unimpaired distinction....

"And tea-cakes, ma'am?" implored the loving waiter.

"Muffins," said Canning, and abolished him by a movement of his little
finger.

Carlisle would have preferred the tea-cakes, but she loved Hugo's lordly
airs.

He dropped his gloves into a chair, and there descended upon him a
winning embarrassment.

"Tell me now, for my sins and my penitence," he said in a low voice, his
strong fingers clasping a spoon, "that you have blotted away what
is past."

She said that she had blotted it all away.

He went on, with considerable loss of ease: "I suppose the accursed
dilettante habit has got into my blood. I needed these unhappy days and
nights, for my soul's good--"

"Oh, please!" said Carlisle, her eyes falling from his grave face.
"Let's not talk of it any more."

He stopped, as if glad to leave the subject; but after a silence he
added with entire continuity:

"Your spirit's very fine.... It's what I've always admired most in
women, and found least often."

The loving waiter set tea and muffins. Peace unfolded white wings over
the little table. A divine orchestra played a dreamy waltz that had
reference to a beautiful lady. Carlisle poured, and remembered from
Willie's apartment that Canning liked one lump and neither cream nor
lemon. He seemed absurdly pleased by the small fact. The topic of the
Past having been finally disposed of, the man's ordinary manner seemed
abruptly to leave him. His gaze became oddly unsettled, but he
perpetually returned it to Carlisle's face. He appeared enormously
interested in everything that she said and did, yet at the same time
erratically distrait and engrossed. He became more and more grave, but
simultaneously he gave evidences of a considerable nervous excitement
within....

If Carlisle noticed these eccentricities at all, she could have had no
difficulty in diagnosing them, having observed them in the demeanor of
young men before now. The case was otherwise with Canning, to whom his
own unsteadinesses were a continuing amazement. Heart-whole he had
reached his thirtieth year, and his present enterprise had furnished him
with the surprise of his life. He was, indeed, a man who had lately
looked upon a miracle. He had watched three humiliating rebuffs turn
under his eye, as it were, to so many powerful lodestones. He himself
hardly understood it, but it was a truth that no degree of cunning on
the part of this girl could have so captured his i