She blushed a slow, painful crimson. She hadn't meant that. She hadn't even thought of it; but, since he had, there was nothing for it but to go in. The door shut behind her sharply, with a click like a little trap; and she breathed such an atmosphere, flat, faint and stale, the mere ghost of some fuller, more fragrant flavor. In the little anteroom where they stood, whose faded ceiling all but brushed their heads, and in the larger little room beyond the Nottingham lace curtains, prevailed a mild shabbiness, a respectable decay. Curtains and table-cloths alike 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."