showed a dull and tempered whiteness as if the shadow of time had fallen
dim across the whole. The little restaurant seemed left behind in the
onward march of the city, and its faded, kindly face was but a shadow of
what had been of the vigor and flourish of bourgeois Spain thirty years
before. There was no one eating at the little tables, no one sitting
behind the high cash-desk in the anteroom. Not a stir of human life in
all the place.

"Hello," said Kerr among the tables looking around him, "we've caught
them asleep." He rapped on the wall with his cane. Flora peered at him
between the curtains, all her fascinated apprehension of what was to
follow plain upon her face. "Shall it be a giant or dwarf?" he asked
her. "There's nothing I won't do for you, you know."

The door opened and a little girl with a long black braid and purple
apron came in.

"A dwarf," cried Flora. She laughed with a quick relaxing of her
strained nerves. It might almost have been the truth from that old
little swarthy face and sedate demeanor that hardly noticed them. The
child walked gravely up to the desk and mounting to the high stool
struck a faint-voiced bell.

"There," said Kerr, "ends formality. Now let the real magic begin!"

"Not black magic," Flora took up his fancy.

He had drawn out a chair for her. "That depends on you. I'm not the
magic maker. I have no talisman."

She felt the conscious jewel burn in her possession. She looked up
beseechingly at him, but he only laughed, and, with a swing, lifted the
chair a little off the ground as he set her up to the table, as if to
show how easily he could put forth strength. There was nothing defiant
in him. He was taking her with him--taking her upon the wings of his
high spirits; but mischievously, obstinately, he would not show her
where the flight was leading, nor let her listen to anything but the
rustling of those wings. He was determined to make holiday, whatever was
to follow. For the glimpse of blue through the dim window might be the
Bay of Naples; and, ah! Chianti. Perhaps the sort one gets down Monte
Video way, where France fades into Italy--perhaps, at least if her kind
fancy could get the better of the reality. In Sicily there were just
such table-cloths as these, and just such fat floor-shaking contadini to
wait upon you. And look now at the purple one behind the desk--child or
gnome--feet not touching the floor--centuries of Italy in her face. Oh,
calculation, indif