II

Mrs. Glamorys herself gave 'At Homes', every Sunday afternoon, and so, on

the morrow, after a sleepless night mitigated by perpended sonnets, the

love-sick young tutor presented himself by invitation at the beautiful

old house in Hampstead. He was enchanted to find his heart's mistress

set in an eighteenth-century frame of small-paned windows and of high

oak-panelling, and at once began to image her dancing minuets and

playing on virginals. Her husband was absent, but a broad band of velvet

round Winifred's neck was a painful reminder of his possibilities.

Winifred, however, said it was only a touch of sore throat caught in the

garden. Her eyes added that there was nothing in the pathological

dictionary which she would not willingly have caught for the sake of

those divine, if draughty moments; but that, alas! it was more than a

mere bodily ailment she had caught there.

There were a great many visitors in the two delightfully quaint rooms,

among whom he wandered disconsolate and admired, jealous of her

scattered smiles, but presently he found himself seated by her side on

a 'cosy corner' near the open folding-doors, with all the other guests

huddled round a violinist in the inner room. How Winifred had managed it

he did not know but she sat plausibly in the outer room, awaiting

newcomers, and this particular niche was invisible, save to a determined

eye. He took her unresisting hand--that dear, warm hand, with its

begemmed artistic fingers, and held it in uneasy beatitude. How

wonderful! She--the beautiful and adored hostess, of whose sweetness and

charm he heard even her own guests murmur to one another--it was her

actual flesh-and-blood hand that lay in his--thrillingly tangible. Oh,

adventure beyond all merit, beyond all hoping!

But every now and then, the outer door facing them would open on some

newcomer, and John had hastily to release her soft magnetic fingers and

sit demure, and jealously overhear her effusive welcome to those

innocent intruders, nor did his brow clear till she had shepherded them

within the inner fold. Fortunately, the refreshments were in this

section, so that once therein, few of the sheep strayed back, and the

jiggling wail of the violin was succeeded by a shrill babble of tongues

and the clatter of cups and spoons. 'Get me an ice, please--strawberry,'

she ordered John during one of these forced intervals in manual

flirtation; and when he had steered laboriously to and fro, he found a

young actor beside her in his cosy corner, and his jealous fancy almost

saw _their_ hands dispart. He stood over them with a sickly smile, while

Winifred ate her ice. When he returned from depositing the empty saucer,

the player-fellow was gone, and in remorse for his mad suspicion he

stooped and reverently lifted her fragrant finger-tips to his lips. The

door behind his back opened abruptly.

'Goodbye,' she said, rising in a flash. The words had the calm

conventional cadence, and instantly extorted from him--amid all his

dazedness--the corresponding 'Goodbye'. When he turned and saw it was Mr.

Glamorys who had come in, his heart leapt wildly at the nearness of his

escape. As he passed this masked ruffian, he nodded perfunctorily and

received a cordial smile. Yes, he was handsome and fascinating enough

externally, this blonde savage.

'A man may smile and smile and be a villain,' John thought. 'I wonder

how he'd feel, if he knew I knew he beats women.'

Already John had generalized the charge. 'I hope Cecilia will keep him

at arm's length,' he had said to Winifred, 'if only that she may not

smart for it some day.'

He lingered purposely in the hall to get an impression of the brute, who

had begun talking loudly to a friend with irritating bursts of laughter,

speciously frank-ringing. Golf, fishing, comic operas--ah, the Boeotian!

These were the men who monopolized the ethereal divinities.

But this brusque separation from his particular divinity was

disconcerting. How to see her again? He must go up to Oxford in the

morning, he wrote her that night, but if she could possibly let him

call during the week he would manage to run down again.

* * * * *

'Oh, my dear, dreaming poet,' she wrote to Oxford, 'how could you

possibly send me a letter to be laid on the breakfast-table beside _The

Times_! With a poem in it, too. Fortunately my husband was in a hurry to

get down to the City, and he neglected to read my correspondence. (The

unchivalrous blackguard,' John commented. 'But what can be expected of a

woman beater?') Never, never write to me again at the house. A letter,

care of Mrs. Best, 8A Foley Street, W.C., will always find me. She is my

maid's mother. And you must not come here either, my dear handsome

head-in-the-clouds, except to my 'At Homes', and then only at judicious

intervals. I shall be walking round the pond in Kensington Gardens at

four next Wednesday, unless Mrs. Best brings me a letter to the contrary.

And now thank you for your delicious poem; I do not recognize my humble

self in the dainty lines, but I shall always be proud to think I

inspired them. Will it be in the new volume? I have never been in print

before; it will be a novel sensation. I cannot pay you song for song,

only feeling for feeling. Oh, John Lefolle, why did we not meet when I

had still my girlish dreams? Now, I have grown to distrust all men--to

fear the brute beneath the cavalier....'

* * * * *

Mrs. Best did bring her a letter, but it was not to cancel the

appointment, only to say he was not surprised at her horror of the male

sex, but that she must beware of false generalizations. Life was still a

wonderful and beautiful thing--_vide_ poem enclosed. He was counting the

minutes till Wednesday afternoon. It was surely a popular mistake that

only sixty went to the hour.

This chronometrical reflection recurred to him even more poignantly in

the hour that he circumambulated the pond in Kensington Gardens. Had she

forgotten--had her husband locked her up? What could have happened? It

seemed six hundred minutes, ere, at ten past five she came tripping

daintily towards him. His brain had been reduced to insanely devising

problems for his pupils--if a man walks two strides of one and a half

feet a second round a lake fifty acres in area, in how many turns will

he overtake a lady who walks half as fast and isn't there?--but the

moment her pink parasol loomed on the horizon, all his long misery

vanished in an ineffable peace and uplifting. He hurried, bare-headed,

to clasp her little gloved hand. He had forgotten her unpunctuality, nor

did she remind him of it.

'How sweet of you to come all that way,' was all she said, and it was a

sufficient reward for the hours in the train and the six hundred minutes

among the nursemaids and perambulators. The elms were in their glory,

the birds were singing briskly, the water sparkled, the sunlit sward

stretched fresh and green--it was the loveliest, coolest moment of the

afternoon. John instinctively turned down a leafy avenue. Nature and

Love! What more could poet ask?

'No, we can't have tea by the Kiosk,' Mrs. Glamorys protested. 'Of course

I love anything that savours of Paris, but it's become so fashionable.

There will be heaps of people who know me. I suppose you've forgotten

it's the height of the season. I know a quiet little place in the High

Street.' She led him, unresisting but bemused, towards the gate, and

into a confectioner's. Conversation languished on the way.

'Tea,' he was about to instruct the pretty attendant.

'Strawberry ices,' Mrs. Glamorys remarked gently. 'And some of those nice

French cakes.'

The ice restored his spirits, it was really delicious, and he had got so

hot and tired, pacing round the pond. Decidedly Winifred was a practical

person and he was a dreamer. The pastry he dared not touch--being a

genius--but he was charmed at the gaiety with which Winifred crammed

cake after cake into her rosebud of a mouth. What an enchanting

creature! how bravely she covered up her life's tragedy!

The thought made him glance at her velvet band--it was broader than

ever.

'He has beaten you again!' he murmured furiously. Her joyous eyes

saddened, she hung her head, and her fingers crumbled the cake. 'What is

his pretext?' he asked, his blood burning.

'Jealousy,' she whispered.

His blood lost its glow, ran cold. He felt the bully's blows on his own

skin, his romance turning suddenly sordid. But he recovered his

courage. He, too, had muscles. 'But I thought he just missed seeing me

kiss your hand.'