ined last night with Amaryllis, with her Titian
red hair and green eyes, her tropic languor and honey-drowsy ways,
was to feel all the keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on
the following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face, and eager
responsiveness of look and gesture--_blonde cendre_, and _fausse
maigre_--a being one of the hot noon, the other a creature of the
starlight. But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus writing of
these dear bearers of symphonic names. To talk of them as flowers and
fruit, as colour and perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget
the best of them, and the best part of loving them and being loved
again; for that consisted in their comradeship, their enchanted
comradeship, the sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a fearful
joy together. For a little while we had escaped from the drab and
songless world, and, cost what it might, we were determined to take
possession, for a while at least, of that paradise which sprang into
existence at the moment when "male and female created He them." Such
divine foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown, or society
play the censorious hypocrite, "were wisdom in the scorn of
consequence."

"Ah, then," says every man to himself of such hours, as I said to myself
in my haunted restaurant--"ah, then came in the sweet o' the year."

But lovely and pleasant as were the memories over which I thus sat
musing, there was one face immeasurably beyond all others that I had
come there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers of whom for years
that seem past counting all the awe and wonder and loveliness of the
world have seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago she and I had sat
at this table where I was now sitting and had risen from it with
breaking hearts, never to see each other's face, hear each other's voice
again. Voluntarily, for another's sake, we were breaking our hearts,
renouncing each other, putting from us all the rapture and religion
of our loving, dying then and there that another might live--vain
sacrifice! Once and again, long silences apart, a word or two would wing
its way across lands and seas and tell us both that we were still
under the same sky and were still what nature had made us from the
beginning--each other's. But long since that veil of darkness unpierced
of my star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear the rustle of
her gown in the autumn woods, nor do the spring winds carry me the
sweetn