"He's apt to look not quite like himself when he is—as the pretty lady with him so delicately put it—'pickled.'"
"Think he knew you?"
"Oh, yes; I saw him look directly at me just before we turned away." Lucinda took up her wrap. "If you'll help me with this, Dobbin, I think I'd like to go."
"Afraid I'll have to ask you to wait a minute or two. I've got these to pay for...." Daubeney indicated the untasted glasses of lemonade they had ordered. "I've sent for our waiter."
"Then if you don't mind, I'll go ahead. Let me have the carriage check, and I'll wait in the car."
Daubeney surrendered the pasteboard slip, and Lucinda went out. The passageway behind the boxes enabled her to gain the entrance without running the gauntlet of the floor, and she descended the stairs with her head slightly lowered, in panic hope that she might thereby escape recognition if bad luck would have it that she must meet Julie Allingham. But she was spared that misfortune.
At the street door she gave the attendant the carriage-check together with a coin. "And hurry, please!" The man saluted respectfully and vanished.
She waited restlessly just inside the glass doors till the reflection that every second was making an encounter with the Allingham woman more certain drove her out to the street; a move which she found immediate reason to repent. Only a few feet away Bellamy stood with an affectionate arm round the shoulder of the door-porter, greatly to the seeming embarrassment of that monumental personage and the amusement of the street. A knot of grinning bystanders had already begun to gather.
Bel's derby was perilously perched, his overcoat, donned in haste, was poorly settled on his shoulders, though he had contrived to worry two buttons through the wrong buttonholes, and he was explaining, unconsciously to everybody within a wide radius, the personal service he required in return for the ten-dollar bill which he was waving beneath the porter's nose.
"Now, lishn, Jim.... Do' mind my callin' you Jim, do you, ol' scout?... Get thish straight: M'wife's here t'night 'nd I don' want her know I wash here, shee? If she don' know I wash here, she's got nothin' on me, nothin' 'tall, shee? So you don' know me, you never heard of me, shee?"