ter       Damp       ier       on       a       Maurice       Far       man       bi       plane       ac       companied       by       Miss       Mu       riel       Con       yers——"

The German girl put in, "Your man again, Gwenna!"

"My man indeed. And I haven't seen him, even yet," complained the Welsh girl again, laughing over her cup of cooling tea, "only in the photograph! Don't suppose I ever shall, either. It's my fate, girls. Nothing really exciting ever happens to me!" She sighed, then brightened again as she remembered something. "I must be off now.... I've got to go out this evening."

"Anywhere thrilling?" asked Miss Butcher.

"I don't know what it'll be like. It's Leslie Long; it's my friend at the Club's married sister somewhere in Kensington, giving a dinner-party," Gwenna answered in the scrambling New English in which she was learning to disguise her Welshiness, "and there's a girl fallen through at the last minute. So she 'phoned through this morning to ask if this girl could rake any one up."

"How mouldy for you, my dear," said Mabel Butcher in her sympathetic Cockney as the Welsh girl rose, took up her sunshine-yellow coat from the back of her chair and chinked down a shilling upon her thick white plate. "Means you'll have to sit next some youth who only forced himself into his dress-suit for the sake of taking that 'fallen through' girl into dinner. He'll be scowling fit to murder you, I expect, for being you and not her. (I know their ways.) Never mind. Pinch a couple of liqueur-choc'lates off the table for me when the Blighted Being isn't looking, will you? And tell us what he's like on Monday, won't you?"

"All right," promised the Welsh girl, smiling back at her friends. She threaded her way through the tables with the plates of coloured cakes, the brown teapots, the coarse white crockery. She passed behind that park of cars with that leisured, well-dressed, upward-gazing throng. She turned her back on the glimpse beyond them of the green field where the brown-clad mechanics ran up towards the slowly downward swooping biplane.

As she reached the entrance she caught again the announcement of that distant megaphone:

The band in the distance was playing the dashing tune of the "Uhlanenritt."

Gwenna Williams passed out of the gates beside the big poster of the aeroplane in full flight carrying a girl-passenger who waved a scarf. It was everywhere, that Spring. So was the other notice:

"An afternoon in the country is always refreshing! Flying is always interesting to watch!"

In the dusty bit of lane mended by the wooden sleepers a line of grass-green taxis was drawn up.

Gwenna hesitated.

Should she——? Taxi all the way home to the Ladies' Residential Club in Hampstead where she lived?

Four shillings, perhaps.... Extravagance again! "But it's not an everyday sort of day," Gwenna told herself as she hailed the taxi. "This afternoon, the flying! This evening, a party with Leslie! Oh, and there was I saying to the other girls that nothing exciting ever happened to me!"

For even now every day of her life seemed to this enjoying Welsh ingénue, packed with thrills. Thrills of anticipation, of amusement—sometimes of disappointment and embarrassment. But what did those matter? Supreme through all there glowed the conviction of youth that, at any moment, Something-More-Exciting still might happen....

It might be waiting to happen, waiting now, just round the corner....

All young people know that feeling. And to many it remains the most poignant pleasure that they are to know—that thought of "the party to-night," that wonder "what may happen at it!"

CHAPTER II

THE BOSOM-CHUMS

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 at the bottom.

The taxi stopped at the glass porch of the large, red-brick building with the many casement-windows, out of which some enterprising committee had formed the Ladies' Residential Club. It was a place where a mixed assembly of young women (governesses, art-students, earnest suffrage workers, secretaries and so on) lived cheaply enough and with a good deal of fun and noise, of feud and good-fellowship. The head of it was a clergyman's widow and the sort of lady who is never to be seen otherwise than wearing a neat delaine blouse of the Edwardian era, a gold curb tie-pin, a hairnet and a disapproving glance.

Gwenna passed this lady in the tessellated hall; she then almost collided with the object of the lady's most constant disapproval.

This was a very tall, dark girl with an impish face, a figure boyishly slim. She looked almost insolently untidy, for she wore a shabby brown hat, something after the pattern of a Boy Scout's, under which her black hair was preparing to slide down over the collar of a rain-coat which (as its owner would have told you) had seen at least two reigns. It was also covered with loose white hairs, after the fashion of garments whose wearers are continually with dogs.

Gwenna caught joyously at the long arm in the crumpled sleeve.

"Oh, Leslie!" she cried eagerly.

For this was the bosom-chum.

"Ha, Taffy-child! Got back early for this orgie of ours? Good," exclaimed Leslie Long in a clear, nonchalant voice. It was very much the same voice, Gwenna noticed now, as those people's at the flying-ground, who belonged to that easy, lordly world of which Gwenna knew nothing. Leslie, now, did seem to know something about it. Yet she was the hardest-up girl in the whole club. She had been for a short time a Slade student, for a shorter time still a probationer at some hospital. Now all her days were given up to being paid companion to an old lady in Highgate who kept seventeen toy-Poms; but her evenings remained her own.

"Afraid this party isn't going to be much of a spree for you," she told Gwenna as they went upstairs. "I don't know who's going, but my brother-in-law's friends seldom are what you could describe as 'men.' Being a stockbroker and rich, he feels he must go in heavily for Art and Music. Long hair to take you in, probably. Hope you don't awfully mind coming to the rescue——"

"Don't mind what it is, as long as I'm going out somewhere, and with you, Leslie!" the younger girl returned blithely. "Will you do me up the back, presently?"

"Rather! I'm dressing in your room. There's a better light there. Hurry up!"

Gwenna's long, narrowish front bedroom at the club was soon breathing of that characteristic atmosphere that surrounds the making of a full-dress toilette; warm, scented soap-suds, hot curling-irons, powder, Odol, perfume. The room possessed a large dressing-table, a long wardrobe, and a fairly spacious chest-of-drawers. But all this did not prevent the heaping of Gwenna's bed with the garments, with the gilded, high-heeled cothurns and with the other gauds belonging to her self-invited guest.

That guest, with her hair turbaned in a towel and her lengthy young body sheathed in tricot, towered above the toilet-table like some modern's illustration of a genie in the Arabian Nights. The small, more closely-knit Welsh girl, who wore a kimono of pink cotton