“I want to go again to that dear little place where we breakfasted,” she said softly. “You must let me have my own way. I have money in my purse, now, and you must come and lunch with me. And it must be--oh, it _must_ be there.” They drove thither, this time in a high-hung, sumptuous, noiseless hansom, which sped with an entranced absence of motion through the busy streets. “It is like fairyland again,” she whispered, nestling against him in the narrow, deeply-padded enclosure. And he, resting his hand upon hers under the shelter of the closed doors, breathed heavily, and murmured a cadence without words in ecstatic response. In some ridiculous fraction of time they were at their journey’s end. The impression of having travelled on a magic carpet was in their minds as, almost ruefully, they woke from their day-dream of arrow-flight through space, stepped out, and paid the cabman. They laughed together at the thought, without necessity of mentioning what amused them. Vestalia, before they entered the restaurant, drew her companion a few doors up the street, and halted before the narrow window of the old French bootmaker’s shop. Here they laughed again, he merrily, she with a lingering, mellow aftermath of feeling in her tone. It was only when they were seated in the little room above and she had drawn off her gloves, and after a joyous insistence upon doing it all herself, had chosen some dishes from the card and sent the waiter off with the order, that their tongues were loosened. David leaned back in his chair, and beamed broad content. He began to talk in the measured, smooth-flowing tone which she remembered so well. “First of all, dear girl,” he said, “I want to put on the record my boundless delight at finding you once more. I take off my hat to the gods. They have devised in my behalf a boon which swallows up all the imaginable ills of a lifetime. I swear to complain of nothing they do for the rest of my days. They have given you back to me; and if I am dull enough to lose you again, why, I will bow my head submissively to the deserved mishaps of an ass.” The girl’s blue eyes twinkled with a soft, glad light. “It is a great joy to hear your voice again,” she said, gently. “The echoes of it have kept up a little faint murmur in my ears ever since we parted, as if some spirit was holding a phantom shell close to my head. And now it is as if we hadn’t parted at all, isn’t it?--I mean, for the present.” “Ah, it matters so little what you mean,” he replied, in affectionate banter. “I erred once, to my profound misfortune, in deferring to your mental processes, and permitting them to translate themselves into actions. Do not think that I shall be so weak again. The key shall never fail to be turned on you hereafter.” She laughed gaily, and shook her head in playful defiance. “Ah, but suppose----” she began, and then let a glance of merry archness complete her sentence.