“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 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—­”