om 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. And you must not come here either, my dear handsome
head-in-the-clouds, except to my 'At Homes', and then only at judicious
intervals. I shall be walking round the pond in Kensington Gardens at
four next Wednesday, unless Mrs. Best brings me a letter to the contrary.
And now thank you for your delicious poem; I do not recognize my humble
self in the dainty lines, but I shall always be proud to think I
inspired them. Will it be in the new volume? I have never been in print
before; it will be a novel sensation. I cannot pay you song for song,
only feeling for feeling. Oh, John Lefolle, why did we not meet when I
had still my girlish dreams? Now, I have grown to distrust all men--to
fear the brute beneath the cavalier....'

* * * * *

Mrs. Best did bring her a letter, but it was not to cancel the
appointment, only to say he was not surprised at her horror of the male
sex, but that she must beware of false generalizations. Life was still a
wonderful and beautiful thing--_vide_ poem enclosed. He was counting the
minutes till Wednesday afternoon. It was surely a popular mistake that
only sixty went to the hour.

This chronometrical reflection recurred to him even more poignantly in
the hour that he circumambulated the pond in Kensington Gardens. Had she
forgotten--had her husband locked her up? What could have happened? It
seemed six hundred minutes, ere, at ten past five she came tripping
daintily towards him. His brain had been reduced to insanely devising
problems for his pupils--if a man walks two strides of one and a half
feet a second round a lake fifty acres in area, in how many turns will
he overtake a lady who walks