“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 tables as well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms and passionate loyalties.  Poets of whom but their songs remain, themselves by tragic pathways descended into the hollow land, had read their verses to me there, still glittering with the dawn dew of their creation, as we sat together over the wine and talked of the only matters then—­and perhaps even yet—­worth talking of:  love and literature.  Of these but one can still be met in London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying brightness—­

Where the oldest bard is as the young,
And the pipe is ever dropping honey,
And the lyre’s strings are ever strung.

Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature, how often have we risen from those tables, to pursue together the not too swiftly flying petticoat, through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets, aglow with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle with eyes brighter far than the city lamps—­passionate pilgrims of the morning star!  Ah! we go on such quests no more—­“another race hath been and other palms are won.”

No, not always women—­but naturally women nearly always, for it was the time of rosebuds, and we were wisely gathering them while we might—­

Through the many to the one—­
O so many! 
Kissing all and missing none,
Loving any.