“Anyhow, I’d hate to have the combination working against me,” and with this deft rejoinder Carshaw hurried away to a garage where he was known. At dawn he was hooting an open passage along the Boston Post Road in a car which temporarily replaced his own damaged cruiser.
Within three hours he was seated in the dining-room of the Maples Inn and reading a newspaper. It was the off season, and the hotel contained hardly any guests, but he had ascertained that Winifred and her aunt were certainly there. For a long time, however, none but a couple of German waiters broke his vigil, for this thing happened before the war. One stout fellow went away. The other, a mere boy, remained and flecked dust with a napkin, wondering, no doubt, why the motorist sat hours at the table. At last, near noon, Rachel Craik, with a plaid shawl draped around her angular shoulders, and Winifred, in a new dress of French gray, came in.
Winifred started and cast down her eyes on seeing who was there. Carshaw, on his part, apparently had no eyes for her, but kept a look over the top of his newspaper at Rachel Craik, to see whether she recognized him, supposing it to be a fact that he had been seen with Winifred. She seemed, however, hardly to be aware of his presence.
The girl and the woman sat some distance from him—the room was large—near a window, looking out, and anon exchanging a remark in quiet voices. Then a lunch was brought into them, Carshaw meantime buried in the newspaper except when he stole a glance at Winifred.
His hope was that the woman would leave the girl alone, if only for one minute, for he had a note ready to slip into Winifred’s hand, beseeching her to meet him that evening at seven in the lane behind the church for some talk “on a matter of high importance.”
But fortune was against him. Rachel Craik, after her meal, sat again at the window, took up some knitting, and plied needles like a slow machine. The afternoon wore on. Finally, Carshaw rang to order his own late lunch, and the German boy brought it in. He rose to go to table; but, as if the mere act of rising spurred him to further action, he walked straight to Winifred. The hours left him were few, and his impatience had grown to the point of desperateness now. He bowed and held out the paper, saying:
“Perhaps you have not seen this morning’s newspaper?” At the same time he presented her the note.
Miss Craik was sitting two yards away, half-turned from Winifred, but at this afternoon offer of the morning’s paper she glanced round fully at Winifred, and saw, that as Winifred took the newspaper, she tried to grasp with it a note also which lay on it—tried, but failed, for the note escaped, slipped down on Winifred’s lap, and lay there exposed.
Miss Craik’s eyebrows lifted a little, but she did not cease her knitting. Winifred’s face was painfully red, and in another moment pale. Carshaw was not often at his wits’ end, but now for some seconds he stood embarrassed.
Rachel Craik, however, saved him by saying quickly: “The gentleman has dropped something in your lap, Winifred.” Whereupon Winifred handed back the unfortunate note.