their first ambrosial meal together--delicious
adventure!--with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet
aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a
roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and
fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever,
nor pass beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those
lovers on the Grecian Urn:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss.
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss.
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

"See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter
has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound
meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious."

"Your old test!" said I. "Do you remember?"

"Yes! And it's one that never fails," said Aurea with decision. "When a
woman goes out to dinner with a man for the first time, he little knows
how much is going to depend on his way of paying the bill. If, as with
some men one meets, he studies it through a microscope and adds it
up with anxious brow--meanwhile quite evidently forgetting your
presence--how your heart sinks, sinks and hardens--but you are glad all
the same, and next day you congratulate yourself on your narrow escape!"

"Was I like that?" said I.

"Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she added, touching my arm as with a
touch of honeyed fire: "O I'm so glad! He did it delightfully--quite _en
prince_. Just the right nonchalance--and perhaps, poor dear, he's as
poor--"

"As we often were," I added.

And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise
from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so
reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy
flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he
did so!

"That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging
kiss but for the street.'"

Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven--some
little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under
the ancient London roofs.

But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left
alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would
prefer.

With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled do