"Tea or coffee?"
"Tea, please. And a roll and butter!"
The waitress left him, and he sat back in his chair, and now he regarded the bent head of the girl sitting opposite to him, and as he did so, she looked up and their eyes met. She looked away.
"What lovely eyes she has," John said to himself.
She stood up as he thought this, and prepared to leave the restaurant, and he saw again that her eyes were very beautiful: blue eyes that had a dark look in them; and he said to himself that a woman who had beautiful eyes had everything. He wished that he had come earlier to the restaurant or that she had come later, so that they might have sat opposite to each other for a longer time. He listened while she asked the waitress for her bill. The softness of her voice was like gentle music. He thought of the tiny noise of a small stream, of the song of a bird heard at a distance, of leaves slightly stirring in a quiet wind, and told himself that the sound of her voice had the quality of all these. He wondered what it was that brought her to the City of London. Perhaps she was employed in an office. Perhaps she had come up to do some shopping.... She moved away, and as she did so, he saw that she had left her letter lying on the table. He leant over and picked it up, reading the name written on the envelope: Miss Eleanor Moore. He got up and hurried after her.
The restaurant was a narrow cramped one, and it was not easy for him to make his way through the people who were entering or leaving it, and he feared that he would not be able to catch up with her before she had reached the street. Customers in that restaurant, however, had to stop at the counter to pay their bills, and so he reached her in time.
"Excuse me," he said. "I think you left this letter behind you."
She looked up in a startled manner, and then, seeing the letter which he held out to her, smiled and said, "Oh, thank you! Thank you very much. I left it on the table!"
She took it from him, and put it in a pocket of her coat.
"Thank you very much," she said again, and turned to take her change from the man behind the counter.