to me: we must both wait till I could go to her.

And with this thought in my mind, I set about preparing to take my leave,
but at that moment I was startled--almost superstitiously--startled by
a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls
without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all
those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling
me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity,
was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him--he
will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition.
The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor
was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. Dear old Jim
Lewis! So some of the old guard were still on deck, after all! And,
I was thinking as I looked at him: "He, too, has looked upon her
face. He it was who poured out our wine, that last time together."
Then I had a whim. My waiter had been used to them in the old days.

"Jim," I said, "I want you to give this half-sovereign to the bandmaster
and ask him to play Chopin's _Funeral March_. There are not many people
in the place, so perhaps he won't mind. Tell him it's for an old friend
of yours, and in memory of all the happy dinners he had here long ago."

So to the strains of that death music, which so strangely blends the
piercing pathos of lost things with a springlike sense of resurrection,
a spheral melody of immortal promise, I passed once more through the
radiant portals of my necropolitan restaurant into the resounding
thoroughfares of still living and still loving humanity.