How different he had
imagined it would be! They were to be alone--he and Miss Baker--in the
evening somewhere, withdrawn from the world, very quiet, very calm and
peaceful. Their talk was to be of their lives, their lost illusions, not
of other people's children.
The two old people did not speak again. They sat there side by side,
nearer than they had ever been before, motionless, abstracted; their
thoughts far away from that scene of feasting. They were thinking of
each other and they were conscious of it. Timid, with the timidity of
their second childhood, constrained and embarrassed by each other's
presence, they were, nevertheless, in a little Elysium of their own
creating. They walked hand in hand in a delicious garden where it was
always autumn; together and alone they entered upon the long retarded
romance of their commonplace and uneventful lives.
At last that great supper was over, everything had been eaten; the
enormous roast goose had dwindled to a very skeleton. Mr. Sieppe had
reduced the calf's head to a mere skull; a row of empty champagne
bottles--"dead soldiers," as the facetious waiter had called them--lined
the mantelpiece. Nothing of the stewed prunes remained but the juice,
which was given to Owgooste and the twins.
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