She had not been long there, however, when there came a knocking at her door. On her invitation to enter, the door opened and Tommy stood breathless on the threshold. His eyes were bright and he was quivering with excitement. “Do come out. Do come out and see something. I hit upon it unawares, and it knocked me silly. I’ve run all the way back to fetch you.” “What is it?” “Something too exquisite for words.” “What about the soul-ache?” “Oh! Let us have an orgy while we’re about it,” he cried recklessly. “It’s worth it. Do come. I want you to feel the thing with me.” The appeal was irresistible. It was spirit summoning spirit. Without thinking, but dimly conscious of a quick throbbing of the heart, Clementina put on her hat and went with Tommy out of the hotel. The full moon blazed from a cloudless sky, flooding the little silent square. She paused on the pavement. “Yes, it’s beautiful,” she said. “Oh—that’s only the silly old moon,” cried Tommy. “I’ve got something much better for you than that.” “What is it?” she asked again. “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.”