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Page 41
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.'
She opened her eyes wide. 'It wasn't you, you darling old dreamer.'
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 today.'
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.
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