"Hush!" he exclaimed, cursing his tell-tale features. "I'm not different; and if I was you could have nothing to do with it."
She said no more, but he saw by her brooding expression that she clung to her intuition, and knew what he denied.
The hands of the clock fixed on the wall above their heads pointed to the half-hour after midnight. The pale and weary waiters were racing to and fro clearing the tables, dodging this way and that with trays, stealing along with arms full of long-stemmed, thick tumblers, eager for rest. The electric moons gave a sudden portentous wink.
"Time!" a voice cried.
People began to get up and move out, exchanging loud good-nights. The long room slowly assumed an aspect of desertion and greedy desolation.
"We must go," Julian said.
Cuckoo woke out of that reverie, which seemed so chilly, so terrible even. She glanced at Julian, and her eyes were again full of tears. He was standing, and he bent down to her with his two hands resting upon the marble of the table. He bent down and then suddenly stooped lower, lower, almost glaring into her eyes. She went back in her seat a little, half frightened.
"What's it?" she murmured.
But Julian only remained fixedly looking into her eyes. In the pool of the tears of them he saw two tiny shadowy flames, flickering, as he thought, but quite clear, distinct, unmistakable. And there came a thick beating in his side. His heart beat hard. Each time he had seen the vision of the flame he had been instantly impressed with a sense of strange mystery, as if at the vision of some holy thing, a flame upon a prayer-blessed altar, a flame ascending from a tear-washed sacrifice. And now he saw this thing that he fancied holy burning behind the tears in Cuckoo's eyes!
Cuckoo got up.