She looked anxiously round as they left the door in Grosvenor Square.
‘I wonder if it was wise of us to come in this car,’ she said, timidly.
Bailey looked critically round.
‘Why not,’ he said rather stupidly. ‘Quite a good car, isn’t it?’
Clearly he was not awake to the danger.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘but people are so ill-natured. They might think it odd for you and me to be driving about in Gilbert’s car.’
He was still odiously obtuse.
‘Well, they couldn’t expect us to walk all the way to Richmond, could they?’ he said.
To her great delight, Winifred saw at this moment a cousin of her husband’s, and bowed and waved her hand and kissed her fingers. She sat very much back as she did this so that Florrie Falcon, who had a proverbially unkind tongue, could clearly see the young man who sat by her side. That made her feel a little better, for it was even more important that other people should see her in the act of doing compromising things, than that he with whom she compromised herself should be aware of the fact. During their game again they came across several people whom Bailey or she knew, who, it was to be hoped, would mention the fact that they had been seen together.
It was a distinct disappointment to poor Winifred that this daring escapade seemed to have attracted so little notice, but she did not despair. A further glorious opportunity turned up indeed only a day or two later, for her husband was threatened with what he called a bronchial catarrh (more usually known as a cough) and departed post-haste to spend a couple of days at Brighton. Winifred, so it happened, was rather full of engagements, and he readily fell in with her wish to stop in town, and not to accompany him. So, the moment she had ceased kissing her fingertips to him as he drove away in the Rolls-Royce with all the windows hermetically closed, she ran back into the house, and planned a daring scheme. She telephoned to Lady Buckhampton’s, where she was dining and dancing that night, to say her husband had this tiresome bronchial catarrh, and that she was going down to Brighton with him, and, while the words were scarcely spoken, telephoned to Joe Bailey asking him to dine with them. He accepted, suggesting that they should go to the first-night at the Criterion after dinner, and then go on to the Buckhamptons’ dance.