each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our
glasses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful
dinner together. Watch them--the poor darlings; it is enough to break
one's heart."

"Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly.

"I wonder what else I was thinking of--dear idiot!" said I, with tender
elegance, as in the old days.

As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was
more a matter of life--than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours
was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and
women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the
ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what
one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness
and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was
nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except--marry
each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on
both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I
am sure neither of us regretted.

Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young
hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better
than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted
intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a
passion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden
surrender, sit down to 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