He was relieved and disturbed in one.
"Somebody else?" he murmured. Somehow the vision of the player-fellow
came up.
She nodded. "Isn't it lucky he has himself drawn a red-herring across
the track? I didn't mind his blows--you were safe!" Then, with one of
her adorable transitions, "I am dreaming of another ice," she cried
with roguish wistfulness.
"I was afraid to confess my own greediness," he said, laughing. He
beckoned the waitress. "Two more."
"We haven't got any more strawberries," was her unexpected reply.
"There's been such a run on them to-day."
Winifred's face grew overcast. "Oh, nonsense!" she pouted. To John the
moment seemed tragic.
"Won't you have another kind?" he queried. He himself liked any kind,
but he could scarcely eat a second ice without her.
Winifred meditated. "Coffee?" she queried.
The waitress went away and returned with a face as gloomy as
Winifred's. "It's been such a hot day," she said deprecatingly. "There
is only one ice in the place and that's Neapolitan."
"Well, bring two Neapolitans," John ventured.
"I mean there is only one Neapolitan ice left."
"Well, bring that. I don't really want one."
He watched Mrs. Glamorys daintily devouring the solitary ice, and felt
a certain pathos about the parti-coloured oblong, a something of
the haunting sadness of "The Last Rose of Summer." It would make
a graceful, serio-comic triolet, he was thinking. But at the last
spoonful, his beautiful companion dislocated his rhymes by her sudden
upspringing.
"Goodness gracious," she cried, "how late it is!"
"Oh, you're not leaving me yet!" he said. A world of things sprang to
his brain, things that he was going to say--to arrange. They had said
nothing--not a word of their love even; nothing but cakes and ices.
"Poet!" she laughed. "Have you forgotten I live at Hampstead?" She
picked up her parasol. "Put me into a hansom, or my husband will be
raving at his lonely dinner-table."
He was so dazed as to be surprised when the waitress blocked his
departure with a bill. When Winifred was spirited away, he remembered
she might, without much risk, have given him a lift to Paddington. He
hailed another hansom and caught the next train to Oxford. But he was
too late for his own dinner in Hall.