He started up from the table. "It's on the kiosk. I'll be counting on Sunday. After the match, we need to talk."
Stephen was gone then, and part of her left with him.
She had been incredibly happy for the few minutes they had sat together talking. Now he was gone and she looked after him until he was lost in the crowd.
He had paid for their tea, so Barbara left the shop and walked over to the kiosk to look at the polo poster. The face of the player swinging his mallet on the poster suddenly became that of Stephen's. She nearly wept for joy.
It should have been a fast day and a half... A Friday night flight to deliver a fighter plane to near Plymouth, then a full Saturday ferrying two bombers to Dover, and then she was back in London. To Barbara, it seemed like an eternity. Afterward, she was asked to take another bomber to Dover on Sunday but managed to trade with a British ATA Girl who said she needed Monday off to be with her new GI boyfriend.
Barbara went to the polo grounds an hour early on Sunday morning in hopes of seeing Stephen before the matches began, but did not see him anywhere.
Maybe he's been called back to duty, she worried. Maybe the invasion is about to begin, and the polo diversion isn't needed anymore. Sitting anxiously in the stands filled mostly with Allied male military personnel, she saw the British team ride out onto the playing field. Then the American.
There he is! Oh, my God, he looks fantastic! Stephen sat his mount in tight-fitting white polo breeches, black riding boots, and short-sleeved white cotton polo shirt with a narrow Stars and Stripes sash across his chest. The short-brimmed white polo cap he wore only partly concealed his silver hair. He was not mounted on a polo pony but a sleek standard-sized black Morgan whose mane was clipped so as to feel the lightest touch of the reins on his neck, to make instant moves in any direction his rider commanded.
No matter what would happen that night when they would be together, Barbara thought, or what Stephen had to tell her about his marriage, and if she would lose him again and forever, But please God, no!, he would always look to her as he did that afternoon.
Tall, lean, and handsome, dressed in white, astride his shiny, ink-black mount, he was her knight, her Ivanhoe. Not riding into battle or in a jousting tournament to win her love, but riding to claim her nonetheless, because he already had her heart.