The ice restored his spirits, it was really delicious, and he had got so hot and tired, pacing round the pond.  Decidedly Winifred was a practical person and he was a dreamer.  The pastry he dared not touch—­being a genius—­but he was charmed at the gaiety with which Winifred crammed cake after cake into her rosebud of a mouth.  What an enchanting creature! how bravely she covered up her life’s tragedy!

The thought made him glance at her velvet band—­it was broader than ever.

‘He has beaten you again!’ he murmured furiously.  Her joyous eyes saddened, she hung her head, and her fingers crumbled the cake.  ’What is his pretext?’ he asked, his blood burning.

‘Jealousy,’ she whispered.

His blood lost its glow, ran cold.  He felt the bully’s blows on his own skin, his romance turning suddenly sordid.  But he recovered his courage.  He, too, had muscles.  ’But I thought he just missed seeing me kiss your hand.’

She opened her eyes wide.  ‘It wasn’t you, you darling old dreamer.’

He was relieved and disturbed in one.

‘Somebody else?’ he murmured.  Somehow the vision of the player-fellow came up.

She nodded.  ’Isn’t it lucky he has himself drawn a red-herring across the track?  I didn’t mind his blows—­you were safe!’ Then, with one of her adorable transitions, ‘I am dreaming of another ice,’ she cried with roguish wistfulness.

‘I was afraid to confess my own greediness,’ he said, laughing.  He beckoned the waitress.  ‘Two more.’

‘We haven’t got any more strawberries,’ was her unexpected reply.  ‘There’s been such a run on them today.’

Winifred’s face grew overcast.  ‘Oh, nonsense!’ she pouted.  To John the moment seemed tragic.

‘Won’t you have another kind?’ he queried.  He himself liked any kind, but he could scarcely eat a second ice without her.

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.