A night so absolutely soft and calm, was delicious after the glare and noise within.
“With whom,” he asked, “sweetheart, were you last dancing?”
“Only the brother of one of the Queen’s Maids, dear,” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi replied. “After dinner, though,” she tittered, “when he gets Arabian-Nighty, it’s apt to annoy one a scrap!”
“Don’t be tiresome, Yousef! The night is too fine,” she murmured glancing absently away towards the hardly moving trees, from whose branches a thousand drooping necklets of silver lamps palely burned.
Strolling on down hoops of white wisteria in the moon they came to the pillared circle of a rustic-temple, commanding a prospect on the town.
“There,” she murmured smiling elfishly, and designating something, far below them, through the moonmist, with her fan: “is the column of Justice and,” she laughed a little, “of _Liberty_!”
“And there,” he pointed inconsequently, “is _the Automobile Club_!”
“And beyond it ... The Convent of the Flaming-Hood....”
“And those blue revolving lights; can you see them, Rara?”
“Those,” he told her, contemplating her beautiful white face against the dusky bloom, “are the lights of the Café Cleopatra!”
“And what,” she questioned, as they sauntered on, pursued by all the sweet perfumes of the night, “are those berried-shrubs, that smell so passionately?”
“I don’t know,” he said: “Kiss me, Rara!”
“What a boy he is!” she murmured, gazing up into the starry clearness.
Overhead a full moon, a moon of circumstance, rode high in the sky, defining phantasmally far off, the violet-farded hills beyond the town.
“To be out there among the silver bean-fields!” he said.
“Yes, Yousef,” she sighed, starting at a Triton’s face among the trailing ivy on the castle wall. Beneath it, half concealed by water-flags, lay a miniature lake: as a rule now, nobody went near the lake at all, since the Queen had called it ‘_appallingly smelly_,’ so that, for rendezvous, it was quite ideal.
“Tell me, Yousef,” she presently said, pausing to admire the beautiful shadow of an orange-tree on the path before them: “tell me, dear, when Life goes like that to one--what does one do!!”
He shrugged. “Usually nothing,” he replied, the tip of his tongue (like the point of a blade) peeping out between his teeth.