Winifred meditated. 'Coffee?' she queried.
The waitress went away and returned with a face as gloomy as Winifred's. 'It's been such a hot day,' she said deprecatingly. 'There is only one ice in the place and that's Neapolitan.'
'Well, bring two Neapolitans,' John ventured.
'I mean there is only one Neapolitan ice left.'
'Well, bring that. I don't really want one.'
He watched Mrs. Glamorys daintily devouring the solitary ice, and felt a certain pathos about the parti-coloured oblong, a something of the haunting sadness of 'The Last Rose of Summer'. It would make a graceful, serio-comic triolet, he was thinking. But at the last spoonful, his beautiful companion dislocated his rhymes by her sudden upspringing.
'Goodness gracious,' she cried, 'how late it is!'
'Oh, you're not leaving me yet!' he said. A world of things sprang to his brain, things that he was going to say—to arrange. They had said nothing—not a word of their love even; nothing but cakes and ices.
'Poet!' she laughed. 'Have you forgotten I live at Hampstead?' She picked up her parasol.
'Put me into a hansom, or my husband will be raving at his lonely dinner-table.'