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Vanishing Roads and Other Essays by Richard Le Gallienne
page 168 of 301 (55%)

"As we often were," I added.

And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise
from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so
reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy
flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he
did so!

"That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging
kiss but for the street.'"

Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven--some
little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under
the ancient London roofs.

But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left
alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would
prefer.

With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled down to
deliberate reverie, as an opium smoker gives himself up to his dream. I
savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories; I took a strange pleasure
in stimulating the ache of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of
innumerable dead hours. I systematically passed from table to table all
around that spacious peristyle. There was scarcely one at which I
had not sat with some vanished companion in those years of ardent,
irresponsible living which could never come again. Not always a woman
had been the companion whose form I thus conjured out of the past, too
often out of the grave; for the noble friendship of youth haunted those
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