He persisted in his persuasions, and, in the end, he won her acquiescence. After all, here were the walls of the city about her, and she had no choice. While they had been talking, the waiter had returned and had placed before each of them one of the stemmed glasses full of the pale yellow concoction that Max had ordered. "Vell," grinned the host, "here's happy returns of the day un' many _of_ them." He took his glass in his hairy hand and flung the contents down his throat. But Mary looked at the drink in growing alarm. "Isn't it whiskey?" she asked. "No-o-o! I don't drink vhiskey. This is only vermout' un' tchin." "Gin's just the same as whiskey," the girl protested. "Not by a long sighd it ain't." "It's liquor, anyhow." "Sure, it's liquor; but drink a liddle of it; it vill gif you an appetite." Mary shook her russet head. "I don't need no appetite," she said; "I'm half starved as it is." "You'll need something to grind up these here Hungarian things, though." "No," said Mary; "I'd rather not." "But efferybody does here in New York." "Then I guess I'll wait till I'm a regular New Yorker." "Don't your fader drink?" "Sometimes he does," said the girl, conclusively; "an' that's why I don't." He urged her no further; he even denied himself a glass of the wine that he had ordered, and he succeeded, by this abstinence, in regaining whatever he had lost of her faith in him. He ate heartily himself, and if his manner of eating was not precisely that most common in restaurants of a more careful sort, this was something that the girl would have failed to note even had she not been so busily engaged by wonder at the service and consumption of the novel food. It was not until, contentedly sighing, she had sunk back from the wreck of her second ice, that she remembered again the lateness of the hour. With a display of his large bills and another flurry of attendants, they left the restaurant, walking among the gayly dressed and loudly laughing people at the tables, passing down the heavily carpeted stairs, and entering another pulsing motor-car. Max leaned out of the door and gave an address that Mary did not hear; the chauffeur threw forward the metal clutch, and the automobile shot ahead on its journey. They went for some time under the still hammering elevated; then turned through a quieter and darker street; threaded rapidly, twisting hither and yon, a dozen other highways and byways and at length drew up at their destination. Max leaped lightly to the pavement and tossed the driver a bill. "Neffer mind the change," he said, and had scarcely helped Mary to dismount before the car had snorted away into the night, leaving the pair of young lovers in the scarcely broken darkness and in a silence that seemed surrounded by a dim, distant rumble of city-sound.