But every now and then, the outer door facing them would open on some newcomer, and John had hastily to release her soft magnetic fingers and sit demure, and jealously overhear her effusive welcome to those innocent intruders, nor did his brow clear till she had shepherded them within the inner fold.  Fortunately, the refreshments were in this section, so that once therein, few of the sheep strayed back, and the jiggling wail of the violin was succeeded by a shrill babble of tongues and the clatter of cups and spoons.  ‘Get me an ice, please—­strawberry,’ she ordered John during one of these forced intervals in manual flirtation; and when he had steered laboriously to and fro, he found a young actor beside her in his cosy corner, and his jealous fancy almost saw their hands dispart.  He stood over them with a sickly smile, while Winifred ate her ice.  When he returned from depositing the empty saucer, the player-fellow was gone, and in remorse for his mad suspicion he stooped and reverently lifted her fragrant finger-tips to his lips.  The door behind his back opened abruptly.

‘Goodbye,’ she said, rising in a flash.  The words had the calm conventional cadence, and instantly extorted from him—­amid all his dazedness—­the corresponding ‘Goodbye’.  When he turned and saw it was Mr. Glamorys who had come in, his heart leapt wildly at the nearness of his escape.  As he passed this masked ruffian, he nodded perfunctorily and received a cordial smile.  Yes, he was handsome and fascinating enough externally, this blonde savage.

‘A man may smile and smile and be a villain,’ John thought.  ’I wonder how he’d feel, if he knew I knew he beats women.’

Already John had generalized the charge.  ’I hope Cecilia will keep him at arm’s length,’ he had said to Winifred, ’if only that she may not smart for it some day.’

He lingered purposely in the hall to get an impression of the brute, who had begun talking loudly to a friend with irritating bursts of laughter, speciously frank-ringing.  Golf, fishing, comic operas—­ah, the Boeotian!  These were the men who monopolized the ethereal divinities.

But this brusque separation from his particular divinity was disconcerting.  How to see her again?  He must go up to Oxford in the morning, he wrote her that night, but if she could possibly let him call during the week he would manage to run down again.

* * * * *

‘Oh, my dear, dreaming poet,’ she wrote to Oxford, ’how could you possibly send me a letter to be laid on the breakfast-table beside The Times!  With a poem in it, too.  Fortunately my husband was in a hurry to get down to the City, and he neglected to read my correspondence. (The unchivalrous blackguard,’ John commented.  ’But what can be expected of a woman beater?’) Never, never write to me again at the house.  A letter, care of Mrs. Best, 8A Foley Street, W.C., will always find me.  She is my maid’s mother.