ith their shoulders against the overhanging
cliff, spread for the passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in
garnets, opals, amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings
as carrot-eating rabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and
peacocks that strut about the feet of the passers and expand their
iridescent tails in mimic pride.

Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they
felt the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian
highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a
mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending
in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer. He waited
politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any
laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs
on way-side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the
flower-gardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of
sweetpease from the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful
joy in her because she knew no English, and gave him a chance of
speaking his German.

"You'll find," he said, as they crossed the road again, "that it's well
to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass. I should still be lagging
along in my thirties if it hadn't been for fooling, and here I am well
on in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever."

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, and
a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the
trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take
refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the
trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that
morning the sun was shining. At the verge of the open space a group of
pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon
her breast, met them and bade them a 'Guten Morgen' of almost cheerful
note, but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing
down the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.

"Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table, this morning. These are some
American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them."

"Oh, yes," the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of
the Marches; "I get you one."

"You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn't had one already."

She ran among the tables along the edge of the western