‘No, no, the grape for me!’ said she:  ’the Rhine grape with the elf in it, and the silver harp and the stained legend!’

‘Glorious!’

He toasted the grape.  ’Wine of the grape is the young bride—­the young sun-bride! divine, and never too sweet, never cloying like the withered sun-dried, with its one drop of concentrated sugar, that becomes ten of gout.  No raisin-juice for us!  None of their too-long-on-the-stem clusters!  We are for the blood of the grape in her youth, her heaven-kissing ardour.  I have a cellar charged with the bravest of the Rhine.  We—­will we not assail it, bleed it in the gallant days to come? we two!’ The picture of his bride and him drinking the sun down after a day of savage toil was in the shout—­a burst unnoticed in the incessantly verbalizing buzz of a continental supper-table.  Clotilde acquiesced:  she chimed to it like a fair boonfellow of the rollicking faun.  She was realizing fairyland.

They retired to the divan-corner where it was you-and-I between them as with rivulets meeting and branching, running parallel, uniting and branching again, divided by the theme, but unending in the flow of the harmony.  So ran their chirping arguments and diversions.  The carrying on of a prolonged and determined you-and-I in company intimates to those undetermined floating atoms about us that a certain sacred something is in process of formation, or has formed; and people looked; and looked hard at the pair, and at one another afterward:  none approached them.  The Signor conjuror who has a thousand arts for conjuring with nature was generally considered to have done that night his most ancient and reputedly fabulous trick—­the dream of poets, rarely witnessed anywhere, and almost too wonderful for credence in a haunt of our later civilization.  Yet there it was:  the sudden revelation of the intense divinity to a couple fused in oneness by his apparition, could be perceived of all having man and woman in them; love at first sight, was visible.  ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’ And if nature, character, circumstance, and a maid clever at dressing her mistress’s golden hair, did prepare them for Love’s lightning-match, not the less were they proclaimingly alight and in full blaze.  Likewise, Time, imperious old gentleman though we know him to be, with his fussy reiterations concerning the hour for bed and sleep, bowed to the magical fact of their condition, and forbore to warn them of his passing from night to day.  He had to go, he must, he has to be always going, but as long as he could he left them on their bank by the margin of the stream, where a shadow-cycle of the eternal wound a circle for them and allowed them to imagine they had thrust that old driver of the dusty high-road quietly out of the way.  They were ungrateful, of course, when the performance of his duties necessitated his pulling them up beside him pretty smartly, but he uttered no prophecy of ever intending to rob them of the celestial moments they had cut from him and meant to keep between them ‘for ever,’ and fresh.