL OF UNDINE 345 III A LAST FAVOUR 350 IV THE DEPARTURE FOR FRANCE 361 V THE NUPTIAL FLIGHT 364 VI THE WINGED VICTORY 370 POSTSCRIPT--MYRTLE...