“You wait,” said he.
He took her across the square, through two or three turns of narrow cobble-paved streets, whirled her swiftly round a corner and said;
“Look!”
Clementina looked, and walked straight into the living heart of the majesty that once was Rome. There, in the midst of an open space, the modern houses around it obscured, softened, de-characterised by the magic-working moon, stood in its proud and perfect beauty the Temple of Augustus and Livia. Twenty centuries, with all their meaning, vanished in a second. It was the heart of Rome. There was the great Temple, perfect, imperishable, with its fluted Corinthian columns, its entablature, its pediment, its noble cornice throwing endless mysteries of shadow. No ruin, from which imagination flogged by scholarship might dimly picture forth what once had been; but the Temple itself, untouched, haughty, defying Time, the companion for two thousand years of the moon that now bathed it lovingly, as a friend of two thousand years’ standing must do, in its softest splendour, and sharing with the moon its godlike scorn of the hectic and transitory life of man.
Clementina drew a sharp breath of wonder. Moisture clouded her eyes. She could not speak for the suddenness of the shock of beauty. Tommy gently took her arm, and they stood for a long time in silence, close together. In their artists’ sensitiveness they were very near together, too, in spirit. She glanced at his face in the moonlight, alive with the joy of the thing, and her heart gave a sudden leap. All the beauty of the day translated itself into something even more radiant that flooded her soul, causing the rows of fluted columns to swim before her eyes until she shut them with a little sigh of content.
At last they moved and walked slowly round the building.
“I just couldn’t help fetching you,” said Tommy.
“Oh, I’m glad you did. Oh so glad. Why didn’t we know of this before we came.”
“Because we are two thrice-blessedly ignorant cockneys, dear. I hate to know what I’m going to see. It’s much better to be like stout Cortez and his men in the poem and discover things, isn’t it? By Jove, I shall never forget running into this.”
“Nor I,” said Clementina.