"Make it your holiday, too. Let yourself go."
"Our holiday, then," she assented; "no past, no future, just here and now."
Copying nature's lead, the character of the park changed by and by; the way rose from a sun-shot ravine and wound a wooded hill full of forest scents and subdued surf-like echoings of the city's roar. Strange rock upheavals with writhing strata flanked the by-paths, a mystery and an invitation, and the man and woman left their hansom to shuffle, a pair of children, in the fallen leaves. A squirrel, tame to familiarity, pushed his nut-begging little nose fairly into their fingers.
"How perfectly Edenic," murmured Mrs. Hilliard. "I feel as if there wasn't another human being besides you on earth."
Paradise before the Fall had its dinner problem to discuss, as witness the apple affair, and so presently had Shelby and Mrs. Hilliard. But it was the man, not Eve, who put the idea forward as the fitting climax of a memorable day, as perhaps did Father Adam, though she it was who ran the garden's resources through, and decided which to choose. The talk had ranged from Sherry's and Delmonico's to Chinatown and the Ghetto, when Mrs. Hilliard recollected a place ideally suited to the occasion.
"It's on Riverside Drive, and overlooks the Hudson," she explained.
"I've heard Ruth Temple speak of it, though I can't remember the name.
The driver will know; it's historic."
The driver did know, and whipped them smartly out of a park exit where the heights fell abruptly away and the elevated railroad far overhead twisted a wriggling S into Harlem's sixth story. Then the land again rose sheer on gray curtains of masonry, splashed red with October ivy, lifting city on city. A cathedral's beginnings, looking a ruin, now cut sharply against the sky, neighboring a hospital with the facade of a chateau. Then they skirted a pink and gray university grouped about a dome, and a great man's tomb which might have been a Titan's pepper-box, flourishing presently between files of waiting hansoms and automobiles to their destination.
The restaurant was crowded, but they luckily succeeded to a just vacated table by a northern window which swept the valley. A sunset of myriad tints and opalescent fires made molten copper of the river and a carnival float of every craft.
"We have it clear to-night," said their waiter, as if the establishment somehow deserved the credit. "You'd not think that big cliff to the left was opposite Yonkers. That's Fort Washington nearer on the right. A fight came off there up on the heights, you know. Washington had to look on from the Palisades and see the Hessians bayonet his troops. They say he wept."
Mrs. Hilliard considered him through her lorgnon, but the man was busy with the napery and escaped punishment.