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‘He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,’ said Miss Fowler. So Mary got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler told the men of her establishment–two gardeners and an odd man, aged sixty–that those who could join the Army had better do so. The gardeners left. Cheape, the odd man, stayed on, and was promoted to the gardener’s cottage. The cook, scorning to be limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited scene with Miss Fowler, and took the housemaid with her. Miss Fowler gazetted Nellie, Cheape’s seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant post; Mrs. Cheape to the rank of cook, with occasional cleaning bouts; and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.

Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who always looked facts in the face, said, ‘He must have it. The chances are he won’t live long to draw it, and if three hundred makes him happy–‘

Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform, to say so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his talk was so technical that it had to be explained by charts of the various types of machines. He gave Mary such a chart.

‘And you’d better study it, Postey,’ he said. ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of ’em soon.’ So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next arrived to swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed badly in cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old days.

‘You look more or less like a human being,’ he said in his new Service voice. ‘You must have had a brain at some time in your past. What have you done with it? Where d’you keep it? A sheep would know more than you do, Postey. You’re lamentable. You are less use than an empty tin can, you dowey old cassowary.’

‘I suppose that’s how your superior officer talks to you?‘ said Miss Fowler from her chair.

‘But Postey doesn’t mind,’ Wynn replied. ‘Do you, Packthread?’

‘Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time you come,’ she muttered, and knitted her pale brows again over the diagrams of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.

In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to Miss Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart and her interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished ‘rolling’ (whatever that might be) and had gone on from a ‘taxi’ to a machine more or less his own. One morning it circled over their very chimneys, alighted on Vegg’s Heath, almost outside the garden gate, and Wynn came in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and she drew Miss Fowler’s bath-chair, as they had often done, along the Heath foot-path to look at the bi-plane. Mary observed that ‘it smelt very badly.’

‘Postey, I believe you think with your nose,’ said Wynn. ‘I know you don’t with your mind. Now, what type’s that?’

‘I’ll go and get the chart,’ said Mary.

‘You’re hopeless! You haven’t the mental capacity of a white mouse,’ he cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for bomb-dropping till it was time to mount and ride the wet clouds once more.

‘Ah!’ said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. ‘Wait till our Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it’s much safer than in the trenches.’

‘I wonder,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘Tell Cheape to come and tow me home again.’

‘It’s all downhill. I can do it,’ said Mary, ‘if you put the brake on.’ She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home they trundled.

‘Now, be careful you aren’t heated and catch a chill,’ said overdressed Miss Fowler.

‘Nothing makes me perspire,’ said Mary. As she bumped the chair under the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had given her a colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across her forehead. Miss Fowler glanced at her.

‘What do you ever think of, Mary?’ she demanded suddenly.