There were a great many visitors in the two delightfully quaint rooms, among whom he wandered disconsolate and admired, jealous of her scattered smiles, but presently he found himself seated by her side on a “cosy corner” near the open folding-doors, with all the other guests huddled round a violinist in the inner room.  How Winifred had managed it he did not know, but she sat plausibly in the outer room, awaiting new-comers, and this particular niche was invisible, save to a determined eye.  He took her unresisting hand—­that dear, warm hand, with its begemmed artistic fingers, and held it in uneasy beatitude.  How wonderful!  She—­the beautiful and adored hostess, of whose sweetness and charm he heard even her own guests murmur to one another—­it was her actual flesh-and-blood hand that lay in his—­thrillingly tangible.  Oh, adventure beyond all merit, beyond all hoping!

But every now and then, the outer door facing them would open on some new-comer, 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 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.

“Good-by,” she said, rising in a flash.  The words had the calm conventional cadence, and instantly extorted from him—­amid all his dazedness—­the corresponding “Good-by.”  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 generalised 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 monopolised the ethereal divinities.