Every day now held the potentialities of amorous adventure.
Sometimes Elsie did not see the doctor all day long, sometimes they met in the evenings, with Mrs. Woolley present, and he talked in the old facetious style, watching Elsie furtively as she giggled in response.
He very often made excuses for passing things to her at meals, so that their hands touched, and he pressed her foot under the table with his big one, or rubbed it up and down her ankle.
There were moments, however, when they were alone together, and then he pulled her to him and kissed her roughly all over her face and neck, pushing her abruptly away at the first possibility of interruption. Once or twice, at the imminent risk of being discovered, he had snatched hasty and provocative kisses from her lips in a chance encounter on the stairs, or even behind the shelter of an open door.
The perpetual fear of detection, no less than the tantalising incompleteness of their relations, was a strain upon Elsie’s nerves, and she was keyed up to a pitch of unusual sensitiveness when the inevitable crisis came.
Mrs. Woolley, in a new blue dress that looked too tight under the arms, had taken the children to a party.
The maid Florrie was out for the afternoon. Elsie, restless and on edge, terribly wanted an excuse to go down to the surgery. At last she found one, and after listening at the door to make certain that no belated patient was with the doctor, she knocked.
“Come in!”
He was sitting at the writing-table, rapidly turning over the leaves of a big book.
“Elsie!”