"Like trying to row a bucket!" he laughed, as the boat spun. "Hi, Gwen!
I ought to have some start, you know!"
He rowed. Presently he rested on his oars and called, "Hullo, have you started?"
"Started--" came back only the echo from the cottage roof. There was no sign of any grey-frocked running figure on the bank. He scanned it on both sides of him, gave a look towards each of those shrub-covered islands on the smooth expanse.
"Gwenna--Why, where are you? What"s become of the girl," he muttered.
"Gwen-na!"
She was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER II
THE SOUL OF UNDINE
"Hul-lo!" he shouted. The echo answered as he sat in the boat staring about him....
Then he felt a twitch at one of his sculls. It turned in his hand; was wrenched from him.
"What the deuce----" he began, surprised.
Then he heard a laugh.
"What on earth----"
It was nothing on earth that had greeted him. It was something of the water that laughed up into his face and called, "Hullo, husband!"
A mermaid, a water-nymph, a little white-shouldered Undine was peeping up and mocking him! She trod water, turned over on her side, swam with easy strokes.
For always Gwenna had been proud of her swimming.
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. She had looked forward to that. She wanted to show him that she could make as graceful movements with her own body in the water as he could make with his biplane in the air. She could! He should see! She made these movements. She had thought of making them--just _so_--on the morning of her marriage. Only then she had thought it would be in the sea off Brighton beach, with whole crowds of other stupid people about in dark-blue or Turkey-red "costumes." Here it was so much lovelier; a whole mountain-side and a clear lake to herself in which to show off her pet accomplishment to her lover. She was one innocent and pretty Vanity incarnate as she glided along beside his boat. She gave a quick twist. There was a commotion of translucent amber water, a gleam of coral white that shaded down into peaty brown as she dived, reappearing on the other side of the boat, looking up at him, blinking as her curls streamed water into her eyes.
His eyes, blue and direct and adoring, were upon her.
"I say," he said admiringly, "I didn"t know you could _swim_ like that.
Jolly!"
This moment of achievement was possibly the most exquisite in the whole of Gwenna"s life.
Shaking the wet from her hair, she laughed with pure, completed, rapturous joy; glorying in her youth, in the life that charged each little blue vein of her, in this power of swimming that she felt had been given her only to please him.
"Why, I could swim you to--Oh! Mind you don"t upset!" she exclaimed.
For Paul had stooped; leaning over the side of the boat he had pa.s.sed one arm beneath her shoulders; he was bending over her to take a kiss, all fresh with lake-water.
"You"ll topple over," she warned him.
"Pooh," he said. "One, Gwenna!"
He always said her name as if it were "darling"--he did not call her "dear" or "darling" much. She found that she adored him for this, as for everything that he said or did. Once, in one of those old-time talks of theirs, Leslie had said, "For every three times a man asks for a kiss refuse him twice. An excellent plan, Taffy----" The happy girl-wife thought there need be no use of "plans" with him and her. She teased him--if she wanted to.
Eyes laughed into eyes now. She threw back her head, evading him, but only for a second. His mouth met hers, dewy as a lotus-bud. The boy and girl kissed closely. Nothing could come between that kiss, she thought.
Then, sudden as a flash of summer lightning, _something came_.
A thought; a shadow; a fear at last.
All these halcyon hours she had known no fear. All those weeks that her husband had been in France she had been certain, at the bottom of her heart, of his safety. She had known by that queer sense of presentiment she possessed that he would come back to her. He"d come back to make this perfect time for which all her unawakened girlhood had been waiting. And now, by that same queer sixth sense, she suddenly found herself realising that he would not--No, no! _That he might not come back to her the second time...._ Suddenly, suddenly the shadow crept over her, taking the glow and colour out of their idyll even at this golden moment. With his lips warms on hers she shivered as if the water in which she swayed had suddenly grown many degrees colder. Supposing he should not return? In two days" time now he was leaving her. Supposing that she were never to see him again? She shut her eyes, felt herself for a horrible second surrounded by darkness, and alone.... She heard his sharp question, "What"s the matter?" and opened her eyes again.
His head was dark against the blue little ripples of light pa.s.sed over his blonde face; ripples cast up from the water. The boat tilted, and his arm held her more tightly. He said again, "What is it?"
Then, in her own ears, her voice said serenely, "It"s all right."
The cloud had pa.s.sed, as suddenly as it had fallen. She knew, somehow, that it would be "all right." Whatever happened, this worst catastrophe of all was not going to fall upon her. She was not going to be left alone and in darkness, her sun of Love gone down. Such a light could not have been kindled, just to be put out again. She would not be forced to live without him. _That_ could not be. Why, the thing was unthinkable.
Yet, somehow that was going to be made "all right."
"You swim back again and get your things on, as quick as you can," he ordered her. "That was a touch of cramp you got, I expect."
"I"m all right now," she again said.
She sighed when at last they left that lovely Paradise of theirs behind them.
They went down hill at a good swinging pace, his arm again girdling the dove-grey frock. He said, "We"ll get tea and topping light-cakes at one of those cottages before we come to the village, shall we? Are you starving, Little Thing? I know I am. Soon be there now."
"I know," she said, "I wasn"t sighing because I wanted my tea. Only because ... It seems such a pity that we _ever_ have to come down from here!" she told him, nestling in his arm.
But she did not tell him of her sudden fear, nor of its sudden pa.s.sing, though (in her heart that beat below his hand) the thought of both remained.
CHAPTER III
A LAST FAVOUR
That thought at the heart of Gwenna seemed to grow with every hour that pa.s.sed.
And they were pa.s.sing 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 it: "_He has to go soon. Perhaps he will not come back this time. The new machine may let him down somehow, perhaps_").
One more train-journey, whizzing through country of twenty different aspects, just him and her together (but still in her mind that thriving dread: "_Very likely he may not come back. He has had so many narrow escapes! That time he told me about when he came down from behind the clouds and the machine was. .h.i.t on both sides at once: our men firing on him as well, thinking his was an enemy craft! He got up into the clouds again and escaped that time. Next time as likely as not...._").
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_----"