I was leaning against the table in the middle of the room, while the doctor, humming a gay air, was finding a pill-box to put the capsules in, when I heard some one laughing—a woman most certainly—in the waiting-room. Not a matter for comment, you may think, but you should have heard the laugh. It was very low, and apparently did not reach the doctor’s less sensitive ears, but, oh, how mean and cruel it was! You know how a certain sound, or the scent of a flower say, may recall to life some vivid scene of childhood’s days? When we were children at home there was an old forbidden book describing the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition and in it there was one illustration depicting a young girl stretched out on the rack with a woman standing by her side laughing at her, which had impressed my young imagination, and had caused me many hours of secret grief. It was an old woodcut, crudely drawn, and I had not thought of it for years, but the woman laughing in the waiting-room brought the gruesome little picture back to life.
The laugh came twice, then there was the sound of an opening door, then whispering in the lobby.
“Who was that, Miss Summerson?” the doctor asked, as the door connecting the dispensary with the lobby opened and a pale nervous-looking girl wearing a white coverall came in—the dispenser, I gathered.
The doctor was fiddling about with my pill-box as he spoke, but I was looking at her as she came in through the door and I could have sworn that she was startled when she saw that we were there—and if she were startled, I was surprised when she answered the doctor’s question.
“There wasn’t any one,” she said. “I’ve been changing the water in the waiting-room and I shut the outer door as I crossed the lobby. Some one had left it ajar.”
Both her look and the rather over-elaborate nature of her explanation convinced me that she was lying. Too, I could have sworn to that laugh, to the whispering, and to the fact that some one had been there besides Miss Summerson herself. At the time I thought very little about it, however; some one—some one with a most amazingly repulsive laugh—had been to see her and she didn’t want the doctor to know of the visit. That was no business of mine, and I was just making my way toward the lobby—the club lies at the end of Dalehouse Lane—when who should come out of the consulting-room but Ethel. She had been to the club and as she was not required to play for a time she had come home for some rubber tape to wind round the handle of her racquet. As soon as her wants had been supplied we returned to the ground together.
On our way I felt half inclined to tell her of Miss Summerson’s little act of deceit. Then, how very easy it would have been. Later it was to become more difficult, but that I could not foresee.
No sooner had we reached the club than I heard the names, Miss M. Hunter and F. H. Jeffcock, being shouted down the conical sound-muffle which the secretary is pleased to call a megaphone. We were to play on court number ten and I found that both my partner and our opponents were waiting for me there.
My partner looked a jolly girl. Pink and white and well rounded, with the bluest of sparkling eyes and her hair tightly braided in two little close packed coils—pale gold shells hiding her pretty ears—she had somehow missed real beauty. For a proper chocolate box lady all the ingredients were there, but there was a certain slight heaviness about her features, that just, and only just, spoiled the picture she made, and inexplicably led me to the conclusion that her mother was fat. Perhaps, however, that was due to the fact that while the modern girl looks like a boy in a smock, she seemed unwilling to disguise her pretty femininity.
I found her an excellent partner and we won our first match. Yes, so far as playing went, Miss Hunter and I got on very well together, but she was just a little annoying in the way she constantly reiterated “Sorry, partner,” whenever she missed a shot, and found it necessary to make some little remark or other whenever the opportunity occurred. Then I was still to learn that her conversational ability was prodigious if volume alone were taken into account, and that she beat every one I ever met for platitudes and proverbs.