I wrote to the theatre introducing myself, at Miss Dainty's desire, asking if I could be of any service, and suggesting to Miss Belle that if she would be kind enough to let me talk to her for half an hour, I should like to do so on Sunday across a dinner-table, and proposing Epitaux's in the Haymarket as being quiet and bright.
Miss Belle, in a little letter ending, "Yours cordially," wrote that she would be pleased to dine, and added that Miss Dainty had often spoken of me.
In one matter Epitaux's is deficient—there is no entrance lounge or waiting-room. A very smart little buffet, with ornamental glass windows, faces the street, and alongside this a narrow entrance passage, gorgeous in white and gold, leads to a short flight of steps and the glass doors which shield the restaurant. I had asked Miss Belle to dine at eight, and I waited at the street entrance, hoping that instinct would point her out to me when she arrived.
Two men drove up in a hansom. A brougham disgorged a married couple. Then a hansom came with a clatter down the Haymarket, pulled up, and a lady, good-looking and very becomingly attired, opened the doors and prepared to get out. The commissionaire put the guard over the wheel, and Miss Belle, for there could be no doubt that it was she, jumped down before I had time to introduce myself and offer a hand.
Miss Belle said a pretty word or two as to the invitation to dinner, and hoped she was not late; and as we went up the entrance passage she told me that she considered Miss Dainty the sweetest girl upon earth, and that she would have recognised me from the picture that Miss Dainty had shown her.
Miss Belle allowed me to help her off with her coat, while I explained that I had chosen Epitaux's for our dining-place because it is comparatively small, and that I was not likely to miss her arrival, as might have happened at Princes' or the Savoy. The pretty lady, looking round the dainty bonbonnière of a restaurant—with its walls of the lightest cream colour, its pilasters and cornices picked out with gold, its panels of deep blue-green stamped velvet, its musicians' gallery filled with palms, under which in a glass-enclosed room a young lady in black serves out the wines and liqueurs, its blaze of electric lights on the walls and its shaded lights on the tables—approved thoroughly of my choice. She had been at parties at Princes' and the Savoy, the Cecil and Romano's, since she arrived a fortnight ago; but she thought Epitaux's, which was new to her, very snug and nice.
I hoped that Miss Belle had had a good passage, but she had not; and I trusted that to make up for bad weather she had had pleasant fellow-passengers; but the passengers seemed to have been as indifferent as the weather.
Messrs. Costa and Rizzi, the two proprietors—one tall, with a moustache that a cavalryman might envy; the other short, with a grizzled beard—had been hovering by the table, and the head waiter, with the carte de jour in one hand, and the menu of the table-d'hôte dinner in the other, was waiting for orders.