I could not hear how they greeted each other, but in the way in which he helped her off with her coat there was implied, I fancied, a suggestion of uneasiness. “They do not know each other very well,” I said to myself, and, moving my chair a little further to the right, I arranged myself so that I should be able to watch them without turning my head. The suggestion of uneasiness was repeated as he leaned over the table towards her with the menu. “He is a little too eager,” I told myself. “He is anxious to make a success of it, and he is overacting. He is confoundedly uncomfortable.” And, calling the waiter, I ordered a dish of which the preparation would take, I knew, a good twenty minutes--and settled myself to enjoy the little comedy. He had ordered an expensive dinner--champagne, a fried sole, a pheasant and a Japanese salad, and a mushroom savoury. He was desperately anxious to make it a success, and, to avoid awkward pauses, he was talking most of the time: amusingly, too, I gathered, for she often smiled at what he said, and once she burst out laughing--fresh, clear laughter; and that laugh, which came about half-way through the meal, revealed to me what indeed I should have seen before, that, while he was enduring agonies of self-consciousness, she was solely concerned with the natural enjoyment of a good dinner in pleasant company. “The plot thickens,” I said, for this discovery ruled out the possibility of the pleasant little romance I had been considering--their parents had forbidden their marriage, they had decided to run away feeling very brave when the scheme was only under discussion, but now that the moment had come they repented the splendid resolution and would give anything to be in their respective homes sitting before the fire, thinking pleasantly of bed. That solution would have to go; for, if this was the case, she would certainly be as nervous, and probably more nervous, than he, unless--but that was a contingency of which I refused to consider the possibility. The elopement idea would have to go, and, besides, there was not the least suggestion that they were lovers; they had not once looked into each other’s eyes; they had not been even silent together, and silence is the beginning of love. They were not man and wife; they were not avowed lovers; they did not even seem to be potential lovers.