The place was too public to indulge in love-making, and it was very tantalising to sit near this vision of beauty without gaining the delight of a kiss. Paul feasted his eyes, and held Sylvia's grey-gloved hand under cover of her dress. Further he could not go.
"But if you put up your sunshade," he suggested artfully.
"Paul!" That was all Sylvia said, but it suggested a whole volume of rebuke. Brought up in seclusion, like the princess in an enchanted castle, the girl was exceedingly shy. Paul's ardent looks and eager wooing startled her at times, and he thought disconsolately that his chivalrous love-making was coarse and common when he gazed on the delicate, dainty, shrinking maid he adored.
"You should not have stepped out of your missal, Sylvia," he said sadly.
"Whatever do you mean, dearest?"
"I mean that you are a saint—an angel—a thing to be adored and worshipped. You are exactly like one of those lovely creations one sees in mass-books of the Middle Ages. I fear, Sylvia," Paul sighed, "that you are too dainty and holy for this work-a-day world."
"What nonsense, Paul! I'm a poor girl without position or friends, living in a poor street. You are the first person who ever thought me pretty."
"You are not pretty," said the ardent Beecot, "you are divine—you are Beatrice—you are Elizabeth of Thuringia—you are everything that is lovely and adorable."
"And you are a silly boy," replied Sylvia, blushing, but loving this poetic talk all the same. "Do you want to put me in a glass case when we marry? If you do, I sha'n't become Mrs. Beecot. I want to see the world and to enjoy myself."
"Then other men will admire you and I shall grow jealous."