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.

III

He was kept very busy for the next few days, and could only exchange a
passionate letter or two with her. For some time the examination fever
had been raging, and in every college poor patients sat with wet towels
round their heads. Some, who had neglected their tutor all the term, now
strove to absorb his omniscience in a sitting.

On the Mond