The Midnight Passenger : a novel by Richard Savage
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page 10 of 346 (02%)
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of color guided him as he followed the gracefully gliding unknown
beauty. Strangely stirred at heart, he marked the distinction of the lady's bearing, her well-gloved hand, clasping a music roll--and even the natty bottines had not escaped him. He saw all this before he was aware that he had passed on beyond University Place, with no other purpose than to gaze into those sweetly earnest eyes again. "Twenty-three--no, twenty-five," his keen perception told him, by right of the supple and imperially moulded form of womanly ripeness. And he wondered vaguely what daughter of the gods this might be--what heiress of the graces of the laughter-loving goddesses of old! He quickened his pace in the narrow space between University Place and Broadway, fearful that he would lose that dark-eyed vision in the human breakers at the Broadway curve. But his grasp mechanically tightened upon his treasure, his right hand clutched the pistol butt more firmly, as his cheek reddened with an involuntary blush. He had seen just such faces on the Prater in sparkling Vienna, and in the antique streets of Buda-Pesth on the one summer European run, snatched from the Moloch worship of the Almighty Dollar! Such eyes, now soft and dreamy, then lit up with a merry challenge, had rested on the handsome young American tourist in the vaulted halls of the Wiener Cafe, where the Waltz King's witching melodies ruled the happy hour. And supple forms like this he had often seen flitting among the copses of the Margarethe Insel, when the yellow sunset rays shone |
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