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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13731 ***
+
+[Illustration: frontispiece]
+
+
+ROMANCE ISLAND
+
+
+By
+
+ZONA GALE
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+HERMANN C. WALL
+
+
+
+INDIANAPOLIS
+THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
+1906
+
+
+
+
+
+  "Who that remembers the first kind glance of her
+   whom he loves can fail to believe in magic?"
+                                     --NOVALIS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+      I DINNER TIME
+     II A SCRAP OF PAPER
+    III ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
+     IV THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
+      V OLIVIA PROPOSES
+     VI TWO LITTLE MEN
+    VII DUSK, AND SO ON
+   VIII THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
+     IX THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
+      X TYRIAN PURPLE
+     XI THE END OF THE EVENING
+    XII BETWEEN-WORLDS
+   XIII THE LINES LEAD UP
+    XIV THE ISLE OF HEARTS
+     XV A VIGIL
+    XVI GLAMOURIE
+   XVII BENEATH THE SURFACE
+  XVIII A MORNING VISIT
+    XIX IN THE HALL OF KINGS
+     XX OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
+    XXI OPEN SECRETS
+
+
+
+
+ROMANCE ISLAND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DINNER TIME
+
+
+As _The Aloha_ rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the
+harbour, St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous
+parody upon capital letters:
+
+"Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
+observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her--do you see? She
+belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
+of rope."
+
+Instead--mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
+own glorie"--he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and
+was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might
+three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch
+counter. For in America, dreams of gold--not, alas, golden
+dreams--do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly
+happenings in this pleasant land of larvæ, few are so spectacular as
+the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a
+toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his _bien_. However, to
+none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to
+himself.
+
+Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
+humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do
+if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
+marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
+among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen
+his mother--an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
+mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune--set
+off for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop
+Arthur Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look
+upon whose portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain
+of his charities seen St. George through college; and it made the
+million worth while to his nephew merely to send him to Tübingen to
+set his soul at rest concerning the date of one of the canonical
+gospels. Next to the rich delight of planning that voyage, St.
+George placed the buying of his yacht.
+
+In the dusty, inky office of the _New York Evening Sentinel_ he had
+been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting
+words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his
+typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone
+bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought
+and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes
+remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked
+toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass
+slipping to the river's mouth; whereupon he had been seized by such
+a passion to work hard and earn a white-and-brass craft of his own
+that the story which he was hurrying for the first edition was quite
+ruined.
+
+"Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had
+gnarled, "we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up
+this wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph
+reads like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less
+than fifteen minutes to do it in."
+
+St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
+ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
+had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like
+that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had
+received for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
+him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
+common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
+craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
+He had found himself estimating the value--in money--of the
+bric-à-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
+alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
+yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
+bric-à-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
+interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
+night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
+photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
+comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
+disagreeable task.
+
+Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
+transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
+the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
+things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
+unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had
+been _The Aloha_, which only that day had slipped to the river's
+mouth in the view from his old window at the _Sentinel_ office. St.
+George had the grace to be ashamed to remember how smoothly the
+social ills had adjusted themselves.
+
+Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected
+triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St.
+George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys
+which his fortune had brought to him. For although he had accurately
+painted, for example, the delight of a cruise in a sea-going yacht
+of his own, yet to step into his dory in the sunset, to watch _The
+Aloha's_ sides shine in the late light as he was rowed ashore past
+the lesser crafts in the harbour; to see the man touch his cap and
+put back to make the yacht trim for the night, and then to turn his
+own face to his apartment where virtually the entire day-staff of
+the _Evening Sentinel_ was that night to dine--these were among the
+pastimes of the lesser angels which his fancy had never compassed.
+
+A glow of firelight greeted St. George as he entered his apartment,
+and the rooms wore a pleasant air of festivity. A table, with covers
+for twelve, was spread in the living-room, a fire of cones was
+tossing on the hearth, the curtains were drawn, and the sideboard
+was a thing of intimation. Rollo, his man--St. George had easily
+fallen in all the habits which he had longed to assume--was just
+closing the little ice-box sunk behind a panel of the wall, and he
+came forward with dignified deference.
+
+"Everything is ready, Rollo?" St. George asked. "No one has
+telephoned to beg off?"
+
+"Yes, sir," answered Rollo, "and no, sir."
+
+St. George had sometimes told himself that the man looked like an
+oval grey stone with a face cut upon it.
+
+"Is the claret warmed?" St. George demanded, handing his hat. "Did
+the big glasses come for the liqueur--and the little ones will set
+inside without tipping? Then take the cigars to the den--you'll have
+to get some cigarettes for Mr. Provin. Keep up the fire. Light the
+candles in ten minutes. I say, how jolly the table looks."
+
+"Yes, sir," returned Rollo, "an' the candles 'll make a great
+difference, sir. Candles do give out an air, sir."
+
+One month of service had accustomed St. George to his valet's gift
+of the Articulate Simplicity. Rollo's thoughts were doubtless
+contrived in the cuticle and knew no deeper operance; but he always
+uttered his impressions with, under his mask, an air of keen and
+seasoned personal observation. In his first interview with St.
+George, Rollo had said: "I always enjoy being kep' busy, sir. _To
+me_, the busy man is a grand sight," and St. George had at once
+appreciated his possibilities. Rollo was like the fine print in an
+almanac.
+
+When the candles were burning and the lights had been turned on in
+the little ochre den where the billiard-table stood, St. George
+emerged--a well-made figure, his buoyant, clear-cut face accurately
+bespeaking both health and cleverness. Of a family represented by
+the gentle old bishop and his own exquisite mother, himself
+university-bred and fresh from two years' hard, hand-to-hand
+fighting to earn an honourable livelihood, St. George, of sound body
+and fine intelligence, had that temper of stability within vast
+range which goes pleasantly into the mind that meets it. A symbol of
+this was his prodigious popularity with those who had been his
+fellow-workers--a test beside which old-world traditions of the
+urban touchstones are of secondary advantage. It was deeply
+significant that in spite of the gulf which Chance had digged the
+day-staff of the _Sentinel_, all save two or three of which were not
+of his estate, had with flattering alacrity obeyed his summons to
+dine. But, as he heard in the hall the voice of Chillingworth, the
+difficulty of his task for the first time swept over him. It was
+Chillingworth who had advocated to him the need of wooden type to
+suit his literary style and who had long ordered and bullied him
+about; and how was he to play the host to Chillingworth, not to
+speak of the others, with the news between them of that million?
+
+When the bell rang, St. George somewhat gruffly superseded Rollo.
+
+"I'll go," he said briefly, "and keep out of sight for a few
+minutes. Get in the bath-room or somewhere, will you?" he added
+nervously, and opened the door.
+
+At one stroke Chillingworth settled his own position by dominating
+the situation as he dominated the city room. He chose the best chair
+and told a good story and found fault with the way the fire burned,
+all with immediate ease and abandon. Chillingworth's men loved to
+remember that he had once carried copy. They also understood all the
+legitimate devices by which he persuaded from them their best
+effort, yet these devices never failed, and the city room agreed
+that Chillingworth's fashion of giving an assignment to a new man
+would force him to write a readable account of his own entertainment
+in the dark meadows. Largely by personal magnetism he had fought his
+way upward, and this quality was not less a social gift.
+
+Mr. Toby Amory, who had been on the Eleven with St. George at
+Harvard, looked along his pipe at his host and smiled, with
+flattering content, his slow smile. Amory's father had lately had a
+conspicuous quarter of an hour in Wall Street, as a result of which
+Amory, instead of taking St. George to the cemetery at Clusium as he
+had talked, himself drifted to Park Row; and although he now knew
+considerably less than he had hoped about certain inscriptions, he
+was supporting himself and two sisters by really brilliant work, so
+that the balance of his power was creditably maintained. Surely the
+inscriptions did not suffer, and what then was Amory that he should
+object? Presently Holt, the middle-aged marine man, and Harding
+who, since he had lost a lightweight sparring championship, was
+sporting editor, solemnly entered together and sat down with the
+social caution of their class. So did Provin, the "elder giant," who
+gathered news as he breathed and could not intelligibly put six
+words together. Horace, who would listen to four lines over the
+telephone and therefrom make a half-column of American newspaper
+humour or American newspaper tears, came in roaring pacifically and
+marshaling little Bud, that day in the seventh heaven of his first
+"beat." Then followed Crass, the feature man, whose interviews were
+known to the new men as literature, although he was not above
+publicly admitting that he was not a reporter, but a special writer.
+Mr. Crass read nothing in the paper that he had not written, and St.
+George had once prophesied that in old age he would use his
+scrap-book for a manual of devotions, as Klopstock used his
+_Messiah_. With him arrived Carbury, the telegraph editor, and later
+Benfy, who had a carpet in his office and wrote editorials and who
+came in evening clothes, thus moving Harding and Holt to instant
+private conversation. The last to appear was Little Cawthorne who
+wrote the fiction page and made enchanting limericks about every one
+on the staff and went about singing one song and behaving, the
+dramatic man flattered him, like a motif. Little Cawthorne entered
+backward, wrestling with some wiry matter which, when he had
+executed a manoeuvre and banged the door, was thrust through the
+passage in the form of Bennie Todd, the head office boy,
+affectionately known as Bennietod. Bennietod was in every one's
+secret, clipped every one's space and knew every one's salary, and
+he had lately covered a baseball game when the man whose copy he was
+to carry had, outside the fence, become implicated in allurements.
+He was greeted with noise, and St. George told him heartily that he
+was glad he had come.
+
+"He made me," defensively claimed Bennietod; frowning deferentially
+at Little Cawthorne.
+
+"Hello, St. George," said the latter, "come on back to the office.
+Crass sits in your place and he wears cravats the colour of goblin's
+blood. Come back."
+
+"Not he," said Chillingworth, smoking; "the Dead-and-Done-with
+editor is too keen for that; I won't give him a job. He's ruined.
+Egg sandwiches will never stimulate him now."
+
+St. George joined in the relieved laugh that followed. They were
+remembering his young Sing Sing convict who had completed his
+sentence in time to step in a cab and follow his mother to the
+grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And
+St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words
+of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed
+for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat
+of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things
+in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the
+composing room had shaken mailed fists.
+
+"Hi, you!" said Little Cawthorne, who was born in the South, "this
+is a mellow minute. I could wish they came often. This shall be a
+weekly occurrence--not so, St. George?"
+
+"Cawthorne," Chillingworth warned, "mind your manners, or they'll
+make you city editor."
+
+A momentary shadow was cast by the appearance of Rollo, who was
+manifestly a symbol of the world Philistine about which these guests
+knew more and in which they played a smaller part than any other
+class of men. But the tray which Rollo bore was his passport.
+Thereafter, they all trooped to the table, and Chillingworth sat at
+the head, and from the foot St. George watched the city editor break
+bread with the familiar nervous gesture with which he was wont to
+strip off yards of copy-paper and eat it. There was a tacit
+assumption that he be the conversational sun of the hour, and in
+fostering this understanding the host took grateful refuge.
+
+"This is shameful," Chillingworth began contentedly. "Every one of
+you ought to be out on the Boris story."
+
+"What is the Boris story?" asked St. George with interest. But in
+all talk St. George had a restful, host-like way of playing the rôle
+of opposite to every one who preferred being heard.
+
+"I'll wager the boy hasn't been reading the papers these three
+months," Amory opined in his pleasant drawl.
+
+"No," St. George confessed; "no, I haven't. They make me homesick."
+
+"Don't maunder," said Chillingworth in polite criticism. "This is
+Amory's story, and only about a quarter of the facts yet," he added
+in a resentful growl. "It's up at the Boris, in West Fifty-ninth
+Street--you know the apartment house? A Miss Holland, an heiress,
+living there with her aunt, was attacked and nearly murdered by a
+mulatto woman. The woman followed her to the elevator and came
+uncomfortably near stabbing her from the back. The elevator boy was
+too quick for her. And at the station they couldn't get the woman to
+say a word; she pretends not to understand or to speak anything
+they've tried. She's got Amory hypnotized too--he thinks she can't.
+And when they searched her," went on Chillingworth with enjoyment,
+"they found her dressed in silk and cloth of gold, and loaded down
+with all sorts of barbarous ornaments, with almost priceless jewels.
+Miss Holland claims that she never saw or heard of the woman before.
+Now, what do you make of it?" he demanded, unconcernedly draining
+his glass.
+
+"Splendid," cried St. George in unfeigned interest. "I say,
+splendid. Did you see the woman?" he asked Amory.
+
+Amory nodded.
+
+"Yes," he said, "Andy fixed that for me. But she never said a word.
+I _parlez-voused_ her, and _verstehen-Sied_ her, and she sighed and
+turned her head."
+
+"Did you see the heiress?" St. George asked.
+
+"Not I," mourned Amory, "not to talk with, that is. I happened to be
+hanging up in the hall there the afternoon it occurred;" he modestly
+explained.
+
+"What luck," St. George commented with genuine envy. "It's a
+stunning story. Who is Miss Holland?"
+
+"She's lived there for a year or more with her aunt," said
+Chillingworth. "She is a New Yorker and an heiress and a great
+beauty--oh, all the properties are there, but they're all we've got.
+What do you make of it?" he repeated.
+
+St. George did not answer, and every one else did.
+
+"Mistaken identity," said Little Cawthorne. "Do you remember
+Provin's story of the woman whose maid shot a masseuse whom she took
+to be her mistress; and the woman forgave the shooting and seemed to
+have her arrested chiefly because she had mistaken her for a
+masseuse?"
+
+"Too easy, Cawthorne," said Chillingworth.
+
+"The woman is probably an Italian," said the telegraph editor,
+"doing one of her Mafia stunts. It's time they left the politicians
+alone and threw bombs at the bonds that back them."
+
+"Hey, Carbury. Stop writing heads," said Chillingworth.
+
+"Has Miss Holland lived abroad?" asked Crass, the feature man.
+"Maybe this woman was her nurse or ayah or something who got fond of
+her charge, and when they took it away years ago, she devoted her
+life to trying to find it in America. And when she got here she
+wasn't able to make herself known to her, and rather than let any
+one else--"
+
+"No more space-grabbing, Crass," warned Chillingworth.
+
+"Maybe," ventured Horace, "the young lady did settlement work and
+read to the woman's kid, and the kid died, and the woman thought
+she'd said a charm over it."
+
+Chillingworth grinned affectionately.
+
+"Hold up," he commanded, "or you'll recall the very words of the
+charm."
+
+Bennietod gasped and stared.
+
+"Now, Bennietod?" Amory encouraged him.
+
+"I t'ink," said the lad, "if she's a heiress, dis yere
+dagger-plunger is her mudder dat's been shut up in a mad-house to a
+fare-you-well."
+
+Chillingworth nodded approvingly.
+
+"Your imagination is toning down wonderfully," he flattered him. "A
+month ago you would have guessed that the mulatto lady was an
+Egyptian princess' messenger sent over here to get the heart from an
+American heiress as an ingredient for a complexion lotion. You're
+coming on famously, Todd."
+
+"The German poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has,
+in his epic of the _Oberon_ made admirable use of much the same
+idea, Mr. Chillingworth--"
+
+Yells interrupted him. Mr. Benfy was too "well-read" to be wholly
+popular with the staff.
+
+"Oh, well, the woman was crazy. That's about all," suggested
+Harding, and blushed to the line of his hair.
+
+"Yes, I guess so," assented Holt, who lifted and lowered one
+shoulder as he talked, "or doped."
+
+Chillingworth sighed and looked at them both with pursed lips.
+
+"You two," he commented, "would get out a paper that everybody would
+know to be full of reliable facts, and that nobody would buy. To be
+born with a riotous imagination and then hardly ever to let it riot
+is to be a born newspaper man. Provin?"
+
+The elder giant leaned back, his eyes partly closed.
+
+"Is she engaged to be married?" he asked. "Is Miss Holland engaged?"
+
+Chillingworth shook his head.
+
+"No," he said, "not engaged. We knew that by tea-time the same day,
+Provin. Well, St. George?"
+
+St. George drew a long breath.
+
+"By Jove, I don't know," he said, "it's a stunning story. It's the
+best story I ever remember, excepting those two or three that have
+hung fire for so long. Next to knowing just why old Ennis
+disinherited his son at his marriage, I would like to ferret out
+this."
+
+"Now, tut, St. George," Amory put in tolerantly, "next to doing
+exactly what you will be doing all this week you'd rather ferret out
+this."
+
+"On my honour, no," St. George protested eagerly, "I mean quite what
+I say. I might go on fearfully about it. Lord knows I'm going to see
+the day when I'll do it, too, and cut my troubles for the luck of
+chasing down a bully thing like this."
+
+If there was anything to forgive, every one forgave him.
+
+"But give up ten minutes on _The Aloha_," Amory skeptically put it,
+adjusting his pince-nez, "for anything less than ten minutes on _The
+Aloha_?"
+
+"I'll do it now--now!" cried St. George. "If Mr. Chillingworth will
+put me on this story in your place and will give you a week off on
+_The Aloha_, you may have her and welcome."
+
+Little Cawthorne pounded on the table.
+
+"Where do I come in?" he wailed. "But no, all I get is another wad
+o' woe."
+
+"What do you say, Mr. Chillingworth?" St. George asked eagerly.
+
+"I don't know," said Chillingworth, meditatively turning his glass.
+"St. George is rested and fresh, and he feels the story. And
+Amory--here, touch glasses with me."
+
+Amory obeyed. His chief's hand was steady, but the two glasses
+jingled together until, with a smile, Amory dropped his arm.
+
+"I _am_ about all in, I fancy," he admitted apologetically.
+
+"A week's rest on the water," said Chillingworth, "would set you on
+your feet for the convention. All right, St. George," he nodded.
+
+St. George leaped to his feet.
+
+"Hooray!" he shouted like a boy. "Jove, won't it be good to get
+back?"
+
+He smiled as he set down his glass, remembering the day at his desk
+when he had seen the white-and-brass craft slip to the river's
+mouth.
+
+Rollo, discreet and without wonder, footed softly about the table,
+keeping the glasses filled and betraying no other sign of life. For
+more than four hours he was in attendance, until, last of the
+guests, Little Cawthorne and Bennietod departed together, trying to
+remember the dates of the English kings. Finally Chillingworth and
+Amory, having turned outdoors the dramatic critic who had arrived
+at midnight and was disposed to stay, stood for a moment by the fire
+and talked it over.
+
+"Remember, St. George," Chillingworth said, "I'll have no
+monkey-work. You'll report to me at the old hour, you won't be late;
+and you'll take orders--"
+
+"As usual, sir," St. George rejoined quietly.
+
+"I beg your pardon," Chillingworth said quickly, "but you see this
+is such a deuced unnatural arrangement."
+
+"I understand," St. George assented, "and I'll do my best not to get
+thrown down. Amory has told me all he knows about it--by the way,
+where is the mulatto woman now?"
+
+"Why," said Chillingworth, "some physician got interested in the
+case, and he's managed to hurry her up to the Bitley Reformatory in
+Westchester for the present. She's there; and that means, we need
+not disguise, that nobody can see her. Those Bitley people are like
+a rabble of wild eagles."
+
+"Right," said St. George. "I'll report at eight o'clock. Amory can
+board _The Aloha_ when he gets ready and take down whom he likes."
+
+"On my life, old chap, it's a private view of Kedar's tents to me,"
+said Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. "I'll probably
+win wide disrespect by my inability to tell a mainsail from a
+cockpit, but I'm a grateful dog, in spite of that."
+
+When they were gone St. George sat by the fire. He read Amory's
+story of the Boris affair in the paper, which somewhere in the
+apartment Rollo had unearthed, and the man took off his master's
+shoes and brought his slippers and made ready his bath. St. George
+glanced over his shoulder at the attractively-dismantled table, with
+its dying candles and slanted shades.
+
+"Gad!" he said in sheer enjoyment as he clipped the story and saw
+Rollo pass with the towels.
+
+It was so absurdly like a city room's dream of Arcady.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A SCRAP OF PAPER
+
+
+To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing
+breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were
+novel preparations for work in the _Sentinel_ office. The
+impossibility of it all delighted St. George rather more than the
+reality, for there is no pastime, as all the world knows, quite like
+that of practising the impossible. The days when, "like a man
+unfree," he had fared forth from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely
+to partake of an evil omelette, seemed enchantingly far away. It
+was, St. George reflected, the experience of having been released
+from prison, minus the disgrace.
+
+Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the
+printers' ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the
+elation of the return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets.
+When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its
+fascination, but now he understood. "A newspaper office," so a
+revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once
+imparted to St. George, "is a place where a man with the
+temperament of a savant and a recluse may bring his American vice of
+commercialism and worship of the uncommon, and let them have it out.
+Newspapers have no other use--except the one I began on." When St.
+George entered the city room, Crass, of the goblin's blood cravats,
+had vacated his old place, and Provin was just uncovering his
+typewriter and banging the tin cover upon everything within reach,
+and Bennietod was writhing over a rewrite, and Chillingworth was
+discharging an office boy in a fashion that warmed St. George's
+heart.
+
+But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of
+Chillingworth, the guest. He waved both arms at the foreman who
+ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he
+frowned a greeting at St. George.
+
+"Get right out on the Boris story," he said. "I depend on you. The
+chief is interested in this too--telephoned to know whom I had on
+it."
+
+St. George knew perfectly that "the chief" was playing golf at Lenox
+and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland
+story, for he was a close friend of the bishop's, and St. George
+knew his ways; but Chillingworth's methods always told, and St.
+George turned away with all the old glow of his first assignment.
+
+St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances
+and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman;
+but he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one
+apostate Chance who open great good luck of any sort. So, though the
+journey to Westchester County was almost certain to result in
+refusal, he meant to be confronted by that certainty before he
+assumed it. To the warden on the wire St. George put his inquiry.
+
+"What are your visitors' days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+
+"Thursdays," came the reply, and the warden's voice suggested
+handcuffs by way of hospitality.
+
+"This is St. George of the _Sentinel_. I want very much to see one
+of your people--a mulatto woman. Can you fix it for me?"
+
+"Certainly not," returned the warden promptly. "The _Sentinel_ knows
+perfectly that newspaper men can not be admitted here."
+
+"Ah, well now, of course," St. George conceded, "but if you have a
+mysterious boarder who talks Patagonian or something, and we think
+that perhaps we can talk with her, why then--"
+
+"It doesn't matter whether you can talk every language in South
+America," said the warden bruskly. "I'm very busy now, and--"
+
+"See here, Mr. Jeffrey," said St. George, "is no one allowed there
+but relatives of the guests?"
+
+"Nobody,"--crisply.
+
+"I beg your pardon, that is literal?"
+
+"Relatives, with a permit," divulged the warden, who, if he had had
+a sceptre would have used it at table, he was so fond of his little
+power, "and the Readers' Guild."
+
+"Ah--the Readers' Guild," said St. George. "What days, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+
+"To-day and Saturdays, ten o'clock. I'm sorry, Mr. St. George, but
+I'm a very busy man and now--"
+
+"Good-by," St. George cried triumphantly.
+
+In half an hour he was at the Grand Central station, boarding a
+train for the Reformatory town. It was a little after ten o'clock
+when he rang the bell at the house presided over by Chillingworth's
+"rabble of wild eagles."
+
+The Reformatory, a boastful, brick building set in grounds that
+seemed freshly starched and ironed, had a discoloured door that
+would have frowned and threatened of its own accord, even without
+the printed warnings pasted to its panels stating that no
+application for admission, with or without permits, would be
+honoured upon any day save Thursday. This was Tuesday.
+
+Presently, the chains having fallen within after a feudal rattling,
+an old man who looked born to the business of snapping up a
+drawbridge in lieu of a taste for any other exclusiveness peered at
+St. George through absurd smoked glasses, cracked quite across so
+that his eyes resembled buckles.
+
+"Good morning," said St. George; "has the Readers' Guild arrived
+yet?"
+
+The old man grated out an assent and swung open the door, which
+creaked in the pitch of his voice. The bare hall was cut by a wall
+of steel bars whose gate was padlocked, and outside this wall the
+door to the warden's office stood open. St. George saw that a
+meeting was in progress there, and the sight disturbed him. Then the
+click of a key caught his attention, and he turned to find the old
+man quietly and surprisingly swinging open the door of steel bars.
+
+"This way, sir," he said hoarsely, fixing St. George with his buckle
+eyes, and shambled through the door after him locking it behind
+them.
+
+If St. George had found awaiting him a gold throne encircled by
+kneeling elephants he could have been no more amazed. Not a word had
+been said about the purpose of his visit, and not a word to the
+warden; there was simply this miraculous opening of the barred door.
+St. George breathlessly footed across the rotunda and down the dim
+opposite hall. There was a mistake, that was evident; but for the
+moment St. George was going to propose no reform. Their steps echoed
+in the empty corridor that extended the entire length of the great
+building in an odour of unspeakable soap and superior disinfectants;
+and it was not until they reached a stair at the far end that the
+old man halted.
+
+"Top o' the steps," he hoarsely volunteered, blinking his little
+buckle eyes, "first door to the left. My back's bad. I won't go up."
+
+St. George, inhumanely blessing the circumstance, slipped something
+in the old man's hand and sprang up the stairs.
+
+The first door at the left stood ajar. St. George looked in and saw
+a circle of bonnets and white curls clouded around the edge of the
+room, like witnesses. The Readers' Guild was about leaving; almost
+in the same instant, with that soft lift and touch which makes a
+woman's gown seem sewed with vowels and sibilants, they all arose
+and came tapping across the bare floor. At their head marched a
+woman with such a bright bonnet, and such a tinkle of ornaments on
+her gown that at first sight she quite looked like a lamp. It was
+she whom St. George approached.
+
+"I beg your pardon, madame," he said, "is this the Readers' Guild?"
+
+There was nothing in St. George's grave face and deferential
+stooping of shoulders to betray how his heart was beating or what a
+bound it gave at her amazing reply.
+
+"Ah," she said, "how do you do?"--and her manner had that violent
+absent-mindedness which almost always proves that its possessor has
+trained a large family of children--"I am so glad that you can be
+with us to-day. I am Mrs. Manners--forgive me," she besought with
+perfectly self-possessed distractedness, "I'm afraid that I've
+forgotten your name."
+
+"My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual
+speechlessness.
+
+The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs.
+Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to
+compensate her total lack of attention.
+
+"Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
+
+Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and
+caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and
+muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter,
+a little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
+
+"Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a
+wonderful meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately
+for us you are just in time for our third floor council."
+
+It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and
+was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns
+on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have
+amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions
+when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the
+temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost
+St. George an effort, which he was afterward glad to remember having
+made, to turn to Mrs. Manners, who had that air of appointing
+committees and announcing the programme by which we always recognize
+a leader, and try to explain.
+
+"I am afraid," St. George said as they reached the stairs, "that you
+have mistaken me, Mrs. Manners. I am not--"
+
+"Pray, pray do not mention it," cried Mrs. Manners, shaking her
+little lamp-shade of a hat at him, "we make every allowance, and I
+am sure that none will be necessary."
+
+"But I am with the _Evening Sentinel_," St. George persisted, "I am
+afraid that--"
+
+"As if one's profession made any difference!" cried Mrs. Manners
+warmly. "No, indeed, I perfectly understand. We all understand," she
+assured him, going over some papers in one hand and preparing to
+mount the stairs. "Indeed, we appreciate it," she murmured, "do we
+not, Miss Utter?"
+
+The little brown nut seemed to crack in a capacious smile.
+
+"Indeed, indeed!" she said fervently, accenting her emphasis by
+briefly-closed eyes.
+
+"Hymn books. Now, have we hymn books enough?" plaintively broke in
+Mrs. Manners. "I declare, those new hymn books don't seem to have
+the spirit of the old ones, no matter what _any one_ says," she
+informed St. George earnestly as they reached an open door. In the
+next moment he stood aside and the Readers' Guild filed past him. He
+followed them. This was pleasantly like magic.
+
+They entered a large chamber carpeted and walled in the garish
+flowers which many boards of directors suppose will joy the
+cheerless breast. There were present a dozen women inmates,--sullen,
+weary-looking beings who seemed to have made abject resignation
+their latest vice. They turned their lustreless eyes upon the
+visitors, and a portly woman in a red waist with a little American
+flag in a buttonhole issued to them a nasal command to rise. They
+got to their feet with a starched noise, like dead leaves blowing,
+and St. George eagerly scanned their faces. There were women of
+several nationalities, though they all looked raceless in the ugly
+uniforms which those same boards of directors consider _de rigueur_
+for the soul that is to be won back to the normal. A little negress,
+with a spirit that soared free of boards of directors, had tried to
+tie her closely-clipped wool with bits of coloured string; an
+Italian woman had a geranium over her ear; and at the end of the
+last row of chairs, towering above the others, was a creature of a
+kind of challenging, unforgetable beauty whom, with a thrill of
+certainty, St. George realized to be her whom he had come to see.
+So strong was his conviction that, as he afterward recalled, he even
+asked no question concerning her. She looked as manifestly not one
+of the canaille of incorrigibles as, in her place, Lucrezia Borgia
+would have looked.
+
+The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder
+and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned. She was young,
+hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar
+litheness which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was
+of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of
+the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more
+penetrable. Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she
+divined that in some way his coming affected her.
+
+"We will have our hymn first." Mrs. Manners' words were buzzing and
+pecking in the air. "What can I have done with that list of numbers?
+We have to select our pieces most carefully," she confided to St.
+George, "so to be sure that _Soul's Prison_ or _Hands Red as
+Crimson_, or, _Do You See the Hebrew Captive Kneeling?_ or anything
+personal like that doesn't occur. Now what can I have done with that
+list?"
+
+Her words reached St. George but vaguely. He was in a fever of
+anticipation and enthusiasm. He turned quickly to Mrs. Manners.
+
+"During the hymn," he said simply, "I would like to speak with one
+of the women. Have I your permission?"
+
+Mrs. Manners looked momentarily perplexed; but her eyes at that
+instant chancing upon her lost list of hymns, she let fall an
+abstracted assent and hurried to the waiting organist. Immediately
+St. George stepped quietly down among the women already fluttering
+the leaves of their hymn books, and sat beside the mulatto woman.
+
+Her eyes met his in eager questioning, but she had that temper of
+unsurprise of many of the eastern peoples and of some animals. Yet
+she was under some strong excitement, for her hands, large but
+faultlessly modeled, were pressed tensely together. And St. George
+saw that she was by no means a mulatto, or of any race that he was
+able to name. Her features were classic and of exceeding fineness,
+and her face was sensitive and highly-bred and filled with repose,
+like the surprising repose of breathing arrested in marble. There
+was that about her, however, which would have made one, constituted
+to perceive only the arbitrary balance of things, feel almost
+afraid; while one of high organization would inevitably have been
+smitten by some sense of the incalculably higher organization of her
+nature, a nature which breathed forth an influence, laid a
+spell--did something indefinable. Sometimes one stands too closely
+to a statue and is frightened by the nearness, as by the nearness
+of one of an alien region. St. George felt this directly he spoke to
+her. He shook off the impression and set himself practically to the
+matter in hand. He had never had greater need of his faculty for
+directness. His low tone was quite matter-of-fact, his manner
+deferentially reassuring.
+
+"I think," he said softly and without preface, "that I can help you.
+Will you let me help you? Will you tell me quickly your name?"
+
+The woman's beautiful eyes were filled with distress, but she shook
+her head.
+
+"Your name--name--name?" St. George repeated earnestly, but she had
+only the same answer. "Can you not tell me where you live?" St.
+George persisted, and she made no other sign.
+
+"New York?" went on St. George patiently. "New York? Do you live in
+New York?"
+
+There was a sudden gleam in the woman's eyes. She extended her hands
+quickly in unmistakable appeal. Then swiftly she caught up a hymn
+book, tore at its fly-leaf, and made the movement of writing. In an
+instant St. George had thrust a pencil in her hand and she was
+tracing something.
+
+He waited feverishly. The organ had droned through the hymn and the
+women broke into song, with loose lips and without restraint, as
+street boys sing. He saw them casting curious, sullen glances, and
+the Readers' Guild whispering among themselves. Miss Bella Bliss
+Utter, looking as distressed as a nut can look, nodded, and Mrs.
+Manners shook her head and they meant the same thing. Then St.
+George saw the attendant in the red waist descend from the platform
+and make her way toward him, the little American flag rising and
+falling on her breast. He unhesitatingly stepped in the aisle to
+meet her, determined to prevent, if possible, her suspicion of the
+message. "Is it the barbarism of a gentleman," Amory had once
+propounded, "or is it the gentleman-like manners of a barbarian
+which makes both enjoy over-stepping a prohibition?"
+
+"I compliment you," St. George said gravely, with his deferential
+stooping of the shoulders. "The women are perfectly trained. This,
+of course, is due to you."
+
+The hard face of the woman softened, but St. George thought that one
+might call her very facial expression nasal; she smiled with evident
+pleasure, though her purpose remained unshaken.
+
+"They do pretty good," she admitted, "but visitors ain't best for
+'em. I'll have to request you"--St. George vaguely wished that she
+would say "ask"--"not to talk to any of 'em."
+
+St. George bowed.
+
+"It is a great privilege," he said warmly if a bit incoherently,
+and held her in talk about an institution of the sort in Canada
+where the women inmates wore white, the managers claiming that the
+effect upon their conduct was perceptible, that they were far more
+self-respecting, and so on in a labyrinth of defensive detail. "What
+do you think of the idea?" he concluded anxiously, manfully holding
+his ground in the aisle.
+
+"I think it's mostly nonsense," returned the woman tartly, "a big
+expense and a sight of work for nothing. And now permit me to say--"
+
+St. George vaguely wished that she would say "let."
+
+"I agree with you," he said earnestly, "nothing could be simpler and
+neater than these calico gowns."
+
+The attendant looked curiously at him.
+
+"They are gingham," she rejoined, "and you'll excuse me, I hope, but
+visitors ain't supposed to converse with the inmates."
+
+St. George was vanquished by "converse."
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, "pray forgive me. I will say good-by
+to my friend."
+
+He turned swiftly and extended his hand to the strange woman behind
+him. With the cunning upon which he had counted she gave her own
+hand, slipping in his the folded paper. Her eyes, with their
+haunting watchfulness, held his for a moment as she mutely bent
+forward when he left her.
+
+The hymn was done and the women were seating themselves, as St.
+George with beating heart took his way up the aisle. What the paper
+contained he could not even conjecture; but there _was_ a paper and
+it _did_ contain something which he had a pleasant premonition would
+be invaluable to him. Yet he was still utterly at loss to account
+for his own presence there, and this he coolly meant to do.
+
+He was spared the necessity. On the platform Mrs. Manners had risen
+to make an announcement; and St. George fancied that she must
+preside at her tea-urn and try on her bonnets with just that same
+formal little "announcement" air.
+
+"My friends," she said, "I have now an unexpected pleasure for you
+and for us all. We have with us to-day Mr. St. George, of New York.
+Mr. St. George is going to sing for us."
+
+St. George stood still for a moment, looking into the expectant
+faces of Mrs. Manners and the other women of the Readers' Guild, a
+spark of understanding kindling the mirth in his eyes. This then
+accounted both for his admittance to the home and for his welcome by
+the women upon their errand of mercy. He had simply been very
+naturally mistaken for a stranger from New York who had not arrived.
+But since he had accomplished something, though he did not know
+what, inasmuch as the slip of paper lay crushed in his hand unread,
+he must, he decided, pay for it. Without ado he stepped to the
+platform.
+
+"I have explained to Mrs. Manners and to these ladies," he said
+gravely, "that I am not the gentleman who was to sing for you.
+However, since he is detained, I will do what I can."
+
+This, mistaken for a merely perfunctory speech of self-depreciation,
+was received in polite, contradicting silence by the Guild. St.
+George, who had a rich, true barytone, quickly ran over his little
+list of possible songs, none of which he had ever sung to an
+audience that a canoe would not hold, or to other accompaniment than
+that of a mandolin. Partly in memory of those old canoe-evenings St.
+George broke into a low, crooning plantation melody. The song, like
+much of the Southern music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the
+college men had loved, something--or so one might have said who took
+the canoe-music seriously--of the wildness and fierceness of old
+tribal loves and plaints and unremembered wooings with a desert
+background: a gallop of hoof-beats, a quiver of noon light above
+saffron sand--these had been, more or less, in the music when St.
+George had been wont to lie in a boat and pick at the strings while
+Amory paddled; and these he must have reëchoed before the crowd of
+curious and sullen and commonplace, lighted by that one wild,
+strange face. When he had finished the dark woman sat with bowed
+head, and St. George himself was more moved by his own effort than
+was strictly professional.
+
+"Dear Mr. St. George," said Mrs. Manners, going distractedly through
+her hand-bag for something unknown, "our secretary will thank you
+formally. It was she who sent you our request, was it not? She
+_will_ so regret being absent to-day."
+
+"She did not send me a request, Mrs. Manners," persisted St. George
+pleasantly, "but I've been uncommonly glad to do what I could. I am
+here simply on a mission for the _Evening Sentinel_."
+
+Mrs. Manners drew something indefinite from her bag and put it back
+again, and looked vaguely at St. George.
+
+"Your voice reminds me so much of my brother, younger," she
+observed, her eyes already straying to the literature for
+distribution.
+
+With soft exclamatory twitters the Readers' Guild thanked St.
+George, and Miss Bella Bliss Utter, who was of womankind who clasp
+their hands when they praise, stood thus beside him until he took
+his leave. The woman in the red waist summoned an attendant to show
+him back down the long corridor.
+
+At the grated door within the entrance St. George found the warden
+in stormy conference with a pale blond youth in spectacles.
+
+"Impossible," the warden was saying bluntly, "I know you. I know
+your voice. You called me up this morning from the _New York
+Sentinel_ office, and I told you then--"
+
+"But, my dear sir," expostulated the pale blond youth, waving a
+music roll, "I do assure you--"
+
+"What he says is quite true, Warden," St. George interposed
+courteously, "I will vouch for him. I have just been singing for the
+Readers' Guild myself."
+
+The warden dropped back with a grudging apology and brows of tardy
+suspicion, and the old man blinked his buckle eyes.
+
+"Gentlemen," said St. George, "good morning."
+
+Outside the door, with its panels decorated in positive
+prohibitions, he eagerly unfolded the precious paper. It bore a
+single name and address: Tabnit, 19 McDougle Street, New York.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
+
+
+St. George lunched leisurely at his hotel. Upon his return from
+Westchester he had gone directly to McDougle Street to be assured
+that there was a house numbered 19. Without difficulty he had found
+the place; it was in the row of old iron-balconied apartment houses
+a few blocks south of Washington Square, and No. 19 differed in no
+way from its neighbours even to the noisy children, without toys,
+tumbling about the sunken steps and dark basement door. St. George
+contented himself with walking past the house, for the mere
+assurance that the place existed dictated his next step.
+
+This was to write a note to Mrs. Medora Hastings, Miss Holland's
+aunt. The note set forth that for reasons which he would, if he
+might, explain later, he was interested in the woman who had
+recently made an attempt upon her niece's life; that he had seen the
+woman and had obtained an address which he was confident would lead
+to further information about her. This address, he added, he
+preferred not to disclose to the police, but to Mrs. Hastings or
+Miss Holland herself, and he begged leave to call upon them if
+possible that day. He despatched the note by Rollo, whom he
+instructed to deliver it, not at the desk, but at the door of Mrs.
+Hastings' apartment, and to wait for an answer. He watched with
+pleasure Rollo's soft departure, recalling the days when he had sent
+a messenger boy to some inaccessible threshold, himself stamping up
+and down in the cold a block or so away to await the boy's return.
+
+Rollo was back almost immediately. Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland
+were not at home. St. George eyed his servant severely.
+
+"Rollo," he said, "did you go to the door of their apartment?"
+
+"No, sir," said Rollo stiffly, "the elevator boy told me they was
+out, sir."
+
+"Showing," thought St. George, "that a valet and a gentleman is a
+very poor newspaper man."
+
+"Now go back," he said pleasantly, "go up in the elevator to their
+door. If they are not in, wait in the lower hallway until they
+return. Do you get that? Until they return."
+
+"You'll want me back by tea-time, sir?" ventured Rollo.
+
+"Wait," St. George repeated, "until they return. At three. Or six.
+Or nine o'clock. Or midnight."
+
+"Very good, sir," said Rollo impassively, "it ain't always wise,
+sir, for a man to trust to his own judgment, sir, asking your
+pardon. His judgment," he added, "may be a bit of the ape left in
+him, sir."
+
+St. George smiled at this evolutionary pearl and settled himself
+comfortably by the open fire to await Rollo's return. It was after
+three o'clock when he reappeared. He brought a note and St. George
+feverishly tore it open.
+
+"Whom did you see? Were they civil to you?" he demanded.
+
+"I saw a old lady, sir," said Rollo irreverently. "She didn't say a
+word to me, sir, but what she didn't say was civiler than many
+people's language. There's a great deal in manner, sir," declaimed
+Rollo, brushing his hat with his sleeve, and his sleeve with his
+handkerchief, and shaking the handkerchief meditatively over the
+coals.
+
+St. George read the note at a glance and with unspeakable relief.
+They would see him. A refusal would have delayed and annoyed him
+just then, in the flood-tide of his hope.
+
+     "My Dear Mr. St. George," the note ran. "My niece is not at
+     home, and I can not tell how your suggestion will be received
+     by her, though it is most kind. I may, however, answer for
+     myself that I shall be glad to see you at four o'clock this
+     afternoon.
+                   "Very truly yours,
+                               "MEDORA HASTINGS."
+
+Grateful for her evident intention to waste no time, St. George
+dressed and drove to the Boris, punctually sending up his card at
+four o'clock. At once he was ushered to Mrs. Hastings' apartment.
+
+St. George entered her drawing-room incuriously. Three years of
+entering drawing-rooms which he never thereafter was to see had
+robbed him of that sensation of indefinable charm which for many a
+strange room never ceases to yield. He had found far too many tables
+upholding nothing which one could remember, far too many pictures
+that returned his look, and rugs that seemed to have been selected
+arbitrarily and because there was none in stock that the owner
+really liked. He was therefore pleasantly surprised and puzzled by
+the room which welcomed him. The floor was tiled in curious blocks,
+strangely hieroglyphed, as if they had been taken from old tombs.
+Over the fireplace was set a panel of the same stone, which, by the
+thickness of the tiles, formed a low shelf. On this shelf and on
+tables and in a high window was the strangest array of objects that
+St. George had ever seen. There were small busts of soft rose stone,
+like blocks of coral. There was a statue or two of some indefinable
+white material, glistening like marble and yet so soft that it had
+been indented in several places by accidental pressure. There were
+fans of strangely-woven silk, with sticks of carven rock-crystal,
+and hand mirrors of polished copper set in frames of gems that he
+did not recognize. Upon the wall were mended bits of purple
+tapestry, embroidered or painted or woven in singular patterns of
+flora and birds that St. George could not name. There were rolls of
+parchment, and vases of rock-crystal, and a little apparatus, most
+delicately poised, for weighing unknown, delicate things; and jars
+and cups without handles, all baked of a soft pottery having a nap
+like the down of a peach. Over the windows hung curtains of lace,
+woven by hands which St. George could not guess, in patterns of such
+freedom and beauty as western looms never may know. On the floor and
+on the divans were spread strange skins, some marked like peacocks,
+some patterned like feathers and like seaweed, all in a soft fur
+that was like silk.
+
+Mingled with these curios were the ordinary articles of a cultivated
+household. There were many books, good pictures, furniture with
+simple lines, a tea-table that almost ministered of itself, a
+work-basket filled with "violet-weaving" needle-work, and a gossipy
+clock with well-bred chimes. St. George was enormously attracted by
+the room which could harbour so many pagan delights without itself
+falling their victim. The air was fresh and cool and smelled of the
+window primroses.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In a few moments Mrs. Hastings entered, and if St. George had been
+bewildered by the room he was still more amazed by the appearance
+of his hostess. She was utterly unlike the atmosphere of her
+drawing-room. She was a bustling, commonplace little creature, with
+an expressionless face, indented rather than molded in features. Her
+plump hands were covered with jewels, but for all the richness of
+her gown she gave the impression of being very badly dressed; things
+of jet and metal bobbed and ticked upon her, and her side-combs were
+continually falling about. She sat on the sofa and looked at the
+seat which St. George was to have and began to talk--all without
+taking the slightest heed of him or permitting him to mention the
+_Evening Sentinel_ or his errand. If St. George had been painted
+purple he felt sure that she would have acted quite the same.
+Personality meant nothing to her.
+
+"Now this distressing matter, Mr. St. George," began Mrs. Hastings,
+"of this frightful mulatto woman. I didn't see her myself--no, I had
+stopped in on the first floor to visit my lawyer's wife who was ill
+with neuralgia, and I didn't see the creature. If I had been with my
+niece I dare say it wouldn't have occurred. That's what I always say
+to my niece. I always say, 'Olivia, nothing _need_ occur to vex one.
+It always happens because of pure heedlessness.' Not that I accuse
+my own niece of heedlessness in this particular. It was the elevator
+boy who was heedless. That is the trouble with life in a great
+city. Every breath you draw is always dependent on somebody else's
+doing his duty, and when you consider how many people habitually
+neglect their duty it is a wonder--I always say that to Olivia--it
+is a wonder that anybody is alive to _do_ a duty when it presents
+itself. 'Olivia,' I always say, 'nobody needs to die.' And I really
+believe that they nearly all do die out of pure heedlessness. Well,
+and so this frightful mulatto creature: you know her, I understand?"
+
+Mrs. Hastings leaned back and consulted St. George through her
+tortoise-shell glasses, tilting her head high to keep them on her
+nose and perpetually putting their gold chain over her ear, which
+perpetually pulled out her side-combs.
+
+"I saw her this morning," St. George said. "I went up to the
+Reformatory in Westchester, and I spoke with her."
+
+"Mercy!" ejaculated Mrs. Hastings, "I wonder she didn't tear your
+eyes out. Did they have her in a cage or in a cell? What was the
+creature about?"
+
+"She was in a missionary meeting at the moment," St. George
+explained, smiling.
+
+"Mercy!" said Mrs. Hastings in exactly the same tone. "Some trick, I
+expect. That's what I warn Olivia: 'So few things nowadays are done
+through necessity or design.' Nearly everything is a trick. Every
+invention is a trick--a cultured trick, one might say. Murder is a
+trick, I suppose, to a murderer. That's why civilization is bad for
+morals, don't you think? Well, and so she talked with you?"
+
+"No, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "she did not say one word. But
+she wrote something, and that is what I have come to bring you."
+
+"What was it--some charm?" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Oh, nobody knows
+what that kind of people may do. I'll meet any one face to face, but
+these juggling, incantation individuals appal me. I have a brother
+who travels in the Orient, and he tells me about hideous things they
+do--raising wheat and things," she vaguely concluded.
+
+"Ah!" said St. George quickly, "you have a brother--in the Orient?"
+
+"Oh, yes. My brother Otho has traveled abroad I don't know how many
+years. We have a great many stamps. I can't begin to pronounce all
+the names," the lady assured him.
+
+"And this brother--is he your niece, Miss Holland's father?" St.
+George asked eagerly.
+
+"Certainly," said Mrs. Hastings severely; "I have only one brother,
+and it has been three years since I have seen him."
+
+"Pardon me, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "this may be most
+important. Will you tell me when you last heard from him and where
+he was?"
+
+"I should have to look up the place," she answered, "I couldn't
+begin to pronounce the name, I dare say. It was somewhere in the
+South Atlantic, ten months or more ago."
+
+"Ah," St. George quietly commented.
+
+"Well, and now this frightful creature," resumed Mrs. Hastings, "do,
+pray, tell me what it was she wrote."
+
+St. George produced the paper.
+
+"That is it," he said. "I fancy you will not know the street. It is
+19 McDougle Street, and the name is simply Tabnit."
+
+"Yes. And is it a letter?" his hostess demanded, "and whatever does
+it say?"
+
+"It is not a letter," St. George explained patiently, "and this is
+all that it says. The name is, I suppose, the name of a person. I
+have made sure that there is such a number in the street. I have
+seen the house. But I have waited to consult you before going
+there."
+
+"Why, what is it you think?" Mrs. Hastings besought him. "Do you
+think this person, whoever it is, can do something? And whatever can
+he do? Oh dear," she ended, "I do want to act the way poor dear Mr.
+Hastings would have acted. Only I know that he would have gone
+straight to Bitley, or wherever she is, and held a revolver at that
+mulatto creature's head, and _commanded_ her to talk English. Mr.
+Hastings was a very determined character. If you could have seen the
+poor dear man's chin! But of course I can't do that, can I? And
+that's what I say to Olivia. 'Olivia, one doesn't _need_ a man's
+judgment if one will only use judgment oneself.' What is it you
+think, Mr. St. George?"
+
+Before St. George could reply there entered the room, behind a low
+announcement of his name, a man of sixty-odd years, nervous,
+slightly stooped, his smooth pale face unlighted by little deep-set
+eyes.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Frothingham!" said Mrs. Hastings in evident relief, "you
+are just in time. Mr. St. John was just telling me horrible things
+about this frightful mulatto creature. This is Mr. St. John. Mr.
+Frothingham is my lawyer and my brother Otho's lawyer. And so I
+telephoned him to come in and hear all about this. And now do go on,
+Mr. St. John, about this hideous woman. What is it you think?"
+
+"How do you do, Mr. St. John?" said the lawyer portentously. His
+greeting was almost a warning, and reminded St. George of the way in
+which certain brakemen call out stations. St. George responded as
+blithely to this name as to his own and did not correct it. "And
+what," went on the lawyer, sitting down with long unclosed hands
+laid trimly along his knees, "have you to contribute to this most
+remarkable occurrence, Mr. St. John?"
+
+St. George briefly narrated the events of the morning and placed the
+slip of paper in the lawyer's hands.
+
+"Ah! We have here a communication in the nature of a confession,"
+the lawyer observed, adjusting his gold pince-nez, head thrown back,
+eyebrows lifted.
+
+"Only the address, sir," said St. George, "and I was just saying to
+Mrs. Hastings that some one ought to go to this address at once and
+find out whatever is to be got there. Whoever goes I will very
+gladly accompany."
+
+Mr. Frothingham had a fashion of making ready to speak and
+soliciting attention by the act, and then collapsing suddenly with
+no explosion, like a bad Roman candle. He did this now, and whatever
+he meant to say was lost to the race; but he looked very wise the
+while. It was rather as if he discarded you as a fit listener, than
+that he discarded his own comment.
+
+"I don't know but I ought to go myself," rambled Mrs. Hastings,
+"perhaps Mr. Hastings would think I ought. Suppose, Mr. Frothingham,
+that we both go. Dear, dear! Olivia always sees to my shopping and
+flowers and everything executive, but I can't let her go into these
+frightful places, can I?"
+
+There was a rustling at the far end of the room, and some one
+entered. St. George did not turn, but as her soft skirts touched and
+lifted along the floor he was tinglingly aware of her presence. Even
+before Mrs. Hastings heard her light footfall, even before the clear
+voice spoke, St. George knew that he was at last in the presence of
+the arbiter of his enterprise, and of how much else he did not know.
+He was silent, breathlessly waiting for her to speak.
+
+"May I come in, Aunt Dora?" she said. "I want to know to what place
+it is impossible for me to go?"
+
+She came from the long room's boundary shadow. There was about her a
+sense of white and gray with a knot of pale colour in her hat and an
+orchid on her white coat. Mrs. Hastings, taking no more account of
+her presence than she had of St. George's, tilted back her head and
+looked at the primroses in the window as closely as at anything, and
+absently presented him.
+
+"Olivia," she said, "this is Mr. St. John, who knows about that
+frightful mulatto creature. Mr. St. George," she went on, correcting
+the name entirely unintentionally, "my niece, Miss Holland. And I'm
+sure I wish I knew what the necessary thing to be done _is_. That is
+what I always tell you, you know, Olivia. 'Find out the necessary
+thing and do it, and let the rest go.'"
+
+"It reminds me very much," said the lawyer, clearing his throat, "of
+a case that I had on the April calendar--"
+
+Miss Holland had turned swiftly to St. George:
+
+"You know the mulatto woman?" she asked, and the lawyer passed by
+the April calendar and listened.
+
+"I went to the Bitley Reformatory this morning to see her," St.
+George replied. "She gave me this name and address. We have been
+saying that some one ought to go there to learn what is to be
+learned."
+
+Mr. Frothingham in a silence of pursed lips offered the paper. Miss
+Holland glanced at it and returned it.
+
+"Will you tell us what your interest is in this woman?" she asked
+evenly. "Why you went to see her?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Holland," St. George replied, "you know of course that
+the police have done their best to run this matter down. You know it
+because you have courteously given them every assistance in your
+power. But the police have also been very ably assisted by every
+newspaper in town. I am fortunate to be acting in the interests of
+one of these--the _Sentinel_. This clue was put in my hands. I came
+to you confident of your coöperation."
+
+Mrs. Hastings threw up her hands with a gesture that caught away the
+chain of her eye-glass and sent it dangling in her lap, and her
+side-combs tinkling to the tiled floor.
+
+"Mercy!" she said, "a reporter!"
+
+St. George bowed.
+
+"But I never receive reporters!" she cried, "Olivia--don't you
+know? A newspaper reporter like that fearful man at Palm Beach, who
+put me in the Courtney's ball list in a blue silk when I never wear
+colours."
+
+"Now really, really, this intrusion--" began Mr. Frothingham, his
+long, unclosed hands working forward on his knees in undulations, as
+a worm travels.
+
+Miss Holland turned to St. George, the colour dyeing her face and
+throat, her manner a bewildering mingling of graciousness and
+hauteur.
+
+"My aunt is right," she said tranquilly, "we never have received any
+newspaper representative. Therefore, we are unfortunate never to
+have met one. You were saying that we should send some one to
+McDougle Street?"
+
+St. George was aware of his heart-beats. It was all so unexpected
+and so dangerous, and she was so perfectly equal to the
+circumstance.
+
+"I was asking to be allowed to go myself, Miss Holland," he said
+simply, "with whoever makes the investigation."
+
+Mrs. Hastings was looking mutely from one to another, her forehead
+in horizons of wrinkles.
+
+"I'm sure, Olivia, I think you ought to be careful what you say,"
+she plaintively began. "Mr. Hastings never allowed his name to go in
+any printed lists even, he was so particular. Our telephone had a
+private number, and all the papers had instructions never to mention
+him, even if he was murdered, unless he took down the notice
+himself. Then if anything important did happen, he often did take it
+down, nicely typewritten, and sometimes even then they didn't use
+it, because they knew how very particular he was. And of course we
+don't know how--"
+
+St. George's eyes blazed, but he did not lift them. The affront was
+unstudied and, indeed, unconscious. But Miss Holland understood how
+grave it was, for there are women whose intuition would tell them
+the etiquette due upon meeting the First Syndic of Andorra or a
+noble from Gambodia.
+
+"We want the truth about this as much as Mr. St. George does," she
+said quickly, smiling for the first time. St. George liked her
+smile. It was as if she were amused, not absent-minded nor yet a
+prey to the feminine immorality of ingratiation. "Besides," she
+continued, "I wish to know a great many things. How did the mulatto
+woman impress you, Mr. St. George?"
+
+Miss Holland loosened her coat, revealing a little flowery waist,
+and leaned forward with parted lips. She was very beautiful, with
+the beauty of perfect, blooming, colourful youth, without line or
+shadow. She was in the very noon of youth, but her eyes did not
+wander after the habit of youth; they were direct and steady and a
+bit critical, and she spoke slowly and with graceful sanity in a
+voice that was without nationality. She might have been the
+cultivated English-speaking daughter of almost any land of high
+civilization, or she might have been its princess. Her face showed
+her imaginative; her serene manner reassured one that she had not,
+in consequence, to pay the usury of lack of judgment; she seemed
+reflective, tender, and of a fine independence, tempered, however,
+by tradition and unerring taste. Above all, she seemed alive,
+receptive, like a woman with ten senses. And--above all again--she
+had charm. Finally, St. George could talk with her; he did not
+analyze why; he only knew that this woman understood what he said in
+precisely the way that he said it, which is, perhaps, the fifth
+essence in nature.
+
+"May I tell you?" asked St. George eagerly. "She seemed to me a very
+wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world. She
+is not mulatto--her features are quite classic; and she is not a
+fanatic or a mad-woman. She is, of her race, a strangely superior
+creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that
+at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some
+tremendous secret. I think we must find out what that is, first, for
+your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth
+while."
+
+"Ah," cried Miss Holland, "delightful. I begin to be glad that it
+happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I
+thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did
+make me wonder, but I hardly believed that."
+
+"The newspapers," Mr. Frothingham said acidly, "became very much
+involved in their statements concerning this matter."
+
+"This 'Tabnit,'" said Miss Holland, and flashed a smile of pretty
+deference at the lawyer to console him for her total neglect of his
+comment, "in McDougle Street. Who can he be?--he _is_ a man, I
+suppose. And where is McDougle Street?"
+
+St. George explained the location, and Mrs. Hastings fretfully
+commented.
+
+"I'm sure, Olivia," she said, "I think it is frightfully unwomanly
+in you--"
+
+"To take so much interest in my own murder?" Miss Holland asked in
+amusement. "Aunt Dora, I'm going to do more: I suggest that you and
+Mr. Frothingham and I go with Mr. St. George to this address in
+McDougle Street--"
+
+"My dear Olivia!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, "it's in the very heart of
+the Bowery--isn't it, Mr. St. John? And only think--"
+
+It was as if Mrs. Hastings' frustrate words emerged in the fantastic
+guise of her facial changes.
+
+"No, it isn't quite the Bowery, Mrs. Hastings," St. George
+explained, "though it won't look unlike."
+
+"I wish I knew what Mr. Hastings would have done," his widow
+mourned, "he always said to me: 'Medora, do only the necessary
+thing.' Do you think this _is_ the necessary thing--with all the
+frightful smells?"
+
+"It is perfectly safe," ventured St. George, "is it not, Mr.
+Frothingham?"
+
+Mr. Frothingham bowed and tried to make non-partisanship seem a
+tasteful resignation of his own will.
+
+"I am at Mrs. Hastings' command," he said, waving both hands, once,
+from the wrist.
+
+"You know the place is really only a few blocks from Washington
+Square," St. George submitted.
+
+Mrs. Hastings brightened.
+
+"Well, I have some friends in Washington Square," she said, "people
+whom I think a great deal of, and always have. If you really feel,
+Olivia--"
+
+"I do," said Miss Holland simply, "and let us go now, Aunt Dora. The
+brougham has been at the door since I came in. We may as well drive
+there as anywhere, if Mr. St. George is willing."
+
+"I shall be happy," said St. George sedately, longing to cry:
+"Willing! Willing! Oh, Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland--_willing_!"
+
+Miss Holland and St. George and the lawyer were alone for a few
+minutes while Mrs. Hastings rustled away for her bonnet. Miss
+Holland sat where the afternoon light, falling through the corner
+window, smote her hair to a glory of pale colour, and St. George's
+eyes wandered to the glass through which the sun fell. It was a thin
+pane of irregular pieces set in a design of quaint, meaningless
+characters, in the centre of which was the figure of a sphinx,
+crucified upon an upright cross and surrounded by a border of coiled
+asps with winged heads. The window glittered like a sheet of gems.
+
+"What wonderful glass," involuntarily said St. George.
+
+"Is it not?" Miss Holland said enthusiastically. "My father sent it.
+He sent nearly all these things from abroad."
+
+"I wonder where such glass is made," observed St. George; "it is
+like lace and precious stones--hardly more painted than carved."
+
+She bent upon him such a sudden, searching look that St. George felt
+his eyes held by her own.
+
+"Do you know anything of my father?" she demanded suddenly.
+
+"Only that Mrs. Hastings has just told me that he is abroad--in the
+South Atlantic," St. George wonderingly replied.
+
+"Why, I am very foolish," said Miss Holland quickly, "we have not
+heard from him in ten months now, and I am frightfully worried. Ah
+yes, the glass is beautiful. It was made in one of the South
+Atlantic islands, I believe--so were all these things," she added;
+"the same figure of the crucified sphinx is on many of them."
+
+"Do you know what it means?" he asked.
+
+"It is the symbol used by the people in one of the islands, my
+father said," she answered.
+
+"These symbols usually, I believe," volunteered Mr. Frothingham,
+frowning at the glass, "have little significance, standing merely
+for the loose barbaric ideas of a loose barbaric nation."
+
+St. George thought of the ladies of Doctor Johnson's Amicable
+Society who walked from the town hall to the Cathedral in Lichfield,
+"in linen gowns, and each has a stick with an acorn; but for the
+acorn they could give no reason."
+
+He looked long at the glass.
+
+"She," he said finally, "our false mulatto, ought to stand before
+just such glass."
+
+Miss Holland laughed. She nodded her head a little, once, every time
+she laughed, and St. George was learning to watch for that.
+
+"The glass would suit any style of beauty better than steel bars,"
+she said lightly as Mrs. Hastings came fluttering back. Mrs.
+Hastings fluttered ponderously, as humblebees fly. Indeed, when one
+considered, there was really a "blunt-faced bee" look about the
+woman.
+
+The brougham had on the box two men in smart livery; the footman,
+closing the door, received St. George's reply to Mrs. Hastings'
+appeal to "tell the man the number of this frightful place."
+
+"I dare say I haven't been careful," Mrs. Hastings kept anxiously
+observing, "I have been heedless, I dare say. And I always think
+that what one must avoid is heedlessness, don't you think? Didn't
+Napoleon say that if only Cæsar had been first in killing the men
+who wanted to kill him--something about Pompey's statue being kept
+clean. What was it--why should they blame Cæsar for the condition of
+the public statues?"
+
+"My dear Mrs. Hastings," Mr. Frothingham reminded her, his long
+gloved hands laid trimly along his knees as before, "you are in my
+care."
+
+The statue problem faded from the lady's eyes.
+
+"Poor, dear Mr. Hastings always said you were so admirable at
+cross-questioning," she recalled, partly reassured.
+
+"Ah," cried Miss Holland protestingly, "Aunt Dora, this is an
+adventure. We are going to see 'Tabnit.'"
+
+St. George was silent, ecstatically reviewing the events of the last
+six hours and thinking unenviously of Amory, rocking somewhere with
+_The Aloha_ on a mere stretch of green water:
+
+"If Chillingworth could see me now," he thought victoriously, as the
+carriage turned smartly into McDougle Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
+
+
+No. 19 McDougle Street had been chosen as a likely market by a
+"hokey-pokey" man, who had wheeled his cart to the curb before the
+entrance. There, despite Mrs. Hastings' coach-man's peremptory
+appeal, he continued to dispense stained ice-cream to the little
+denizens of No. 19 and the other houses in the row. The brougham,
+however, at once proved a counter-attraction and immediately an
+opposition group formed about the carriage step and exchanged
+penetrating comments upon the livery.
+
+"Mrs. Hastings, you and Miss Holland would better sit here,
+perhaps," suggested St. George, alighting hurriedly, "until I see if
+this man is to be found."
+
+"Please," said Miss Holland, "I've always been longing to go into
+one of these houses, and now I'm going. Aren't we, Aunt Dora?"
+
+"If you think--" ventured Mr. Frothingham in perplexity; but Mr.
+Frothingham's perplexity always impressed one as duty-born rather
+than judicious, and Miss Holland had already risen.
+
+"Olivia!" protested Mrs. Hastings faintly, accepting St. George's
+hand, "do look at those children's aprons. I'm afraid we'll all
+contract fever after fever, just coming this far."
+
+Unkempt women were occupying the doorstep of No. 19. St. George
+accosted them and asked the way to the rooms of a Mr. Tabnit. They
+smiled, displaying their wonderful teeth, consulted together, and
+finally with many labials and uncouth pointings of shapely hands
+they indicated the door of the "first floor front," whose wooden
+shutters were closely barred. St. George led the way and entered the
+bare, unclean passage where discordant voices and the odours of
+cooking wrought together to poison the air. He tapped smartly at the
+door.
+
+Immediately it was opened by a graceful boy, dressed in a long,
+belted coat of dun-colour. He had straight black hair, and eyes
+which one saw before one saw his face, and he gravely bowed to each
+of the party in turn before answering St. George's question.
+
+"Assuredly," said the youth in perfect English, "enter."
+
+They found themselves in an ample room extending the full depth of
+the house; and partly because the light was dim and partly in sheer
+amazement they involuntarily paused as the door clicked behind them.
+The room's contrast to the squalid neighbourhood was complete. The
+apartment was carpeted in soft rugs laid one upon another so that
+footfalls were silenced. The walls and ceiling were smoothly covered
+with a neutral-tinted silk, patterned in dim figures; and from a
+fluted pillar of exceeding lightness an enormous candelabrum shed
+clear radiance upon the objects in the room. The couches and divans
+were woven of some light reed, made with high fantastic backs, in
+perfect purity of line however, and laid with white mattresses. A
+little reed table showed slender pipes above its surface and these,
+at a touch from the boy, sent to a great height tiny columns of
+water that tinkled back to the square of metal upon which the table
+was set. A huge fan of blanched grasses automatically swayed from
+above. On a side-table were decanters and cups and platters of a
+material frail and transparent. Before the shuttered window stood an
+observable plant with coloured leaves. On a great table in the
+room's centre were scattered objects which confused the eye. A light
+curtain stirring in the fan's faint breeze hung at the far end of
+the room.
+
+In a career which had held many surprises, some of which St. George
+would never be at liberty to reveal to the paper in whose service he
+had come upon them, this was one of the most alluring. The mere
+existence of this strange and luxurious habitation in the heart of
+such a neighbourhood would, past expression, delight Mr. Crass, the
+feature man, and no doubt move even Chillingworth to approval.
+Chillingworth and Crass! Already they seemed strangers. St. George
+glanced at Miss Holland; she was looking from side to side, like a
+bird alighted among strange flowers; she met his eyes and dimpled
+in frank delight. Mrs. Hastings sat erectly beside her, her
+tortoise-rimmed glasses expressing bland approval. The improbability
+of her surroundings had quite escaped her in her satisfied discovery
+that the place was habitable. The lawyer, his thin lips parted, his
+head thrown back so that his hair rested upon his coat collar,
+remained standing, one long hand upon a coat lapel.
+
+"Ah," said Miss Holland softly, "it _is_ an adventure, Aunt Dora."
+
+St. George liked that. It irritated him, he had once admitted, to
+see a woman live as if living were a matter of life and death. He
+wished her to be alive to everything, but without suspiciously
+scrutinizing details, like a census-taker. To appreciate did not
+seem to him properly to mean to assess. Miss Holland, he would have
+said, seemed to live by the beats of her heart and not by the waves
+of her hair--but another proof, perhaps, of "if thou likest her
+opinions thou wilt praise her virtues."
+
+It was but a moment before the curtain was lifted, and there
+approached a youth, apparently in the twenties, slender and
+delicately formed as a woman, his dark face surmounted by a great
+deal of snow-white hair. He was wearing garments of grey, cut in
+unusual and graceful lines, and his throat was closely wound in
+folds of soft white, fastened by a rectangular green jewel of
+notable size and brilliance. His eyes, large and of exceeding beauty
+and gentleness, were fixed upon St. George.
+
+"Sir," said St. George, "we have been given this address as one
+where we may be assisted in some inquiries of the utmost importance.
+The name which we have is simply 'Tabnit.' Have I the honour--"
+
+Their host bowed.
+
+"I am Prince Tabnit," he said quietly.
+
+St. George, filled with fresh amazement, gravely named himself and,
+making presentation of the others, purposely omitted the name of
+Miss Holland. However, hardly had he finished before their host
+bowed before Miss Holland herself.
+
+"And you," he said, "you to whom I owe an expiation which I can
+never make,--do you know it is my servant who would have taken your
+life?"
+
+In the brief interval following this naïve assertion, his guests
+were not unnaturally speechless. Miss Holland, bending slightly
+forward, looked at the prince breathlessly.
+
+"I have suffered," he went on, "I have suffered indescribably since
+that terrible morning when I missed her and understood her mission.
+I followed quickly--I was without when you entered, but I came too
+late. Since then I have waited, unwilling to go to you, certain that
+the gods would permit the possible. And now--what shall I say?"
+
+He hesitated, his eyes meeting Miss Holland's. And in that moment
+Mrs. Hastings found her voice. She curved the chain of her
+eye-glasses over her ear, threw back her head until the
+tortoise-rims included her host, and spoke her mind.
+
+"Well, Prince Tabnit," she said sharply--quite as if, St. George
+thought, she had been nursery governess to princes all her life--"I
+must say that I think your regret comes somewhat late in the day.
+It's all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has
+tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a
+servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous
+and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?"
+
+Her voice, never modulated in her excitements, was so full that no
+one heard at that instant a quick, indrawn breath from St. George,
+having something of triumph and something of terror. Even as he
+listened he had been running swiftly over the objects in the room to
+fasten every one in his memory, and his eyes had rested upon the
+table at his side. A disc of bronze, supported upon a carven tripod,
+caught the light and challenged attention to its delicate traceries;
+and within its border of asps and goat's horns he saw cut in the
+dull metal a sphinx crucified upon an upright cross--an exact
+facsimile of the device upon that strange opalized glass from some
+far-away island which he had lately noted in the window in Mrs.
+Hastings' drawing-room. Instantly his mind was besieged by a volley
+of suppositions and imaginings, but even in his intense excitement
+as to what this simple discovery might bode, he heard the prince's
+soft reply to Mrs. Hastings:
+
+"Madame," said the prince, "she is a loyal creature. Whatever she
+does, she believes herself to be doing in my service. I trusted her.
+I believed that such error was impossible to her."
+
+"Error!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, looking about her for support and
+finding little in the aspect of Mr. Augustus Frothingham, who
+appeared to be regarding the whole proceeding as one from which he
+was to extract data to be thought out at some future infinitely
+removed.
+
+As for St. George, he had never had great traffic with a future
+infinitely removed; he had a youthful and somewhat imaginative
+fashion of striking before the iron was well in the fire.
+
+"Your servant believed, then, your Highness," he said clearly,
+"that in taking Miss Holland's life she was serving you?"
+
+"I must regretfully conclude so."
+
+St. George rose, holding the little brazen disc which he had taken
+from the table, and confronted his host, compelling his eyes.
+
+"Perhaps you will tell us, Prince Tabnit," he said coolly, "what it
+is that the people who use this device find against Miss Holland's
+father?"
+
+St. George heard Olivia's little broken cry.
+
+"It is the same!" she exclaimed. "Aunt Dora--Mr. Frothingham--it is
+the crucified sphinx that was on so many of the things that father
+sent. Oh," she cried to the prince, "can it be possible that you
+know him--that you know anything of my father?"
+
+To St. George's amazement the face of the prince softened and glowed
+as if with peculiar delight, and he looked at St. George with
+admiration.
+
+"Is it possible," he murmured, half to himself, "that your race has
+already developed intuition? Are you indeed so near to the Unknown?"
+
+He took quick steps away and back, and turned again to St. George, a
+strange joy dawning in his face.
+
+"If there be some who are ready to know!" he said. "Ah," he recalled
+himself penitently to Miss Holland, "your father--Otho Holland, I
+have seen him many times."
+
+"_Seen Otho_!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, as pink and trembling and
+expressionless as a disturbed mold of jelly. "Oh, poor, dear Otho!
+Did he live where there are people like your frightful servant?
+Olivia, think! Maybe he is lying at the bottom of a gorge, all
+wounded and bloody, with a dagger in his back! Oh, my poor, dear
+Otho, who used to wheel me about!"
+
+Mrs. Hastings collapsed softly on the divan, her glasses fallen in
+her lap, her side-combs slipping silently to the rug. Olivia had
+risen and was standing before Prince Tabnit.
+
+"Tell me," she said trembling, "when have you seen him? Is he well?"
+
+Prince Tabnit swept the faces of the others and his eyes returned to
+Miss Holland and dropped to the floor.
+
+"The last time that I saw him, Miss Holland," he answered, "was
+three months ago. He was then alive and well."
+
+Something in his tone chilled St. George and sent a sudden thrill of
+fear to his heart.
+
+"He was then alive and well?" St. George repeated slowly. "Will you
+tell us more, your Highness? Will you tell us why the death of his
+daughter should be considered a service to the prince of a country
+which he had visited?"
+
+"You are very wonderful," observed the prince, smiling meditatively
+at St. George, "and your penetration gives me good news--news that
+I had not hoped for, yet. I can not tell you all that you ask, but I
+can tell you much. Will you sit down?"
+
+He turned and glanced at the curtain at the far end of the room.
+Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were
+placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties
+not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and
+Finnish and all but Icelandic cafés in every block.
+
+"Pray do me the honour," the prince besought, taking the dishes from
+the hands of the boy. "It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell
+you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before
+him."
+
+Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the
+smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business
+toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He
+impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from
+the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer
+atmosphere. The lawyer's face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of
+affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.
+
+There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a
+tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that
+had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and
+with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white
+berries, such as the Japanese call "pinedews"; there was a tea
+distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury
+and fantastic. So potent was the spell of the prince's hospitality,
+and so gracious the insistence with which he set before them the
+strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia, eager almost to tears
+for news of her father, and Mrs. Hastings, as critical and
+suspicious as some beetle with long antennæ, might not refuse them.
+As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might be Cagliostro's
+spagiric food, or "extract of Saturn," for aught that his previous
+experience equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and was
+constrained to nibble again.
+
+When they had been served, Prince Tabnit abruptly began speaking,
+the while turning the fine stem of his glass in his delicate
+fingers.
+
+"You do not know," he said simply, "where the island of Yaque lies?"
+
+Mrs. Hastings sat erect.
+
+"Yaque!" she exclaimed. "That was the name of the place where your
+father was, Olivia. I know I remembered it because it wasn't like
+the man What's-his-name in _As You Like It_, and because it didn't
+begin with a J."
+
+"The island is my home," Prince Tabnit continued, "and now, for the
+first time, I find myself absent from it. I have come a long
+journey. It is many miles to that little land in the eastern seas,
+that exquisite bit of the world, as yet unknown to any save the
+island-men. We have guarded its existence, but I have no fear to
+tell you, for no mariner, unaided by an islander, could steer a
+course to its coasts. And I can tell you little about the island for
+reasons which, if you will forgive me, you would hardly understand.
+I must tell you something of it, however, that you may know the
+remarkable conditions which led to the introduction of Mr. Holland
+to Yaque.
+
+"The island of Yaque," continued the prince, "or Arqua, as the name
+was written by the ancient Phoenicians, has been ruled by hereditary
+monarchs since 1050 B.C., when it was settled."
+
+"What date did I understand you to say, sir?" demanded Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham.
+
+The prince smiled faintly.
+
+"I am well aware," he said, "that to the western mind--indeed, to
+any modern mind save our own--I shall seem to be speaking in
+mockery. None the less, what I am saying is exact. It is believed
+that the enterprises of the Phoenicians in the early ages took them
+but a short distance, if at all, beyond the confines of the
+Mediterranean. It is merely known that, in the period of which I
+speak, a more adventurous spirit began to be manifested, and the
+Straits of Gibraltar were passed and settlements were made in
+Iberia. But how far these adventurers actually penetrated has been
+recorded only in those documents that are in the hands of my
+people--descendants of the boldest of these mariners who pushed
+their galleys out into the Atlantic. At this time the king of Tyre
+was Abibaal, soon to be succeeded by his son Hiram, the friend, you
+will remember, of King David,--"
+
+Mr. Frothingham, who did not go to the theatre for fear of exciting
+his imagination, uttered the soft non-explosion which should have
+been speech.
+
+"King Abibaal," continued the prince, "who maintained his court in
+great pomp, had a younger and favourite son who bore his own name.
+He was a wild youth of great daring, and upon the accession of
+Hiram to the throne he left Tyre and took command of a galley of
+adventuresome spirits, who were among the first to pass the
+straits and gain the open sea. The story of their wild voyage I
+need not detail; it is enough to say that their trireme was
+wrecked upon the coast of Yaque; and Abibaal and those who joined
+him--among them many members of the court circle and even of the
+royal family--settled and developed the island. And there the race
+has remained without taint of admixture, down to the present day.
+Of what was wrought on the island I can tell you little, though
+the time will come when the eyes of the whole world will be
+turned upon Yaque as the forerunner of mighty things. Ruled over
+by the descendants of Abibaal, the islanders have dwelt in peace
+and plenty for nearly three thousand years--until, in fact, less
+than a year ago. Then the line thus traceable to King Hiram
+himself abruptly terminated with the death of King Chelbes,
+without issue."
+
+Again Mr. Frothingham attempted to speak, and again he collapsed
+softly, without expression, according to his custom. As for St.
+George, he was remembering how, when he first went to the paper, he
+had invariably been sent to the anteroom to listen to the daily
+tales of invention, oppression and projects for which a continual
+procession of the more or less mentally deficient wished the
+_Sentinel_ to stand sponsor. St. George remembered in particular one
+young student who soberly claimed to have invented wireless
+telegraphy and who molested the staff for months. Was this olive
+prince, he wondered, going to prove himself worth only a half-column
+on a back page, after all?
+
+"I understand you to say," said St. George, with the weary
+self-restraint of one who deals with lunatics, "that the line of
+King Hiram, the friend of King David of Israel, became extinct less
+than a year ago?"
+
+The prince smiled.
+
+"Do not conceal your incredulity," he said liberally, "for I
+forgive it. You see, then," he went on serenely, "how in Yaque the
+question of the succession became engrossing. The matter was not
+merely one of ascendancy, for the Yaquians are singularly free from
+ambition. But their pride in their island is boundless. They see in
+her the advance guard of civilization, the peculiar people to whom
+have come to be intrusted many of the secrets of being. For I should
+tell you that my people live a life that is utterly beyond the ken
+of all, save a few rare minds in each generation. My people live
+what others dream about, what scientists struggle to fathom, what
+the keenest philosophers and economists among you can not formulate.
+We are," said Prince Tabnit serenely, "what the world will be a
+thousand years from now."
+
+"Well, I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings broke in plaintively, "that I hope
+your servant, for instance, is not a sample of what the world is
+coming to!"
+
+The prince smiled indulgently, as if a child had laid a little,
+detaining hand upon his sleeve.
+
+"Be that as it may," he said evenly, "the throne of Yaque was still
+empty. Many stood near to the crown, but there seemed no reason for
+choosing one more than another. One party wished to name the head of
+the House of the Litany, in Med, the King's city, who was the chief
+administrator of justice. Another, more democratic than these,
+wished to elevate to the throne a man from whose family we had won
+knowledge of both perpetual motion and the Fourth Dimension--"
+
+St. George smiled angelically, as one who resignedly sees the last
+fragments of a shining hope float away. This quite settled it. The
+olive prince was crazy. Did not St. George remember the old man in
+the frayed neckerchief and bagging pockets who had brought to the
+office of the _Sentinel_ chart after chart about perpetual motion,
+until St. George and Amory had one day told him gravely that they
+had a machine inside the office then that could make more things go
+for ever than he had ever dreamed of, though they had _not_ said
+that the machine was named Chillingworth.
+
+"You have knowledge of both these things?" asked St. George
+indulgently.
+
+"Yaque understood both those laws," said the prince quietly, "when
+William the Conqueror came to England."
+
+He hesitated for a moment and then, regardless of another soft
+explosion from Mr. Frothingham's lips, he added:
+
+"Do you not see? Will you not understand? It is our knowledge of the
+Fourth Dimension which has enabled us to keep our island a secret."
+
+St. George suddenly thrilled from head to foot. What if he were
+speaking the truth? What if this man were speaking the truth?
+
+"Moreover," resumed the prince, "there were those among us who had
+long believed that new strength would come to my people by the
+introduction of an inhabitant of one of the continents. His coming
+would, however, necessitate his sovereignty among us, in fulfilment
+of an ancient Phoenician law, providing that the state, and every
+satrapy therein, shall receive no service, either of blood or of
+bond, nor enter into the marriage contract with an alien; from which
+law only the royal house is exempt. Thus were the two needs of our
+land to be served by the means to which we had recourse. For there
+being no way to settle the difficulty, we vowed to leave the matter
+to Chance, that great patient arbiter of destinies of which your
+civilization takes no account, save to reduce it to slavery.
+Accordingly each inhabitant of the island took a solemn oath to
+await, with an open mind free from choice or prejudice, the
+settlement of the event, certain that the gods would permit the
+possible. Five days after this decision our watchers upon the hills
+sighted a South African transport bound for the Azores to coal. A
+hundred miles from our coast she was wrecked, and it was thought
+that all on board had been lost. A submarine was ordered to the
+spot--"
+
+"Do you mean," interrupted St. George, "that you were able to see
+the wreck at that distance?"
+
+"Certainly," said the prince. "Pray forgive me," he added winningly,
+"if I seem to boast. It is difficult for me to believe that your
+appliances are so immature. We were using steamship navigation and
+limiting our vision at the time of Pericles, but the futility of
+these was among our first discoveries."
+
+Involuntarily St. George turned to Miss Holland. What would she
+think, he found himself wondering. Her eyes were luminous and her
+breath was coming quickly; he was relieved to find that she had not
+the infectious vulgarity to doubt the possibility of what seemed
+impossible. This was one of the qualities of Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham, who had assumed an air of polite interest and an
+accurately cynical smile, and the manner of generously lending his
+professional attention to any of the vagaries of the client. Mrs.
+Hastings stirred uneasily.
+
+"I'm sure," she said fretfully, "that I must be very stupid, but I
+simply can _not_ follow you. Why, you talk about things that don't
+exist! My husband, who was a very practical and advanced man, would
+have shown you at once that what you say is impossible."
+
+Here was the attitude of the Commonplace the world over, thought St.
+George: to believe in wireless telegraphy simply because it has
+been found out, and to disbelieve in the Fourth Dimension because it
+has not been.
+
+"I can not explain these things," admitted the prince gravely, "and
+I dare say that you could prove that they do not exist, just as a
+man from another planet could show us to his own satisfaction that
+there are no such things as music or colour."
+
+"Go on, please," said Olivia eagerly.
+
+"Olivia, I'm sure," protested Mrs. Hastings, "I think it's very
+unwomanly of you to show such an interest in these things."
+
+"Will you bear with me for one moment, Mrs. Hastings?" begged the
+prince, "and perhaps I shall be able to interest you. The submarine
+returned, bringing the sole survivor of the wreck of the African
+transport."
+
+"Ah, now," Mrs. Hastings assured him blandly, "you are dealing with
+things that can happen. My brother Otho, my niece's father, was just
+this last year the sole survivor of the wreck of a very important
+vessel."
+
+"I have the honour, Mrs. Hastings, to be narrating to you the
+circumstances attending the discovery of your brother and Miss
+Holland's father, after the wreck of that vessel."
+
+"My father?" cried Olivia.
+
+The prince bowed.
+
+"After this manner, Chance had rewarded us. We crowned your father
+King of Yaque."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+OLIVIA PROPOSES
+
+
+Prince Tabnit's announcement was received by his guests in the
+silence of amazement. If they had been told that Miss Holland's
+father was secretly acting as King of England they could have been
+no more profoundly startled than to hear stated soberly that he had
+been for nearly a year the king of a cannibal island. For the
+cannibal phase of his experience seemed a foregone conclusion. To
+St. George, profoundly startled and most incredulous, the possible
+humour of the situation made first appeal. The picture of an
+American gentleman seated upon a gold throne in a leopard-skin coat,
+ordering "oysters and foes" for breakfast, was irresistible.
+
+          "But he shaved with a shell when he chose,
+          'Twas the manner of Primitive Man"
+
+floated through his mind, and he brought himself up sharply.
+Clearly, somebody was out of his head, but it must not be he.
+
+"What?" cried Mrs. Hastings in two inelegant syllables, on the
+second of which her uncontrollable voice rose. "My brother Otho, a
+vestry-man at St. Mark's--"
+
+"Aunt Dora!" pleaded Olivia. "Tell us," she besought the prince.
+
+"King Otho I of Yaque," the prince was begining, but the title was
+not to be calmly received by Mrs. Hastings.
+
+"_King_ Otho!" she articulated. "Then--am I royalty?"
+
+"All who may possibly succeed to the throne Blackstone holds to be
+royalty," said the lawyer in an edictal voice, and St. George looked
+away from Olivia.
+
+_The Princess Olivia_!
+
+"King Otho," continued the prince, "ruled wisely and well for seven
+months, and it was at the beginning of that time that the imperial
+submarine was sent to the Azores with letters and a packet to you.
+The enterprise, however, was attended by so great danger of
+discovery that it was never repeated. This is why, for so long, you
+have had no word from the king. And now I come," said the prince
+with hesitation, "to the difficult part of my narrative."
+
+He paused and Mr. Frothingham rushed to his assistance.
+
+"As the family solicitor," said the lawyer, pursing his lips, and
+waving his hands, once, from the wrists, "would you not better
+divulge to my ear alone, the--a--"
+
+"No--no!" flashed Olivia. "No, Mr. Frothingham--please."
+
+The prince inclined his head.
+
+"Will it surprise you, Miss Holland," he said, "to learn that I made
+my voyage to this country expressly to seek you out?"
+
+"To seek me?" exclaimed Olivia. "But--has anything happened to my
+father?"
+
+"We hope not," replied the prince, "but what I have to tell will
+none the less occasion you anxiety. Briefly, Miss Holland, it is
+more than three months since your father suddenly and mysteriously
+disappeared from Yaque, leaving absolutely no clue to his
+whereabouts."
+
+A little cry broke from Olivia's lips that went to St. George's
+heart. Mrs. Hastings, with a gesture that was quite wild and sent
+her bonnet hopelessly to one side, burst into a volley of
+exclamations and demands.
+
+"Who did it?" she wailed. "Who did it? Otho is a gentleman. He
+would never have the bad taste to disappear, like all those
+dreadful people's wives, if somebody hadn't--"
+
+"My dear Madame," interposed Mr. Frothingham, "calm--calm
+yourself. There are families of undisputed position which
+record disappearances in several generations."
+
+"Please," pleaded Olivia. "Ah, tell us," she begged the prince
+again.
+
+"There is, unfortunately, but little to tell, Miss Holland," said
+the prince with sympathetic regret. "I had the honour, three months
+ago, to entertain the king, your father, at dinner. We parted at
+midnight. His Majesty seemed--"
+
+"His Majesty!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, smiling up at the opposite
+wall as if her thought saw glories.
+
+"--in the best of health and spirits," continued the prince. "A
+meeting of the High Council was to be held at noon on the following
+day. The king did not appear. From that moment no eye in Yaque has
+fallen upon him."
+
+"One moment, your Highness," said St. George quickly; "in the
+absence of the king, who presides over the High Council?"
+
+"As the head of the House of the Litany, the chief administrator of
+justice, it is I," said the prince with humility.
+
+"Ah, yes," St. George said evenly.
+
+"But what have you done?" cried Olivia. "Have you had search made?
+Have you--"
+
+"Everything," the prince assured her. "The island is not large. Not
+a corner of it remains unvisited. The people, who were devoted to
+the king, your father, have sought night and day. There is, it is
+hardly right to conceal from you," the prince hesitated, "a
+circumstance which makes the disappearance the more alarming."
+
+"Tell us. Keep nothing from us, I beg, Prince Tabnit," besought
+Olivia.
+
+"For centuries," said the prince slowly, "there has been in the
+keeping of the High Council of the island a casket, containing what
+is known as the Hereditary Treasure. This casket, with some of the
+finest of its jewels, was left by King Abibaal himself. Since his
+time every king of the island has upon his death bequeathed to the
+casket the finest jewel in his possession; and its contents are now
+therefore of inestimable value. The circumstance to which I refer is
+that two days after the disappearance of the king, your father,
+which spread grief and alarm through all Yaque, it was discovered
+that the Hereditary Treasure was gone."
+
+"Gone!" burst from the lips of the prince's auditors.
+
+"As utterly as if the Fifth Dimension had received it," the prince
+gravely assured them. "The loss, as you may imagine, is a grievous
+one. The High Council immediately issued a proclamation that if the
+treasure be not restored by a certain date--now barely two weeks
+away--a heavy tax will be levied upon the people to make good, in
+the coin of the realm, this incalculable loss. Against this the
+people, though they are a people of peace, are murmurous."
+
+"Indeed!" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Great loyalty it is that sets up the
+loss of their trumpery treasure over and above the loss of their
+king, my brother Otho! If," she shrilled indignantly, "we are not
+unwise to listen to this at all. What is it you think? What is it
+your people think?"
+
+She raised her head until she had framed the prince in
+tortoise-shell. Mrs. Hastings never held her head quite still. It
+continually waved about a little, so that usually, even in peace, it
+intimated indignation; and when actual indignation set in, the jet
+on her bonnet tinkled and ticked like so many angry sparrows.
+
+"Madame," said the prince, "there are those among his Majesty's
+subjects who would willingly lay down their lives for him. But he is
+a stranger to us--come of an alien race; and the double
+disappearance is a most tragic occurrence, which the burden of the
+tax has emphasized. To be frank, were his Majesty to reappear in
+Yaque without the treasure having been found--"
+
+"Oh!" breathed Mrs. Hastings, "they would kill him!"
+
+The prince shuddered and set his white teeth in his nether lip.
+
+"The gods forbid," he said. "Such primeval punishment is as unknown
+among us as is war itself. How little you know my people; how
+pitifully your instincts have become--forgive me--corrupted by
+living in this barbarous age of yours, fumbling as you do at
+civilization. With us death is a sacred rite, the highest tribute
+and the last sacrifice to the Absolute. Our dying are carried to the
+Temple of the Worshipers of Distance, and are there consecrated.
+The limit of our punishment would be aerial exposure--"
+
+"You mean?" cried St. George.
+
+"I mean that in extreme cases we have, with due rite and ceremonial,
+given a victim to an airship, without ballast or rudder, and
+abundantly provisioned. Then with solemn ritual we have set him
+adrift--an offering to the great spirits of space--so that he may
+come to know. This," the prince paused in emotion, "this is the
+worst that could befall your father."
+
+"How horrible!" cried Olivia. "Oh, how horrible."
+
+"Oh," Mrs. Hastings moaned, "he was born to it. He was born to it.
+When he was six he tied kites to his arms and jumped out the window
+of the cupola and broke his collar bone--oh, Otho,--oh Heaven,--and
+I made him eat oatmeal gruel three times a day when he was getting
+well."
+
+"Prince Tabnit," said St. George, "I beg you not to jest with us.
+Have consideration for the two to whom this man is dear."
+
+"I am speaking truth to you," said the prince earnestly. "I do not
+wish to alarm these ladies, but I am bound in honour to tell you
+what I know."
+
+"Ah then," said St. George, his narrowed eyes meeting those of the
+prince, "since the taking of life is unknown to you in Yaque, will
+you explain how it was that your servant adopted such unerring
+means to take the life of Miss Holland? And why?"
+
+"My servant," said the prince readily, "belongs to the lahnas or
+former serfs of the island. Upon her people, now the owners of rich
+lands, the tax will fall heavily. Crazed by what she considers her
+people's wrongs following upon the coming of the stranger sovereign,
+the poor creature must have developed the primitive instincts of
+your race. Before coming to this country my servant had never heard
+of murder save as a superseded custom of antiquity, like the
+crucifying of lions. Her discovery of your daily practice of murder,
+and of murder practised as a cure for crime--"
+
+"Sir," began the lawyer imposingly.
+
+"--wakened in her the primitive instincts of humanity, and her
+instinct took the deplorable and fanatic form of your own courts,"
+finished the prince. "Her bitterness toward his Majesty she sought
+to visit upon his daughter."
+
+Olivia sprang to her feet.
+
+"I must go to my father. I must go to Yaque," she cried ringingly.
+"Prince Tabnit, will you take me to him?"
+
+Into the prince's face leaped a fire of admiration for her beauty
+and her daring. He bowed before her, his lowered lashes making thick
+shadows on his dark cheeks.
+
+"I insist upon this," cried little Olivia firmly, "and if you do not
+permit it, Prince Tabnit, we must publish what you have told us
+from one end of the city to the other."
+
+"Yes, by Jove," thought St. George, "and one's country will have a
+Yaque exhibit in its own department at the next world's fair."
+
+"Olivia! My child! Miss Holland--," began the lawyer.
+
+The prince spoke tranquilly.
+
+"It is precisely this errand," he said, "that has brought me to
+America. Do you not see that, in the event of your father's failure
+to return to his people, you will eventually be Queen of Yaque?"
+
+St. George found himself looking fixedly at Mrs. Hastings' false
+front as the only reality in the room. If in a minute Rollo was
+going to waken him by bringing in his coffee, he was going to
+throttle Rollo--that was all. Olivia Holland, an American heiress,
+the hereditary princess of a cannibal island! St. George still
+insisted upon the cannibal; it somehow gave him a foothold among the
+actualities.
+
+"I!" cried Olivia.
+
+Mrs. Hastings, brows lifted, lips parted, winked with lightning
+rapidity in an effort to understand.
+
+St. George pulled himself together.
+
+"Your Highness," he said sternly, "there are several things upon
+which I must ask you to enlighten us. And the first, which I hope
+you will forgive, is whether you have any direct proof that what
+you tell us of Miss Holland's father is true."
+
+"That's it! That's it!" Mr. Frothingham joined him with all the
+importance of having made the suggestion. "We can hardly proceed in
+due order without proofs, sir."
+
+The prince turned toward the curtain at the room's end and the youth
+appeared once more, this time bearing a light oval casket of
+delicate workmanship. It was of a substance resembling both glass
+and metal of changing, rainbow tints, and it passed through St.
+George's mind as he observed it that there must be, to give such a
+dazzling and unreal effect, more than seven colours in the spectrum.
+
+"A spectrum of seven colours," said the prince at the same moment,
+"could not, of course, produce this surface. I confess that until I
+came to this country I did not know that you had so few colours. Our
+spectrum already consists of twelve colours visible to the naked
+eye, and at least five more are distinguishable through our powerful
+magnifying glasses."
+
+St. George was silent. It was as if he had suddenly been permitted
+to look past the door that bars and threatens all knowledge.
+
+The prince unlocked the casket. He drew out first a quantity of
+paper of extreme thinness and lightness on which, embossed and
+emblazoned, was the coat of arms of the Hollands--a sheaf of wheat
+and an unicorn's head--and this was surmounted by a crown.
+
+"This," said the prince, "is now the device upon the signet ring of
+the King of Yaque, the arms of your own family. And here chances to
+be a letter from your father containing some instructions to me. It
+is true that writing has with us been superseded by wireless
+communication, excepting where there is need of great secrecy. Then
+we employ the alphabet of any language we choose, these being almost
+disused, as are the Cuneiform and Coptic to you."
+
+"And how is it," St. George could not resist asking, "that you know
+and speak the English?"
+
+The prince smiled swiftly.
+
+"To you," he said, "who delve for knowledge and who do not know that
+it is absolute and to be possessed at will, this can not now be made
+clear. Perhaps some day..."
+
+Olivia had taken the paper from the prince and pressed it to her
+lips, her eyes filling with tears. There was no mistaking that
+evidence, for this was her father's familiar hand.
+
+"Otho always did write a fearful scrawl," Mrs. Hastings commented,
+"his l's and his t's and his vowels were all the same height. I used
+to tell him that I didn't know whatever people would think."
+
+"I may, moreover," continued the prince, "call to mind several
+articles which were included in the packet sent from the Azores by
+his Majesty. You have, for example, a tapestry representing an ibis
+hunt; you have an image in pink sutro, or soft marble, of an ancient
+Phoenician god--Melkarth. And you have a length of stained glass
+bearing the figure of the Tyrian sphinx, crucified, and surrounded
+by coiled asps."
+
+"Yes, it is true," said Olivia, "we have all these things."
+
+"Why, the trash must be quite expensive," observed Mrs. Hastings. "I
+don't care much for so many colours myself, perhaps because I always
+wear black; though I did wear light colours a good deal when I was a
+girl."
+
+"What else, Mr. St. George?" inquired the prince pleasantly.
+
+"Nothing else," cried Olivia passionately. "I am satisfied. My
+father is in danger, and I believe that he is in Yaque, for he would
+never of his own will desert a place of trust. I must go to him.
+And, Aunt Dora, you and Mr. Frothingham must go with me."
+
+"Oh, Olivia!" wailed Mrs. Hastings, a different key for every
+syllable, "think--consider! Is it the necessary thing to do? And
+what would your poor dear uncle have done? And is there a better way
+than his way? For I always say that it is not really necessary to do
+as my poor dear husband would have done, providing only that we can
+find a better way. Oh," she mourned, lifting her hands, "that this
+frightful thing should come to me at my age. Otho may be married to
+a cannibal princess, with his sons catching wild goats by the hair
+like Tennyson and the whistling parrots--"
+
+"Madame," said the prince coldly, "forgets what I have been saying
+of my country."
+
+"I do not forget," declared Mrs. Hastings sharply, "but being behind
+civilization and being ahead of civilization comes to the same thing
+more than once. In morals it does."
+
+St. George was silent. Olivia's splendid daring in her passionate
+decision to go to her father stirred him powerfully; moreover, her
+words outlined a possible course of his own whose magnitude startled
+him, and at the same time filled him with a sudden, dazzling hope.
+
+"But where is your island, Prince Tabnit?" he asked. "You've
+naturally no consul there and no cable, since you are not even on
+the map."
+
+"Yaque," said the prince readily, "lies almost due southwest from
+the Azores."
+
+Mr. Frothingham stirred skeptically.
+
+"But such an island," he said pompously, "so rich in material for
+the archaeologist, the anthropologist, the explorer in all fields of
+antiquity--ah, it is out of the question, out of the question!"
+
+"It is difficult," said the prince patiently, "most difficult for me
+to make myself intelligible to you--as difficult, if you will
+forgive me, as if you were to try to explain calculus to one of the
+street boys outside. But directly your phase of civilization has
+opened to you the secrets of the Fourth Dimension, much will be
+discovered to you which you do not now discern or dream, and among
+these, Yaque. I do not jest," he added wearily, "neither do I expect
+you to believe me. But I have told you the truth. And it would be
+impossible for you to reach Yaque save in the company of one of the
+islanders to whom the secret is known. I can not explain to you, any
+more than I can explain harmony or colour."
+
+"Well, I'm sure," cried Mrs. Hastings fretfully, "I don't know why
+you all keep wandering from the subject so. Now, my brother Otho--"
+
+"Prince Tabnit,"--Olivia's voice never seemed to interrupt, but
+rather to "divide evidence finely" at the proper moment--"how long
+will it take us to reach Yaque?"
+
+St. George thrilled at that "us."
+
+"My submarine," replied the prince, "is plying about outside the
+harbour. I arrived in four days."
+
+"By the way," St. George submitted, "since your wireless system is
+perfected, why can not we have news of your island from here?"
+
+"The curve of the earth," explained the prince readily, "prevents.
+We have conquered only those problems with which we have had to
+deal. The curve of the earth has of course never entered our
+calculation. We have approached the problem from another
+standpoint."
+
+"We have much to do, Prince Tabnit," said Olivia; "when may we
+leave?"
+
+"Command me," said Prince Tabnit, bowing.
+
+"To-morrow!" cried Olivia, "to-morrow, at noon."
+
+"Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings' voice broke over the name like ice upon a
+warm promontory. Mrs. Hastings' voice was suited to say "Keziah" or
+"Katinka," not Olivia.
+
+"Can you go, Mr. Frothingham?" demanded Olivia.
+
+Mr. Frothingham's long hands hung down and he looked as if she had
+proposed a jaunt to Mars.
+
+"My physician has ordered a sea-change," he mumbled doubtfully, "my
+daughter Antoinette--I--really--there is nothing in all my
+experience--"
+
+"Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings in tears was superintending the search for
+both side-combs.
+
+"Aunt Dora," said Olivia, "you're not going to fail me now. Prince
+Tabnit--at noon to-morrow. Where shall we meet?"
+
+St. George listened, glowing.
+
+"May I have the honour," suggested the prince, "of waiting upon you
+at noon to conduct you? And I need hardly say that we undertake the
+journey under oath of secrecy?"
+
+"Anything--anything!" cried Olivia.
+
+"Oh, my dear Olivia," breathed Mrs. Hastings weakly, "taking me, at
+my age, into this awful place of Four Dimentias--or whatever it was
+you said."
+
+"We will be ready to go with you at noon," said Olivia steadily.
+
+St. George held his peace as they made their adieux. A great many
+things remained to be thought out, but one was clear enough.
+
+The boy servant ran before them to the door. They made their way to
+the street in the early dusk. A hurdy-gurdy on the curb was bubbling
+over with merry discords, and was flanked by garrulous Italians with
+push-carts, lighted by flaring torches. Men were returning from
+work, children were quarreling, women were in doorways, and a
+policeman was gossiping with the footman in a knot of watching
+idlers. With a sigh that was like a groan, Mrs. Hastings sank back
+on the cushions of the brougham.
+
+"I feel," she said, eyes closed, "as if I had been in a pagan temple
+where they worship oracles and what's-his-names. What time is it? I
+haven't an idea. Dear, dear, I want to get home and feel as if my
+feet were on land and water again. I want some strong sleep and a
+good sound cup of coffee, and then I shall know what's actually
+what."
+
+To St. George the slow drive up town was no less unreal than their
+visit. His head was whirling, a hundred plans and speculations
+filled his mind, and through these Mrs Hastings' chatter of
+forebodings and the lawyer's patterned utterance hardly found their
+way. At his own street he was set down, with Mrs. Hastings'
+permission to call next day.
+
+Miss Holland gave him her hand.
+
+"I can not thank you," she said, "I can not thank you. But try to
+know, won't you, what this has been to me. Until to-morrow."
+
+Until to-morrow. St. George stood in the brightness of the street
+looking after the vanishing carriage, his hand tingling from her
+touch. Then he went up to his apartment and met Rollo--sleek,
+deferential, the acme of the polite barbarism in which the prince
+had made St. George feel that he and his world were living. Ah, he
+thought, as Rollo took his hat, this was no way to live, with the
+whole world singing to be discovered anew.
+
+He sat down before the trim little white table with its pretty china
+and silver and its one rose-shaded candle, but the doubtful content
+of comfort was suddenly not enough. The spirit of the road and of
+the chase was in his veins, and he was aglow with "the taste for
+pilgriming." He looked about on the simple luxury with which he had
+surrounded himself, and he welcomed his farewell to it. And when
+Rollo had gone up stairs to complain in person of the shad-roe, St.
+George spoke aloud:
+
+"If Miss Holland sails for Yaque to-morrow on the prince's
+submarine," he said, "_The Aloha_ and I will follow her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TWO LITTLE MEN
+
+
+Next morning St. George was early astir. He had slept little and his
+dreams had been grotesques. He threw up his blind and looked across
+buildings to the grey park. The sky was marked with rose, the still
+reservoir gave back colour upon its breast, and the tower upon its
+margin might have been some guttural-christened castle on the Rhine.
+St. George drew a deep breath of good, new air and smiled for the
+sake of the things that the day was to bring him. He was in the
+golden age when the youthful expectation of enjoyment is just
+beginning to be savoured by the inevitable longing for more light,
+and he seemed to himself to be alluringly near the verge of both.
+
+His first care the evening before had been to hunt out
+Chillingworth. He had found him in a theatre and had got him out to
+the foyer and kept him through the third act, pouring in his ears as
+much as he felt that it was well for him to know. Chillingworth had
+drawn his square, brown hands through his hair and, in lieu of
+copy-paper, had nibbled away his programme and paced the corner by
+the cloak-room.
+
+"It looks like a great big thing," said the city editor; "don't you
+think it looks like a great big thing?"
+
+"Extraordinarily so," assented St. George, watching him.
+
+"Can you handle it alone, do you think?" Chillingworth demanded.
+
+"Ah, well now, that depends," replied St. George. "I'll see it
+through, if it takes me to Yaque. But I'd like you to promise, Mr.
+Chillingworth, that you won't turn Crass loose at it while I'm gone,
+with his feverish head-lines. Mrs. Hastings and her niece must be
+spared that, at all events."
+
+"Don't you be a sentimental idiot," snapped Chillingworth, "and
+spoil the biggest city story the paper ever had. Why, this may draw
+the whole United States into a row, and mean war and a new
+possession and maybe consulates and governorships and one thing or
+another for the whole staff. St. George, don't spoil the sport.
+Remember, I'm dropsical and nobody can tell what may happen. By the
+way, where did you say this prince man is?"
+
+"Ah, I didn't say," St. George had answered quietly. "If you'll
+forgive me, I don't think I shall say."
+
+"Oh, you don't," ejaculated Chillingworth. "Well, you please be
+around at eight o'clock in the morning."
+
+St. George watched him walking sidewise down the aisle as he always
+walked when he was excited. Chillingworth was a good sort at heart,
+too; but given, as the bishop had once said of some one else, to
+spending right royally a deal of sagacity under the obvious
+impression that this is the only wisdom.
+
+At his desk next morning Chillingworth gave to St. George a note
+from Amory, who had been at Long Branch with _The Aloha_ when the
+letter was posted and was coming up that noon to put ashore
+Bennietod.
+
+"May Cawthorne have his day off to-morrow and go with me?" the
+letter ended. "I'll call up at noon to find out."
+
+"Yah!" growled Chillingworth, "it's breaking up the whole staff,
+that's what it's doin'. You'll all want cut-glass typewriters next."
+
+"If I should sail to-day," observed St. George, quite as if he were
+boarding a Sound steamer, "I'd like to take on at least two men. And
+I'd like Amory and Cawthorne. You could hardly go yourself, could
+you, Mr. Chillingworth?"
+
+"No, I couldn't," growled Chillingworth, "I've got to keep my tastes
+down. And I've got to save up to buy kid gloves for the staff. Look
+here--" he added, and hesitated.
+
+"Yes?" St. George complied in some surprise.
+
+"Bennietod's half sick anyway," said Chillingworth, "he's thin as
+water, and if you would care--"
+
+"By all means then," St. George assented heartily, "I would care
+immensely. Bennietod sick is like somebody else healthy. Will you
+mind getting Amory on the wire when he calls up, and tell him to
+show up without fail at my place at noon to-day? And to wait there
+for me."
+
+Little Cawthorne, with a pair of shears quite a yard long, was
+sitting at his desk clipping jokes for the fiction page. He was
+humming a weary little tune to the effect that "Billy Enny took a
+penny but now he hadn't many--Lookie They!" with which he whiled
+away the hours of his gravest toil, coming out strongly on the
+"Lookie They!" until Benfy on the floor above pounded for quiet
+which he never got.
+
+"Cawthorne," said St. George, "it may be that I'm leaving to-night
+on the yacht for an island out in the southeast. And the chief says
+that you and Amory are to go along. Can you go?"
+
+Little Cawthorne's blue eyes met St. George's steadily for a moment,
+and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.
+
+"I can get the page done in an hour," he promised, "and I can pack
+my thirty cents in ten minutes. Will that do?"
+
+St. George laughed.
+
+"Ah, well now, this goes," he said. "Ask Chillingworth. Don't tell
+any one else."
+
+"'Billy Enny took a penny,'" hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect
+tranquillity.
+
+St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand
+doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to
+face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away.
+Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world
+which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present
+knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced
+his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk
+more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.
+
+The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early
+morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand
+Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only
+avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out
+incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For
+only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to
+be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid
+wonderment at crêpe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed
+woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in
+McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive
+comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour
+gone astray.
+
+St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted
+him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons
+brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the
+latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of
+furniture remained.
+
+He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find
+the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and
+he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could
+have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls,
+to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so
+emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured
+a title. But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted
+and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable
+characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the
+prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and
+questioned a group of boys in the passage.
+
+"Yup," shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation
+distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement
+as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, "he means de
+bloke wid de black block. Aw, he lef' early dis mornin' wid 's junk
+follerin.' Dey's two of 'em. Wot's he t'ink? Dis ain't no Nigger's
+Rest. Dis yere's all Eyetalian."
+
+St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street. It was not yet ten
+o'clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and
+for his life he could not have waited longer. Perhaps it was not
+true at all; perhaps none of it had happened. The McDougle Street
+part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth? But as he
+sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better.
+The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time,
+and she had said "Until to-morrow."
+
+On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to
+her apartment. He found the drawing-room in confusion--the furniture
+covered with linen, the bric-à-brac gone, and three steamer trunks
+strapped and standing outside the door. All of which mattered to him
+less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.
+
+She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and
+very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had
+been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober
+little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he
+could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.
+She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To
+complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before
+the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.
+
+"This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and
+a muffin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."
+
+For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.
+
+"You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the
+little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.
+
+"Really leaving," she assented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham
+sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great
+comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added
+naïvely, "but he must take her."
+
+St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he
+reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the
+daughter of its sovereign.
+
+"Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.
+
+He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place
+below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince,
+it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to assure them
+that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no
+impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt
+withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St.
+George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a
+world of uncertainty.
+
+"I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided
+between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear
+lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.
+
+Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.
+
+"Have a muffin--do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in
+America for a time--let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St.
+George, I want--oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate--"
+
+"Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you
+see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now
+to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."
+
+"No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was
+a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through
+the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds
+without packing a bag and feeding the peacocks and leaving, pinned
+to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.
+
+"Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought.
+"Forgive me--what are you going to do all alone there in that
+strange land, and such a land?"
+
+He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he
+was lost in anticipative admiration; when she was neither he admired
+more than ever.
+
+"I don't know," said Olivia gravely, "I only know that I must go.
+You see that, do you not--that I must go?"
+
+"Ah, yes," St. George assured her, "I do indeed, believe me. Don't
+you think," he said, "that I might give you a lamp to rub if you
+need help? And then I'll appear."
+
+"In Yaque?"
+
+He nodded gravely.
+
+"Yes, in Yaque. I shall rise out of a jar like the Evil Genie; and
+though I shall be quite helpless you will still have the lamp. And I
+shall be no end glad to have appeared."
+
+"But suppose," said Olivia merrily, "that when I have eaten a
+pomegranate or a potato or something in Yaque I forget all about
+America? And when you step out of the jar I say 'Off with his head,'
+by mistake. How shall I know it is you when the jar is opened?"
+
+"I shall ask you what the population of Yaque is," he assured her,
+"and how the island compares with Manhattan, and if this is your
+first visit, and how you are enjoying your stay; and then you will
+recognize the talk of civilization and spare me."
+
+"No," she protested, "I've longed to say 'Off with his head' to too
+many people who have said all that to me. And you mustn't say that a
+holiday always seems like Sunday, either."
+
+Whereat they both laughed, and it seemed an uncommonly pleasant
+world, and even the sad errand that was taking Olivia to Yaque
+looked like a hope.
+
+Then the talk ran on pleasantly, and things went very briskly
+forward, and there was no dearth of fleet little smiles at this and
+that. What was she to bring him from Yaque--a pet ibis? No, he had
+no taste for ibises--unless indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension
+ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a
+magic field-glass, with which one might see what is happening at an
+infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he
+wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her
+errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the
+puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor
+children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of
+science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with
+mere tricks of jars of genii instead of applied electricity and its
+daring. What an Arabian Nights' Entertainment we might have had if
+only Scheherazade had ever heard of the Present! As for the
+thousand-and-one-nights, they would not have contained all her
+invention. No wonder that the time went trippingly for the two who
+were concerned in such bewildering speculation as the prince had
+made possible and who were furthering acquaintanceship besides.
+
+"Ah, well now, at all events," begged St. George at length, "will
+you remember something while you are away?"
+
+"Your kindness, always," she returned.
+
+"But will you remember," said St. George with his boy's eagerness,
+"that there is some one who hopes no less than you for your success,
+and who will be infinitely proud of any command at all from you? And
+will you remember that, though I may not be successful, I shall at
+least be doing something to try to help you?"
+
+"You are very good," she said gently, "I shall remember. For already
+you have not only helped me--you have made the whole matter
+possible."
+
+"And what of that," propounded St. George gloomily, "if I can't help
+you just when the danger begins? I insist, Miss Holland, that it
+takes far more good nature to see some one else set off at adventure
+than it takes to go one's self. Won't you let me come back here at
+twelve o'clock and go down with you to the boat?"
+
+"By all means," Olivia assented, "my aunt and I shall both be glad,
+Mr. St. George. Then you can wish us well. What is a submarine
+like," she wanted to know; "were you ever on one?"
+
+"Never, excepting a number of times," replied St. George, supremely
+unconscious of any vagueness. He was rapidly losing count of all
+events up to the present. He was concerned only with these things:
+that she was here with him, that the time might be measured by
+minutes until she would be caught away to undergo neither knew what
+perils, and that at any minute Mrs. Hastings might escape from the
+chemist's.
+
+Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was
+quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did
+make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her
+drawing-room had been untenanted. And in the meantime no one knows
+what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so
+perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon
+the shore for a word of farewell. But, indeed, if it were not for
+the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would
+become very tame affairs. When the first man and maid said even the
+most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the
+right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion. Very likely
+the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination.
+Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the
+preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it. And, enchantment
+being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been
+that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat
+staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and
+Olivia was taking her tea. Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very
+literal interfering goddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so
+that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent
+and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness. But it
+must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore
+were "_les antipodes des grâces_." She was followed by a footman,
+his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan
+and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hastings
+had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and
+whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug. She sat
+down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another
+sort of energy and became fragments of talk. Mrs. Hastings was like
+the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the goddess of silence, but
+could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. St. George," she said. "I'm sure I've quite
+forgotten everything. Olivia dear, I've had all the prescriptions
+made up that I've ever taken to Rutledge's, because no one can tell
+what the climate will be like, it's so low on the map. I've looked
+up the Azores--that's where we get some of our choicest cheese. And
+camphor--I've got a pound of camphor. And I must say positively that
+I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the
+camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now
+it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound. And then the flaxseed,
+Olivia dear. I've got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell--"
+
+St. George doubted if she knew when he said good morning, although
+she named him Mr. St. John, gave him permission to go to the boat,
+hoped in one breath that he would come again to see them, and in the
+next that he would send them a copy of whatever the _Sentinel_ might
+publish about them, in serene oblivion of the state of the
+post-office department in Yaque. Mrs. Hastings, in short, was one of
+the women who are thrown into violent mental convulsions by the
+prospect of a journey; this was not at all because she was setting
+sail specifically for Yaque, for the moment that she saw a porter or
+a pier, though she was bound only for the Bronx or Staten Island,
+she was affected in the same way.
+
+As Olivia gave St. George her hand he came perilously near telling
+her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he
+were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the
+submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator
+bell for so long that the boy deliberately stopped on the floor
+below and waited, with the diabolical independence of the American
+lords of the lift, "for to teach 'im a lessing," this one explained
+to a passing chamber-maid.
+
+St. George hurried to his apartment to leave a note for Amory who
+was directed upon his arrival to bide there and await his host's
+return. Then he paced the floor until it was time to go back to the
+Boris, deaf to Rollo's solemn information that the dust comes up out
+of the varnish of furniture during the night, like cream out of
+milk. By the time he had boarded a down-town car, St. George had
+tortured himself to distraction, and his own responsibility in this
+submarine voyage loomed large and threatening. Therefore, it
+suddenly assumed the proportion of mountains yet unseen when, though
+it wanted ten minutes to twelve when he reached the Boris, his card
+was returned by a faint polite clerk with the information that Mrs.
+Hastings and Miss Holland had been gone from the hotel for half an
+hour. There was a note for him in their box the clerk believed, and
+presently produced it--a brief, regretful word from Olivia telling
+him that the prince had found that they must leave fully an hour
+earlier than he had planned.
+
+Sick with apprehension, cursing himself for the ease and dexterity
+with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St.
+George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of
+chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had
+bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod
+would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of
+anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer
+hallway and saw that which caused that confidence to balloon
+smilingly back to support him.
+
+In the vestibule of the Boris, deaf to the hovering attention of a
+door-boy more curious than dutiful, stood two men of the stature and
+complexion of Prince Tabnit of Yaque. They were dressed like the
+youth who had answered the door of the prince's apartment, and they
+were speaking softly with many gestures and evidently in some
+perplexity. The drooping spirits of St. George soared to Heaven as
+he hastened to them.
+
+"You are asking for Miss Holland, the daughter of King Otho of
+Yaque," he said, with no time to smile at the pranks of the
+democracy with hereditary titles.
+
+The men stared and spoke almost together.
+
+"We are," they said promptly.
+
+"She is not here," explained St. George, "but I have attended to
+some affairs for her. Will you come with me to my apartment where we
+may be alone?"
+
+The men, who somehow made St. George think of tan-coloured
+greyhounds with very gentle eyes, consulted each other, not with the
+suspicion of the vulgar but with the caution of the thorough-bred.
+
+"Pardon," said one, "if we may be quite assured that this is Miss
+Holland's friend to whom we speak--"
+
+St. George hesitated. The hall-boy listened with an air of polite
+concern, and there were curious over-shoulder glances from the
+passers-by. Suddenly St. George's face lighted and he went swiftly
+through his pockets and produced a scrap of paper--the fragment that
+had lain that morning on the floor of the prince's deserted
+apartment, and that bore the arms of the King of Yaque. It was the
+strangers' turn to regard him with amazement. Immediately, to St.
+George's utmost embarrassment, they both bowed very low and
+pronounced together:
+
+"Pardon, adôn!"
+
+"My name is St. George," he assured them, "and let's get into a
+cab."
+
+They followed him without demur.
+
+St. George leaned back on the cushions and looked at them--lean
+lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great
+repose. They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had
+felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley
+Reformatory--as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way
+rhymed with a word which he did not know.
+
+"What is it," St. George asked as they rolled away, "what is it that
+you have come to tell Miss Holland?"
+
+Only one of the men spoke, the other appearing content to show two
+rows of exceptionally white teeth.
+
+"May we not know, adôn," asked the man respectfully, "whether the
+prince has given her his news? And if the prince is still in your
+land?"
+
+"The prince's servant, Elissa, has tried to stab Miss Holland and
+has got herself locked up," St. George imparted without hesitation.
+
+An exclamation of horror broke from both men.
+
+"To stab--to _kill_!" they cried.
+
+"Quite so," said St. George, "and the prince, upon being discovered,
+disclosed some very important news to Miss Holland, and she and her
+friends started an hour ago for Yaque."
+
+"That is well, that is well!" cried the little man, nodding, and
+momentarily hesitated; "but yet his news--what news, adôn, has he
+told her?"
+
+For a moment St. George regarded them both in silence.
+
+"Ah, well now, what news had he?" he asked briefly.
+
+The men answered readily.
+
+"Prince Tabnit was commissioned by the Yaquians to acquaint the
+princess with the news of the strange disappearance of her father,
+the king, and to supplicate her in his place to accept the
+hereditary throne of Yaque."
+
+"Jupiter!" said St. George under breath.
+
+In a flash the whole matter was clear to him. Prince Tabnit had
+delivered no such message from the people of Yaque, but had
+contented himself with the mere intimation that in some vanishing
+future she would be expected to ascend the throne. And he had done
+this only when Olivia herself had sought him out after an attempt
+had been made upon her life by his servant. It seemed to St. George
+far from improbable that the woman had been acting under the
+prince's instructions and, that failing, he himself had appeared and
+obligingly placed the daughter of King Otho precisely within the
+prince's power. Now she was gone with him, in the hope of aiding her
+father, to meet Heaven knew what peril in this pagan island; and he,
+St. George, was wholly to blame from first to last.
+
+"Good Heavens," he groaned, "are you sure--but are you sure?"
+
+"It is simple, adôn," said the man, "we came with this message from
+the people of Yaque. A day before we were to land, Akko and I--I am
+Jarvo--overheard the prince plan with the others to tell her
+nothing--nothing that the people desire. When they knew that we had
+heard they locked us up and we have only this morning escaped from
+the submarine. If the prince has told her this message everything is
+well. But as for us, I do not know. The prince has gone."
+
+"He told her nothing--nothing," said St. George, "but that her
+father and the Hereditary Treasure have disappeared. And he has
+taken her with him. She has gone with him."
+
+Deaf alike to their exclamations and their questions St. George sat
+staring unseeingly through the window, his mind an abyss of fear.
+Then the cab drew up at the door of his hotel and he turned upon the
+two men precipitantly.
+
+"See," he cried, "in a boat on the open sea, would you two be at all
+able to direct a course to Yaque?"
+
+Both men smiled suddenly and brilliantly.
+
+"But we have stolen a chart," announced Jarvo with great simplicity,
+"not knowing what thing might befall."
+
+St. George wrenched at the handle of the cab door. He had a glimpse
+of Amory within, just ringing the elevator bell, and he bundled the
+two little men into the lobby and dashed up to him.
+
+"Come on, old Amory," he told him exultingly. "Heaven on earth, put
+out that pipe and pack. We leave for Yaque to-night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+DUSK, AND SO ON
+
+
+Dusk on the tropic seas is a ceremony performed with reverence, as
+if the rising moon were a priestess come among her silver vessels.
+Shadows like phantom sails dip through the dark and lie idle where
+unseen crafts with unexplained cargoes weigh anchor in mid-air. One
+almost hears the water cunningly lap upon their invisible sides.
+
+To Little Cawthorne, lying luxuriously in a hammock on the deck of
+_The Aloha_, fancies like these crowded pleasantly, and slipped away
+or were merged in snatches of remembered songs. His hands were
+clasped behind his head, one foot was tapping the deck to keep the
+hammock in motion while strange compounds of tune and time broke
+aimlessly from his lips.
+
+          "Meet me by moonlight alone,
+           And then I will tell you a tale.
+           Must be told in the moonlight alone
+           In the grove at the end of the vale"
+
+he caroled contentedly.
+
+Amory, the light of his pipe cheerfully glowing, lay at full length
+in a steamer chair. _The Aloha_ was bounding briskly forward, a
+solitary speck on the bosom of darkening purple, and the men sitting
+in the companionship of silence, which all the world praises and
+seldom attains, had been engaging in that most entertaining of
+pastimes, the comparison of present comfort with past toil. Little
+Cawthorne's satisfaction flowered in speech.
+
+"Two weeks ago to-night," he said, running his hands through his
+grey curls, "I took the night desk when Ellis was knocked out. And
+two weeks ago to-morrow morning we were the only paper to be beaten
+on the Fownes will story. Hi--you."
+
+"Happy, Cawthorne?" Amory removed his pipe to inquire with idle
+indulgence.
+
+"Am I happy?" affirmed Little Cawthorne ecstatically in four tones,
+and went on with his song:
+
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,
+           But there's something about the moon's ray
+           That is sweeter to you and to me."
+
+"Did you make that up?" inquired Amory with polite interest.
+
+"I did if I want to," responded Little Cawthorne. "Everything's true
+out here--go on, tell everything you like. I'll believe you."
+
+St. George came out of the dark and leaned on the rail without
+speaking. Sometimes he wondered if he were he at all, and he liked
+the doubt. He felt pleasantly as if he had been cut loose from all
+old conditions and were sailing between skies to some unknown
+planet. This was not only because of the strange waters rushing
+underfoot but because of the flowering and singing of something
+within him that made the world into which he was sailing an alien
+place, heavenly desirable. A week ago that day _The Aloha_ had
+weighed anchor, and these seven days, in fairly fortunate weather,
+her white nose had been cleaving seas to traverse which had so long
+been her owner's dream; and yet her owner, in pleasant apostasy, had
+turned his back upon the whole matter of what he had been used to
+dream, and now ungratefully spent his time in trying to count the
+hours to his journey's end.
+
+Somewhere out yonder, he reflected, as he leaned on the rail, this
+southern moonlight was flooding whatever scene _she_ looked on; the
+lapping of the same sea was in her ears; and his future and hers
+might be dependent upon those two perplexed tan-coloured greyhounds
+below. By which one would have said that matters had been going
+briskly forward with St. George since the morning that he had
+breakfasted with Olivia Holland.
+
+Exactly when the end of the journey would be was not evident either
+to him or to the two strange creatures who proposed to be his
+guides. Or rather to Jarvo, who was still the spokesman; lean
+little Akko, although his intelligence was unrivaled, being content
+with monosyllables for stepping-stones while the stream of Jarvo's
+soft speech flowed about him. Barnay, the captain, frankly
+distrusted them both, and confided to St. George that "them two
+little jool-eyed scuts was limbs av the old gint himself, and they
+reminded him, Barnay, of a pair of haythen naygurs," than which he
+could say no more. But then, Barnay's wholesale skepticism was his
+only recreation, save talking about his pretty daughter "of school
+age," and he liked to stand tucking his beard inside his collar and
+indulging in both. In truth, Barnay, who knew the waters of the
+Atlantic fairly well, was sorely tried to take orders from the two
+little brown strangers who, he averred, consulted a "haythen
+apparaytus" which they would cheerfully let him see but of which he
+could "make no more than av the spach av a fish," and then directed
+him to take courses which lay far outside the beaten tracks of the
+high seas.
+
+St. George, who had had several talks with them, was puzzled and
+doubtful, and more than once confided to himself that the lives of
+the passenger list of _The Aloha_ might be worth no more than coral
+headstones at the bottom of the South Atlantic. But he always
+consoled himself with the cheering reflection that he had had to
+come--there was no other way half so good. So _The Aloha_ continued
+to plow her way as serenely as if she were heading toward the white
+cliffs of Dover and trim villas and a custom-house. And the sea lay
+a blue, uninhabited glory save as land that Barnay knew about marked
+low blades of smoke on the horizon and slipped back into blue
+sheaths.
+
+This was the evening of the seventh day, and that noon Jarvo had
+looked despondent, and Barnay had sworn strange oaths, and St.
+George had been disquieted. He stood up now, going vaguely down into
+his coat pockets for his pipe, his erect figure thrown in relief
+against the hurrying purple. St. George was good to look at, and
+Amory, with the moonlight catching the glass of his pince-nez,
+smoked and watched him, shrewdly pondering upon exactly how much
+anxiety for the success of the enterprise was occupying the breast
+of his friend and how much of an emotion a good bit stronger. Amory
+himself was not in love, but there existed between him and all who
+were a special kinship, like that between a lover of music and a
+musician.
+
+Little Cawthorne rose and shuffled his feet lazily across deck.
+
+"Where is that island, anyway?" he wanted to know, gazing
+meditatively out to sea.
+
+St. George turned as if the interruption was grateful.
+
+"The island. I don't see any island," complained Little Cawthorne.
+"I tell you," he confided, "I guess it's just Chillingworth's little
+way of fixing up a nice long vacation for us."
+
+They smiled at memory of Chillingworth's grudging and snarling
+assents to even an hour off duty.
+
+From below came Bennietod, walking slowly. The seaman's life was not
+for Bennietod, and he yearned to reach land as fervently as did St.
+George, though with other anxiety. He sat down on the moon-lit deck
+and his face was like that of a little old man with uncanny
+shrewdness. His week among them had wrought changes in the head
+office boy. For Bennietod was ambitious to be a gentleman. His
+covert imitations had always amused St. George and Amory. Now in the
+comparative freedom of _The Aloha_ his fancy had rein and he had
+adopted all the habits and the phrases which he had long reserved
+and liked best, mixing them with scraps of allusions to things which
+Benfy had encouraged him to read, and presenting the whole in his
+native lower East-side dialect. Bennietod was Bowery-born and
+office-bred, and this sad metropolitanism almost made of him a good
+philosopher.
+
+"I'd like immensely to say something," observed St. George abruptly,
+when his pipe was lighted.
+
+"Oh, yes. All right," shrilled Little Cawthorne with resignation, "I
+suppose you all feel I'm the Jonah and you thirst to scatter me to
+the whales."
+
+"I want to know," St. George went on slowly, "what you think. On my
+life, I doubt if I thought at all when we set out. This all promised
+good sport, and I took it at that. Lately, I've been wondering, now
+and then, whether any of you wish yourselves well out of it."
+
+For a moment no one spoke. To shrink from expression is a
+characteristic in which the extremes of cultivation and mediocrity
+meet; the reserve of delicacy in St. George and Amory would have
+been a reserve of false shame in Bennietod, and of an exaggerated
+sense of humour in Little Cawthorne. It was not remarkable that from
+the moment the enterprise had been entered upon, its perils and its
+doubtful outcome had not once been discussed. St. George vaguely
+reckoned with this as he waited, while Amory smoked on and blew
+meditative clouds and regarded the bowl of his pipe, and Little
+Cawthorne ceased the motion of his hammock, and Bennietod hugged his
+knees and looked shrewdly at the moon, as if he knew more about the
+moon than he would care to tell. St. George felt his heart sink a
+little. Then Little Cawthorne rose and squared valiantly up to him.
+
+"What," inquired the little man indignantly, "are you trying to do?
+Pick a fight?"
+
+St. George looked at him in surprise.
+
+"Because if you are," continued little Cawthorne without preamble,
+"we're three to one. And three of us are going to Yaque. We'll put
+you ashore if you say so."
+
+St. George smiled at him gratefully.
+
+"No--Bennietod?" inquired Little Cawthorne.
+
+Bennietod, pale and manifestly weak, grinned cheerfully and fumbled
+in sudden abashment at an amazing checked Ascot which he had derived
+from unknown sources.
+
+"Bes' t'ing t'ever I met up wid," he assented, "ef de deck'd lay
+down levil. I'm de sonny of a sea-horse if it ain't."
+
+"Amory?" demanded the little man.
+
+Amory looked along his pipe and took it briefly from his lips and
+shook his head.
+
+"Don't say these things," he pleaded in his pleasant drawl, "or I'll
+swear something horrid."
+
+St. George merely held his pipe by the bowl and nodded a little, but
+the hearts of all of them glowed.
+
+After dinner they sat long on deck. Rollo, at his master's
+invitation, joined them with a mandolin, which he had been
+discovered to play considerably better than any one else on board.
+Rollo sat bolt upright in a reclining chair to prove that he did not
+forget his station and strummed softly, and acknowledged approval
+with:
+
+"Yes, sir. A little music adds an air to any occasion, _I_ always
+think, sir."
+
+The moon was not yet full, but its light in that warm world was
+brilliant. The air was drowsy and scented with something that might
+have been its own honey or that might have come from the strange
+blooms, water-sealed below. Now and then St. George went aside for a
+space and walked up and down the deck or sent below for Jarvo. Once,
+as Jarvo left St. George's side, Little Cawthorne awoke and sat
+upright and inquiring, in his hammock.
+
+"What _is_ the matter with his feet?" he inquired peevishly. "I
+shall certainly ask him directly."
+
+"It's the seventh day out," Amory observed, "and still nobody
+knows."
+
+For Jarvo and Akko had another distinction besides their diminutive
+stature and greyhound build. Their feet, clad in soft soleless
+shoes, made of skins, were long and pointed and of almost uncanny
+flexibility. It had become impossible for any one to look at either
+of the little men without letting his eyes wander to their curiously
+expressive feet, which, like "courtier speech," were expressive
+without revealing anything.
+
+"I t'ink," Bennietod gave out, "dat dey're lost Eyetalian
+organ-grinder monkeys, wid huming intelligence, like Bertran's
+Bimi."
+
+"What a suspicious child it is," yawned Little Cawthorne, and went
+to sleep again. Toward midnight he awoke, refreshed and happy, and
+broke into instant song:
+
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,
+           But there's something about the moon's ray--"
+
+he was chanting in perfect tonelessness, when St. George cried out.
+The others sprang to their feet.
+
+"Lights!" said St. George, and gave the glass to Amory, his hand
+trembling, and very nearly snatched it back again.
+
+Far to the southeast, faint as the lost Pleiad, a single golden
+point pricked the haze, danced, glimmered, was lost, and reappeared
+to their eager eyes. The impossibility of it all, the impossibility
+of believing that they could have sighted the lights of an island
+hanging there in the waste and hitherto known to nobody simply
+because nobody knew the truth about the Fourth Dimension did not
+assail them. So absorbed had St. George become in the undertaking,
+so convincing had been the events that led up to it, and so ready
+for anything in any dimension were his companions, that their
+excitement was simply the ancient excitement of lights to the
+mariner and nothing more; save indeed that to St. George they spoke
+a certain language sweeter than the language of any island lying in
+the heart of mere science or mere magic either.
+
+When it became evident that the lights were no will-o'-the-wisps,
+born of the moon and the void, but the veritable lights that shine
+upon harbours, Bennietod tumbled below for Jarvo, who came on deck
+and gazed and doubted and well-nigh wept for joy and poured forth
+strange words and called aloud for Akko. Akko came and nodded and
+showed white teeth.
+
+"To-morrow," he said only.
+
+Barnay came.
+
+"Fwhat matther?" He put it cynically, scowling critically at Jarvo
+and Akko. "All in the way av fair fight, that'll be about Mor-rocco,
+if I've the full av my wits about me, an' music to my eyes, by the
+same token."
+
+Jarvo fixed him with his impenetrable look.
+
+"It is the light of the king's palace on the summit of Mount
+Khalak," he announced simply.
+
+The light of the king's palace. St. George heard and thrilled with
+thanksgiving. It would be then the light at her very threshold,
+provided the impossible is possible, as scientists and devotees have
+every reason to think. But was she there--was she there? If there
+was an oracle for the answer, it was not St. George. The little
+white stars danced and signaled faintly on the far horizon. Whatever
+they had to reveal was for nearer eyes than his.
+
+The glass passed from hand to hand, and in turn they all swept the
+low sky where the faint points burned; but when some one had cried
+that the lights were no longer visible, and the others had verified
+the cry by looking blankly into a sudden waste of milky black--black
+water, pale light--and turned baffled eyes to Jarvo, the little man
+spoke smoothly, not even reaching a lean, brown hand for the glass.
+
+"But have no fear, adôn," he reassured them, "the chart is not
+exact--it is that which has delayed us. It will adjust itself. The
+light may long disappear, but it will come again. The gods will
+permit the possible."
+
+They looked at one another doubtfully when the two little brown men
+had gone below, where Barnay had immediately retired, tucking his
+beard in his collar and muttering sedition. If the two strange
+creatures were twin Robin Goodfellows perpetrating a monstrous
+twentieth century prank, if they were gigantic evolutions of Puck
+whose imagination never went far beyond threshing corn with shadowy
+flails, at least this very modern caper demanded respect for so
+perfectly catching the spirit of the times. At all events it was
+immensely clever of them to have put their finger upon the public
+pulse and to have realized that the public imagination is ready to
+believe anything because it has seen so much proved. Still, "science
+was faith once"; and besides, to St. George, charts and compasses of
+all known and unknown systems of seamanship were suddenly become
+but the dead letter of the law. The spirit of the whole matter was
+that Olivia might be there, under the lights that his own eyes would
+presently see again. "Who, remembering the first kind glance of her
+whom he loves, can fail to believe in magic?" It is very likely that
+having met Olivia at all seemed at that moment so wonderful to St.
+George that any of the "frolic things" of science were to be
+accepted with equanimity.
+
+For an hour or more the moon, flooding the edge of the deck of _The
+Aloha_, cast four shadows sharply upon the smooth boards. Lined up
+at the rail stood the four adventurers, and the glass passed from
+one to another like the eye of the three Grey Sisters. The far
+beacon appeared and disappeared, but its actuality might not be
+doubted. If Jarvo and Akko were to be trusted, there in the velvet
+distance lay Yaque, and Med, the King's City, and the light upon the
+very palace of its American sovereign.
+
+St. George's pulses leaped and trembled. Amory lifted lazy lids and
+watched him with growing understanding and finally, upon a pretext
+of sleep, led the others below. And St. George, with a sense of
+joyful companionship in the little light, paced the deck until dawn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
+
+
+By afternoon the island of Yaque was an accomplished fact of
+distinguishable parts. There it lay, a thing of rock and green, like
+the islands of its sister latitudes before which the passing ships
+of all the world are wont to cast anchor. But having once cast
+anchor before Yaque the ships of all the world would have had great
+difficulty in landing anybody.
+
+Sheer and almost smoothly hewn from the utmost coast of the island
+rose to a height of several hundred feet one scarcely deviating wall
+of rock; and this apparently impregnable wall extended in either
+direction as far as the sight could reach. Above the natural rampart
+the land sloped upward still in steep declivities, but cut by
+tortuous gorges, and afar inland rose the mountain upon whose summit
+the light had been descried. There the glass revealed white towers
+and columns rising from a mass of brilliant tropical green, and now
+smitten by the late sun; but save these towers and columns not a
+sign of life or habitation was discernible. No smoke arose, no
+wharf or dock broke the serene outline of the black wall lapped by
+the warm sea; and there was no sound save that of strong torrents
+afar off. Lonely, inscrutable, the great mass stood, slightly
+shelved here and there to harbour rank and blossomy growths of green
+and presenting a rugged beauty of outline, but apparently as
+uninhabitable as the land of the North Silences.
+
+Consternation and amazement sat upon the faces of the owner of _The
+Aloha_ and his guests as they realized the character of the
+remarkable island. St. George and Amory had counted upon an
+adventure calling for all diplomacy, but neither had expected the
+delight of hazard that this strange, fairy-like place seemed about
+to present. Each felt his blood stirring and singing in his veins at
+the joy of the possibilities that lay folded before them.
+
+"We shall be obliged to land upon the east coast then, Jarvo?"
+observed St. George; "but how long will it take us to sail round the
+island?"
+
+"Very long," Jarvo responded, "but no, adôn, we land on this coast."
+
+"How is that possible?" St. George asked.
+
+"Well, hi--you," said Little Cawthorne, "I'm a goat, but I'm no
+mountain goat. See the little Swiss kid skipping from peak to peak
+and from crag to crag--"
+
+"Do we scale the wall?" inquired St. George, "or is there a passage
+in the rock?"
+
+Bennietod hugged himself in uncontrollable ecstasy.
+
+"Hully Gee, a submarine passage, in under de sea, like Jules Werne,"
+he said in a delight that was almost awe.
+
+"There is a way over the rock," said Jarvo, "partly hewn, partly
+natural, and this is known to the islanders alone. That way we must
+take. It is marked by a White Blade blazoned on the rock over the
+entrance of the submarines. The way is cunningly concealed--hardly
+will the glass reveal it, adôn."
+
+Barnay shook his head.
+
+"You've a bad time comin' with the home-sickness," he prophesied,
+tucking his beard far down in his collar until he looked, for
+Barnay, smooth-shaven. "I've sailed the sou' Atlantic up an' down
+fer a matther av four hundhred years, more or less, an' I niver as
+much as seed hide _nor_ hair av the place before this prisint. There
+ain't map or chart that iver dhrawed breath that shows ut, new or
+old. Ut's been lifted out o' ground to be afther swallowin' us in--a
+sweet dose will be the lot av us, mesilf with as foine a gir-rl av
+school age as iver you'll see in anny counthry."
+
+"Ah yes, Barnay," said St. George soothingly--but he would have
+tried now to soothe a man in the embrace of a sea-serpent in just
+the same absent-minded way, Amory thought indulgently.
+
+The sun was lowering and birds of evening were beginning to brood
+over the painted water when _The Aloha_ cast anchor. In the late
+light the rugged sides of the island had an air of almost sinister
+expectancy. There was a great silence in their windless shelter
+broken only by the boom and charge of the breakers and the gulls and
+choughs circling overhead, winging and dipping along the water and
+returning with discordant cries to their crannies in the black rock.
+Before the yacht, blazoned on a dark, water-polished stratum of the
+volcanic stone, was the White Blade which Jarvo told them marked the
+subterranean entrance to the mysterious island.
+
+St. George and his companions and Barnay, Jarvo and Akko were on
+deck. Rollo, whose soul did not disdain to be valet to a steam
+yacht, was tranquilly mending a canvas cushion.
+
+"The adôn will wait until sunrise to go ashore?" asked Jarvo.
+
+"_Sunrise_!" cried St. George. "Heaven on earth, no. We'll go now."
+
+There was no need to ask the others. Whatever might be toward, they
+were eager to be about, though Rollo ventured to St. George a
+deprecatory: "You know, sir, one can't be too careful, sir."
+
+"Will you prefer to stay aboard?" St. George put it quietly.
+
+"Oh, no, sir," said Rollo with a grieved face, "one should meet
+danger with a light heart, sir," and went below to pack the
+oil-skins.
+
+"Hear me now," said Barnay in extreme disfavour. "It's I that am to
+lay hereabouts and wait for you, sorr? Lord be good to me, an' fwhat
+if she lays here tin year', and you somewheres fillin' the eyes av
+the aygles with your brains blowed out, neat?" he demanded
+misanthropically. "Fwhat if she lays here on that gin'ral theory
+till she's rotted up, sorr?"
+
+"Ah well now, Barnay," said St. George grimly, "you couldn't have an
+easier career."
+
+Little Cawthorne, from leaning on the rail staring out at the
+island, suddenly pulled himself up and addressed St. George.
+
+"Here we are," he complained, "here has been me coming through the
+watery deep all the way from Broadway, with an octopus clinging to
+each arm and a dolphin on my back, and you don't even ask how I
+stood the trip. And do you realize that it's sheer madness for the
+five of us to land on that island together?"
+
+"What do you mean?" asked St. George.
+
+The little man shook his grey curls.
+
+"What if it's as Barnay says?" he put it. "What if they should bag
+us all--who'll take back the glad news to the harbour? Lord, you
+can't tell what you're about walking into. You don't even know the
+specific gravity of the island," he suggested earnestly. "How do
+you know but your own weight will flatten you out the minute you
+step ashore?"
+
+St. George laughed. "He thinks he is reading the fiction page," he
+observed indulgently. "Still, I fancy there is good sense on the
+page, for once. We don't know anything about anything. I suppose we
+really ought not to put all five eggs in one basket. But, by Jove--"
+
+He looked over at Amory with troubled eyes.
+
+"As host of this picnic," he said, "I dare say I ought to stay
+aboard and let you fellows--but I'm hanged if I will."
+
+Little Cawthorne reflected, frowning; and you could as well have
+expected a bird to frown as Little Cawthorne. It was rather the name
+of his expression than a description of it.
+
+"Suppose," he said, "that Bennietod and I sit rocking here in this
+bay--if it is a bay--while you two rest your chins on the top of
+that ledge of rock up there, and look over. And about to-morrow or
+day after we two will venture up behind you, or you could send one
+of the men back--"
+
+"My thunder," said Bennietod wistfully, "ain't I goin' to get to
+climb in de pantry window at de palace--nor fire out of a
+loophole--"
+
+"Bennietod an' I couldn't talk to a prince anyway," said Little
+Cawthorne; "we'd get our language twisted something dizzy, and
+probably tell him 'yes, ma'am.'"
+
+St. George's eyes softened as he looked at the little man. He knew
+well enough what it cost him to make the suggestion, which the good
+sense of them all must approve. Not only did Little Cawthorne always
+sacrifice himself, which is merely good breeding, but he made
+opportunities to do so, which is both well-bred and virtuous. When
+Rollo came up with the oil-skins they told him what had been
+decided, and Rollo, the faithful, the expressionless, dropped his
+eyelids, but he could not banish from his voice the wistfulness that
+he might have been one to stay behind.
+
+"Sometimes it _is_ best for a person to change his mind, sir," was
+his sole comment.
+
+Presently the little green dory drew away from _The Aloha_, and they
+left her lying as much at her ease as if the phantom island before
+her were in every school-boy's geography, with a scale of miles and
+a list of the principal exports attached.
+
+"If we had diving dresses, adôn," Jarvo suggested, "we might have
+gone down through the sluice and entered by the lagoon where the
+submarines pass."
+
+"Jove," said Amory, trying to row and adjust his pince-nez at the
+same time, "Chillingworth will never forgive us for missing that."
+
+"You couldn't have done it," shouted Little Cawthorne derisively,
+from the deck of the yacht, "you didn't wear your rubbers. If
+anybody sticks a knife in you send up a r-r-r-ocket!"
+
+The landing, effected with the utmost caution, was upon a flat
+stone already a few inches submerged by the rising tide. Looking up
+at the jagged, beetling world above them their task appeared
+hopeless enough. But Jarvo found footing in an instant, and St.
+George and Amory pressed closely behind him, Rollo and little Akko
+silently bringing up the rear and carrying the oil-skins. Slowly and
+cautiously as they made their way it was but a few minutes until the
+three standing on the deck, and Barnay open-mouthed in the dory, saw
+the sinuous line of the five bodies twist up the tortuous course
+considerably above the blazoned emblem of the White Blade.
+
+In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever
+before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble
+and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent,
+perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from
+below it had appeared. But it seemed interminable. Even when the sea
+lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of
+_The Aloha_ were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued
+to stretch upward, melting into the sky's late blue.
+
+The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk
+came swiftly out of the east. At snail's pace, now with heads bent
+to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up by the arms or to
+leap a wicked-looking crevice, the four took their way up the black
+side of the rock. Birds of the cliffs, disturbed from long rest,
+wheeled and screamed about them, almost brushing their faces with
+long, fearless wings. There was an occasional shelf where, with
+backs against the wall spotted with crystals of feldspar, they
+waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge. Great
+slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of
+calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava
+covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp
+shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray. Gradually rock-slides
+and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches,
+but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral crevasses
+made the vague trail slippery and the occasional earth sodden and
+treacherous. For a quarter of a mile their way lay over a kind of
+porous gravel into which their feet sank, and beyond at the summit
+of a ridge Jarvo halted and threw back to them a summary warning to
+prepare for "a long leap." A sharp angle of rock, jutting out, had
+been split down the middle by some ancient force--very likely a
+Paleozoic butterfly had brushed it with its wing--and the edges had
+been worn away in a treacherous slope to the very lip of the
+crumbling promontory. From this edge to the edge of the opposite
+abutment there was a gap of wicked width, and between was a sheer
+drop into space wherefrom rose the sound of tumbling waters. When
+Jarvo had taken the leap, easily and gracefully, alighting on the
+other side like the greyhound that he resembled, and the others,
+following, had cleared the edge by as safe a margin as if the abyss
+were a minor field-day event, St. George and Amory looked back with
+sudden wonder over the path by which they had come.
+
+"I feel as if I weighed about ninety pounds," said St. George; "am I
+fading away or anything?"
+
+Amory stood still.
+
+"I was thinking the same thing," he said. "By Jove--do you
+suppose--what if Little Cawthorne hit the other end of the
+nail, as usual? Suppose the specific gravity--suppose there is
+something--suppose it doesn't hold good in this dimension that
+a body--by Jove," said Amory, "wouldn't that be the deuce?"
+
+St. George looked at Jarvo, bounding up the stony way as easily as
+if he were bounding down.
+
+"Ah well now," he said, "you know on the moon an ordinary man would
+weigh only twenty-six or seven pounds. Why not here? We aren't held
+down by any map!"
+
+They laughed at the pleasant enormity of the idea and were hurrying
+on when Akko, behind them, broke his settled silence.
+
+"In America," he said, "a man feels like a mountain. Here he feels
+like a man."
+
+"What do you mean by that?" demanded St. George uneasily. But Akko
+said no more, and St. George and Amory, with a disquieting idea that
+each was laughing at the other, let the matter drop.
+
+From there on the way was easier, leveling occasionally, frequently
+swelling to gentle ridges, and at last winding up a steep trail that
+was not difficult to keep in spite of the fast falling night. And at
+length Jarvo, rounding a huge hummock where converging ridges met,
+scrambled over the last of these and threw himself on the ground.
+
+"Now," he said simply.
+
+The two men stood beside him and looked down. It seemed to St.
+George that they looked not at all upon a prospect but upon the
+sudden memory of a place about which he might have dreamed often and
+often and, waking, had not been able to remember, though its
+familiarity had continued insistently to beat at his heart; or that
+in what was spread before him lay the satisfaction of Burne-Jones'
+wistful definition of a picture: "... a beautiful, romantic dream of
+something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any
+light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only
+desire..." yet it was to St. George as if he had reached no strange
+land, no alien conditions; but rather that he had come home. It was
+like a home-coming in which nothing is changed, none of the little
+improvements has been made which we resent because no one has
+thought to tell us of them; but where everything is even more as one
+remembers than one knew that one remembered.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+At his feet lay a pleasant valley filled with the purple of deep
+twilight. Far below a lagoon caught the late light and spread it in
+a pattern among hidden green. In the midst of the valley towered the
+mountain whose summit, royally crowned by shining towers, had been
+visible from the open sea. At its feet, glittering in the abundant
+light shed upon its white wall and dome and pinnacle, stood Med, the
+King's City--but its light was not the light of the day, for that
+was gone; nor of the moon, not risen; and no false lights vexed the
+dark. Yet he was looking into a cup of light, as clear as the light
+in a gazing-crystal and of a quality as wholly at variance with
+reality. The rocky coast of Yaque was literally a massive, natural
+wall; and girt by it lay the heart of the island, fertile and
+populous and clothed in mystery. This new face which Nature turned
+to him was a glorified face, and some way _it meant what he meant_.
+
+St. George was off for a few steps, trampling impatiently over the
+coarse grass of the bank. Somewhere in that dim valley--was she
+there, was she there? Was she in trouble, did she need him, did she
+think of him? St. George went through the ancient, delicious list
+as conscientiously as if he were the first lover, and she were the
+first princess, and this were the first ascent of Yaque that the
+world had ever known. For by some way of miracle, the mystery of the
+island was suddenly to him the very mystery of his love, and the two
+so filled his heart that he could not have told of which he was
+thinking. That which had lain, shadowy and delicious, in his soul
+these many days--not so very many, either, if one counts the
+suns--was become not only a thing of his soul but a thing of the
+outside world, almost of the visible world, something that had
+existed for ever and which he had just found out; and here, wrapped
+in nameless light, lay its perfect expression. When a shaft of
+silver smote the long grass at his feet, and the edge of the moon
+rose above the mountain, St. George turned with a poignant
+exultation--did a mere victory over half a continent ever make a man
+feel like that?--and strode back to the others.
+
+"Come on," he called ringingly in a voice that did everything but
+confess in words that something heavenly sweet was in the man's
+mind, "let's be off!"
+
+Amory was carefully lighting his pipe.
+
+"I feel sort of tense," he explained, "as if the whole place would
+explode if I threw down my match. What do you think of it?"
+
+St. George did not answer.
+
+"It's a place where all the lines lead up," he was saying to
+himself, "as they do in a cathedral."
+
+The four went the fragrant way that led to the heart of the island.
+First the path followed the high bank the branches of whose tropical
+undergrowth brushed their faces with brief gift of perfume. On the
+other side was a wood of slim trunks, all depths of shadow and
+delicacies of borrowed light in little pools. Everywhere, everywhere
+was a chorus of slight voices, from bark and air and secret moss,
+singing no forced notes of monotone, but piping a true song of the
+gladness of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It
+came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would
+always sound if, somehow, one were able to hear the sweetness that
+poured itself out. Even that familiar sense in the night-woods that
+something is about to happen was deliciously present with him; and
+though Amory went on quietly enough, St. George swam down that green
+way, much as one dreams of floating along a street, above-heads.
+
+The path curved, and went hesitatingly down many terraces. Here,
+from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged
+into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering
+upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to
+meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than
+any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a
+veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the
+censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and
+curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see
+about them. Yet it did not occur to either to distrust the
+phenomenon, or to regard it as unnatural or the fruit of any
+unnatural law. It was somehow quite as convincing to them as is his
+first sight of electric light to the boy of the countryside, and no
+more to be regarded as witchcraft.
+
+St. George was silent. It was as if he were on the threshold of
+Far-Away, within the Porch of the Morning of some day divine. The
+place was so poignantly like the garden of a picture that one has
+seen as a child, and remembered as a place past all speech
+beautiful, and yet failed ever to realize in after years, or to make
+any one remember, or, save fleetingly in dreams to see once more,
+since the picture-book is never, never chanced upon again. Sometimes
+he had dreamed of a great sunny plain, with armies marching;
+sometimes he had awakened at hearing the chimes, and fancied
+sleepily that it was infinite music; sometimes, in the country in
+the early morning, he had had an unreasonable, unaccountable moment
+of perfect happiness: and now the fugitive element of them all
+seemed to have been crystallized and made his own in that floating
+walk down the wooded terraces of this unknown world. And yet he
+could not have told whether the element was contained in that
+beauty, or in his thought of Olivia.
+
+At last they emerged upon a narrow, grassy terrace where white steps
+mounted to a wide parapet. Jarvo ran up the steps and turned:
+
+"Behold Med, adôn," he said modestly, as if he had at that moment
+stirred it up in a sauce-pan and baked it before their astonished
+eyes.
+
+They were standing at the top of an immense flight of steps
+extending as far to right and left as they could see, and leading
+down by easy stages and wide landings to the white-paved city
+itself. The clear light flooded the scene--lucid, vivid,
+many-peopled. Far as the eye could see, broad streets extended,
+lined with structures rivaling in splendour and beauty those
+unforgotten "topless towers." Temples, palaces, and public buildings
+rose, storey upon storey, built of hewn stones of great size; and
+noble arches faced an open square before a temple of colossal
+masonry crowning an eminence in the centre of the city. Directly in
+line with this eminence rose the mountain upon whose summit stood
+the far-seen pillars where burned the solitary light.
+
+If an enchanted city had risen from the waves because some one had
+chanced to speak the right word, it could have been no more
+bewildering; and yet the look of this city was so substantial, so
+adapted to all commonplace needs, so essentially the scene of
+every-day activity and purpose, that dozens of towns of petty
+European principalities seem far less actual and practicable homes
+of men. Busy citizens hurrying, the bark of a dog, the mere tone of
+a temple bell spoke the ordinary occupations of all the world; and
+upon the chief street the moon looked down as tranquilly as if the
+causeway were a continuation of Fifth Avenue.
+
+But it was as if the spirit of adventure in St. George had suddenly
+turned and questioned him, saying:
+
+"What of Olivia?"
+
+For Olivia gone to a far-away island to find her father was subject
+of sufficient anxiety; but Olivia in the power of a pretender who
+might have at command such undreamed resources was more than cool
+reason could comprehend. That was the principal impression that Med,
+the King's City, made upon St. George.
+
+"To the right, adôn," Jarvo was saying, "where the walls are
+highest--that is the palace of the prince, the Palace of the
+Litany."
+
+"And the king's palace?" St. George asked eagerly.
+
+Jarvo lifted his face to the solitary summit light upon the
+mountain.
+
+"But how does one ascend?" cried St. George.
+
+"By permission of Prince Tabnit," replied Jarvo, "one is borne up
+by six imperial carriers, trained in the service from birth. One
+attempting the ascent alone would be dashed in pieces."
+
+"No municipal line of airships?" ventured Amory in slow
+astonishment.
+
+Jarvo did not quite get this.
+
+"The airships, adôn," he said, "belong to the imperial household and
+are kept at the summit of Mount Khalak."
+
+"A trust," comprehended Amory; "an absolute monarchy is a bit of a
+trust, anyhow. Of course, it's sometimes an outraged trust..." he
+murmured on.
+
+"The adôn," said Jarvo humbly, "will understand that we, I and Akko,
+have borne great risk. It is necessary that we make our peace with
+all speed, if that may be. The very walls are the ears of Prince
+Tabnit, and it is better to be behind those walls. May the gods
+permit the possible."
+
+"Do you mean to say," asked St. George, "that we too would better
+look out the prince at once?"
+
+"The adôn is wise," said Jarvo simply, "but nothing is hid from
+Prince Tabnit."
+
+St. George considered. In this mysterious place, whose ways were as
+unknown to him and to his companions as was the etiquette of the
+court of the moon, clearly diplomacy was the better part of valour.
+It was wiser to seek out Prince Tabnit, if he had really arrived on
+the island, than to be upon the defensive.
+
+"Ah, very well," he said briefly, "we will visit the prince."
+
+"Farewell, adôn," said Jarvo, bowing low, "may the gods permit the
+possible."
+
+"Of course you will communicate with us to-morrow," suggested St.
+George, "so that if we wish to send Rollo down to the yacht--"
+
+"The gods will permit the possible, adôn," Jarvo repeated gently.
+
+There was a flash of Akko's white teeth and the two little men were
+gone.
+
+St. George and Amory turned to the descending of the wide white
+steps. Such immense, impossible white steps and such a curious place
+for these two to find themselves, alone, with a valet. Struck by the
+same thought they looked at each other and nodded, laughing a
+little.
+
+"Alone in the distance," said Amory, emptying his pipe, "and not a
+cab to be seen."
+
+Rollo thrust forward his lean, shadowed face.
+
+"Shall I look about for a 'ansom, sir?" he inquired with perfect
+gravity.
+
+St. George hardly heard.
+
+"It's like cutting into a great, smooth sheet of white paper," he
+said whimsically, "and making any figure you want to make."
+
+Before they reached the bottom of the steps they divined, issuing
+from an isolated, temple-seeming building below, a train of
+sober-liveried attendants, all at first glance resembling Jarvo and
+Akko. These defiled leisurely toward the strangers and lined up
+irregularly at the foot of the steps.
+
+"Enter Trouble," said Amory happily.
+
+They found themselves confronting, in the midst of the attendants,
+an olive man with no angles, whose face, in spite of its health and
+even wealth of contour, was ridiculously grave, as if the
+_papier-mâché_ man in the down-town window should have had a sudden
+serious thought just before his _papier-mâché_ incarnation.
+
+"Permit me," said the man in perfect English and without bowing, "to
+bring to you the greeting of his Highness, Prince Tabnit, and his
+welcome to Yaque. I am Cassyrus, an officer of the government. At
+the command of his Highness I am come to conduct you to the palace."
+
+"The prince is most kind," said St. George, and added eagerly: "He
+is returned, then?"
+
+"Assuredly. Three days ago," was the reply.
+
+"And the king--is he returned?" asked St. George.
+
+The man shook his head, and his very anxiety seemed important.
+
+"His Majesty, the King," he affirmed, "is still most lamentably
+absent from his throne and his people."
+
+"And his daughter?" demanded St. George then, who could not
+possibly have waited an instant longer to put that question.
+
+"The daughter of his Majesty, the King," said Cassyrus, looking
+still more as if he were having his portrait painted, "will in three
+days be recognized publicly as Princess of Yaque."
+
+St. George's heart gave a great bound. Thank Heaven, she was here,
+and safe. His hope and confidence soared heavenward. And by some
+miracle she was to take her place as the people of Yaque had
+petitioned. But what was the meaning of that news of the prince's
+treachery which Jarvo and Akko had come bearing? The prince had
+faithfully fulfilled his mission and had conducted the daughter of
+the King of Yaque safely to her father's country. What did it all
+mean?
+
+St. George hardly noted the majestic square through which they
+were passing. Impressions of great buildings, dim white and misty
+grey and bathed in light, bewilderingly succeeded one another;
+but, as in the days which followed the news of his inheritance, he
+found himself now in a temper of unsurprise, in that mental
+atmosphere--properly the normal--which regards all miracle as
+natural law. He even omitted to note what was of passing
+strangeness: that neither the retinue of the minister nor the
+others upon the streets cast more than casual glances at their
+unusual visitors. But when the great gates of the palace were
+readied his attention was challenged and held, for though mere
+marvels may become the air one breathes, beauty will never cease
+to amaze, and the vista revealed was of almost disconcerting
+beauty.
+
+Avenues of brightness, arches of green, glimpses of airy columns, of
+boundless lawns set with high, pyramidal shrines, great places of
+quiet and straight line, alleys whose shadow taught the necessity of
+mystery, the sound of water--the pure, positive element of it
+all--and everywhere, above, below and far, that delicate, labyrinth
+light, diffused from no visible source. It was as if some strange
+compound had changed the character of the dark itself, transmuting
+it to a subtle essence more exquisite than light, inhabiting it with
+wonders. And high above their heads where this translucence seemed
+to mix with the upper air and to fuse with moonbeams, sprang almost
+joyously the pale domes and cornices of the palace, sending out
+floating streamers and pennons of colours nameless and unknown.
+
+"Jupiter," said the human Amory in awe, "what a picture for the
+first page of the supplement."
+
+St. George hardly heard him. The picture held so perfectly the
+elusive charm of the Question--the Question which profoundly
+underlies all things. It was like a triumphant burst of music which
+yet ends on a high note, with imperfect close, hinting passionately
+at some triumph still loftier.
+
+From either side of the wall of the palace yard came glittering a
+detachment of the Royal Golden Guard, clad in uniforms of unrelieved
+cloth-of-gold. These halted, saluted, wheeled, and between their
+shining ranks St. George and Amory footed quietly on, followed by
+Rollo carrying the yellow oil-skins. To St. George there was relief
+in the motion, relief in the vastness, and almost a boy's delight in
+the pastime of living the hour.
+
+Yet Royal Golden Guard, majestic avenues, and towered palace with
+its strange banners floating in strange light, held for him but one
+reality. And when they had mounted the steps of the mighty entrance,
+and the sound of unrecognized music reached him--a very myth of
+music, elusive, vagrant, fugued--and the palace doors swung open to
+receive them, he could have shouted aloud on the brilliant
+threshold:
+
+"He says she is here in Yaque."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
+
+
+So there were St. George and Amory presently domiciled in a prince's
+palace such as Asia and Europe have forgotten, as by and by they
+will forget the Taj Mahal and the Bon Marché. And at nine o'clock
+the next morning in a certain Tyrian purple room in the west wing of
+the Palace of the Litany the two sat breakfasting.
+
+"One always breakfasts," observed St. George. "The first day that
+the first men spend on Mars I wonder whether the first thing they do
+will be to breakfast."
+
+"Poor old Mars has got to step down now," said Amory. "We are one
+farther on. I don't know how it will be, but if I felt on Mars the
+way I do now, I should assent to breakfast. Shouldn't you?"
+
+"On my life, Toby," said St. George, "as an idealist you are
+disgusting. Yes, I should."
+
+The table had been spread before an open window, and the window
+looked down upon the palace garden, steeped in the gold of the sunny
+morning, and formal with aisles of mighty, flowering trees. Within,
+the apartment was lofty, its walls fashioned to lift the eye to
+light arches, light capitals, airy traceries, and spaces of the hue
+of old ivory, held in heavenly quiet. The sense of colour, colour
+both captive and atmospheric, was a new and persistent delight, for
+it was colour purified, specialized, and infinitely extended in
+either direction from the crudity of the seven-winged spectrum. The
+room was like an alcove of outdoors, not divorced from the open air
+and set in contra-distinction, but made a continuation of its space
+and order and ancient repose--a kind of exquisite porch of light.
+
+Across this porch of light Rollo stepped, bearing a covered dish.
+The little breakfast-table and the laden side-table were set with
+vessels of rock-crystal and drinking-cups of silver gilt, and
+breakfast consisted of delicately-prepared sea-food, a pulpy fruit,
+thin wine and a paste of delicious powdered gums. These things Rollo
+served quite as if he were managing oatmeal and eggs and china. One
+would have said that he had been brought up between the covers of an
+ancient history, nothing in consequence being so old or so new as to
+amaze him. Upon their late arrival the evening before he had
+instantly moved about his duties in all the quiet decorum with which
+he officiated in three rooms and a bath, emptying the oil-skins,
+disposing of their contents in great cedar chests, and, from
+certain rich and alien garments laid out for the guests, pretending
+as unconcernedly to fleck lint as if they had been broadcloth from
+Fifth Avenue. He stood bending above the breakfast-table, his lean,
+shadowed hands perfectly at home, his lean, shadowed face all
+automatic attention.
+
+"Rollo," said St. George, "go and look out the window and see if
+Sodom is smoking."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo, and moved to the nearest casement and bent
+his look submissively below.
+
+"Everything quiet, sir," he reported literally; "a very warm day,
+sir. But it's easy to sleep, sir, no matter how warm the days are if
+only the nights are cool. Begging your pardon, sir."
+
+St. George nodded.
+
+"You don't see Jezebel down there in the trees," he pressed him, "or
+Elissa setting off to found Carthage? Chaldea and Egypt all calm?"
+he anxiously put it.
+
+Rollo stirred uneasily.
+
+"There's a couple o' blue-tailed birds scrappin' in a palm tree,
+sir," he submitted hopefully.
+
+"Ah," said St. George, "yes. There would be. Now, if you like," he
+gave his servant permission, "you may go to the festivals or the
+funeral games or wherever you choose to-day. Or perhaps," he
+remembered with solicitude, "you would prefer to be present at the
+wedding-of-the-land-water-with-the-sea-water, providing, as I
+suspect, Tyre is handy?"
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Rollo doubtfully.
+
+"Mind you put your money on the crack disc-thrower, though," warned
+St. George, "and you might put up a couple of darics for me."
+
+"No," languidly begged Amory, "pray no. You are getting your periods
+mixed something horrid."
+
+"A person's recreation is as good for him as his food, sir,"
+proclaimed Rollo, sententious, anxious to agree.
+
+"Food," said Amory languidly, "this isn't food--it's molten history,
+that's what it is. Think--this is what they had to eat at the cafés
+boulevardes of Gomorrah. And to think we've been at Tony's, before
+now. Do you remember," he asked raptly, "those brief and savoury
+banquets around one o'clock, at Tony's? From where Little Cawthorne
+once went away wearing two omelettes instead of his overshoes? Don't
+tell me that Tonycana and all this belong to the same system in
+space. Don't tell me--"
+
+He stopped abruptly and his eyes sought those of St. George. It was
+all so incredible, and yet it was all so real and so essentially,
+distractingly natural.
+
+"I feel as if we had stepped through something, to somewhere else.
+And yet, somehow, there is so little difference. Do you suppose when
+people die _they_ don't notice any difference, either?"
+
+"What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's
+going to look in print. Think of Crass--digging for head-lines."
+
+St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl;
+but there were times--
+
+"Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the
+absolute."
+
+Amory nodded.
+
+"Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an
+Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out
+with the camera, while the light is good."
+
+The lateness of the hour of their arrival at the palace the evening
+before had prevented the prince from receiving them, but he had sent
+a most courteous message announcing that he himself would wait upon
+them at a time which he appointed. While they were abiding his
+coming, Rollo setting aside the dishes, Amory smoking, strolling up
+and down, and examining the faint symbolic devices upon the walls'
+tiling, St. George stood before one of the casements, and looked
+over the aisles of flowering tree-tops to the grim, grey sides of
+Mount Khalak, inscrutable, inaccessible, now not even hinting at the
+walls and towers upon its secret summit. He was thinking how
+heavenly curious it was that the most wonderful thing in his
+commonplace world of New York--that is, his meeting with
+Olivia--should, out here in this world of things wonderful beyond
+all dream, still hold supreme its place as the sovereign wonder, the
+sovereign delight.
+
+"I dare say that means something," he said vaguely to himself, "and
+I dare say all the people who are--in love--know what it does mean,"
+and at this his spirit of adventure must have nodded at him, as if
+it understood, too.
+
+When, in a little time, Prince Tabnit appeared at the open door of
+the "porch of light," it was as if he had parted from St. George in
+McDougle Street but the night before. He greeted him with exquisite
+cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He
+was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem
+burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly
+tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One
+might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested
+certain of his smile.
+
+"I wonder," he asked with engaging hesitation when he was seated,
+"whether I may have a--cigarette? That is the name? Yes, a
+cigarette. Tobacco is unknown in Yaque. We have invented no colonies
+useful for the luxury. How can it be--forgive me--that your people,
+who seem remote from poetry, should be the devisers and popularizers
+of this so poetic pastime? To breathe in the green of earth and the
+light of the dead sun! The poetry of your American smoke delights
+me."
+
+St. George smiled as he offered the prince his case.
+
+"In America," he said, "we devised it as a vice, your Highness. We
+are obliged to do the same with poetry, if we popularize it."
+
+And St. George was thinking:
+
+"Miss Holland. He has seen Miss Holland--perhaps yesterday. Perhaps
+he will see her to-day. And how in this world am I ever to mention
+her name?"
+
+But the prince was in the idlest and most genial of humours. He
+spoke at once of the matters uppermost in the minds of his guests,
+gave them news of the party from New York, told how they were in
+comfort in the palace on the summit of Mount Khalak, struck a
+momentary tragic note in mention of the mystery still mantling the
+absence of the king and repeated the announcement already made by
+Cassyrus, the premier, that in two days' time, failing the return of
+the sovereign, the king's daughter would be publicly recognized,
+with solemn ceremonial, as Princess of Yaque. Then he turned to St.
+George, his eyes searching him through the haze of smoke.
+
+"Your own coming to Yaque," he said abruptly, "was the result of a
+sudden decision?"
+
+"Quite so, your Highness," replied St. George. "It was wholly
+unexpected."
+
+"Then we must try to make it also an unexpected pleasure," suggested
+the prince lightly. "I am come to ask you to spend the day with me
+in looking about Med, the King's City."
+
+He dropped the monogrammed stub of his cigarette in a little jar of
+smaragdos, brought, he mentioned in passing, from a despoiled temple
+of one of the Chthonian deities of Tyre, and turned toward his
+guests with a winning smile.
+
+"Come," he said, "I can no longer postpone my own pleasure in
+showing you that our nation is the Lady of Kingdoms as once were
+Babylon and Chaldea."
+
+It was as if the strange panorama of the night before had once more
+opened its frame, and they were to step within. As the prince left
+them St. George turned to Rollo for the novelty of addressing a
+reality.
+
+"How do you wish to spend the day, Rollo?" he asked him.
+
+Rollo looked pensive.
+
+"Could I stroll about a bit, sir?" he asked.
+
+"Stroll!" commanded St. George cheerfully.
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Rollo. "I always think a man can best learn
+by observation, sir."
+
+"Observe!" supplemented his master pleasantly, as a detachment of
+the guard appeared to conduct Amory and him below.
+
+"Don't black up the sandals," Amory warned Rollo as he left him,
+"and be back early. We may want you to get us ready for a mastodon
+hunt."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo with simplicity, "I'll be back quite some
+time before tea-time, sir."
+
+St. George was smiling as they went down the corridor. He had been
+vain of his love that, in Yaque as in America, remained the thing it
+was, supreme and vital. But had not the simplicity of Rollo taken
+the leap in experience, and likewise without changing? For a moment,
+as he went down the silent corridors, lofty as the woods, vocal with
+faint inscriptions on the uncovered stone, the old human doubt
+assailed him. The very age of the walls was a protest against the
+assumption that there is a touchstone that is ageless. Even if there
+is, even if love is unchanging, the very temper of unconcern of his
+valet might be quite as persistent as love itself. But the gallery
+emptying itself into a great court open to the blue among graven
+rafters, St. George promptly threw his doubt to the fresh,
+heaven-kissing wind that smote their faces, and against mystery and
+argument and age alike he matched only the happy clamour of his
+blood. Olivia Holland was on the island, and all the age was gold.
+In Yaque or on the continents there can be no manner of doubt that
+this is love, as Love itself loves to be.
+
+They emerged in the appeasing air of that perfect morning, and the
+sweetness of the flowering trees was everywhere, and wide roads
+pointed invitingly to undiscovered bournes, and overhead in the
+curving wind floated the flags and streamers of those joyous, wizard
+colours.
+
+They went out into the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating
+at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds
+captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals
+itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey
+that he has taken long ago--Long Ago and Far Away are the great
+touchstones--and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget
+the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and forget
+the fabric, then he will understand the spirit that informed that
+first morning in Yaque. It was a morning all compact of wonder and
+delight--wonder at that which half-revealed itself, delight in the
+ever-present possibility that here, there, at any moment, Olivia
+Holland might be met. As for the wonder, that had taken some three
+thousand years to accumulate, as nearly as one could compute; and as
+for the delight, that had taken less than ten days to make possible;
+and yet there is no manner of doubt which held high place in the
+mind of St. George as the smooth miles fled away from hurrying
+wheels.
+
+Such wheels! Motors? St. George asked himself the question as he
+took his place beside the prince in the exquisitely light vehicle,
+Amory following with Cassyrus, and the suites coming after, like the
+path from a lanthorn. For the vehicles were a kind of electric
+motor, but constructed exquisitely in a fashion which, far from
+affronting taste, delighted the eye by leading it to lines of
+unguessed beauty. They were motors as the ancients would have built
+them if they had understood the trick of science, motors in which
+the lines of utility were veiled and taught to be subordinate. The
+speed attained was by no means great, and the motion was gentle and
+sacrificed to silence. And when St. George ventured to ask how they
+had imported the first motors, the prince answered that as Columbus
+was sailing on the waters of the Atlantic at adventure, the people
+of Yaque were touring the island in electric motors of much the same
+description, though hardly the clumsiness, of those which he had
+noticed in New York.
+
+This was the first astonishment, and other astonishments were to
+follow. For as they went about the island it was revealed that the
+remainder of the world is asleep with science for a pillow and the
+night-lamp of philosophy casting shadows. Yet as the prince
+exhibited wonders, one after another, St. George, dimly conscious
+that these are the things that men die to discover, would have given
+them all for one moment's meeting with Olivia on that high-road of
+Med. If you come to think of it, this may be why science always has
+moved so slowly, creeping on from point to point.
+
+Thus it came about that when Prince Tabnit indicated a low,
+pillared, temple-like building as the home of perpetual motion,
+which gave the power operating the manufactures and water supply of
+the entire island, St. George looked and understood and resolved to
+go over the temple before he left Yaque, and then fell a-wondering
+whether, when he did so, Olivia would be with him. When the prince
+explained that it is ridiculous to suppose that combustion is the
+chief means of obtaining light and heat, or that Heaven provided
+divinely-beautiful forests for the express purpose of their being
+burned up; and when he told him that artificial light and heat were
+effected in a certain reservoir (built with a classic regard for the
+dignity of its use as a link with unspoken forces) St. George
+listened, and said over with attention the name of the substance
+acted upon by emanations--and wondered if Olivia were not afraid of
+it. So it was all through the exhibition of more wonders scientific
+and economic than any one has dreamed since every one became a
+victim of the world's habit of being afraid to dream. Although it is
+true that when St. George chanced to observe that there were about
+Med few farms of tilled ground, the prince's reply did startle him
+into absorbed attention:
+
+"You are referring to agriculture?" Prince Tabnit said after a
+moment's thought. "I know the word from old parchments brought from
+Phoenicia by our ancestors. But I did not know that the art is in
+practice anywhere in the world. Do you mean to assure me," cried the
+prince suddenly, "that the vegetables which I ate in America were
+raised by what is known as 'tilling the soil'?"
+
+"How else, your Highness?" doubted St. George, wondering if he were
+responsible for the fading mentality of the prince.
+
+Prince Tabnit looked away toward the splendour of some new thought.
+
+"How beautiful," he said, "to subsist on the sun and the dust.
+Beautiful and lost, like the dreams of Mitylene. But I feel as if I
+were reading in Genesis," he declared. "Is it possible that in this
+'age of science' of yours it has not occurred to your people that if
+plants grow by slowly extracting their own elements from the soil,
+those elements artificially extracted and applied to the seed will
+render growth and fruitage almost instantaneous?"
+
+"At all events we've speculated about it," St. George hastened to
+impart with pride, "just as we do about telephones that will let
+people see one another when they talk. But nearly every one smiles
+at both."
+
+"Don't smile," the prince warned him. "Yaque has perfected both
+those inventions only since she ceased to smile at their
+probability. Nothing can be simpler than instantaneous vegetation.
+Any Egyptian juggler can produce it by using certain acids. We have
+improved the process until our fruits and vegetables are produced as
+they are needed, from hour to hour. This was one of the so-called
+secrets of the ancient Phoenicians--has it never occurred to you as
+important that the Phoenician name for Dionysos, the god of
+wine-growers, was lost?"
+
+Mentally St. George added another barrel to the cargo of _The
+Aloha_, and wondered if the _Sentinel_ would start botanical gardens
+and a lighting plant and turn them to the account of advertisers.
+
+All the time, mile upon mile, was unrolling before them the
+unforgetable beauty of the island. So perfectly were its features
+marshaled and so exact were its proportions that, as in many great
+experiences and as in all great poems, one might not, without
+familiarity, recall its detail, but must instead remain wrapped in
+the glory of the whole. The avenues, wide as a river, swept between
+white banks of majestic buildings combining with the magic of great
+mass the pure beauty of virginal line. Line, the joy of line, the
+glory of line, almost, St. George thought, the divinity of line, was
+everywhere manifest; and everywhere too the divinity of colour, no
+longer a quality extraneous, laid on as insecure fancy dictates,
+but, by some law long unrevealed, now actually identified with the
+object which it not so much decorated as purified. The most
+interesting of the thoroughfares led from the Eurychôrus, or public
+square, along the lagoon. This fair water, extending from Med to
+Melita, was greenly shored and dotted with strange little pleasure
+crafts with exquisite sweeping prows and silken canopies. Before a
+white temple, knee-deep in whose flowered ponds the ibises dozed
+and contemplated, was anchored the imperial trireme, with
+delicately-embroidered sails and prow and poop of forgotten metals.
+From within, temple music sounded softly and was never permitted to
+be silenced, as the flame of the Vestals might never be
+extinguished. Here on the shores had begun the morning traffic of
+itinerant merchants of Med and Melita, compelled by law to carry on
+their exchange in the morning only, when the light is least lovely.
+Upon canopied wagons drawn by strange animals, with shining horns,
+were displayed for sale all the pleasantest excuses for
+commerce--ostrich feathers, gums, gems, quicksilver, papyrus, bales
+of fair cloth, pottery, wine and oranges. The sellers of salt and
+fish and wool and skins were forced down under the wharfs of the
+lagoon, and there endeavoured to attract attention by displaying
+fanciful and lovely banners and by liberating faint perfumes of the
+native orris and algum. Street musicians, playing tunefully upon the
+zither and upon the crowd, wandered, wearing wreaths of fir, and
+clustered about stalls where were offered tenuous blades, and
+statues, and temple vessels filled with wine and flowers.
+
+At the head of the street leading to the temple of Baaltis (My
+Lady--Aphrodite) the prince's motor was checked while a procession
+of pilgrims, white-robed and carrying votive offerings, passed
+before them, the votive tablet to the Lady Tanith and the Face of
+Baal being borne at the head of the line by a dignitary in a smart
+electric victoria. This was one of the frequent Festival Embassies
+to Melita, to combine religious rites with mourning games and the
+dedication of the tablet, and there was considerable delay incident
+to the delivery of a wireless message to the dignitary with the
+tablet of the Semitic inscription. St. George wondered vaguely why,
+in a world of marvels, progress should not already have outstripped
+the need of any communication at all. This reminded him of something
+at which the prince had hinted away off in another æon, in another
+world, when St. George had first seen him, and there followed ten
+minutes of talk not to be forgotten.
+
+"Would it be possible for you to tell me, your Highness," St. George
+asked,--and thereafter even a lover must have forgiven the brief
+apostasy of his thought--"how it can be that you know the English?
+How you are able to speak it here in Yaque?"
+
+The motor moved forward as the procession passed, and struck into a
+magnificent country avenue bordered by trees, tall as elms and
+fragrant as acacias.
+
+"I can tell you, yes," said the prince, "but I warn you that you
+will not in the least understand me. I dare say, however, that I may
+illustrate by something of which you know. Do there chance to be,
+for example, any children in America who are regarded as prodigies
+of certain understanding?"
+
+"You mean," St. George asked, "children who can play on a musical
+instrument without knowing how they do it, and so on?"
+
+"Quite so," said the prince with interest.
+
+"Many, your Highness," affirmed St. George. "I myself know a child
+of seven who can play most difficult piano compositions without ever
+having been taught, or knowing in the least how he does it."
+
+"Do you think of any one else?" asked the prince.
+
+"Yes," said St. George, "I know a little lad of about five, I should
+say, who can add enormous numbers and instantly give the accurate
+result. And he has no idea how he does that, and no one has ever
+taught him to count above twelve. Oh--every one knows those cases, I
+fancy."
+
+"Has any one ever explained them, Mr. St. George?" asked the prince.
+
+"How should they?" asked St. George simply. "They are prodigies."
+
+"Quite so," said the prince again. "It is almost incredible that
+these instances seem to suggest to no one that there must be other
+ways to 'learn' music and mathematics--and, therefore, everything
+else--than those known to your civilization. Let me assure you that
+such cases as these, far from being miracles and prodigies, are
+perfectly normal when once the principle is understood, as we of
+Yaque understand it. It is the average intelligence among your
+people which is abnormal, inasmuch as it is unable to perform these
+functions which it was so clearly intended to exercise."
+
+"Do you mean," asked St. George, "that we need not learn--as we
+understand 'learn'?"
+
+"Precisely," said the prince simply. "You are accustomed, I was told
+in New York, to say that there is 'no royal road to learning.' On
+the contrary, I say to you that the possibilities of these children
+are in every one. But to my intense surprise I find that we of Yaque
+are the only ones in the world who understand how to use these
+possibilities. Our system of education consists simply in mastering
+this principle. After that, all knowledge--all languages, for
+instance--everything--belongs to us."
+
+St. George looked away to the rugged sides of Mount Khalak, lying in
+its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima
+Thule. It was all right--what he had just been hearing was a part of
+this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet _he_
+was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic,
+perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the
+prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that
+he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might
+have been his of his own accord if only he had understood how to
+call them in!
+
+"That would make a very jolly thing of college," he pensively
+conceded. "You could not show me how it is managed, your Highness?"
+he besought. "That will hardly come in bulk, too--"
+
+The prince shook his head, smiling.
+
+"I could not 'show you,' as you say," he answered, "any more than I
+could, at present, send a wireless communication without the
+apparatus--though it will be only a matter of time until that is
+accomplished, too."
+
+St. George pulled himself up sharply. He glanced over his shoulder
+and saw Amory polishing his pince-nez and looking quite as if he
+were leaning over hansom-doors in the park, and he turned quickly to
+the prince, half convinced that he had been mocked.
+
+"Suppose, your Highness," he said, "that I were to print what you
+have just told me on the front page of a New York morning paper,
+for people to glance over with their coffee? Do you think that even
+the most open-minded among them would believe that there is such a
+place as Yaque?"
+
+The prince smiled curiously, and his long-fringed lids drooped in
+momentary contemplation. The auto turned into that majestic avenue
+which terminates in the Eurychôrus before the Palace of the Litany.
+St. George's eye eagerly swept the long white way. At its far end
+stood Mount Khalak. _She_ must have passed over this very ground.
+
+"There is," the prince's smooth voice broke in upon his dream, "no
+such place as Yaque--as you understand 'place.'"
+
+"I beg your pardon, your Highness?" St. George doubted blankly. Good
+Heavens. Maybe there had arrived in Yaque no Olivia, as he
+understood Olivia.
+
+"You showed some surprise, I remember," continued the prince, "when
+I told you, in McDougle Street, that we of Yaque understand the
+Fourth Dimension."
+
+McDougle Street. The sound smote the ear of St. George much as would
+the clang of the fire patrol in the midst of light opera.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said, his attention now completely chained. Yet even
+then it was not that he cared so absorbingly about the Fourth
+Dimension. But what if this were all some trick and if, in this
+strange land, Olivia had simply been flashed before his eyes by the
+aid of mirrors?
+
+"I find," said the prince with deliberation, "that in America you
+are familiar with the argument that, if your people understood
+only length and breadth and did _not_ understand the Third
+Dimension--thickness--you could not then conceive of lifting, say,
+a square or a triangle and laying it down upon another square or
+triangle. In other words, you would not know anything of _up_ and
+_down_."
+
+St. George nodded. This was the familiar talk of college
+class-rooms.
+
+"As it is," pursued the prince, "your people do perfectly understand
+lifting a square and placing it upon a square, or a triangle upon a
+triangle. But you do not know anything about placing a cube upon a
+cube, or a pyramid upon a pyramid _so that both occupy the same
+space at the same time_. We of Yaque have mastered that principle
+also," the prince tranquilly concluded, "and all that of which this
+is the alphabet. That is why we are able to keep our island unknown
+to the world--not to say 'invisible.'"
+
+For a moment St. George looked at him speechlessly; then, in spite
+of himself, a slow smile overspread his face.
+
+"But," he said, "your Highness, there is not a mathematician in the
+civilized world who has not considered that problem and cast it
+aside, with the word that if fourth-dimensional space does exist it
+can not possibly be inhabited."
+
+"Quite so," said the prince, "and yet here we are."
+
+And, if you come to think of it--as St. George did--that is the only
+answer to a world of impossibilities already proved possible. But
+the vista which all this opened smote him with irresistible humour.
+
+"Ah well now, I suppose, your Highness," he said, "that our ocean
+liners sail clean through the island of Yaque, then, and never even
+have their smoke pushed sidewise?"
+
+The prince laughed pleasantly.
+
+"Have you ever," he asked, "had occasion to explain the principles
+of hydraulics, or chess, or philosophical idealism to a
+three-year-old child, or a charwoman? You must forgive me, but
+really I can think of no better comparison. I am quite as powerless
+now as you have been if you have ever attempted it. I can only
+assure you that such things _are_. Without Jarvo or Akko or some one
+who understood, you might have sailed the high seas all your life
+and never have come any nearer to Yaque."
+
+St. George reflected.
+
+"Is Yaque the only example of this kind of thing," he asked, "that
+the Fourth Dimension would reveal?"
+
+"By no means," said the prince in surprise, "the world is
+literally teeming with like revelations, once the key is in your
+hands. The Fourth Dimension is only the beginning. We utilize that
+to isolate our island. But the higher dimensions are gradually
+being conquered, too. Nearly all of us can pass into the Fifth at
+will, 'disappearing,' as you have the word, from the lower
+dimensions. It is well-known to you that in a land whose people
+knew length and breadth, but no _up_ and _down_, an object might
+be pushed, but never lifted _up_ or put _down_. If it were to be
+lifted, such a people would believe it to have 'disappeared.' So,
+from you who know only three dimensions, Yaque has 'disappeared,'
+until one of us guides you here. Also we pass at will into the
+Fifth Dimension and even higher, and seem to 'disappear'; the only
+difference is that, there, we should not be able yet to guide one
+who did not himself understand how to pass there. Just as one who
+understands how to die and to come to life, as you have the
+phrase, would not be able to take with him any one who did not
+understand how to take himself there..."
+
+St. George listened, grasping at straws of comprehension,
+remembering how he had heard all this theorized about and smiled at;
+but most of all he was beset by a practical consideration.
+
+"Then," he said suddenly, the question leaping to his lips almost
+against his will, "if you hold this key to all knowledge, how is it
+that the king--Mr. Holland--could get away from you, and the
+Hereditary Treasure be lost?"
+
+The prince sighed profoundly.
+
+"We have by no means," he said, "perfected our knowledge. We are at
+one with the absolute in knowledge--true. But the affairs of every
+day most frequently elude us. Not even the most advanced among us
+are perfect intuitionists. We have by no means reached that
+desirable and inevitable day when our minds shall flow together,
+without need of communication, without possibility of secret. We
+still suffer the disadvantage of a slight barrier of personality."
+
+"And it is into one of these lapses," thought St. George
+irreverently, "that the king has disappeared." Aloud he asked
+curiously concerning a matter which was every moment becoming more
+incomprehensible.
+
+"But how, your Highness," he said simply, "did your people ever
+consent to have an American for your king?"
+
+Before the prince could reply there occurred a phenomenon that sent
+all thought of such insubstantialities as the secrets of the Fourth
+Dimension far in the background.
+
+The prince's motor, closely followed by the others of the train, had
+reached a little eminence from which the island unrolled in fair
+patterns. Before them the smooth road unwound in varied light. At
+their left lay a still grove from whose depths was glimpsed a slim
+needle of a tower, rising, arrow-like, from the green. In the
+distance lay Med, with shining domes. The water of the lagoon gave
+brightness here and there among the hills. And as St. George and the
+prince looked over the prospect they saw, far down the avenue toward
+Med, a little, moving speck--a speck moving with a rapidity which
+neither the prince's motor nor any known motor of Yaque had ever
+before permitted itself.
+
+In an instant the six members of the Royal Golden Guard, who upon
+beautiful, spirited horses rode in advance of the train of the
+prince, wheeled and thundered back, lifting glittering hands of
+warning. "Aside! Aside!" shrieked the main Golden Guard, "a motor is
+without control!"
+
+Immediately there was confusion. At a touch the prince's car was
+drawn to the road's extreme edge, and the Golden Guards rode
+furiously back along the train, hailing the peaceful, slow-going
+machines into orderly retreat. They were all sufficiently amenable,
+for at sight of the alarming and unprecedented onrush of the growing
+speck that was bearing full down upon them, anxiety sat upon every
+face.
+
+St. George watched. And as the car drew nearer the thought which, at
+first sight of its speed, had vaguely flashed into being, took
+definite shape, and his blood leaped to its music. Whose hand would
+be upon that lever, whose daring would be directing its flight,
+whose but one in all Yaque--and that Olivia's?
+
+It was Olivia. That was plain even in the mere instant that it took
+the great, beautiful motor, at thirty miles an hour, to flash past
+them. St. George saw her--coat of hunting pink and fluttering veil
+and shining eyes; he was dimly conscious of another little figure
+beside her, and of the unmistakable and agonized Mrs. Hastings in
+the tonneau; but it was only Olivia's glance that he caught as it
+swept the prince. There was the faintest possible smile, and she was
+gone; and St. George, his heart pounding, sat staring stupidly after
+that shining cloud of dust, frantically wondering whether she could
+just possibly have seen him. For this was no trick of the
+imagination, his galloping heart told him that. And whether or not
+Yaque was a place, the world, the world was within his grasp,
+instinct with possibilities heavenly sweet. His eyes met Amory's in
+the minute when Cassyrus, prime minister of Yaque, had it borne in
+upon him that this was no runaway machine, but the ordinary and
+preferred pace of the daughter of their king; and while Cassyrus, at
+the enormity of the conception, breathed out expostulations in
+several languages--some of them known to us only by means of
+inscriptions on tombs--Amory spoke to St. George:
+
+"Who was the other girl?" he asked comprehensively.
+
+"What other girl?" St. George blankly murmured.
+
+And at this, Amory turned away with a look that could be made to
+mean whatever Amory meant.
+
+On went the imperial train faring back to Med over the road lately
+stirred to shining dust by the wheels of Olivia's auto. Olivia's
+auto. St. George was secretly saying over the words with a kind of
+ecstatic non-comprehension, when the prince spoke:
+
+"That," he said, "may explain why an American has been able to
+govern us. Chance crowned him, but he made himself king."
+
+Prince Tabnit hesitated and his eyes wandered--and those of St.
+George followed--to a far winding dot in that opal valley, a mere
+speck of silver with a prick of pink, fleeing in a cloud of sunny
+dust.
+
+"I do not know if you will know what I mean," said the prince, "but
+hers is the spirit, and the spirit of her father, the king, which
+Yaque had never known. It is the spirit which we of Phoenicia seem
+to have lost since the wealth of the world accumulated at her ports
+and she gave her trust to the hands of mariners and mercenaries, and
+later bowed to the conqueror. It is the spirit that not all the
+continental races, I fancy, have for endowment, but yours possesses
+in rich measure. For this we would exchange half that we have
+achieved."
+
+St. George nodded, glowing.
+
+"It is a great tribute, your Highness," he said simply, and in his
+heart he laid it at Olivia's feet.
+
+Thereafter, in the long ride to Melita, during luncheon upon a high
+white terrace overlooking the sailless sea, and in the hours on the
+unforgetable roads of the islands, St. George, while incommunicable
+marvels revealed themselves linked with incommunicable beauty, sat
+in the prince's motor, his eyes searching the horizon for that
+fleeing speck of silver and pink. It did not appear again. And when
+the train of the prince rolled into the yard of the Palace of the
+Litany it trembled upon St. George's lips to ask whether the
+formalities of the court would permit him that day to scale the
+skies and call upon the royal household.
+
+"For whatever he says, I've got to do," thought St. George, "but no
+matter what he says, I shall go. Doesn't Amory realize that we've
+been more than twelve hours on this island, and that nothing has
+been done?"
+
+And then as they crossed the grassy court in the delicate hush of
+the merging light--the nameless radiance already penetrating the
+dusk--the prince spoke smoothly, as if his words bore no import
+deeper than his smile:
+
+"You are come," he said courteously, "in time for one of the
+ceremonies of our régime most important--to me. You will, I hope, do
+honour to the occasion by your presence. This evening, in the Hall
+of Kings in the Palace of the Litany, will occur the ceremony of my
+betrothal."
+
+"Your betrothal, your Highness?" repeated St. George uncertainly.
+
+"You will be attended by an escort," the prince continued, "and
+Balator, the commander of the guard, will receive you in the hall.
+May the gods permit the possible."
+
+He swept through the portico before them, and they followed dumbly.
+
+The betrothal of the prince.
+
+St. George heard, and his eager hope went down in foreboding. He
+turned, hardly daring to read his own dread in the eyes of Amory.
+
+Amory, as St. George had said, was delicious, especially his drawl;
+but there were times--now, for example, when all that the eyes of
+Amory expressed was what his lips framed, _sotto-voce_:
+
+"An American heiress, betrothed to the prince of a cannibal island!
+Wouldn't Chillingworth turn in his grave at his desk?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+TYRIAN PURPLE
+
+
+The "porch of light" proved to be an especially fascinating place at
+evening. Evening, which makes most places resemble their souls
+instead of their bodies, had a grateful task in the beautiful room
+whose spirit was always uppermost, and Evening moved softly in its
+ivory depths, preluding for Sleep. Here, his lean, shadowed face all
+anxiety, Rollo stood, holding at arm's length a parti-coloured robe
+with floating scarfs.
+
+"It seems to me, sir," he said doubtfully, "that this one would 'ave
+done better. Beggin' your pardon, sir."
+
+St. George shook his head distastefully.
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said, and broke into a slow smile as he
+looked at Amory. The robes which the prince had provided for the
+evening were rather harder to become accustomed to than the notion
+of intuitive knowledge.
+
+"There's an air about this one though, sir," opined Rollo firmly,
+"there's a cut--a sort of _way_ with the seams, so to speak, sir,
+that the other can't touch. And cut is what counts, sir, cut counts
+every time."
+
+"Ah, yes, I dare say, Rollo," said St. George, "and as a judge of
+'cut' I don't say you can be equaled. But I do say that in the
+styles of Deuteronomy you aren't necessarily what you might call
+up."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo, dropping his eyes, "but a well-dressed man
+was a well-dressed man, sir, then _as_ now."
+
+As a matter of fact the well-knit, athletic young figures looked
+uncommonly well in the garments _à la mode_ in Yaque. One would have
+said that if the garments followed Deuteronomy fashions they had at
+all events been cut by the scissors of a court tailor to Louis XV.
+The result was beautiful and bizarre, but it did not suggest
+stageland because the colours were so good.
+
+"I dare say," said St. George, examining the exquisitely fine cloth
+whose shades were of curious depth and richness, "that this may be
+regular Tyrian purple."
+
+Amory waved his long sleeves.
+
+"Stop," he languidly begged, "you make me feel like a golden text."
+
+St. George went back to the row of open casements and resumed his
+walk up and down before the windows that looked away to the huge
+threatening bulk of Mount Khalak. Since the prince's announcement
+that afternoon St. George had done little besides continuing that
+walk. Now it wanted hardly half an hour to the momentous ceremony of
+the evening, big with at least one of the dozen portents of which he
+accused it.
+
+"Amory," he burst out as he walked, "if you didn't know anything
+about it, would you say that the prince could possibly have made her
+consent to marry him?"
+
+Amory, left in the middle of the great room, stood polishing his
+pince-nez exactly as if he had been waiting at the end of
+Chillingworth's desk of a bright, American morning.
+
+"If I didn't know anything about it," he said cheerfully, "I should
+say that he had. As it is, having this afternoon watched a certain
+motor wear its way past me, I should say that nothing in Yaque is
+more unlikely. And that's about as strong as you could put it."
+
+"We don't know what the man may have threatened," said St. George
+morosely, "he may have played upon her devotion to her father to
+some ridiculous extent. He may have refused to land the submarine at
+Yaque at all otherwise--"
+
+St. George broke off suddenly.
+
+"Toby!" he said.
+
+Amory looked over and nodded. He had seen that look before on St.
+George's face.
+
+"She's not going to marry the prince," said St. George, "and if her
+father is alive and in a hole, he's going to be pulled out. And
+she's _not_ going to marry the prince."
+
+"Why, no," assented Amory, "no."
+
+He had guessed a good deal of the truth since he had been watching
+St. George flee over seas upon a yacht, shod, so to speak, with
+fire, and he had arrived at the suspicion that _The Aloha_ was
+winged by little Loves and guided under water by plenty of blue and
+green dragons. But he had not, until now, been thoroughly certain
+that St. George's spirit of adventure had another name; and though
+theoretically his sympathies leaped to the look in his friend's
+eyes, yet he found himself wondering practically what effect romance
+would be having upon their enterprise. After all, from a newspaper
+point of view, to relinquish any part of the adventure was a kind of
+tragedy, and it cost Amory something to emphasize his assent.
+
+"Of course she won't," he said, "and now let's toddle down and see
+about it."
+
+When the tread of the feet of a detachment of the Royal Golden Guard
+was heard without, Rollo advanced to the door with a dignity which
+amounted to melancholy. The setting of a palace and the proximity of
+a prince had raised his office to the majesty of skilled labour. He
+always threw open the door now as who should say, "Enter. But mind
+you have a reason."
+
+At sight of the long liberty of the corridor where the light lay
+mysteriously touching tiles and tapestries to festal colours,
+Amory's spirits rose contagiously, and his eyes shone behind his
+pince-nez.
+
+"Me," he said, looking ahead with enjoyment at the glittering
+escort, "me--done in a fabric of about the eleventh shade of the
+Yaque spectrum--made loose and floppy, after a modish Canaanitish
+model. I'll wager that when the first-born of Canaan was in the
+flood-tide of glory, this very gown was worn by one of the most
+beautiful women in the pentapolis of Philistia. I'm going to
+photograph the model for the Sunday supplement, and name it _The
+Nebuchadnezzar_."
+
+Amory murmured on, and St. George hardly heard him. He could almost
+count by minutes now the time until he should see her. Would she see
+him, and might he just possibly speak with her, and what would the
+evening hold for her? As he went forth where she would be, the spell
+of the place was once more laid upon him, as it had been laid in the
+hour of his coming. Once more, as in the hour when he had first
+looked down upon the valley brimming with a light "better than any
+light that ever shone" he was at one with the imponderable things
+which, always before, had just eluded him. Now, as then, the thought
+of Olivia was the symbol for them all. So the two went on through
+the winding galleries--silent, haunted--to the great staircase, and
+below into the crowded court. And when they reached the threshold
+of the audience-chamber they involuntarily stood still.
+
+The hall was like a temple in its sense of space and height and
+clear air, but its proportions did not impress one, and indeed one
+could not remember its boundaries as one does not consider the
+boundaries of a grove. It was amphitheatre-shaped, and about it ran
+a splendid colonnade, in the niches of whose cornices were beautiful
+grotesques--but Yaque seemed to be a land whose very grotesques had
+all the dignity of the ultimate instead of crying for the indulgence
+due a phase. The roof was inlaid with prisms of clear stone, and on
+high were pilasters carved with the Tyrian sphinxes crucified upon
+upright crosses, surmounted by parhelions of burnished metal. All
+the seats faced a great dais at the chamber's far end where three
+thrones were set.
+
+But it was the men and women in the great chamber who filled St.
+George with wonder. The women--they were beautiful women,
+slow-moving, slow-eyed, of soft laughter and sudden melancholy, and
+clear, serene profiles and abundant hair. And they were all _alive_,
+fully and mysteriously alive, alive to their finger-tips. It was as
+if in comparison all other women acted and moved in a kind of
+half-consciousness. It was as if, St. George thought vaguely, one
+were to step through the frame of a pre-Raphaelite tapestry and
+suddenly find its strange women rejoicing in fulfillment instead of
+yearning, in noon instead of dusk. As he stood looking down the vast
+chamber, all springing columns and light lines lifting through the
+honey-coloured air, it smote St. George that these people, instead
+of being far away, were all near, surprisingly, unbelievably near to
+him,--in a way, nearer to his own elusive personality than he was
+himself. They were all obviously of his own class; he could
+perfectly imagine his mother, with her old lace and Roman mosaics,
+moving at home among them, and the bishop, with his wise, kindly
+smile. Yet he was irresistibly reminded of a certain haunting dream
+of his childhood in which he had seemed to himself to walk the world
+alone, with every one else allied against him because they all knew
+something that he did not know. That was it, he thought suddenly,
+and felt his pulse quickening at the intimation: _They all knew
+something that he did not know_, that he could not know. But, as
+they swept him with their clear-eyed, impersonal look, a look
+that seemed in some exquisite fashion to take no account of
+individuality, he was gratefully aware of a curious impression
+that they would like to have had him know, too.
+
+"They wish I knew--they'd rather I did know," St. George found
+himself thinking in a strange excitement, "if only I could know--if
+only I could know."
+
+He looked about him, smiling a little at his folly. He saw the
+light flash on Amory's glasses as they turned inquisitively on this
+and that, and somehow the sight steadied him.
+
+"Ah well," he assured himself, "I'll look them up in a thousand
+years or so, and we'll dine together, and then we'll say: 'Don't you
+remember how I didn't know?'"
+
+Immediately there presented himself to them a little man who proved
+to be Balator, lord-chief-commander of the Royal Golden Guard, and
+now especially directed by the prince, he pleasantly told them, to
+be responsible for their entertainment and comfort during the
+ceremony to follow. They were, in fact, his guests for the evening,
+but St. George and Amory were uncertain whether, considering his
+office, this was a high honour or a kind of exalted durance.
+However, as the man was charming the doubt was not important. He had
+an attenuated face, so conveniently brown by race as to suggest the
+most soldierly exposure, and he had great, peaceable, slow-lidded
+eyes. He was, they subsequently learned, an authority upon insect
+life in Yaque, for he had never had the smallest opportunity to go
+to war.
+
+As Balator led his guests to their seats near the throne every one
+looked on them, as they passed, with the serenest fellowship, and no
+regard persisted longer than a glance, friendly and fugitive.
+Balator himself not only refrained from stoning the barbarians with
+commonplaces, but he did not so much as mention America to them or
+treat them otherwise than as companions, as if his was not only the
+cosmopolitanism that knows no municipal or continental aliens of its
+own class, but a kind of inter-dimensional cosmopolitanism as well.
+
+"Which," said Amory afterward, "was enviable. The next man from
+Trebizond or Saturn or Fez whom I meet I'm going to greet and treat
+as if he lived the proverbial 'twenty minutes out.'"
+
+A great clock boomed and throbbed through the palace, striking an
+hour that was no more intelligible than the jargon of a ship's clock
+to a landsman. Somewhere an orchestra thrilled into haunting sound,
+poignant with disclosures barely missed. Overhead, through the
+mighty rafters of the conical roof, the moon looked down.
+
+"That'll be the same old moon," said Amory. "By Jove! Won't it?"
+
+"It will, please Heaven," said St. George restlessly; "I don't know.
+Will it?"
+
+Near the throne was seated a company of dignitaries who wore upon
+their breasts great stars and were soberly dressed in a kind of
+scholar's gown. Some whispered together and nodded and looked as
+solemn as tithing men; and others were feverishly restless and
+continually took papers from their graceful sleeves. By
+developments these were revealed to be the High Council of Yaque,
+conservative and radical, even in dimensional isolation. Farther
+back rose tier upon tier of seats sacred to the wives and daughters
+of the ministry, and St. George even looked hopelessly and
+mechanically among these for the face that he sought.
+
+To some seats slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his
+attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of
+purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to
+have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs.
+Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham, in indescribably gorgeous apparel elaborately bent to
+receive--and a member of the High Council bent to hand--two
+glittering articles which St. George was certain were side-combs.
+There the lady sat, tilting her head to keep her tortoise-shell
+glasses on her nose, perpetually curving their chain over her ear, a
+gesture by which the side-combs were perpetually displaced. If the
+island people had been painted purple, St. George felt sure that she
+would have acted quite the same. Personality meant nothing to
+her--not, as with them, because it had been merged in something
+greater, but because, with her, it was overborne by self. And there
+sat Mr. Frothingham (who did not attend the play during court
+because he believed that a man of affairs should not unduly
+stimulate the imagination), his head thrown back so that his long
+hair rested on his amazing collar, his hands laid trimly along his
+knees. In that crystal air, instinct with its delicate, dominant
+implication of things imponderable, the personality of each
+persisted undisturbed, in a kind of adamantine unconsciousness.
+Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St. George
+smiled a shade bitterly. Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?
+Is love's uttermost gift so little? But as the music swelled with
+premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very
+transitoriness disclosed: the persistence of love, love's mere
+immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is
+elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to
+which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.
+
+Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by
+the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about
+the walls and from the alcoves of the lofty roof. Then a veil
+hanging between two pillars was drawn aside, and the prince's train
+appeared. There were a detachment of the guard, splendid in their
+unrelieved gold, and the officers of the court, at their head
+Cassyrus, the premier, who had manifestly been compounded of Heaven
+to be a drum-major, and had so undeviating a look that he seemed
+always to have been caught, red-handed, at his post. Last came
+Prince Tabnit, dressed in pure white save for a collar of precious
+stones from which hung the strange green gem that St. George
+remembered. His clear face and the whiteness of his hair lent to him
+an air of almost unearthly distinction. His delicate hands wearing
+no jewels were at his sides, and his head was magnificently erect.
+He mounted the dais as the music sank to silence, and without
+preface began to speak.
+
+"My people," he said, and St. George felt himself thrilling with the
+strength and tenderness of that voice, "in the continuance of this
+our time of trial we come among you that we may win strength and
+courage from your presence. Since one mind dwells in us all, we have
+no need of words of cheer. That no message from his Majesty, the
+King, has come to us is known to you all, with mourning. But the
+gods--to whom 'here' is the same as 'there'--will permit the
+possible, and they have permitted to us the presence of the daughter
+of our sovereign, by the grace of the infinite, heir to the throne
+of Yaque. In two days, should his Majesty not then have returned to
+his sorrowing people, she will, in accordance with our custom, be
+crowned Hereditary Princess of Yaque and, after one year, Queen of
+Yaque and your rightful sovereign."
+
+As the prince paused, a little breath of assent was in the room,
+more potent than any crudity of applause.
+
+"Next," pursued the prince, "we would invite your attention to our
+own affairs, which are of importance solely as they are affected by
+the immemorial tradition of the House of the Litany. Therefore, in
+accordance with the custom of our predecessors for two thousand
+years," lightly pursued the prince, "we have named this day as the
+day of our betrothal. Moreover, this is determined upon in justice
+to the daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque, whose marriage the
+law forbids until the choice of the head of the House of the Litany
+has been made..."
+
+St. George listened, and his hope soared heavenward as the hope of
+young love will soar, in spite of itself, at the mere sight of open
+sky. The daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque! Of course they were
+to be considered. Why should he fear that, because Olivia was in
+Yaque, the mere mention of a betrothal referred to Olivia? He was
+bold enough to smile at his fears, to smile even when, as the prince
+ceased speaking, the music sounded again, as it were from the air,
+in a chorus of pure young voices with a ripple of unknown strings in
+accompaniment.
+
+Suddenly, at the opening of great doors, a flood of saffron light
+was poured upon a stair, and at the summit appeared the leisurely
+head of a procession which the two men were destined never to
+forget. Across the gallery and down the stair--it might have been
+the Golden Stair linking Near with Far--came a score of exquisite
+women in all the glory of their youth, of perfect physical beauty
+and splendid strength and fullness of life; and the wonder was not
+their beauty more than a kind of dryad delicacy of that beauty,
+which was yet not frailty but a look of angelic strength. But they
+were not remote--they were gloriously human, almost, one would say,
+divinely human, all gentle movement and warmth and tender breath.
+They were not remote, save as one's own soul would be remote by its
+very excess of intimacy with life, Little maids, so shy that their
+actuality was certain, came before them carrying flowers, and these
+were followed by youths scattering fragrant burning powder whose
+fallen flames were instantly pounced upon and extinguished by small
+furry lemurs trained to lay silver discs upon the flames. And as
+they all ranged themselves about the throne a little figure appeared
+at the top of the stairway alone, beneath the lifted curtain.
+
+She was veiled; but the elastic step, the girlish grace, the poise
+and youthful dignity were not to be mistaken. The room whirled round
+St. George, and then closed in about him and grew dark. For this was
+the woman advancing to her betrothal; from the manner of her
+entrance there could be no doubt of that. And it was none of the
+daughters of the twenty peers. It was Olivia.
+
+She wore a trailing gown of rainbow hues, more like the hues of
+water than of texture, and the warm light fell upon these as she
+descended and variously multiplied them to beauty. Her little feet
+were sandaled and a veil of indescribable thinness was wound about
+her abundant hair and fell across her face, but the gold of her hair
+escaped the veil and rippled along her gown. Carven chains and
+necklaces were upon her throat, and bracelets of beaten gold and
+jewels upon her arms. About her forehead glittered a jeweled band
+with pendent gems which, at her moving, were like noon sun upon
+water.
+
+As he realized that this was indeed she whom he had come to seek,
+only to find her hedged about with difficulties--and it might be by
+divinities--which he had not dreamed of coping, a kind of madness
+seized St. George. The lights danced before his eyes, and his
+impulse had to do with rushing up to the dais and crying everybody
+defiance but Olivia. On the moon-lit deck of _The Aloha_ he had
+dreamed out the island and the rescue of the island princess, and a
+possible home-going on his yacht to a home about which he had even
+dared to dream, too. But it had not once occurred to him to forecast
+such a contingency as this, or, later, so to explain to himself
+Prince Tabnit's change of purpose in permitting her recognition as
+Princess of Yaque--indeed, if what Jarvo and Akko had told him in
+New York were accurate, in bringing her to the island at all. And
+yet what, he thought crazily, if his guess at her part in this
+betrothal were far wrong? What if her father's safety were not the
+only consideration? What if, not unnaturally dazzled by the
+fairy-land which had opened to her ... even while he feared, St.
+George knew far better. But the number of terrors possible to a man
+in love is equal to those of battle-fields.
+
+Amory bent toward him, murmuring excitedly.
+
+"Jupiter," he said, "is she the American girl?"
+
+"She's Miss Holland," answered St. George miserably.
+
+"No--no, not the princess," said Amory, "the other."
+
+St. George looked. On the stair was a little figure in rose and
+silver--very tiny, very fair, and no doubt the lawyer's daughter.
+
+"I dare say it is," he told him, as one would say, "Now what the
+deuce of it?"
+
+Prince Tabnit had risen to receive Olivia, and St. George had to see
+him extend his hand and assist her beside him upon the dais. In the
+absence of her father she was obliged to stand alone. Then the
+little figure in rose and silver and one of the daughters of the
+peers advanced and lifted her veil, and St. George wanted to shout
+with sudden exultation. This then was she--so near, so near. Surely
+no great harm could come to them so long as the sea and the mystery
+of the island no longer lay between them. Did she know of his
+presence? Although he and Amory were seated so near the throne, they
+were at one side, and her clear, pure profile was turned toward
+them. And Olivia did not lift her eyes throughout the prime
+minister's long address, of which St. George and Amory, so lapped
+were they in wild projects and importunities, heard nothing until,
+uttered with indescribable pompousness, as if Cassyrus were a
+dowager and had made the match himself, the concluding words beat
+upon St. George's heart like stones. They were the formal
+announcement of the betrothal of Olivia, daughter of his Majesty,
+Otho I of Yaque, to Tabnit, Prince of Yaque and Head of the House of
+the Litany.
+
+St. George saw Prince Tabnit kneel before Olivia and place a ring
+upon her hand--no doubt the ring which had betrothed the island
+princesses for three thousand years. He saw the High Council
+standing with bowed heads, like the necessary archangels in an old
+painting; he caught the flash of the turquoise-blue ephod of the
+head of the religious order, as the benediction was pronounced by
+its wearer. And through it all he said to himself that all would be
+well if only she understood, if only she had the supreme
+self-consciousness to play the game. After all he knew her so
+little. He was certain of her exquisite, playful fancy, but had she
+imagination? Would she see the value of the moment and watch herself
+moving through it? Or would she live it with that feminine,
+unhumourous seriousness which is woman's weakness? She had an
+exquisite independence, he was certain that she had humour, and he
+remembered how alive she had seemed to him, receptive, like a woman
+with ten senses. But after all, would not her graceful sanity of
+view, that sense of tradition and unerring taste which he so
+reverenced, yet handicap her now and prevent her from daring
+whatever she must dare?
+
+Amory was beside himself. It was all very well to feel a great
+sympathy for St. George, but the sight was more than journalistic
+flesh and blood could look upon with sympathetic calm.
+
+"An American girl!" he breathed in spite of himself. "Why, St.
+George, if we can leave this island alive--"
+
+"Well, _you_ won't," St. George explained, with brutal directness,
+"unless you can cut that."
+
+Before silence had again fallen, the prime minister, all his fever
+of importance still upon him, once more faced the audience. This
+time his words came to St. George like a thunderbolt:
+
+"In three days' time, at noon, in this the Hall of Kings," he cried,
+letting each phrase fall as if he were its proud inventor,
+"immediately following the official recognition of Olivia, daughter
+of Otho I, as Hereditary Princess of Yaque, there will be
+solemnized, according to the immemorial tradition of the island last
+observed six hundred and eighty-four years ago by Queen Pentellaria,
+the marriage of Olivia of Yaque, to his Highness, Prince Tabnit,
+head of the House of the Litany, and chief administrator of justice.
+_For the law prescribes that no unmarried woman shall sit upon the
+throne of Yaque._ At noon of the third day will be observed the
+double ceremony of the recognition and the marriage. May the gods
+permit the possible."
+
+There was a soft insistence of music from above, a stir and breath
+about the room, the premier backed away to his seat, and St. George,
+even with the horrified tightening at his heart, was conscious of a
+vague commotion from the vicinity of Mrs. Medora Hastings. Then he
+saw the prince rise and turn to Olivia, and extend his hand to
+conduct her from the hall. The great banquet room beyond the
+colonnade was at once thrown open, and there the court circle and
+the ministry were to gather to do honour to the new princess, whom
+Prince Tabnit was to lead to the seat at his right hand at the
+table's head.
+
+To the amazement of his Highness, Olivia made no movement to accept
+the hand that he offered. Instead, she sat slightly at one side of
+the great glittering throne, looking up at him with something like
+the faintest conceivable smile which, while one saw, became once
+more her exquisite, girlish gravity. When the music sank a little
+her voice sounded above it with a sweet distinctness:
+
+"One moment, if you please, your Highness," she said clearly.
+
+It was the first time that St. George had heard her voice since its
+good-by to him in New York. And before her words his vague fears for
+her were triumphantly driven. The spirit that he had hoped for was
+in her face, and something else; St. George could have sworn that he
+saw, but no one else could have seen the look, a glimpse of that
+delicate roguery that had held him captive when he had breakfasted
+with her--several hundred years before, was it?--at the Boris. Ah,
+he need not have feared for her, he told himself exultantly. For
+this was Olivia--of America--standing in a company of the women who
+seemed like the women of whom men dream, and whose presence, save in
+glimpses at first meetings, they perhaps never wholly realize. These
+were the women of the land which "no one can define or remember."
+And yet, as he watched her now, St. George was gloriously conscious
+that Olivia not only held her own among them, but that in some charm
+of vividness and of _knowledge of laughter_, she transcended them
+all.
+
+A ripple of surprise had gone round the room. For all the air of the
+ultimate about the island-women, St. George doubted whether ever in
+the three thousand years of Yaque's history a woman had raised her
+voice from that throne upon a like occasion. And such a tender,
+beguiling, cajoling little voice it was. A voice that held little
+remarques upon whatever it had just said, and that made one
+breathless to know what would come next.
+
+"Bully!" breathed Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez.
+
+Prince Tabnit hesitated.
+
+"If the princess wishes to speak with us--" he began, and Olivia
+made a charming gesture of dissent, and all the jewels in her hair
+and upon her white throat caught the light and were set glittering.
+
+"No," she said gently, "no, your Highness. I wish to speak in the
+presence of my people."
+
+She gave the "my" no undue value, yet it fell from her lips with
+delicious audacity.
+
+"Indeed," she said, "I think, your Highness, that I will speak to my
+people myself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE END OF THE EVENING
+
+
+The Hall of Kings was very still as Olivia rose. She stood with one
+hand touching her veil's hem, the other resting on the low, carved
+arm of the throne, and at the coming and going of her breath her
+jewels made the light lambent with the indeterminate colours of
+those strange, joyous banners floating far above her head.
+
+Her voice was very sweet and a little tremulous--and it is the very
+grace of a woman's courage that her voice tremble never so slightly.
+It seemed to St. George that he loved her a thousand times the more
+for that mere persuasive wavering of her words. And, while he
+listened to what he felt to be the prelude of her message, it seemed
+to him that he loved her another thousand times the more--what
+heavenly ease there is in this arithmetic of love--for the tender
+meaning which, upon her lips, her father's name took on. When,
+speaking with simplicity and directness of the subject that lay
+uppermost in the minds of them all, she asked their utmost endeavour
+in their common grief, it was clear that what she said transcended
+whatever phenomena of mere experience lay between her and those who
+heard her, and they understood. The _rapport_ was like that among
+those who hear one music. But St. George listened, and though his
+mind applauded, it ran on ahead to the terrifying future. This was
+all very well, but how was it to help her in the face of what was to
+happen in three days' time?
+
+"Therefore," Olivia's words touched tranquilly among the flying ends
+of his own thought, "I am come before you to make that sacrifice
+which my love for my father, and my grief and my anxiety demand. I
+count upon your support, as he would count upon it for me. I ask
+that one heart be in us all in this common sorrow. And I am come
+with the unalterable determination both to renounce my throne
+there"--never was anything more enchanting than the way those two
+words fell from her lips--"and to postpone my marriage"--there never
+was anything more profoundly disquieting than _those_ two words in
+such a connection--"until such time as, by your effort and by my
+own, we may have news of my father, the king; and until, by your
+effort or by my own, the Hereditary Treasure shall be restored."
+
+So, serenely and with the most ingenuous confidence, did the
+daughter of the absent King Otho make disposition of the hour's
+events. Amory leaned forward and feverishly polished his pince-nez.
+
+"What do you think of that?" he put it, beneath his breath, "what
+_do_ you think of that?"
+
+St. George, watching that little figure--so adorably, almost
+pathetically little in its corner of the great throne--knew that he
+had not counted upon her in vain. Over there on the raised seats
+Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham were looking on
+matters as helplessly as they would look at a thunder-storm or a
+circus procession, and they were taking things quite as seriously.
+But Olivia, in spite of the tragedy that the hour held for her, was
+giving the moment its exact value, guiltless of the feminine
+immorality of panic. To give a moment its due without that panic,
+is, St. George knew, a kind of genius, like creating beauty, and
+divining another's meaning, and redeeming the spirit of a thing from
+its actuality. But by that time the arithmetic of his love was by
+way of being in too many figures to talk about. Which is the proper
+plight of love.
+
+Every one had turned toward Prince Tabnit, and as St. George looked
+it smote him whimsically that that impassive profile was like the
+profiles upon the ancient coins which, almost any day, might be cast
+up by a passing hoof on the island mold. Indeed, St. George thought,
+one might almost have spent the prince's profile at a fig-stall,
+and the vender would have jingled it among his silver and never have
+detected the cheat. But in the next moment the joyous mounting of
+his blood running riot in audacious whimsies was checked by the even
+voice of the prince himself.
+
+"The gratitude and love of this people," he said slowly, "are due to
+the daughter of its sovereign for what she has proposed. It is,
+however, to be remembered that by our ancient law the State and
+every satrapy therein shall receive no service, whether of blood or
+of bond, from an alien. The king himself could serve us only in that
+he was king. To his daughter as Princess of Yaque and wife of the
+Head of the House of the Litany, this service in the search for the
+sovereign and the Hereditary Treasure will be permitted, but she may
+serve us only from the throne."
+
+"Upon my soul, then that lets _us_ out," murmured Amory.
+
+And St. George remembered miserably how, in that dingy house in
+McDougle Street, he and Olivia had listened once before to the
+recital of that law from the prince's lips. If they had known how
+next they would hear it! If they had known then what that law would
+come to mean to her! What could she do now--what could even Olivia
+do now but assent?
+
+She could do a great deal, it appeared. She could incline her head,
+with a bewitching droop of eyelids, and look up to meet the eyes of
+the prince with a serenity that was like a smile.
+
+"In my country," said Olivia gravely, "when anything special arises
+they frequently find that there is no law to cover it. It would seem
+to us"--it was as though the humility of that "us" took from her
+superb daring--"that this is a matter requiring the advice of the
+High Council. Therefore," asked little Olivia gently, "will you not
+appoint, your Highness, a special session of the High Council to
+convene at noon to-morrow, to consider our proposition?"
+
+There was a scarcely perceptible stir among the members of the High
+Council, for even the liberals were, it would seem, taken aback by a
+departure which they themselves had not instituted. Olivia, still in
+submission to tradition which she could not violate, had gained the
+time for which she hoped. With a grace that was like the conferring
+of a royal favour, Prince Tabnit appointed the meeting of the High
+Council for noon on the following day.
+
+"May the gods permit the possible," he added, and once more extended
+his hand to Olivia. This time, with lowered eyes, she gave him the
+tips of her fingers and, as the beckoning music swelled a delicate
+prelude, she stepped from the dais and suffered the prince to lead
+her toward the banquet hall.
+
+Amory drew a long breath, and it came to St. George that if he,
+Amory, said anything about what he would give if he had a leased
+wire to the _Sentinel_ Office, there would no longer be room on the
+island for them both. But Amory said no such thing. Instead, he
+looked at St. George in distinct hesitation.
+
+"I say," he brought out finally, "St. George, by Jove, do you know,
+it seems to me I've seen Miss Frothingham before. And how jolly
+beautiful she is," he added almost reverently.
+
+"Maybe it was when you were a Phoenician galley slave and she went
+by in a trireme," offered St. George, trying to keep in sight the
+bright hair and the floating veil beyond the press of the crowd.
+Would he see Olivia and would he be able to speak with her, and did
+she know he was there, and would she be angry? Ah well, she could
+not possibly be angry, he thought; but with all this in his mind it
+was hardly reasonable of Amory to expect him to speculate on where
+Miss Frothingham might have been seen before. If it weren't for this
+Balator now, St. George said to himself restlessly, and suddenly
+observed that Balator was expecting them to follow him. So, in the
+slow-moving throng, all soft hues and soft laughter, they made their
+way toward the colonnade that cut off the banquet room. And at every
+step St. George thought, "she has passed here--and here--and here,"
+and all the while, through the mighty open rafters in the conical
+roof, were to be seen those strange banners joyously floating in the
+delicate, alien light. The wine of the moment flowed in his veins,
+and he moved under strange banners, with a strange ecstasy in his
+heart.
+
+Therefore, suddenly to hear Rollo's voice at his shoulder came as a
+distinct shock.
+
+"It's one of them little brown 'uns, sir," Rollo announced in his
+best tone of mystery. "He's settin' upstairs, sir, an' he's all fer
+settin' there _till_ he sees you. He says it's most important, sir."
+
+Amory heard.
+
+"Shall I go up?" he asked eagerly; "I'd like a whiff of a pipe,
+anyway. It'll be something to tie to."
+
+"Will you go?" asked St. George in undisguised gratitude. He was
+prepared to accept most risks rather than to lose sight of the star
+he was following.
+
+With a word to Balator who explained where, on his return, he could
+find them, Amory turned with Rollo, and slipped through the crowd.
+Having reasons of his own for getting back to the hall below, Amory
+was prepared to speed well the interview with "the little brown 'un"
+who, he supposed, was Jarvo.
+
+It was Jarvo--Jarvo, in a state of excitement, profound and
+incredible. The little man, from the annoyingly serene mode of mind
+in which he had left them, was become, for him, almost agitated. He
+sprang up from a divan in the great dressing-room of their apartment
+and approached Amory almost without greeting.
+
+"Adôn, adôn," he said earnestly, "you must leave the palace at
+once--at once. But to-night!"
+
+Amory hunted for his pipe, found and lighted it, pressing a
+cigarette upon Jarvo who accepted, and held it, alight, in the palm
+of his hand.
+
+"To-night," he repeated, as if it were a game.
+
+"Ah well, now," said Amory reasonably, "why, Jarvo? And we so
+comfortable."
+
+The little man looked at Amory beseechingly.
+
+"I know what I know," he said earnestly, "many things will happen.
+There is danger about the palace to-night--danger it may be for you.
+I do not know all, but I come to warn you, and to warn the adôn who
+has been kind to us. You have brought us here when we were alone in
+America," said Jarvo simply. "Akko and I will help you now. It was
+Akko who remembered the tower."
+
+Amory looked down at the bowl of his pipe, and shook his vestas in
+their box, and turned his eyes to Rollo, listening near by with an
+air of the most intense abstraction. Yes, all these things were
+real. They were all real, and here was he, Amory, smoking. And yet
+what was all this amazing talk about danger in the palace, and being
+warned, and remembering the tower?
+
+"Anybody would think I was Crass, writing head-lines," he told
+himself, and blew a cloud of smoke through which to look at Jarvo.
+
+"What are you talking about?" he demanded sternly.
+
+Jarvo had a little key in his hand, which he shook. The key was on a
+slender, carved ring, and it jingled. And when he offered it to him
+Amory abstractedly took it.
+
+"See, adôn," said Jarvo, "see! In the ilex grove on the road that we
+took last night there is a white tower--it may be that you have
+noticed it to-day. That tower is empty, and this is the key. There
+may be guards, but I shall know how to pass among them. You must
+come with me there to-night, the three. Even then it may be too
+late, I do not know. The gods will permit the possible. But this I
+know: the Royal Guard are of the lahnas, on whom the tax to make
+good the Hereditary Treasure will fall most heavily. They are filled
+with rage against your people--you and the king who is of your
+people. I do not know what they will do, but you are not safe for
+one moment in the palace. I come to warn you."
+
+Amory's pipe went out. He sat pulling at it abstractedly, trying to
+fit together what St. George had told him of the Hereditary Treasure
+situation. And more than at any other time since his arrival on the
+island his heart leaped up at the prospect of promised adventure.
+What if St. George's romantic apostasy were not, after all, to spoil
+the flavour of the kind of adventure for which he, Amory, had been
+hoping? He leaned eagerly forward.
+
+"What would you suggest?" he said.
+
+Jarvo's eyes brightened. At once he sprang to his feet and stood
+before Amory, taking soft steps here and there as he talked, in
+movement graceful and tenuous as the greyhound of which he had
+reminded St. George.
+
+"In the palace yard," explained the little man rapidly, "is a motor
+which came from Melita, bringing guests for the ceremony of
+to-night. They will remain in the palace until after the marriage of
+the prince, two days hence. But the motor--that must go back
+to-night to Melita, adôn. I have made for myself permission to take
+it there. But you--the three--must go with me. At the tower in the
+ilex grove I shall leave you, and I shall return. Is this good?"
+
+"Excellent. But what afterward?" demanded Amory. "Are we all to keep
+house in the tower?"
+
+Jarvo shook his head, like a man who has thought of everything.
+
+"Through to-morrow, yes," he said, "but to-morrow night, when the
+dark falls--"
+
+He bent forward and spoke softly.
+
+"Did not the adôn wish to ascend the mountain?" he asked.
+
+"Rather," said Amory, "but how, good heavens?"
+
+"I and Akko wish to ascend also; the prince has sent us no message,
+and we fear him," said Jarvo simply. "There are on the island, adôn,
+six carriers, trained from birth to make the ascent. They are the
+sons of those whose duty it was to ascend, and they the sons for
+many generations. The trail is very steep, very perilous. Six were
+taught to go up with messages long before the knowledge of the
+wireless way, long before the flight of the airships. They are
+become a tradition of the island. It is with them that you must
+ascend--if you have no fear."
+
+"Fear!" cried Amory. "But these men, what of them? They are in the
+employ of the State. How do you know they will take us?"
+
+Jarvo dropped his eyes.
+
+"I and Akko," he said quietly, "we are two of these six carriers,
+adôn."
+
+Then Amory leaped up, scattering the ashes of his pipe over the
+tiles. This, then, was what was the matter with the feet of the two
+men, about which they had all speculated on the deck of _The Aloha_,
+the feet trained from birth to make the ascent of the steep trail,
+feet become long, tenuous, almost prehensile--
+
+"It's miracles, that's what it is," declared Amory solemnly. "How on
+earth did they come to take you to New York?" he could not forbear
+asking.
+
+"The prince knew nothing of your country, adôn," answered Jarvo
+simply. "He might have needed us to enter it."
+
+"To climb the custom-house," said Amory abstractedly, and laughed
+out suddenly in sheer light-heartedness. Here was come to them an
+undertaking to which St. George himself must warm as he had warmed
+at the prospect of the voyage. To go up the mountain to the
+threshold of the king's palace, where lived the daughter of the
+king.
+
+Amory bent himself with a will to mastering each detail of the
+little man's proposals. Rollo, they decided, was at once to make
+ready a few belongings in the oil-skins. Immediately after the
+banquet St. George and Amory were to mingle with the throng and
+leave the palace--no difficult matter in the press of the
+departures--and, on the side of the courtyard beneath the windows of
+the banquet room, Jarvo, already joined by Rollo, would be awaiting
+them in the motor bound for Melita.
+
+"It sounds as if it couldn't be done," said Amory in intense
+enjoyment. "It's bully."
+
+He paced up and down the room, talking it over. He folded his arms,
+and looked at the matter from all sides and wondered, as touching a
+story being "covered" for Chillingworth, whether he were leaving
+anything unthought.
+
+"Chillingworth!" he said to himself in ecstasy. "Wouldn't
+Chillingworth dote to idolatry upon this sight?"
+
+Then Amory stood still, facing something that he had not seen
+before. He had come, in his walk, upon a little table set near the
+room's entrance, and bearing a decanter and some cups.
+
+"Hello," he said, "Rollo, where did this come from?"
+
+Rollo came forward, velvet steps, velvet pressing together of his
+hands, face expressionless as velvet too.
+
+"A servant of 'is 'ighness, sir," he said--Rollo did that now and
+then to let you know that his was the blood of valets--"left it some
+time ago, with the compliments of the prince. It looks like a good,
+nitzy Burgundy, sir," added Rollo tolerantly, "though the man did
+say it was bottled in something B.C., sir, and if it was it's most
+likely flat. You can't trust them vintages much farther back than
+the French Revolootion, beggin' your pardon, sir."
+
+Amory absently lifted the decanter, and then looked at it with some
+curiosity. The decanter was like a vase, ornamented with gold
+medallions covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+beauty and variety of design. Serpents, men contending with lions,
+sacred trees and apes were chased in the gold, and the little cups
+of sard were engraved in pomegranates and segments of fruit and
+pendent acorns, and were set with cones of cornelian. The cups were
+joined by a long cord of thick gold.
+
+Amory set his hand to the little golden stopper, perhaps
+hermetically sealed, he thought idly, at about the time of the
+accidental discovery of glass itself by the Phoenicians. Amory was
+not imaginative, but as he thought of the possible age of the wine,
+there lay upon him that fascination communicable from any link
+between the present and the living past.
+
+"Solomon and Sargon," he said to himself, "the geese in the capitol,
+Marathon, Alexander, Carthage, the Norman conquest, Shakespeare and
+Miss Frothingham!"
+
+He smiled and twisted the carven stopper.
+
+"And the girl is alive," he said almost wonderingly. "There has been
+so much Time in the world, and yet she is alive now. Down there in
+the banquet room."
+
+The odour of the contents of the vase, spicy, penetrating,
+delicious, crept out, and he breathed it gratefully. It was like no
+odour that he remembered. This was nothing like Rollo's "good, nitzy
+Burgundy"--this was something infinitely more wonderful. And the
+odour--the odour was like a draught. And wasn't this the wine of
+wines, he asked himself, to give them courage, exultation, the most
+superb daring when they started up that delectable mountain? St.
+George must know; he would think so too.
+
+"Oh, I say," said Amory to himself, "we must put some strength in
+Jarvo's bones too--poor little brick!"
+
+With that Amory drew the carven stopper, fitted in the little funnel
+that hung about the neck of the vase, poured a half-finger of the
+wine in each cup, and lifted one in his hand. But the mere odour was
+enough to make a man live ten lives, he thought, smiling at his own
+strange exultation. He must no more than touch it to his lips, for
+he wanted a clear head for what was coming.
+
+"Come, Jarvo," he cried gaily--was he shouting, he wondered, and
+wasn't that what he was trying to do--to shout to make some far-away
+voice answer him? "Come and drink to the health of the prince. Long
+may he live, long may he live--without us!"
+
+Amory had stood with his back to the little brown man while he
+poured the wine. As he turned, he lifted one cup to his lips and
+Rollo gravely presented the other to Jarvo. But with a bound that
+all but upset the velvet valet, the little man cleared the space
+between him and Amory and struck the cup from Amory's hand.
+
+"Adôn!" he cried terribly, "adôn! Do not drink--do not drink!"
+
+The precious liquid splashed to the floor with the falling cup and
+ran red about the tiles. Instantly a powerful and delightful
+fragrance rose, and the thick fumes possessed the air. Amory threw
+out his hands blindly, caught dizzily at Rollo, and was half dragged
+by Jarvo to the open window.
+
+"Oh, I say, sir--" burst out Rollo, more upset over the loss of the
+wine than he was alarmed at the occurrence. If it came to losing a
+good, nitzy Burgundy, Rollo knew what that meant.
+
+"Adôn," cried Jarvo, shaking Amory's shoulders, "did you taste the
+liquor--tell me--the liquor--did you taste?"
+
+Amory shook his head. Jarvo's face and the hovering Rollo and the
+whole room were enveloped in mist, and the wine was hot on his lips
+where the cup had touched them. Yet while he stood there, with that
+permeating fragrance in the air, it came to him vaguely that he had
+never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this,
+he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old
+days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy"
+Burgundy was no more than a flabby, _vin ordinaire_ beside it. Not
+that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word
+that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in
+his veins, he summed it up to himself triumphantly.
+
+But after all, the effect was only momentary. Almost as quickly as
+those strange fumes had arisen they were dissipated. And when
+presently Amory stood up unsteadily from the seat of the window, he
+could see clearly enough that Jarvo, with terrified eyes, was
+turning the vase in his hands.
+
+"It is the same," he was saying, "it must be the same. The gods have
+permitted the possible. I was here to tell you."
+
+"Tell me what?" demanded Amory with ungrateful irritation. "Is the
+stuff poison?" he asked, tottering in spite of himself as he crossed
+the floor toward him. But Jarvo turned his face, and upon it was
+such an incongruous terror that Amory involuntarily stood still.
+
+"There are known to be two," said Jarvo, holding the vase at arm's
+length, "and the one is abundant life, if the draught is not
+over-measured. But the other is ten thousand times worse than
+death."
+
+"What do you mean?" cried Amory roughly. "What are you talking
+about? If the stuff is poison can't you say so?"
+
+Jarvo looked at him swiftly.
+
+"These things are not spoken aloud in Yaque," he said simply, and
+after that he held his peace. Amory threatened him and laughed at
+him, but Jarvo shook his head. At last Amory scoffed at the whole
+matter and stretched out his hand for the vase.
+
+"Come," he said, "at all events I'll take it with me. It can't be
+very much worse than the American liqueurs."
+
+"My word for it, sir, beggin' your pardon," said Rollo earnestly,
+"it's a kind of what you might call med-i-eval Burgundy, sir."
+
+"It is not well," said Jarvo, handing the vase with reluctance, "yet
+take it--but see that it touches no lips. I charge you that, adôn."
+
+Amory smiled and slipped the little vase in his coat pocket.
+
+"It's all right," he said, "I won't let it get away from me. I can
+find my legs now; I'll go back down. Look sharp, Rollo. Be down
+there with the oil-skins. We put on this Tyrian purple stuff over
+the whole outfit," he explained to Jarvo, "and I suppose, you know,
+that you can get both robes back here for us, if we escape in them?"
+
+"Assuredly, adôn," said Jarvo, "and you must escape without delay.
+This wine must mean that the prince, too, wishes you harm. Now let
+me be before you for a little, so that no one may see us together. I
+shall go now, immediately, to the motor--it is waiting already by
+the wall on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+banquet hall. I shall not fail you."
+
+"On the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the banquet
+room," repeated Amory. "Thanks, Jarvo. You're all kinds of a good
+fellow."
+
+"Yes, adôn," gravely assented the little man from the threshold.
+
+Ten minutes later Amory followed. Already Rollo had packed the
+oil-skins, and Amory, his nerves steadied and the excitement of all
+that the night promised come upon him, hurried before him down the
+corridor, his thoughts divided in their allegiance between the
+delight of telling St. George what was toward, and the new and
+alluring delight of seeing Antoinette Frothingham near at hand in
+the banquet room. After all, he had had only the vaguest glimpse of
+a little figure in rose and silver, and he doubted if he could tell
+her from the princess, but for the interpreting gown.
+
+Amory looked up with an irrepressible thrill of delight. He was just
+at that moment crossing the high white audience-hall, the anteroom
+to the Hall of Kings--he, Amory, in Tyrian purple garments. If
+anything were needed to complete the picture it would be to meet
+face to face, there in that big, lonely room, a little figure in
+rose and silver. It made his heart beat even to think of the
+possibilities of that situation. He skirted the Hall of Kings, and
+stood in one of the archways of the colonnade, facing the banquet
+room.
+
+The banquet-table extended about three sides of the room, whose
+centre the guests faced. The middle space was left pure, unvexed by
+columns or furnishing. At the room's far end Amory glimpsed the
+prince, at his side Olivia's white veil, and her women about her;
+and, nearer, St. George and Balator in the place appointed. A guard
+came to conduct him, and he crossed to his seat and sank down with
+the look that could be made to mean whatever Amory meant.
+
+"I expect to be served," murmured the journalist in him, "by
+beautiful tame megatheriums, in sashes. And is that glyptodon
+salad?"
+
+St. George's eyes were upon the guests, so tranquilly seated, aware
+of the hour.
+
+"I fancy," he said in half-voice, "that presently we shall see
+little flames issuing from their hair, as there used from the hair
+of the ladies in Werner's ballets."
+
+Then as Balator leaned toward him in his splendid leisure, fostering
+his charm, there came an amazing interruption.
+
+The low key of the room was electrically raised by a cry, loosed
+from some other plight of being, like an odour of burning
+encroaching upon a garden.
+
+"Why have you not waited?" some one called, and the voice--clear,
+equal, imperious--evened its way upon the air and reduced to itself
+the soft speech of the others. Silence fell upon them all, and
+their eyes were toward a figure standing in the open interval of the
+room--a figure whose aspect thrilled St. George with sudden,
+inexplicable emotion.
+
+It was an old man, incredibly old, so that one thought first of his
+age. His beard and hair were not all grey, but he had grotesquely
+brown and wrinkled flesh. His stuff robe hung in straight folds
+about his singularly erect figure, and there was in his bearing the
+dignity of one who has understood all fine and gentle things, all
+things of quietude. But his look was vacant, as if the mind were
+asleep.
+
+"Why have you not waited?" he repeated almost wonderingly. "Why have
+you not sent for me?" and his eyes questioned one and another, and
+rested on the face of the prince upon the dais, with Olivia by his
+side. The guard, whom in some fashion the strange old man had
+eluded, hurried from the borders of the room. But he broke from them
+and was off up half the length of the hall toward the prince's seat.
+
+"Do you not know?" he cried as he went, "I am Malakh. Read one
+another's eyes and you will know. I am Malakh."
+
+As the guards closed about him he tottered and would have fallen
+save that they caught him roughly and pressed to a door, half
+carrying him, and he did not resist. But as speech was renewed
+another voice broke the murmur, and with great amazement St. George
+knew that this was Olivia's voice.
+
+"No," she cried--but half as if she distrusted her own strange
+impulse, "let him stay--let him stay."
+
+St. George saw the prince's look question her. He himself was unable
+to account for her unexpected intercession, and so, one would have
+said, was Olivia. She looked up at the prince almost fearfully, and
+down the length of the listening table, and back to the old man
+whose eyes were upon her face.
+
+"He is an old man, your Highness," St. George heard her saying, "let
+him stay."
+
+Prince Tabnit, who gave a curious impression of doing everything
+that he did in obedience to inertia rather than in its defiance,
+indicated some command to the puzzled guards, and they led old
+Malakh to a stone bench not far from the dais, and there he sank
+down, looking about him without surprise.
+
+"It is well," he said simply, "Malakh has come."
+
+While St. George was marveling--but not that the old man spoke the
+English, for in Yaque it was not surprising to find the very madmen
+speaking one's own tongue--Balator explained the man.
+
+"He is a poor mad creature," Balator said. "He walks the streets of
+Med saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say, 'king,' and so he is
+seeking the king. But he is mad, and they say that he always weeps,
+and therefore they pretend to believe that he says 'Malakh,' which
+is to say 'salt.' And they call him that for his tears. Doubtless
+the princess does not understand. Her Highness has a tender heart."
+
+St. George was silent. The incident was trivial, but Olivia had
+never seemed so near.
+
+Sometimes in the world of commonplace there comes an extreme hour
+which one afterward remembers with "Could that have been I? But
+could it have been I who did that?" And one finds it in one's heart
+to be certain that it was not one's self, but some one else--some
+one very near, some one who is always sharing one's own
+consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's moments. "Perhaps,"
+St. George would have said, "there is some such person who is
+nearly, but not quite, I myself. And if there is, it was he and not
+I who was at that banquet!" It was one of the hours which seem to
+have been made with no echo. It was; and then passed into other
+ways, and one remembered only a brightness. For example, St. George
+listened to what Balator said, and he heard with utmost
+understanding, and with the frequent pleasure of wonder, and was now
+and then exquisitely amused as one is amused in dreams. But even as
+he listened, if he tried to remember the last thing that was said,
+and the next to the last thing, he found that these had escaped him;
+and as he rose from the table he could not recall ten words that had
+been spoken. It was as if the some one very near, who is always
+sharing one's consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's
+moments, had taken St. George's part at the banquet while he,
+himself, sat there in the rôle of his own outer consciousness. But
+neither he nor that hypothetical "some one else," who was also he,
+lost for one instant the heavenly knowledge that Olivia was up there
+at the head of the table.
+
+Amory, in spite of diplomatic effort, had not succeeded in imparting
+to St. George anything of his talk with Jarvo. Balator was too near,
+and the place was somehow too generally attentive to permit a secret
+word. So, as they rose from the table, St. George was still in
+ignorance of what was toward and knew nothing of either the Ilex
+Tower or the possibilities of the morrow. He had only one thought,
+and that was to speak with Olivia, to let her know that he was there
+on the island, near her, ready to serve her--ah well, chiefly, he
+did not disguise from himself, what he wanted was to look at her and
+to hear her speak to him. But Amory had depended on the confusion of
+the rising to communicate the great news, and to tell about Jarvo,
+waiting in a motor out there in the palace courtyard, by the wall on
+the side opposite the windows of the banquet room. In an auspicious
+moment Amory looked warily about, thrilling with premonition of his
+friend's enthusiasm.
+
+Before he could speak, St. George uttered a startled exclamation,
+caught at Amory's arm, sprang forward, and was off up the long room,
+dragging Amory with him.
+
+About the dais there was suddenly an appalling confusion. Push of
+feet, murmurs, a cry and, visible over the heads between, a
+glistening of gold uniforms closing about the throne seats, flashing
+back to the long, open windows, disappearing against the night...
+
+"What is it?" cried Amory as he ran. "What is it?"
+
+"Quick," said St. George only, "I don't know. They've gone with
+her."
+
+Amory did not understand, but he saw that Olivia's seat was empty;
+and when he swept the heads for her white veil, it was not there.
+
+"Who has?" he said.
+
+St. George swerved to the side of the room toward the windows, and
+old Malakh stood there, crying out and pointing.
+
+"The guard, I think," St. George answered, and was over the low sill
+of a window, running headlong across the courtyard, Amory behind
+him. "There they go," St. George cried. "Good God, what are we to
+do? There they go."
+
+Amory looked. Down a side avenue--one of those tunnels of shadow
+that taught the necessity of mystery--a great motor car was
+speeding, and in the dimness the two men could see the white of
+Olivia's floating veil.
+
+At this, Amory wheeled and searched the length of wall across the
+yard. If only--if only--
+
+There on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+banquet room stood the motor that was that night to go back to
+Melita. Bolt upright on the seat was Jarvo, and climbing in the
+tonneau, with his neck stretched toward the confusion of the palace,
+was Rollo. Jarvo saw Amory, who beckoned; and in an instant the car
+was beside them and the two men were over the back of the tonneau in
+a flash.
+
+"That way," cried St. George, with no time to waste on the miracle
+of Jarvo's appearance, "that way--there. Where you see the white."
+
+At a touch the motor plunged away into the fragrant darkness. Amory
+looked back. Figures crowded the windows of the palace, and streamed
+from the banquet hall into the courtyard. Men hurried through the
+hall, and there was clamour of voices, and in the honey-coloured air
+the great bulk of the palace towered like a faithless sentinel, the
+alien banners in nameless colours sending streamers into the
+moon-lit upper spaces.
+
+On before, down nebulous ways, went the whiteness of the floating
+veil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BETWEEN-WORLDS
+
+
+Down nebulous ways they went, the thin darkness flowing past them.
+The sloping avenue ran all the width of the palace grounds, and here
+among slim-trunked trees faint fringes of the light touched away the
+dimness in the open spaces and expressed the borders of the dusk.
+Always the way led down, dipping deeper in the conjecture of shadow,
+and always before them glimmered the mist of Olivia's veil, an
+eidolon of love, of love's eternal Vanishing Goal.
+
+And St. George was in pursuit. So were Amory and Jarvo, and Rollo of
+the oil-skins, but these mattered very little, for it was St. George
+whose eyes burned in his pale face and were striving to catch the
+faintest motion in that fleeing car ahead.
+
+"Faster, Jarvo," he said, "we're not gaining on them. I think
+they're gaining on us. Put ahead, can't you?"
+
+Amory vexed the air with frantic questionings. "How did it happen?"
+he said. "Who did it? Was it the guard? What did they do it for?"
+
+"It looks to me," said St. George only, peering distractedly into
+the gloom, "as if all those fellows had on uniforms. Can you see?"
+
+Jarvo spoke softly.
+
+"It is true, adôn," he said, "they are of the guard. This is what
+they had planned," he added to Amory. "I feared the harm would be to
+you. It is the same. Your turn would be the next."
+
+"What do you mean?" St. George demanded.
+
+Amory, with some incoherence, told him what Jarvo had come to them
+to propose, and heightened his own excitement by plunging into the
+business of that night and the next, as he had had it from the
+little brown man's lips.
+
+"Up the mountain to-morrow night," he concluded fervently, "what do
+you think of that? Do you see us?"
+
+"Maniac, no," said St. George shortly, "what do we want to go up the
+mountain for if Miss Holland is somewhere else? Faster, Jarvo, can't
+you?" he urged. "Why, this thing is built to go sixty miles an hour.
+We're creeping."
+
+"Perhaps it's better to start in gentle and work up a pace, sir,"
+observed Rollo inspirationally, "like a man's legs, sir, beggin'
+your pardon."
+
+St. George looked at him as if he had first seen him, so that Amory
+once more explained his presence and pointed to the oil-skins. And
+St. George said only:
+
+"Now we're coming up a little--don't you think we're coming up a
+little? Throw it wide open, Jarvo--now, go!"
+
+"What are you going to do when you catch them?" demanded Amory. "We
+can't lunge into them, for fear of hurting Miss Holland. And who
+knows what devilish contrivance they've got--dum-dum bullets with a
+poison seal attachment," prophesied Amory darkly. "What are you
+going to do?"
+
+"I don't know what we're going to do," said St. George doggedly,
+"but if we can overtake them it won't take us long to find out."
+
+Never so slightly the pursuers were gaining. It was impossible to
+tell whether those in the flying car knew that they were followed,
+and if they did know, and if Olivia knew, St. George wondered
+whether the pursuit were to her a new alarm, or whether she were
+looking to them for deliverance. If she knew! His heart stood still
+at the thought--oh, and if they had both known, that morning at
+breakfast at the Boris, that _this_ was the way the genie would come
+out of the jar. But how, if he were unable to help her? And how
+could he help her when these others might have Heaven knew what
+resources of black art, art of all the colours of the Yaque
+spectrum, if it came to that? The slim-trunked trees flew past them,
+and the tender branches brushed their shoulders and hung out their
+flowers like lamps. Warm wind was in their faces, sweet,
+reverberant voices of the wood-things came chorusing, and ahead
+there in the dimness, that misty will-o'-the-wisp was her veil,
+Olivia's veil. St. George would have followed if it had led him
+between-worlds.
+
+In a manner it did lead him between-worlds. Emerging suddenly upon a
+broader avenue their car followed the other aside and shot through a
+great gateway of the palace wall--a wall built of such massive
+blocks that the gateway formed a covered passageway. From there,
+delicately lighted, greenly arched, and on this festal night, quite
+deserted, went the road by which, the night before, they had entered
+Med.
+
+"Now," said St. George between set teeth, "now see what you can do,
+Jarvo. Everything depends on you."
+
+Evidently Jarvo had been waiting for this stretch of open road and
+expecting the other car to take it. He bent forward, his wiry
+little frame like a quivering spring controlling the motion. The
+motor leaped at his touch. Away down the road they tore with the
+wind singing its challenge. Second by second they saw their
+gain increase. The uniforms of the guards in the car became
+distinguishable. The white of Olivia's veil merged in the
+brightness of her gown--was it only the shining of the gold of the
+uniforms or could St. George see the floating gold of her hair?
+Ah, wonderful, past all speech it was wonderful to be fleeing
+toward her through this pale light that was like a purer element
+than light itself. With the phantom moving of the boughs in the
+wood on either side light seemed to dance and drip from leaf to
+leaf--the visible spirit of the haunted green. The unreality of it
+all swept over him almost stiflingly. Olivia--was it indeed Olivia
+whom he was following down lustrous ways of a land vague as a
+star; or was his pursuit not for her, but for the exquisite,
+incommunicable Idea, and was he following it through a world
+forth-fashioned from his own desire?
+
+Suddenly indistinguishable sounds were in his ears, words from
+Amory, from Jarvo certain exultant gutturals. He felt the car
+slacken speed, he looked ahead for the swift beckoning of the veil,
+and then he saw that where, in the delicate distance, the other
+motor had sped its way, it now stood inactive in the road before
+them, and they were actually upon it. The four guards in the motor
+were standing erect with uplifted faces, their gold uniforms shining
+like armour. But this was not all. There, in the highway beside the
+car, the mist of her veil like a halo about her, Olivia stood alone.
+
+St. George did not reckon what they meant to do. He dropped over the
+side of the tonneau and ran to her. He stood before her, and all the
+joy that he had ever known was transcended as she turned toward
+him. She threw out her hands with a little cry--was it gladness, or
+relief, or beseeching? He could not be certain that there was even
+recognition in her eyes before she tottered and swayed, and he
+caught her unconscious form in his arms. As he lifted her he looked
+with apprehension toward the car that held the guards. To his
+bewilderment there was no car there. The pursued motor, like a
+winged thing of the most innocent vagaries, had taken itself off
+utterly. And on before, the causeway was utterly empty, dipping idly
+between murmurous green. But at the moment St. George had no time to
+spend on that wonder.
+
+He carried Olivia to the tonneau of Jarvo's car, jealous when Rollo
+lifted her gown's hem from the dust of the road and when Amory threw
+open the door. He held her in his arms, half kneeling beside her,
+profoundly regardless where it should please the others to dispose
+themselves. He had no recollection of hearing Jarvo point the way
+through the trees to a path that led away, as far from them as a
+voice would carry, to the Ilex Tower whose key burned in Amory's
+pocket, promising radiant, intangible things to his imagination. St.
+George understood with magnificent unconcern that Amory and Rollo
+were gone off there to wait for the return of him and Jarvo; he took
+it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken
+back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he
+knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving
+across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate
+destination in which he found himself believing with infinite faith.
+
+For this was Olivia, in his arms. St. George looked down at her, at
+the white, exquisite face with its shadow of lashes, and it seemed
+to him that he must not breathe, or remember, or hope, lest the gods
+should be jealous and claim the moment, and leave him once more
+forlorn. That was the secret, he thought, not to touch away the
+elusive moment by hope or memory, but just to live it, filled with
+its ecstasies, borne on the crest of its consciousness. It seemed to
+him in some intimately communicated fashion, that the moment, the
+very world of the island, was become to him a more intense object
+of consciousness than himself. And somehow Olivia was its
+expression--Olivia, here in his arms, with the stir of her breath
+and the light, light pressure of her body and the fall of her hair,
+not only symbols of the sovereign hour, but the hour's realities.
+
+On either side the phantom wood pressed close about them, and its
+light seemed coined by goblin fingers. Dissolving wind, persuading
+little voices musical beyond the domain of music that he knew,
+quick, poignant vistas of glades where the light spent itself in
+its longed-for liberty of colour, labyrinthine ways of shadow that
+taught the necessity of mystery. There was something lyric about it
+all. Here Nature moved on no formal lines, understood no frugality
+of beauty, but was lavish with a divine and special errantry to a
+divine and special understanding. And it had been given St. George
+to move with her merely by living this hour, with Olivia in his
+arms.
+
+The sweet of life--the sweet of life and the world his own. The
+words had never meant so much. He had often said them in exultation,
+but he had never known their truth: the world was literally his own,
+under the law. Nothing seemed impossible. His mind went back to the
+unexplained disappearing of that other motor and, however it had
+been, that did not seem impossible either. It seemed natural, and
+only a new doorway to new points of contact. In this amazing land no
+speculation was too far afield to be the food of every day. Here men
+understood miracle as the rest of the world understands invention.
+Already the mere existence of Yaque proved that the space of
+experience is transcended--and with the thought a fancy, elusive and
+profound, seized him and gripped at his heart with an emotion wider
+than fear. What had become of the other car? Had it gone down some
+road of the wood which the guards knew, or ... The words of Prince
+Tabnit came back to him as they had been spoken in that wonderful
+tour of the island. "The higher dimensions are being conquered.
+Nearly all of us can pass into the fifth at will, 'disappearing,' as
+you have the word." Was it possible that in the vanishing of the
+pursued car this had been demonstrated before him? Into this space,
+inclusive of the visible world and of Yaque as well, had the car
+passed _without the pursuers being able to point_ to the direction
+which it had taken? St. George smiled in derision as this flashed
+upon him, and it hardly held his thought for a moment, for his eyes
+were upon Olivia's face, so near, so near his own ... Undoubtedly,
+he thought vaguely, that other motor had simply swerved aside to
+some private opening of the grove and, from being hard-pressed and
+almost overtaken, was now well away in safety. Yet if this were so,
+would they not have taken Olivia with them? But to that strange and
+unapparent hyperspace they could not have taken her, because she did
+not understand. "...just as one," Prince Tabnit had said, "who
+understands how to die and come to life again would not be able to
+take with him any one who himself did not understand how to
+accompany him..."
+
+Some terrifying and exalting sense swept him into a new intimacy of
+understanding as he realized glimmeringly what heights and depths
+lay about his ceasing to see that car of the guard. Yet, with
+Olivia's head upon his arm, all that he theorized in that flash of
+time hung hardly beyond the border of his understanding. Indeed, it
+seemed to St. George as if almost--almost he could understand, as if
+he could pierce the veil and know utterly all the secrets of spirit
+and sense that confound. "We shall all know _when we are able to
+bear it_," he had once heard another say, and it seemed to him now
+that at last he was able to bear it, as if the sense of the
+uninterrupted connection between the two worlds was almost a part of
+his own consciousness. A moment's deeper thought, a quicker flowing
+of the imagination, a little more poignant projecting of himself
+above the abyss and he, too, would understand. It came to him that
+he had almost understood every time that he had looked at Olivia.
+Ah, he thought, and how exquisite, how matchless she was, and what
+Heaven beyond Heaven the world would hold for him if only she were
+to love him. St. George lifted the little hand that hung at her
+side, and stooped momentarily to touch his cheek to the soft hair
+that swept her shoulder. Here for him lay the sweet of life--the
+sweet of the world, ay, and the sweet of all the world's mysteries.
+This alien land was no nearer the truth than he. His love was the
+expression of its mystery. They went back through the great
+archway, and entered the palace park. Once more the slim-trunked
+trees flew past them with the fringes of light expressing the
+borders of the dusk. St. George crouched, half-kneeling, on the
+floor of the tonneau, his free hand protecting Olivia's face from
+the leaning branches of heavy-headed flowers. He had been so
+passionately anxious that she should know that he was on the island,
+near her, ready to serve her; but now, save for his alarm and
+anxiety about her, he felt a shy, profound gratitude that the hour
+had fallen as it had fallen. Whatever was to come, this nearness to
+her would be his to remember and possess. It had been his supreme
+hour. Whether she had recognized him in that moment on the road,
+whether she ever knew what had happened made, he thought, no
+difference. But if she was to open her eyes as they reached the
+border of the park, and if she was to know that it was like this
+that the genie had come out of the jar--the mere notion made him
+giddy, and he saw that Heaven may have little inner Heaven-courts
+which one is never too happy to penetrate.
+
+But Olivia did not stir or unclose her eyes. The great strain of the
+evening, the terror and shock of its ending, the very relief with
+which she had, at all events, realized herself in the hands of
+friends were more than even an island princess could pass through in
+serenity. And when at last from the demesne of enchantment the car
+emerged in the court of the palace, Olivia knew nothing of it and,
+as nearly as he could recall afterward, neither did St. George. He
+understood that the courtyard was filled with murmurs, and that as
+Olivia was lifted from the car the voice of Mrs. Medora Hastings, in
+all its excesses of tone and pitch, was tilted in a kind of
+universal reproving. Then he was aware that Jarvo, beseeching him
+not to leave the motor, had somehow got him away from all the tumult
+and the questioning and the crush of the other motors setting
+tardily off down the avenue in a kind cf majestic pursuit of the
+princess. After that he remembered nothing but the grateful gloom of
+the wood and the swift flight of the car down that nebulous way,
+thin darkness flowing about him.
+
+He was to go back to join Amory in some kind of tower, he knew; and
+he was infinitely resigned, for he remembered that this was in some
+way essential to his safety, and that it had to do with the ascent
+of Mount Khalak to-morrow night. For the rest St. George was certain
+of nothing save that he was floating once more in a sea of light,
+with the sweet of the world flowing in his veins; and upon his arm
+and against his shoulder he could still feel the thrill of the
+pressure of Olivia's head.
+
+The genie had come out of the jar--and never, never would he go
+back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE LINES LEAD UP
+
+
+In the late hours of the next afternoon Rollo, with a sigh, uncoiled
+himself from the shadow of the altar to the god Melkarth, in the
+Ilex Temple, and stiffly rose. Vicissitudes were not for Rollo, who
+had not fathomed the joys of adaptability; and the savour of the
+sweet herbs which, from Jarvo's wallet, he had that day served, was
+forgotten in his longing for a drop of tarragan vinegar and a bulb
+of garlic with which to dress the herbs. His lean and shadowed face
+wore an expression of settled melancholy.
+
+"Sorrow's nothing," he sententiously observed. "It's trouble that
+does for a man, sir."
+
+St. George, who lay at full length on a mossy sill of the king's
+chapel counting the hours of his inaction, continued to look out
+over the glistening tops of the ilex trees.
+
+"Speaking of trouble," he said, "what would you say, Rollo, to
+getting back to the yacht to-night, instead of going up the mountain
+with us?"
+
+Rollo dropped his eyes, but his face brightened under, as it were,
+his never-lifted mask.
+
+"Oh, sir," he said humbly, "a person is always willing to do
+whatever makes him the most useful."
+
+"Little Cawthorne and Bennietod," went on St. George, "ten to one
+will take to the trail to-night, if they haven't already. They'll be
+coming to Med and reorganizing the police force, or raising a
+standing army or starting a subway. You'd do well to drop down and
+give them some idea of what's happened, and I fancy you'd better all
+be somewhere about on the day after to-morrow, at noon. Not that
+there will be any wedding at that time," explained St. George
+carefully, "although there may be something to see, all the same.
+But you might tell them, you know, that Miss Holland is due to marry
+the prince then. Can you get back to the yacht alone?"
+
+Rollo hadn't thought of that, and his mask fell once more into its
+lines of misery.
+
+"I don't know, sir," he said doubtfully, "most men can go up a steep
+place all right. It's comin' down that's hard on the knees. And if I
+was to try it alone, sir--"
+
+Jarvo made a sign of reassurance.
+
+"That is not well," he said, "you would be dashed to pieces. Ulfin,
+one of the six, will wait for us to-night on the edge of the grove.
+He can conduct the way to the vessel."
+
+"Ah, sir," said Rollo, not without a certain self-satisfaction,
+"something is always sure to turn up, sir."
+
+From a tour of the temple Amory came listlessly back to the king's
+chapel. There, where the descendants of Abibaal had worshiped until
+their idols had been refined by Time to a kind of decoration, the
+Americans and Jarvo had spent the night. They had slept stretched on
+benches of beveled stone. They had waked to trace the figures in a
+length of tapestry representing the capture of Io on the coast of
+Argolis, doubtless woven by an eye-witness. They had bathed in a
+brook near the entrance where stood the altar for the sacrifice
+round which the priests and _hierodouloi_ had been wont to dance,
+and where huge architraves, metopes and tryglyphs, massive as those
+at Gebeil and Tortosa and hewn from living rock, rose from the
+fragile green of the wood like a huge arm signaling its eternal
+"Alas!" They had partaken of Jarvo's fruit and sweet herbs, and
+Rollo had served them, standing with his back to the niche where
+once had looked augustly down the image of the god. And now Amory,
+with a smile, leaned against a wall where old vines, grown
+miraculously in crannies, spread their tendrils upon the friendly
+hieroglyphic scoring of the crenelated stone, and summed up his
+reflections of the night.
+
+"I've got it," he announced, "I think it was up in the Adirondacks,
+summer before last. I think I was in a canoe when she went by in a
+launch, with the Chiswicks. Why, do you know, I think I dreamed
+about Miss Frothingham for weeks."
+
+St. George smiled suddenly and radiantly, and his smile was for the
+sake of both Rollo and Amory--Rollo whose sense of the commonplace
+nothing could overpower, Amory who talked about the Chiswicks in the
+Adirondacks. Why not? St. George thought happily. Here in the temple
+certain precious and delicate idols were believed to be hidden in
+alcoves walled up by mighty stone; and here, Jarvo was telling them,
+were secret exits to the road contrived by the priests of the temple
+at the time of their oppression by the worshipers of another god;
+but yet what special interest could he and Amory have in brooding
+upon these, or the ancient Phoenicians having "invited to traffic by
+a signal fire," when they could sit still and remember?
+
+"To-night," he said aloud, feeling a sudden fellowship for both
+Amory and Rollo, "to-night, when the moon rises, we shall watch it
+from the top of the mountain."
+
+Then he wondered, many hundred times, whether Olivia could possibly
+have recognized him.
+
+When the dark had fallen they set out. The ilex grove was very still
+save for a fugitive wind that carried faint spices, and they took a
+winding way among trunks and reached the edge of the wood without
+adventure. There Ulfin and another of the six carriers were waiting,
+as Jarvo had expected, and it was decided that they should both
+accompany Rollo down to the yacht.
+
+Rollo handed the oil-skins to St. George and Amory, and then stood
+crushing his hat in his hands, doing his best to speak.
+
+"Look sharp, Rollo," St. George advised him, "don't step one foot
+off a precipice. And tell the people on the yacht not to worry. We
+shall expect to see them day after to-morrow, somewhere about. Take
+care of yourself."
+
+"Oh, sir," said Rollo with difficulty, "good-by, sir. I '_ope_
+you'll be successful, sir. A person likes to succeed in what they
+undertake."
+
+Then the three went on down the glimmering way where, last night,
+they had pursued the floating pennon of the veil. There were few
+upon the highway, and these hardly regarded them. It occurred to St.
+George that they passed as figures in a dream will pass, in the
+casual fashion of all unreality, taking all things for granted. Yet,
+of course, to the passers-by upon the road to Med, there was nothing
+remarkable in the aspect of the three companions. All that was
+remarkable was the adventure upon which they were bound, and nobody
+could possibly have guessed that.
+
+Almost a mile lay between them and the point where the ascent of
+the mountain was to be begun. The road which they were taking
+followed at the foot of the embankment which girt the island, and it
+led them at last to a stretch of arbourescent heath, piled with
+black basaltic rocks. Here, where the light was dim like the glow
+from light reflected upon low clouds, they took their way among
+great branching cacti and nameless plants that caught at their
+ankles. A strange odour rose from the earth, mineral, metallic, and
+the air was thick with particles stirred by their feet and more
+resembling ashes than dust. This was a waste place of the island,
+and if one were to lift a handful of the soil, St. George thought,
+it was very likely that one might detect its elements; as, here the
+dust of a temple, here of a book, here a tomb and here a sacrifice.
+He felt himself near the earth, in its making. He looked away to the
+sugar-loaf cone of the mountain risen against the star-lit sky.
+Above its fortress-like bulk with circular ramparts burned the clear
+beacon of the light on the king's palace. As he saw the light, St.
+George knew himself not only near the earth but at one with the very
+currents of the air, partaker of now a hope, now a task, now a
+spell, and now a memory. It was as if love had made him one with the
+dust of dead cities and with their eternal spiritual effluence.
+
+At length they crossed the broad avenue that led from the
+Eurychôrus to Melita, and struck into the road that skirted the
+mountain; and where a thicket of trees flung bold branches across
+the way, three figures rose from the ground before them, and Akko
+stepped forward and saluted, his white teeth gleaming. Immediately
+Jarvo led the way through a strip of underbrush at the base of the
+mountain, and they emerged in a glade where the light hardly
+penetrated.
+
+Here were distinguishable the palanquins in which the ascent was to
+be made. These were like long baskets, upborne by a pole of great
+flexibility broadening to a wider support beneath the body of the
+basket and provided with rubber straps through which the arms were
+passed. When St. George and Amory were seated, Jarvo spoke
+hesitatingly:
+
+"We must bandage your eyes, adôn," he said.
+
+"Oh really, really," protested St. George, "we don't understand half
+we do see. Do let us see what we can."
+
+"You must be blindfolded, adôn," repeated Jarvo firmly.
+
+Amory, passing his arms reflectively through the rubber straps which
+Akko held for him, spoke cheerfully:
+
+"I'll go up blindfold," he submitted, "if I can smoke."
+
+"Neither of us will," said St. George with determination. "See
+here, Jarvo, we are both level-headed. We pledge you our word of
+honour, in addition, not to dive overboard. Now--lead on."
+
+"It has never been done," said the little brown man with obstinacy,
+"you will lose your reason, adôn."
+
+"Ah well now, if we do," said St. George, "pitch us over and leave
+us. Besides, I think we have. Lead on, please."
+
+Against the will of the others, he prevailed. The light oil-skins
+were placed in the baskets, each of which was shouldered by two men,
+Jarvo bearing the foremost pole of St. George's palanquin. All the
+carriers had drawn on long, soft shoes which, perhaps from some
+preparation in which they had been dipped, glowed with light,
+illuminating the ground for a little distance at every step.
+
+"Are you ready, adôn?" asked Jarvo and Akko at the same moment.
+
+"Ready!" cried St. George impatiently.
+
+"Ready," said Amory languidly, and added one thought more: "I hope
+for Chillingworth's sake," he said, "that Frothingham is a notary
+public. We'll have to have somebody's seal at the bottom of all this
+copy."
+
+The baskets were lightly lifted. Jarvo gave a sharp command, and all
+four of the men broke into a rhythmic chant. Jarvo, leading the way,
+sprang immediately upon the first foothold, where none seemed to
+be, and without pause to the next. So perfectly were the men trained
+that it was as if but one set of muscles were inspiring the
+movements made to the beat of that monotonous measure. In their
+strong hands the flexible pole seemed to give as their bodies gave,
+and so lightly did they leap upward that the jar of their alighting
+was hardly perceptible, as if, as had occurred to St. George as they
+ascended the lip of the island, gravity were here another matter.
+So, without pause, save in the rhythm of that strange march music,
+the remarkable progress was begun.
+
+St. George threw one swift glance upward and looked down,
+shudderingly. Beetling above them in the great starlight hung the
+gigantic pile, wall upon wall of rock hewn with such secret foothold
+that it was a miracle how any living thing could catch and cling to
+its forbidding surface. Only lifelong practice of the men, who from
+childhood had been required to make the ascent and whose fathers and
+fathers' fathers before them had done the same, could have accounted
+for that catlike ability to cling to the trail where was no trail.
+The sensation of the long swinging upward movement was unutterably
+alien to anything in life or in dreams, and the sheer height above
+and the momently-deepening chasm below were presences contending for
+possession.
+
+Strange fragrance stole from gum and bark of the decreasing
+vegetation. Dislodged stones rolled bounding from rock to rock into
+the abyss. To right and left the way went. There was not even the
+friendly beacon of the summit to beckon them. It seemed to St.
+George that their whole safety lay in motion, that a moment's
+cessation from the advance would hurl them all down the sides of the
+declivity. Since the ascent began he had not ceased to look down;
+and now as they rose free of the tree-tops that clothed the base of
+the mountain he could see across the plain, and beyond the bounding
+embankment of the island to the dark waste of the sea. Somewhere out
+there _The Aloha_ was rocking. Somewhere, away to the northwest, the
+lights of New York harbour shone. _Did_ they, St. George wondered
+vaguely; and, when he went back, how would they look to him? It
+seemed to him in some indeterminate fashion that when he saw them
+again there would be new lines and sides of beauty which he had
+never suspected, and as if all the world would be changed, included
+in this new world that he had found.
+
+Half-way up the ascent a resting-place was contrived for the
+carriers. The projection upon which the baskets were lowered was
+hardly three feet in width. Its edge dropped into darkness. Within
+reach, leaves rustled from the summit of a tree rooted somewhere in
+the chasm. The blackness below was vast and to be measured only by
+the memory of that upward course. Gemmed by its lighted hamlets the
+fair plain of the island lay, with Med and Melita glowing like lamps
+to the huge dusk.
+
+"St. George," said Amory soberly, "if it's all true--if these people
+do understand what the world doesn't know anything about--"
+
+"Yes," said St. George.
+
+"It makes a man feel--"
+
+"Yes," said St. George, "it does."
+
+This, they afterward remembered, was all that they said on the
+ascent. One wonders if two, being met among the "strengthless tribes
+of the dead," would find much more to say.
+
+Then they went on, scaling that invisible way, with the twinkling
+feet of the carriers drawing upward like a thread of thin gold which
+they were to climb. What, St. George thought as the way seemed to
+lengthen before them, what if there were no end? What if this were
+some gigantic trick of Destiny to keep him for the rest of his life
+in mid-air, ceaselessly toiling up, a latter-day Sisyphus, in a
+palanquin? He had dreamed of stairs in the darkness which men
+mounted and found to have no summits, and suppose this were such a
+stair? Suppose, among these marvels that were related to his dreams,
+he had, as it were, tossed a ball of twine in the air and, like the
+Indian jugglers, climbed it? Suppose he had built a castle in the
+clouds and tenanted it with Olivia, and were now foolhardily
+attempting to scale the air? Ah well, he settled it contentedly,
+better so. For this divine jugglery comes once into every life, and
+one must climb to the castle with madness and singing if he would
+attain to the temples that lie on the castle-plain.
+
+Gradually, as they approached the summit, the ascent became less
+precipitous. As they neared the cone their way lay over a kind of
+natural fosse at the cone's base; and, although the mountain did not
+reach the level of perpetual snow, yet an occasional cool breath
+from the dark told where in some natural cavern snow had lain
+undisturbed since the unremembered eruption of the sullen, volcanic
+peak. Then came a breath of over-powering sweetness from some secret
+thicket, and something was struck from the feet of the bearers that
+was like white pumice gravel. St. George no longer looked downward;
+the plain and the waste of the sea were in a forgotten limbo, and he
+searched eagerly on high for the first rays of the light that marked
+the goal of his longing.
+
+Yet he was unprepared when, swerving sharply and skirting an immense
+shoulder of rock, Jarvo suddenly emerged upon a broad retaining wall
+of stone bordering a smooth, moon-lit terrace extending by shallow
+flights of steps to the white doors of the king's palace itself.
+
+As St. George and Amory freed themselves and sprang to their feet
+their eyes were drawn to a glory of light shining over the low
+parapet which surrounded the terrace.
+
+"Look," cried St. George victoriously, "the moon!"
+
+From the sea the moon was momently growing, like a giant bubble, and
+a bright path had issued to the mountain's foot. "See," she would
+doubtless have said if she could, "I would have shown you the way
+here all your life if only you had looked properly." But at all
+events St. George's prophecy was fulfilled: From the top of Mount
+Khalak they were watching the moon rise. St. George, however, was
+not yet in the company whose image had pleasantly besieged him when
+he had prophesied. He turned impatiently to the palace. Jarvo,
+resting on the stones where he had sunk down, signaled them to go
+on, and the two needed no second bidding. They set off briskly
+across the plateau, Amory looking about him with eager curiosity,
+St. George on the crest of his divine expectancy.
+
+The palace was set on the west of the gentle slope to which the
+mountain-top had been artificially leveled. The terrace led up on
+three sides from the marge of the height to the great portals. Over
+everything hung that imponderable essence that was clearer and purer
+than any light--"better than any light that ever shone." In its
+glamourie, with that far ocean background, the palace of pale stone
+looked unearthly, a sky thing, with ramparts of air. The principle
+of the builders seemed not to have been the ancient dictum that
+"mass alone is admirable," for the great pile was shaped, with
+beauty of unknown line, in three enormous cylinders, one rising from
+another, the last magnificently curved to a huge dome on whose
+summit burned with inconceivable brilliance the light which had been
+a beacon to the longing eyes turned toward it from the deck of _The
+Aloha_. In the shadow of the palace rose two high towers,
+obelisk-shaped from the pure white stone. Scattered about the slope
+were detached buildings, consisting of marble monoliths resting upon
+double bases and crowned with carved cornices, or of truncated
+pyramids and pyramidions. These had plinths of delicately-coloured
+stone over which the light diffused so that they looked luminous,
+and the small blocks used to fill the apertures of the courses shone
+like precious things. Adjacent to one of the porches were two
+conical shrines, for images and little lamps; and, near-by, a fallen
+pillar of immense proportions lay undisturbed upon the court of
+sward across which it had some time shivered down.
+
+But if the palace had been discovered to be the preserved and
+transported Temple of Solomon it could not have stayed St. George
+for one moment of admiration. He was off up the slope, seeing only
+the great closed portals, and with Amory beside him he ran boldly up
+the long steps. It was a part of the unreality of the place that
+there seemed absolutely no sign of life about the King's palace. The
+windows glowed with the soft light within, but there were no guards,
+no servants, no sign of any presence. For the first time, when they
+reached the top of the steps, the two men hesitated.
+
+"Personally," said Amory doubtfully, "I have never yet tapped at a
+king's front door. What does one do?"
+
+St. George looked at the long stone porches, uncovered and girt by a
+parapet following the curve of the façade.
+
+"Would you mind waiting a minute?" he said.
+
+With that he was off along the balcony to the south--and afterward
+he wondered why, and if it is true that Fate tempts us in the way
+that she would have us walk by luring us with unseen roses budding
+from the air.
+
+Where the porch abruptly widened to a kind of upper terrace, like a
+hanging garden set with flowering trees, three high archways opened
+to an apartment whose bright lights streamed across the grass-plots.
+St. George felt something tug at his heart, something that urged him
+forward and caught him up in an ecstasy of triumph and hope
+fulfilled. He looked back at Amory, and Amory was leaning on the
+parapet, apparently sunk in reflections which concerned nobody. So
+St. George stepped softly on until he reached the first archway, and
+there he stopped, and the moment was to him almost past belief.
+Within the open doorway, so near that if she had lifted her eyes
+they must have met his own, was the woman whom he had come across
+the sea to seek.
+
+St. George hardly knew that he spoke, for it was as if all the world
+were singing her name.
+
+"Olivia!" he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE ISLE OF HEARTS
+
+
+The room in which St. George was looking was long and lofty and hung
+with pale tapestries. White pillars supporting the domed white
+ceiling were wound with garlands. The smoke from a little brazen
+tripod ascended pleasantly, and about the windows stirred in the
+faint wind draperies of exceeding thinness, woven in looms stilled
+centuries ago.
+
+Olivia was crossing before the windows. She wore a white gown strewn
+with roses, and she seemed as much at home on this alien
+mountain-top as she had been in her aunt's drawing-room at the
+Boris. But her face was sad, and there was not a touch of the
+piquancy which it had worn the night before in the throne-room, nor
+of its delicious daring as she had sped past him in the big Yaque
+touring car. Save for her, the room was deserted; it was as if the
+prince had come to the castle and found the Sleeping Princess the
+only one awake.
+
+If in that supreme moment St. George had leaped forward and taken
+her in his arms no one--no one, that is, in the fairy-tale of what
+was happening--would greatly have censured him. But he stood without
+for a moment, hardly daring to believe his happiness, hardly knowing
+that her name was on his lips.
+
+He had spoken, however, and she turned quickly, her look uncertainly
+seeking the doorway, and she saw him. For a moment she stood still,
+her eyes upon his face; then with a little incredulous cry that
+thrilled him with a sudden joyous hope that was like belief, she
+came swiftly toward him.
+
+St. George loved to remember that she did that. There was no waiting
+for assurance and no fear; only the impulse, gloriously obeyed, to
+go toward him.
+
+He stepped in the room, and took her hands in his and looked into
+her eyes as if he would never turn away his own. In her face was a
+dawning of glad certainty and welcome which he could not doubt.
+
+"You," she cried softly, "you. How is it possible? But how is it
+possible?"
+
+Her voice trembled a little with something so sweet that it raced
+through his veins with magic.
+
+"Did you rub the lamp?" he said. "Because I couldn't help coming."
+
+She looked at him breathlessly.
+
+"Have you," he asked her gravely, "eaten of the potatoes of Yaque?
+And are you going to say, 'Off with his head'? And can you tell me
+what is the population of the island?"
+
+At that they both laughed--the merry, irrepressible laugh of youth
+which explains that the world is a very good place indeed and that
+one is glad that one belongs there. And the memory of that breakfast
+on the other side of the world, of their happy talk about what would
+happen if they two were impossibly to meet in Yaque came back to
+them both, and set his heart beating and flooded her face with
+delicate colour. In her laugh was a little catching of the breath
+that was enchanting.
+
+"Not yet," she said, "your head is safe till you tell me how you got
+here, at all events. Now tell me--oh, tell me. I can't believe it
+until you tell me."
+
+She moved a little away from the door.
+
+"Come in," she said shyly, "if you've come all the way from America
+you must be very tired."
+
+St. George shook his head.
+
+"Come out," he pleaded, "I want to stand on top of a high mountain
+and show you the whole world."
+
+She went quite simply and without hesitation--because, in Yaque, the
+maddest things would be the truest--and when she had stepped from
+the low doorway she looked up at him in the tender light of the
+garden terrace.
+
+"If you are quite sure," she said, "that you will not disappear in
+the dark?"
+
+St. George laughed happily.
+
+"I shall not disappear," he promised, "though the world were to turn
+round the other way."
+
+They crossed the still terrace to the parapet and stood looking out
+to sea with the risen moon shining across the waters. The light wind
+stirred in the cedrine junipers, shaking out perfume; the great
+fairy pile of the palace rose behind them; and before them lay the
+monstrous moon-lit abyss than whose depths the very stars, warm and
+friendly, seemed nearer to them. To the big young American in blue
+serge beside the little new princess who had drawn him over seas the
+dream that one is always having and never quite remembering was
+suddenly come true. No wonder that at that moment the patient Amory
+was far enough from his mind. To St. George, looking down upon
+Olivia, there was only one truth and one joy in the universe, and
+she was that truth and that joy.
+
+"I can't believe it," he said boyishly.
+
+"Believe--what?" she asked, for the delight of hearing him say so.
+
+"This--me--most of all, you!" he answered.
+
+"But you must believe it," she cried anxiously, "or maybe it will
+stop being."
+
+"I will, I will, I am now!" promised St. George in alarm.
+
+Whereat they both laughed again in sheer light-heartedness. Then,
+resting his broad shoulders against a prism of the parapet, St.
+George looked down at her in infinite content.
+
+"You found the island," she said; "what is still more wonderful you
+have come here--but _here_--to the top of the mountain. Oh, did you
+bring news of my father?"
+
+St. George would have given everything save the sweet of the moment
+to tell her that he did.
+
+"But now," he added cheerfully, and his smile disarmed this of its
+over-confidence, "I've only been here two days or so. And, though it
+may look easy, I've had my hands full climbing up this. I ought to
+be allowed another day or two to locate your father."
+
+"Please tell me how you got here," Olivia demanded then.
+
+St. George told her briefly, omitting the yacht's ownership,
+explaining merely that the paper had sent him and that Jarvo and
+Akko had pointed the way and, save for that journey down nebulous
+ways in the wake of her veil the night before, sketching the
+incidents which had followed his arrival upon the island.
+
+"And one of the most agreeable hours I've had in Yaque," he
+finished, "was last night, when you were chairman of the meeting.
+That was magnificent."
+
+"You _were_ there!" cried Olivia, "I thought--"
+
+"That you saw me?" St. George pressed eagerly.
+
+"I think that I thought so," she admitted.
+
+"But you never looked at me," said St. George dolefully, "and I had
+on a forty-two gored dress, or something."
+
+"Ah," Olivia confessed, "but I had thought so before when I knew it
+couldn't be you."
+
+St. George's heart gave a great bound.
+
+"When before?" he wanted to know ecstatically.
+
+"Ah, before," she explained, "and then afterward, too."
+
+"When afterward?" he urged.
+
+(Smile if you like, but this is the way the happy talk goes in Yaque
+as you remember very well, if you are honest.)
+
+"Yesterday, when I was motoring, I thought--"
+
+"I was. You did," St. George assured her. "I was in the prince's
+motor. The procession was temporarily tied up, you remember. Did you
+really think it was I?"
+
+But this the lady passed serenely over.
+
+"Last night," she said, "when that terrible thing happened, who was
+it in the other motor? Who was it, there in the road when I--was it
+you? Was it?" she demanded.
+
+"Did you think it was I?" asked St. George simply.
+
+"Afterward--when I was back in the palace--I thought I must have
+dreamed it," she answered, "and no one seemed to know, and _I_
+didn't know. But I did fancy--you see, they think father has taken
+the treasure," she said, "and they thought if they could hide me
+somewhere and let it be known, that he would make some sign."
+
+"It was monstrous," said St. George; "you are really not safe here
+for one moment. Tell me," he asked eagerly, "the car you were
+in--what became of that?"
+
+"I meant to ask you that," she said quickly. "I couldn't tell, I
+didn't know whether it turned aside from the road, or whether they
+dropped me out and went on. Really, it was all so quick that it was
+almost as if the motor had stopped being, and left me there."
+
+"Perhaps it did stop being--in this dimension," St. George could not
+help saying.
+
+At this she laughed in assent.
+
+"Who knows," she said, "what may be true of us--_nous autres_ in the
+Fourth Dimension? In Yaque queer things are true. And of course you
+never can tell--"
+
+At this St. George turned toward her, and his eyes compelled hers.
+
+"Ah, yes, you can," he told her, "yes, you can."
+
+Then he folded his arms and leaned against the stone prisms again,
+looking down at her. Evidently the magician, whoever he was, did not
+mind his saying that, for the palace did not crumble or the moon
+cease from shining on the white walls.
+
+"Still," she answered, looking toward the sea, "queer things _are_
+true in Yaque. It is queer that you are here. Say that it is."
+
+"Heaven knows that it is," assented St. George obediently.
+
+Presently, realizing that the terrace did not intend to turn into a
+cloud out-of-hand, they set themselves to talk seriously, and St.
+George had not known her so adorable, he was once more certain, as
+when she tried to thank him for his pursuit the night before. He had
+omitted to mention that he had brought her back alone to the Palace
+of the Litany, for that was too exquisite a thing, he decided, to be
+spoiled by leaving out the most exquisite part. Besides, there was
+enough that was serious to be discussed, in all conscience, in spite
+of the moon.
+
+"Tell me," said St. George instead, "what has happened to you since
+that breakfast at the Boris. Remember, I have come all the way from
+New York to interview you, Mademoiselle the Princess."
+
+So Olivia told him the story of the passage in the submarine which
+had arrived in Yaque two days earlier than _The Aloha_; of the first
+trip up Mount Khalak in the imperial airship; of Mrs. Hastings'
+frantic fear and her utter refusal ever to descend; and of what she
+herself had done since her arrival. This included a most practical
+account of effort that delighted and amazed St. George. No wonder
+Mrs. Hastings had said that she always left everything "executive"
+to Olivia. For Olivia had sent wireless messages all over the island
+offering an immense reward for information about the king, her
+father; she had assigned forty servants of the royal household to
+engage in a personal search for such information and to report to
+her each night; she had ordered every house in Yaque, not excepting
+the House of the Litany and the king's palace itself, to be searched
+from dungeon to tower; and, as St. George already knew, she had
+brought about a special meeting of the High Council at noon that
+day.
+
+"It was very little," said the American princess apologetically,
+"but I did what I could."
+
+"What about the meeting of the High Council?" asked St. George
+eagerly; "didn't anything come of that?"
+
+"Nothing," she answered, "they were like adamant. I thought of
+offering to raise the Hereditary Treasure by incorporating the
+island and selling the shares in America. Nobody could ever have
+found what the shares stood for, but that happens every day. Half
+the corporations must be capitalized chiefly in the Fourth
+Dimension. That is all," she added wearily, "save that day after
+to-morrow I am to be married."
+
+"That," St. George explained, "is as you like. For if your father
+is on the island we shall have found him by day after to-morrow, at
+noon, if we have to shake all Yaque inside out, like a paper sack.
+And if he isn't here, we simply needn't stop."
+
+Olivia shook her head.
+
+"You don't know the prince," she said. "I have heard enough to
+convince me that it is quite as he says. He holds events in the
+hollow of his hand."
+
+"Amory proposed," said St. George, "that we sit up here and throw
+pebbles at him for a time. And Amory is very practical."
+
+Olivia laughed--her laugh was delicious and alluring, and St. George
+came dangerously near losing his head every time that he heard it.
+
+"Ah," she cried, "if only it weren't for the prince and if we had
+news of father, what a heavenly, heavenly place this would be, would
+it not?"
+
+"It would, it would indeed," assented St. George, and in his heart
+he said, "and so it is."
+
+"It's like being somewhere else," she said, looking into the abyss
+of far waters, "and when you look down there--and when you look up,
+you nearly _know_. I don't know what, but you nearly know. Perhaps
+you know that 'here' is the same as 'there,' as all these people
+say. But whatever it is, I think we might have come almost as near
+knowing it in New York, if we had only known how to try."
+
+"Perhaps it isn't so much knowing," he said, "as it is being where
+you can't help facing mystery and taking the time to be amazed.
+Although," added St. George to himself, "there are things that one
+finds out in New York. In a drawing-room, at the Boris, for
+instance, over muffins and tea."
+
+"It will be delightful to take all this back to New York," Olivia
+vaguely added, as if she meant the fairy palace and the fairy sea.
+
+"It will," agreed St. George fervently, and he couldn't possibly
+have told whether he meant the mystery of the island or the mystery
+of that hour there with her. There was so little difference.
+
+"Suppose," said Olivia whimsically, "that we open our eyes in a
+minute, and find that we are in the prince's room in McDougle
+Street, and that he has passed his hand before our faces and made us
+dream all this. And father is safe after all."
+
+"But it isn't all a dream," St. George said softly, "it can't
+possibly all be a dream, you know."
+
+She met his eyes for a moment.
+
+"Not your coming away here," she said, "if the rest is true I
+wouldn't want that to be a dream. You don't know what courage this
+will give us all."
+
+She said "us all," but that had to mean merely "us," as well. St.
+George turned and looked over the terrace. What an Arabian night it
+was, he was saying to himself, and then stood in a sudden amazement,
+with the uncertain idea that one of the Schererazade magicians had
+answered that fancy of his by appearing.
+
+A little shrine hung thick with vines, its ancient stone chipped and
+defaced, stood on the terrace with its empty, sightless niche turned
+toward the sea. Leaning upon its base was an old man watching them.
+His eyes under their lowered brows were peculiarly intent, but his
+look was perfectly serene and friendly. His stuff robe hung in
+straight folds about his singularly erect figure, and his beard and
+hair were not all grey. But he was very old, with incredibly brown
+and wrinkled flesh, and his face was vacant, as if the mind were
+asleep.
+
+As he looked, St. George knew him. Here on the top of this mountain
+was that amazing old man whom he had last seen in the banquet hall
+at the Palace of the Litany--that old Malakh for whom Olivia had so
+unexplainably interceded.
+
+"What is that man doing here?" St. George asked in surprise.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"He is a mad old man, they said," Olivia told him, "down there they
+call him Malakh--that means 'salt'--because they said he always
+weeps. We had stopped to look at a metallurgist yesterday--he had
+some zinc and some metals cut out like flowers, and he was making
+them show phosphorescent colours in his little dark alcove. The old
+man was watching him and trying to tell him something, but the
+metallurgist was rude to him and some boys came by and jostled him
+and pushed him about and taunted him--and the metallurgist actually
+explained to us that every one did that way to old Malakh. So I
+thought he was better off up here," concluded Olivia tranquilly.
+
+St. George was silent. He knew that Olivia was like this, but
+everything that proved anew her loveliness of soul caught at his
+heart.
+
+"Tell me," he said impulsively, "what made you let him stay last
+night, there in the banquet hall?"
+
+She flushed, and shook her head with a deprecatory gesture.
+
+"I haven't an idea," she said gravely, "I think I must have done it
+so the fairies wouldn't prick their feet on any new sorrow. One has
+to be careful of the fairies' feet."
+
+St. George nodded. It was a charming reason for the left hand to
+give the right, and he was not deceived.
+
+"Look at him," said St. George, almost reverently, "he looks like a
+shade of a god that has come back from the other world and found his
+shrine dishonoured."
+
+Some echo of St. George's words reached the old man and he caught
+at it, smiling. It was as if he had just been thinking what he
+spoke.
+
+"There are not enough shrines," he said gently, "but there are far
+too many gods. You will find it so."
+
+Something in his words stirred St. George strangely. There was about
+the old creature an air of such gentleness, such supreme repose and
+detachment that, even in that place of quiet, his presence made a
+kind of hush. He was old and pallid and fragile, but there lingered
+within him, while his spirit lingered, the perfume of all fine and
+gentle things, all things of quietude. When he had spoken the old
+man turned and moved slowly down the ways of strange light, between
+the fallen temples builded to forgotten gods, and he seemed like the
+very spirit of the ancient mountain, ignorant of itself and knowing
+all truth.
+
+"How strange," said St. George, looking after him, "how unutterably
+strange and sad."
+
+"That is good of you," said Olivia. "Aunt Dora and Antoinette
+thought I'd gone quite off my head, and Mr. Frothingham wanted to
+know why I didn't bring back some one who could have been called as
+a witness."
+
+"Witness," St. George echoed; "but the whole place is made of
+witnesses. Which reminds me: what is the sentence?"
+
+"The sentence?" she wondered.
+
+"The potatoes of Yaque," he reminded her, "and my head?"
+
+"Ah well," said Olivia gravely, "inasmuch as the moon came up in the
+east to-night instead of the west, I shall be generous and give you
+one day's reprieve."
+
+"Do you know, I _thought_ the moon came up in the east to-night,"
+cried St. George joyfully.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was half an hour afterward that Amory's languid voice from
+somewhere in the sky broke in upon their talk. As he came toward
+them across the terrace St. George saw that he was miraculously not
+alone.
+
+Afterward Amory told him what had happened and what had made him
+abide in patience and such wondrous self-effacement.
+
+When St. George had left him contemplating the far beauties of the
+little blur of light that was Med, Mr. Toby Amory set a match to one
+of his jealously expended store of Habanas and added one more aroma
+to the spiced air. To be standing on the doorstep of a king's
+palace, confidently expecting within the next few hours to assist in
+locating the king himself was a situation warranting, Amory thought,
+such fragrant celebration, and he waited in comparative content.
+
+The moon had climbed high enough to cast a great octagonal shadow on
+the smooth court, and the Habana was two-thirds memory when,
+immediately back of Amory, a long window opened outward, releasing
+an apparition which converted the remainder of the Habana into a
+fiery trail ending out on the terrace. It was a girl of rather more
+than twenty, exquisitely petite and pretty, and wearing a ruffley
+blue evening gown whose skirt was caught over her arm. She stopped
+short when she saw Amory, but without a trace of fear. To tell the
+truth, Antoinette Frothingham had got so desperately bored
+withindoors that if Amory had worn a black mask or a cloak of flame
+she would have welcomed either.
+
+For the last two hours Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham had sat in a white marble room of the king's palace,
+playing chess on Mr. Frothingham's pocket chess-board. Mr.
+Frothingham, who loathed chess, played it when he was tired so that
+he might rest and when he was rested he played it so that he might
+exercise his mind--on the principle of a cool drink on a hot day and
+a hot drink on a cool day. Mrs. Hastings, who knew nothing at all
+about the game, had entered upon the hour with all the suave
+complacency with which she would have attacked the making of a pie.
+Mrs. Hastings had a secret belief that she possessed great aptitude.
+
+Antoinette Frothingham, the lawyer's daughter, had leaned on the
+high casement and looked over the sea. The window was narrow, and
+deep in an embrasure of stone. To be twenty and to be leaning in
+this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly
+suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had
+been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle
+tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no
+possibility of any knight within an altitude of many hundred feet.
+
+"The dear little ponies' heads!" Mrs. Hastings had kept saying.
+"What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don't you think?
+That's what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings--at least,
+that's what he always said to me: 'Most games are so _needless_, but
+chess is really up and down poetic'"
+
+Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in
+silence.
+
+"Um," he had responded liberally.
+
+"I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, "neither he nor
+I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano
+in the middle of the ocean. It's this awful feeling," Mrs. Hastings
+had cried querulously, "of being neither on earth nor under the
+water nor in Heaven that I object to. And nobody can get to us."
+
+"That's just it, Mrs. Hastings," Antoinette had observed earnestly
+at this juncture.
+
+"Um," said Mr. Frothingham, then, "not at all, not at all. We have
+all the advantages of the grave and none of its discomforts."
+
+Whereupon Antoinette, rising suddenly, had slipped out of the white
+marble room altogether and had found the knight smoking in
+loneliness on the very veranda.
+
+Amory put his cap under his arm and bowed.
+
+"I hope," he said, "that I haven't frightened you."
+
+He was an American! Antoinette's little heart leaped.
+
+"I am having to wait here for a bit," explained Amory, not without
+vagueness.
+
+Miss Frothingham advanced to the veranda rail and contrived a shy
+scrutiny of the intruder.
+
+"No," she said, "you didn't frighten me in the least, of course.
+But--do you usually do your waiting at this altitude?"
+
+"Ah, no," answered Amory with engaging candour, "I don't. But
+I--happened up this way." Amory paused a little desperately. In that
+soft light he could not tell positively whether this was Miss
+Holland or that other figure of silver and rose which he had seen in
+the throne room. The blue gown was not interpretative. If she was
+Miss Holland it would be very shabby of him to herald the surprise.
+Naturally, St. George would appreciate doing that himself. "I'm
+looking about a bit," he neatly temporized.
+
+Antoinette suddenly looked away over the terrace as her eyes met
+his, smiling behind their pince-nez. Amory was good to look at, and
+he had never been more so than as he towered above her on the steps
+of the king's palace. Who was he--but who was he? Antoinette
+wondered rapidly. Had a warship arrived? Was Yaque taken? Or
+had--she turned eyes, round with sudden fear, upon Amory.
+
+"Did Prince Tabnit send you?" she demanded.
+
+Amory laughed.
+
+"No, indeed," he said. Amory had once lived in the South, and he
+accented the "no" very takingly. "I came myself," he volunteered.
+
+"I thought," explained Antoinette, "that maybe he opened a door in
+the dark, and you walked out. It _is_ rather funny that you should
+be here."
+
+"You are here, you know," suggested Amory doubtfully.
+
+"But I may be a cannibal princess," Antoinette demurely pointed out.
+It was not that her astonishment was decreasing; but why--modernity
+and the democracy spoke within her--waste the possibilities of a
+situation merely because it chances to be astonishing? Moments of
+mystery are rare enough, in all conscience; and when they do arrive
+all the world misses them by trying to understand them. Which is
+manifestly ungrateful and stupid. They do these things better in
+Yaque.
+
+"You maybe," agreed Amory evenly, "though I don't know that I ever
+met a desert island princess in a dinner frock. But then, I am a
+beginner in desert islands."
+
+"Are you an American?" inquired Antoinette earnestly.
+
+Amory looked up at the frowning façade of the king's palace, and he
+could have found it in his heart to believe his own answer.
+
+"I'm the ghost," he confessed, "of a poor beggar of a Phoenician who
+used to make water-jars in Sidon. I have been condemned to plow the
+high seas and explore the tall mountains until I find the Pitiful
+Princess. She must be up at the very peak, in distress, and I--"
+
+Amory stopped and looked desperately about him. Would St. George
+never come? How was he, Amory, to be accountable for what he told if
+he were left here alone in these extraordinary circumstances?
+
+Then Antoinette lightly clapped her hands.
+
+"A ghost!" she exclaimed with pleasure. "Miss Holland hoped the
+place was haunted. A Phoenician ghost with an Alabama accent."
+
+She had said "Miss Holland hoped."
+
+"Aren't you--aren't you Miss Holland?" demanded Amory promptly, a
+joyful note of uncertainty in his voice.
+
+Antoinette shook her head.
+
+"No," she said, "though I don't know why I should tell you that."
+
+From Amory's soul rolled a burden that left him treading air on
+Mount Khalak. She was not Miss Holland. What did he care how long
+St. George stayed away?
+
+"I am Tobias Amory," he said, "of New York. Most people don't know
+about the Sidonian ghost part. But I've told you because I thought,
+perhaps, you might be the Pitiful Princess."
+
+Antoinette's heart was beating pleasantly. Of New York! How--oh, how
+did he get here? Was there, then, a wishing-stone in that window
+embrasure where she had been sitting, and had the knight come
+because she had willed it? How much did he know? How much ought she
+to tell? Nothing whatever, prudently decided the lawyer's daughter.
+
+"I've had, I'm almost certain, the pleasure of seeing you before,"
+imparted Amory pleasantly, adjusting his pince-nez and looking down
+at her. She was so enchantingly tiny and he was such a giant.
+
+"In New York?" demanded Antoinette.
+
+"No," said Amory, "no. Do desert island princesses get to New York
+occasionally, then? No, I think I saw you in Yaque. Yesterday. In a
+silver automobile. Did I?"
+
+Antoinette dimpled.
+
+"We frightened them all to death," she recalled. "Did we frighten
+you?"
+
+"So much," admitted Amory, "that I took refuge up here."
+
+"Where were you?" Antoinette asked curiously. Really, he was very
+amusing--this big courtly creature. How agreeable of Olivia to stay
+away.
+
+"Ah, tell me how you got here," she impetuously begged. "Desert
+island people don't see people from New York every day."
+
+"Well then, O Pitiful Princess," said the Shade from Sidon, "it was
+like this--"
+
+It was easy enough to fleet the time carelessly, and assuredly that
+high moon-lit world was meant to be no less merry than the golden.
+Whoever has chanced to meet a delightful companion on some silver
+veranda up in the welkin knows this perfectly well; and whoever has
+not is a dull creature. But there are delightful folk who are wont
+to suspect the dullest of harbouring some sweet secret, some sense
+of "those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life
+worth enduring," and this was akin to such a sight.
+
+After a time, at Antoinette's conscientious suggestion, they
+strolled the way that St. George had taken. And to Olivia and the
+missing adventurer over by the parapet came Amory's soft query:
+
+"St George, may I express a friendly concern?"
+
+"Ah, come here, Toby," commanded St. George happily, "her Highness
+and I have been discussing matters of state."
+
+"Antoinette!" cried Olivia in amazement. From time immemorial
+royalty has perpetually been surprised by the behaviour of its
+ladies-in-waiting.
+
+"I've been remembering a verse," said Amory when he had been
+presented to Olivia, "may I say it? It goes:
+
+          "'I'll speak a story to you,
+              Now listen while I try:
+            I met a Queen, and she kept house
+              A-sitting in the sky.'"
+
+"Come in and say it to my aunt," Olivia applauded. "Aunt Dora is
+dying of ennui up here."
+
+They crossed the terrace in the hush of the tropic night. Through
+the fairy black and silver the four figures moved, and it was as if
+the king's palace--that sky thing, with ramparts of air--had at
+length found expression and knew a way to answer the ancient
+glamourie of the moon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A VIGIL
+
+
+Upon Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, drowsing over the
+pocket chess-board, the sound of footsteps and men's voices in the
+corridor acted with electrical effect. Then the door was opened and
+behind Olivia and Antoinette appeared the two visitors who seemed to
+have fallen from the neighbouring heavens. The two chess-pretenders
+looked up aghast. If there were a place in the world where
+chaperonage might be relaxed the uninformed observer would say that
+it would be the top of Mount Khalak.
+
+"Mercy around us!" cried Mrs. Medora Hastings, "if it isn't that
+newspaper man! He's probably come over here to cable it all over the
+front page of every paper in New York. Well," she added
+complacently, as if she had brought it all about, "it seems good to
+see some of your own race. How _did_ you get here? Some trick, I
+suppose?"
+
+"My dear fellows," burst out Mr. Augustus Frothingham fervently,
+"thank God! I'm not, ordinarily, unequal to my situations, but I
+confess to you, as I would not to a client, that I don't object to
+sharing this one. How did you come?"
+
+"It's a house-party!" said Antoinette ecstatically.
+
+Amory looked at her in her blue gown in the light of the white room,
+and his spirits soared heavenward. Why should St. George have an
+idea that he controlled the hour?
+
+From a tumult of questioning, none of which was fully answered
+before Mrs. Hastings put another query, the lawyer at length
+elicited the substance of what had occurred.
+
+"You came up the side of the mountain, carried by four of those
+frightful natives?" shrilled Mrs. Hastings. "Olivia, think. It's a
+wonder they didn't murder you first and throw you over afterward,
+isn't it, Olivia? Oh, and my poor dear brother. To think of his
+lying somewhere all mangled and bl--"
+
+Emotion overcame Mrs. Hastings. Her tortoise-shell glasses fell to
+her lap and both her side-combs tinkled melodiously to the tiled
+floor.
+
+"This reminds me," said Mr. Frothingham, settling back and finding a
+pencil with which to emphasize his story, "this reminds me very much
+of a case that I had on the June calendar--"
+
+In half an hour St. George and Amory saw that all serious
+consideration of their situation must be accomplished alone with
+Olivia; for in that time Mr. Frothingham had been reminded of two
+more cases and Mrs. Hastings had twice been reduced to tears by the
+picture of the possible fate of her brother. Moreover, there
+presently appeared supper--a tray of the most savoury delicacies, to
+produce which Olivia had slipped away and, St. George had no doubt,
+said over some spell in the kitchens. Supper in the white marble
+room of the king's palace was almost as wonderful as muffins and tea
+at the Boris.
+
+There were Olivia in her gown of roses on one side of the table and
+Antoinette on the other and between them the hungry and happy
+adventurers. Across the room under a tall silver vase that might
+have been the one proposed by Achilles at the funeral games for
+Patroclus ("that was the work of the 'skilful Sidonians'" St. George
+recalled with a thrill), Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham were
+conscientiously finishing their chess, since the lawyer believed in
+completing whatever he undertook, if for nothing more than a warning
+never to undertake it again. Manifestly the little ivory kings and
+queens and castles were in league with all the other magic of the
+night, for the game prolonged itself unconscionably, and the supper
+party found it far from difficult to do the same. St. George looked
+at Olivia in her gown of roses, and his eyes swept the high white
+walls of the room with its frescoes and inscriptions, its broken
+statues and defaced chests of stone and ancient armour, and so back
+to Olivia in her gown of roses, with her little ringless hands
+touching and lifting among the alien dishes as she ministered to
+him. What a dear little gown of roses and what beautiful hands, St.
+George thought; and as for the broken statues and the inscriptions
+and the contents of the stone chests, nobody had paid any attention
+to them for so long that they could hardly have missed his regard.
+Nor Amory's. For Amory was in the midst of a reminiscent reference
+to the Chiswicks, in the Adirondacks, and to Antionette Frothingham
+in a launch.
+
+At last they all were aware that the chess-board was being closed
+and Mrs. Hastings had risen.
+
+"I suppose," she was saying, "that they have an idea here, the poor
+deluded creatures, that it is very late. But I tell Olivia that we
+are so much farther east it _can't_ be very late in New York at this
+minute, and I intend to go to bed by my watch as I always do, and
+that is New York time. If I were in New York I wouldn't be sleepy
+now, and I'm no different here, am I? I don't think people are half
+independent enough."
+
+Mrs. Hastings stepped round a stone god, almost faceless, that stood
+in a little circular depression in the floor.
+
+"Olivia, where," she inquired, patting the bobbing, ticking jet on
+her gown, "where do you think that frightful, mad, old man is?"
+
+"I heard him cross the corridor a little while ago," Olivia
+answered. "I think he went to his room."
+
+"I must say, Olivia," said Mrs. Hastings with a damp sigh, "that you
+are very selfish where I am concerned--in _this_ matter."
+
+"Ah," said Olivia, "please, Aunt Dora. He is far too feeble to harm
+any one. And he's away there on the second floor."
+
+"I'm sure he's a murderer," protested Mrs. Hastings. "He has the
+murderer's eye. Mr. Hastings would have said he has. We all sleep on
+the ground floor here," she continued plaintively, "because we are
+so high up anyway that I think the air must be just as pure as it
+would be up stairs. I always leave my window up the width of my
+handkerchief-box."
+
+As they went out to the great corridor Olivia spoke softly to St.
+George.
+
+"Look up," she said.
+
+He looked, and saw that the vast circular chamber was of
+incalculable height, extending up to the very dome of the palace,
+and shaping itself to the lines of the topmost of the three huge
+cones. It was a great well of light, playing over strange frescoes
+of gods and daemons, of constellations and of beasts, and exquisite
+with all the secret colours of some other way of vision. As high as
+the eye could see, the precious metals upon the skeleton of the open
+roof shone in the bright light that was set there--the light on the
+summit of the king's palace.
+
+St. George turned from the glory of it and looked into her eyes.
+
+"'A new Heaven and a new earth,'" he said; but he did not mean the
+dome of light nor yet the splendour of the palace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Manifestly, there is no use in being asleep when one can dream
+rather better awake. St. George wandered aimlessly between his room
+and Amory's and took the time to reflect that when a man looks the
+way Amory did he might as well have Cupids painted on his coat.
+
+"St. George," Amory said soberly, "is this the way you've been
+feeling all the way here? Is this what you came for? Then, on my
+soul, I forgive you everything. I would have climbed ten mountains
+to meet Antoinette Frothingham."
+
+"I've been watching you, you son of Dixie," said St. George darkly;
+"don't you lose your head just when you need it most."
+
+"I have a notion yours is gone," defended Amory critically, "and
+mine is only going."
+
+"That's twice as dangerous," St. George wisely opined;
+"besides--mine is different."
+
+"So is mine," said Amory, "so is everybody's."
+
+St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace. Amory
+didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and
+St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the
+south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood;
+and there, because the night would have it no other way, he
+stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe,
+and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business
+of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a
+field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal
+experiences where words themselves are born. Better and more
+intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.
+
+He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith
+been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and
+thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies,
+breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of
+what will be. He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman
+mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to
+the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told
+himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His
+mother and the bishop at Tübingen and on the Baltic! Curiously
+enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the
+bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
+All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast
+kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was
+Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.
+
+He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman
+emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken
+with him, when something--he was not sure whether it was a voice or
+a touch--startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked
+drowsily out at the glorified blackness--as if black were no longer
+absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been
+pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more
+inclusive than white. The very dark seemed delicately vocal and to
+"fill the waste with sound" no less than the wash of the waves. St.
+George awoke deliciously confused by a returning sense of the sweet
+and the joy of the night.
+
+"'This was the loneliest beach between two seas,'" there flitted
+through his mind, "'and strange things had been done there in the
+ancient ages.'" He turned among the vines, half listening. "And in
+there is the king's daughter," he told himself, "and this is
+certainly 'the strangest thing that ever befell between two seas.'
+And I have a great mind to look up the old woman of that tale who
+must certainly be hereabout, dancing 'widdershins.'"
+
+Then, like a bright blade unsheathed in a quiet chamber, a cry of
+great and unmistakable fear rang out from the palace--a woman's
+cry, uttered but once, and giving place to a silence that was even
+more terrifying. In an instant St. George was on his feet, running
+with all his might.
+
+"Coming!" he called, "where are you--where are you?" And his heart
+pounded against his side with the certainty that the voice had been
+Olivia's.
+
+It was unmistakably Olivia's voice that replied to him.
+
+"Here!" she cried clearly, and St. George followed the sound and
+dashed through the long open window of the room next that in which
+he had first seen her that night.
+
+"Here," she repeated, "but be careful. Some one is in this room."
+
+"Don't be afraid," he cried cheerily into the dark. "It's all
+right," which is exactly what he would have said if there had been
+about dragons and real shades from Sidon.
+
+The room was now in darkness, and in the dim light cast by the high
+moon he could at first discern nothing. He heard a silken rustling
+and the tap of slippered feet. The next instant the apartment was
+quick with light, and in the curtained entrance to an inner room,
+Olivia, in a brown dressing-gown, her hair vaguely bright about her
+flushed face, stood confronting him.
+
+Between them, his thin hand thrown up, palm outward, to protect his
+eyes from the sudden light, was the old man whom St. George had last
+seen by the shrine on the terrace.
+
+St. George was prepared for a mere procession of palace ghosts, but
+at this strange visitor he stared for an uncomprehending moment.
+
+"What are you doing here?" he said wonderingly to him; "what in the
+world are you doing here?"
+
+The old man looked uncertainly about him, one hand spread against
+the pillar behind him, the other fumbling at his throat.
+
+"I think," he answered almost indistinguishably, "I think that I
+meant to sit here--to sit in the room beyond, where the mock stars
+shine."
+
+Olivia uttered an exclamation.
+
+"How could he possibly know that?" she said.
+
+"But what does he mean?" asked St. George.
+
+She crossed swiftly to a portiere hanging by slender rings from the
+full height of the lofty room, and at her bidding St. George
+followed her. She pushed aside the curtain, revealing a huge cave of
+the dark, a room whose walls were sunk in shadow. But overhead the
+ceiling was constellated in stars, so that it seemed to St. George
+as if he were looking into a nearer heaven, homing the far lights
+that he knew. The Pleiades, Orion, and the Southern Cross, blazing
+down with inconceivable brilliance, were caught and held captive in
+the cup of this nearer sky.
+
+"It is like this at night," Olivia said, "but we see nothing in the
+daytime, save the vague outlines of here and there a star. But how
+could he have known? There is no other door save this."
+
+The old man had followed them and stood, his eyes fixed on the
+shining points.
+
+"It is done well," he said softly, "it makes one feel the
+firmament."
+
+St. George, thrilling with the strangeness of what he saw, and the
+strangeness of being there with Olivia and this weird old man of the
+mountain, turned toward him almost fearfully. How did he know,
+indeed?
+
+"Ah well," he said, striving to reassure her, "I've no doubt he has
+wandered in here some evening, while you were at dinner. No doubt--"
+
+He stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the old man's hand. For as he
+lifted it St. George had thought that something glittered. Without
+hesitation he caught the old man's arm about the wrist, and turned
+his hand in his own palm. In the thin fingers he found a small
+sealed tube, filled with something that looked like particles of
+nickel.
+
+"Do you mind telling me what that is?" asked St. George.
+
+Old Malakh's eyes, liquid and brown and very peaceful, met his own
+without rebuke.
+
+"Do you mean the gem?" he asked gently. "It is a very beautiful
+ruby."
+
+Then St. George saw upon the hand that held the sealed tube a ring
+of matchless workmanship, set with a great ruby that smouldered in
+the shadow where they stood. Olivia looked at St. George with
+startled eyes.
+
+"He was not wearing this when we first saw him," she said. "I
+haven't seen him wearing it at all."
+
+St. George confronted the old man then and spoke with some
+determination.
+
+"Will you please tell us," he said, "what there is in this tube, and
+how you came by this ring?"
+
+Old Malakh looked down reflectively at his hand, and back to St.
+George's face. It was wonderful, the air of courtliness and urbanity
+and delicate breeding which persisted through age and infirmity and
+the fallow mind.
+
+"I wish that I might tell you," he said humbly, "but I have only
+little lights in my head, instead of words. And when I say them,
+they do not mean--what they _shine_. Do you not see? That is why
+every one laughs. But I know what the lights say."
+
+St. George looked at Olivia helplessly.
+
+"Will you tell me where his room is?" he said, "and I'll go back
+with him. I don't know what to make of this, quite, but don't be
+frightened. It's all right. Didn't you say he is on the second
+floor?"
+
+"Yes, but don't go alone with him," begged Olivia suddenly, "let me
+call some of the servants. We don't know what he may do."
+
+St. George shook his head, smiling a little in sheer boyish delight
+at that "we." "We" is a very wonderful word, when it is not put to
+unimportant uses by kings, editors and the like.
+
+"I'd rather not, thank you," he said. "I'll have a talk with him, I
+think."
+
+"His room is at the top of the stair, on the left," said Olivia
+reluctantly, "but I wish--"
+
+"We shall get on all right," St. George assured her, "and don't let
+this worry you, will you? I was smoking on the terrace. I'll be
+there for a while yet. Good night," he said from the doorway.
+
+"Good night," said Olivia. "Good night--and, oh, I thank you."
+
+St. George's expectation of having a talk with the old man was,
+however, unfounded. Old Malakh led the way to his room--a great
+place of carven seats and a frowning bed-canopy and high windows,
+and doors set deep in stone; and he begged St. George to sit down
+and permitted him to examine the sealed tube filled with little
+particles that looked like nickel, and spoke with gentle irrelevance
+the while. At the last St. George left him, feeling as if he were
+committing not so much an indignity as a social solecism when he
+locked the door upon the lonely creature, using for the purpose a
+key-like implement chained to the lock without and having a ring
+about the size of the iron crown of the Lombards.
+
+"Good night," old Malakh told him courteously, "good night. But yet
+all nights are good--save the night of the heart."
+
+St. George went back to the terrace. For hours he paced the paths of
+that little upper garden or lay upon the wall among the pungent
+vines. But now he forgot the iridescent dark and the companion-sea
+and the high moon and the king's palace, for it was not these that
+made the necromancy of the night. It was permitted him to watch
+before the threshold while Olivia slept, as lovers had watched in
+the youth of the world. Whatever the morrow held, to-night had been
+added to yesternight. Not until the dawn of that morrow whitened the
+sky and drew from the vapourous plain the first far towers of Med,
+the King's City, did St. George say good night to her glimmering
+windows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+GLAMOURIE
+
+
+There is a certain poster, all stars and poppies and deep grass; and
+over these hangs a new moon which must surely have been cut by fairy
+scissors, for it looks as much like a cake or a cowslip as it looks
+like a moon. But withal it sheds a light so eery and strangely
+silver that the poster seems, in spite of the poppies, to have been
+painted in Spring-wind.
+
+"Never," said some chance visitors vehemently, "have I seen such a
+moon as that!"
+
+"But ah, sir, and ah, madame," was the answer--it is not recorded
+whether the poster spoke or whether some one spoke for it--"wouldn't
+you like to?"
+
+Now, therefore, concerning the sweet of those hours in the king's
+palace the Vehement may be tempted to exclaim that in life things
+never happen like that. Ah--do they not so? You have only to go back
+to the days when young love and young life were yours to recall
+distinctly that the most impossible things were every-day
+occurrences. What about the time that you went down one street
+instead of up another and _that_ changed the entire course of your
+days and brought you two together? What about the song, the June,
+the letter that touched the world to gold before your eyes and
+caught you up in a place of clouds? Remembering that magic, it is
+quite impossible to assert that any charming thing whatever would
+not have happened. Is there not some wonderland in every life? And
+is not the ancient citadel of Love-upon-the-Heights that common
+wonderland? One must believe in all the happiness that one can.
+
+But if the Most Vehement--who are as thick as butterflies--still
+remain unconvinced and persist that they never heard of things
+fallen out thus, there is left this triumph:
+
+"Ah, sir, or ah, madame, wouldn't you like to?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A fugitive wind rollicking in from sea next morning swept through
+the palace and went on around the world; and thereafter it had an
+hundred odourous ways of attracting attention, which were merely its
+own tale of what pleasant things it had seen and heard on high.
+
+For example, that breakfast. A cloth had been laid at one end of the
+long stone table whereat, since the days of Abibaal, brother to
+Hiram, friend to David, kings had breakfasted and banqueted, and
+this cloth had now been set with the ancient plate of the
+palace--dishes that looked like helmets and urns and discs. Here
+Olivia and Antoinette, in charming print frocks, made a kind of tea
+in a kind of biblical samovar and served it in vessels that
+resembled individual trophies of the course. And here St. George and
+Amory praised the admirable English muffins which some one had
+taught the dubious cook to make; and Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+tip-fingered his way about his plate among alien fruits and
+queer-shaped cakes. "Are they cookies or are they manna?" Amory
+wondered, "for they remind me of coriander seeds." And here Mrs.
+Hastings, who always awoke a thought impatient and became
+ultra-complacent with no interval of real sanity, wistfully asked
+for a soft-boiled egg and added plaintively:
+
+"Though I dare say the very hens in Yaque lay something besides
+eggs--pineapples, very likely."
+
+"I suppose," speculated Amory, "that when we get perfectly
+intuitionized we won't have to eat either one because we'll know
+beforehand exactly how they both taste."
+
+"A _reductio ad absurdum_, my young friend," said the lawyer
+sternly; "the real purpose of eating will remain for ever
+unchanged."
+
+Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on the
+terrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss the
+weather report so," complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young people
+with Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace. For
+St. George had risen from his two hours' sleep with some
+clearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every niche
+and corner of the great pile where one--say a king--might be hidden
+with twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.
+
+What a morning it was! When the rollicking wind got to that part of
+the story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumes
+that even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, "thinking
+delicate thoughts." There never was a fairer temple of romance, a
+very temple of Young Love's Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St.
+George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries were
+become homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yet
+be well.
+
+To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, all
+octagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity and
+amazement might increase with every step. How they had ever raised
+those massive blocks of stone to that great height no one can
+guess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palace
+had originally been built upon level ground and had had its
+surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain. At all events
+there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked
+stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the
+planetary deities--Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white
+bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in
+the form of a rising flame--types taken from the heavens and from
+the abyss. There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven
+cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and little
+circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of
+Baal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth,
+with the lion's skin.
+
+From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step
+of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing
+size, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the painted
+ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic
+paws. Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled
+with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most
+luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort. The palace
+was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two
+thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance
+of this moment's civilization of the world. The heart of that
+elder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where they
+came upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and tools
+and empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallic
+plate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in one
+light, slightly fluorescent.
+
+"It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adôn," said Jarvo. "She was
+the daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touched
+in this room was left unmoved. But it was very many years ago--I
+have forgotten. Every one has forgotten."
+
+They went down among the very roots of the palace, three full
+storeys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lighting
+the way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding passages,
+and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones had
+been hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber of
+the tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, now
+hollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hall
+were lined with _loculi_ or niches, each as deep as the length of a
+man. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the long
+flags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven on
+the stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was a
+lofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was the
+resting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal of
+Tyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when the
+Phoenicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first passed the Straits of
+Gibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastings
+when they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and the
+Washingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they were
+nothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wall
+was a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, where
+slept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king of
+Persia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket of
+love-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probably
+at one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in the
+very palace. And if this is true the story of his omission to
+conquer the island may one day divert the world.
+
+Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored with
+winged circles.
+
+"Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnapped
+Egyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Phoenician
+merchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Here
+lie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holy
+office."
+
+Nothing was unbelievable--nothing had been unbelievable for so long
+that these four had almost learned that everything is possible.
+Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly you
+learn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world of
+possibilities. It is one of our two magics.
+
+"And this," Jarvo said softly, pausing before a vacant niche
+opposite the tomb of King Abibaal, "this will be the receptacle for
+the present king of Yaque, his Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of
+God."
+
+Olivia suddenly looked up at St. George, her face pale in the
+ghostly light. There it had been, waiting for them all the while,
+the sense of the vivid personal against the vague eternal. But her
+involuntary appeal to him, slight as it was, thrilled St. George
+with tenderness as vivid as this tragic element itself.
+
+They went back to the sun and the sweet messengering air above, and
+crossed a little vacant grassy court on the north side of the
+mountain. Here they saw that the palace climbed down the northern
+slope from the summit, and literally overhung the precipice where
+the supports were made fast by gigantic girders run in the living
+rock. A little observatory was built below the edge of the mountain,
+and this box of a place had a glass floor, and one felt like a fly
+on the sky as one stood there. It was said that a certain king of
+Yaque, sometime in the course of the Punic Wars, had thrown himself
+from this observatory in a rage because his court electrician had
+died, but how true this may be it is impossible to say because so
+little is known about electricity. Below the building lay quite the
+most wonderful part of the king's palace.
+
+Here in the long north rooms, hermetically quiet, was the heart of
+the treasure of the ancient island. Here, saved inexplicably from
+the wreck of the past, were a thousand testimonies to that lost and
+but half-guessed art of the elder world. Beautiful things, made in
+the days when King Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, lined the
+walls, and filled the stone shelves, together with curios of that
+later day when Phoenicia stood first in knowledge of the plastic and
+glyptic arts. Workers in gold and ivory, in gems and talismans, in
+brass and fine linen and purple had done the marvels which those
+courtier adventurers brought with them over the sea, and to these,
+from year to year, had been added the treasure of private
+chests--necklaces and coronals and hair-loops, bottles and vases of
+glass coloured with metallic oxides, and patterned aggry-beads, now
+sometimes found in ancient tombs on the Ashantee coasts. Beneath an
+altar set with censers and basins of gold was a chest brought from
+Amathus, its ogive lid carved with _bigæ_ or two-horsed chariots,
+and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the Hereditary
+Treasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered with
+bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the
+Phoenician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were
+set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the
+Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days
+remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected
+in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied
+from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered--annals,
+State documents, the Phoenician originals of histories preserved
+elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the
+secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose
+names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and
+Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy
+and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were
+chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of
+no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the
+Past, watching lonely on the mountain.
+
+"Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to the
+cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"
+
+"No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted to
+go somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure and
+you thought Clusium was the name of it."
+
+"I know," said Amory shamelessly, "and there are no end of names for
+it. But it's always the same thing. _Excepting this_."
+
+"Excepting this," St. George repeated fervently as they turned to
+go; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sang
+that, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faint
+voices from every shelf in the room,--voices that of old had
+thrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.
+
+Woke now to the eternal echo--an echo that touched delicately
+through the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on all
+that happened. Otherwise, if they four were not all a little
+echo-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face of
+danger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found time
+for the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, because
+they hold revelation. There were, too, some events; but an event is
+a clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.
+The delicious moments are when the intangibilities prevail and
+pervade and possess. In the king's palace there must have been
+shrines to intangibilities--as there should be everywhere--for they
+seemed to come there, and belong.
+
+The mere happenings included, for example, a talk that St. George
+had with Mr. Augustus Frothingham on the terrace after luncheon,
+in which St. George laid before the lawyer a plan which he had
+virtually matured and of which he himself thought very well.
+Thought so well, because of its possibilities, that his face was
+betrayingly eager as he told about it. It was, briefly, that
+inasmuch as four of the six men who could scale the mountain were
+now on its summit, and inasmuch as all the airships were there
+also, now, therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque,
+were in a perfectly impregnable position--counting out Fifth
+Dimension contingencies, which of course might include appearings
+as well as disappearings--and why shouldn't they stay there, and
+let the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked? And
+when the lawyer said, "But, my dear fellow," as he was bound to
+say, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, by
+noon of the following day, two determined persons who, if Jarvo
+would get word to them, would with perfect certainty find Mr. Otho
+Holland, the king, if he were on the island. And when "Well, but
+my dear fellow" occurred again, St. George replied with deference
+that he knew it, but although he never had managed an airship he
+fancied that perhaps he might help with one; and down there in the
+harbour was a yacht waiting to sail for New York, and therefore no
+one need even set foot on the island who didn't wish. And Mr.
+Frothingham laid one long hand on each coat-lapel and threw back
+his head until his hair rested on his collar, and he looked at the
+palace--that Titan thing of the sky with ramparts of air--and
+said, "Nothing in all my experience--" and St. George left him,
+deep in thought.
+
+On the way back he chanced upon Mrs. Hastings, seated on a bench of
+lapidescent wood in the portico--and a Titanic portico it looked by
+day--and, having sent for the palace chef, she was attempting to
+write down the recipe for the salad of that day's luncheon, although
+it was composed chiefly of fowls now extinct everywhere excepting in
+Yaque.
+
+"But my poultry man will get them for me," she urged with
+determination; "I have only to tell him the name of what I want, and
+he can always produce it in tins, nicely labeled."
+
+Later, St. George came upon old Malakh, leaning on the terrace wall,
+looking out to sea, and stood close beside him, marveling at the
+pallor and the thousand wrinkles of the man's strange face. The face
+was stranger by day than it had been by night--this St. George had
+felt when he went that morning to release him, and the old man
+leaned from the frowning bed-hangings to bid him a gentle good
+morning. Could he be, St. George now wondered vaguely, a citizen of
+the fifteenth or twentieth dimension, and, there, did they live to
+his incredible age? Then he noticed that the old man was not wearing
+the ruby ring.
+
+"I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakh
+answered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and at
+other things.
+
+To everything that he asked him the old man returned only his
+urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism.
+When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would
+consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George
+himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I
+would far rather talk with one madman with this madman's manners
+than to sup with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murder
+us, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Olivia
+had no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could one
+possibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle.
+
+All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing as
+only that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that went
+before. St. George was saying to himself that at last the _Here_ and
+the _Now_ were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for the
+morrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noon
+they all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leaves
+above carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. They
+leaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the glory
+of the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings of
+gulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did not
+know they gave--ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind told
+about that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their young
+courage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility of
+their understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. For
+the wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, and
+one has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth.
+Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spite
+of the little wing-like moments that hold not history but
+revelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendent
+sword of "To-morrow, at noon."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+BENEATH THE SURFACE
+
+
+Up came the dusk to the doors of the king's palace--a hurry of grey
+banners flowing into the empty ways where the sun had been. Upon
+this high dominion Night could not advance unheralded, and here the
+Twilight messengered her coming long after the dark lay thick on the
+lowland and on the toiling water.
+
+St. George, leaning from Amory's window, looked down on the shadows
+rising in exquisite hesitation, as if they came curling from the
+lighted censer of Med. There is no doubt at all, Olivia had said
+gravely, that the dusk is patterned, if only one could see
+it--figured in unearthly flowers, in wandering stars, in upper-air
+sprites, grey-winged, grey-bodied, so that sometimes glimpsing them
+one fancies them to be little living goblins. He smiled, remembering
+her words, and glanced over his shoulder down the long room where
+the other light was now beginning to creep about, first expressing,
+then embracing the chamber dusk. It seemed precisely the moment
+when something delicate should be caught passing from gloom to
+radiance, to be thankfully remembered. But only many-winged colours
+were visible, though he could hear a sound like little murmurous
+speech in the dusky roof where the air had a recurrent fashion of
+whispering knowingly.
+
+Indeed, the air everywhere in the palace had a fashion of whispering
+knowingly, for it was a place of ghostly draughts and blasts
+creeping through chambers cleft by yawning courts and open corridors
+and topped by that skeleton dome. And as St. George turned from the
+window he saw that the door leading into the hall, urged by some
+nimble gust, imaginative or prying, had swung ajar.
+
+St. George mechanically crossed the room to close the door, noting
+how the pale light warmed the stones of that cave-like corridor.
+With his hand upon the latch his eyes fell on something crossing the
+corridor, like a shadow dissolving from gloom to gloom. Well beyond
+the open door, stealing from pillar to pillar in the dimness and
+moving with that swiftness and slyness which proclaim a covert
+purpose as effectually as would a bell, he saw old Malakh.
+
+Now St. George was in felt-soled slippers and he was coatless,
+because in the adjoining room Jarvo, with a heated, helmet-like
+apparatus, was attempting to press his blue serge coat. In that
+room too was Amory, catching glimpses of himself in a mirror of
+polished steel, but within reach, on the divan where Jarvo had just
+laid it, was Amory's coat; and St. George caught that up, slipped it
+on, and was off down the corridor after the old man, moving as
+swiftly and slyly as he. St. George had no great faith in him or in
+what he might know, but the old man puzzled him, and mystification
+is the smell of a pleasant powder.
+
+The palace was very still. Presumably, Mrs. Hastings and Mr.
+Frothingham were already at chess in the drawing-room awaiting
+dinner. St. George heard a snatch of distant laughter, in quick
+little lilts like a song, and it occurred to him that its echo there
+was as if one were to pin a ruffle of lace to the grim stones. Some
+one answered the laugh, and he heard the murmurous touching of soft
+skirts entering the corridor as he dived down the ancient dark of
+one of the musty passages. There the silence was resumed. In the
+palace it was as though the stillness were some living sleeper,
+waking with protests, thankful for the death of any echo.
+
+No one was in the gallery. St. George, stepping softly, followed as
+near as he dared to that hurrying figure, flitting down the dark. A
+still narrower hallway connected the main portion of the palace with
+a shoulder of the south wing, and into this the old man turned and
+skirted familiarly the narrow sunken pool that ran the length of
+the floor, drawing the light to its glassy surface and revealing the
+shadows sent clustering to the indistinguishable roof.
+
+Midway the gallery sprang a narrow stairway, let in the wall and
+once leading to the ancient armoury, but now disused and piled with
+rubbish. Old Malakh went up two steps of this old stairway, turned
+aside, and slipped away so swiftly that his amazed pursuer caught no
+more than an after-flutter of his dun-coloured garments. St. George,
+his softly-clad feet making no noise upon the stones, bounded
+forward and saw, through a triangular aperture in the stones, and
+set so low that a man must crouch upon the step to enter, a yawning
+place of darkness.
+
+He might very well have been taking his life in his hands, for he
+could have no idea whether the aperture led to the imperial dungeons
+or to the imperial rain-water cistern; but St. George instantly bent
+and slipped down into that darkness, thick with the dust of the
+flight of the old man. With the distinctly pleasurable sensation of
+being still alive he found himself standing upright upon an uneven
+floor of masonry. He thrust out his arms and touched sides of mossy
+rock. Then just before him a pale flame flickered. The old man had
+kindled a little taper that hardly did more than make shallow
+hollows in the darkness through which he moved.
+
+It was easy to follow now, and St. George went breathlessly on
+past the rudely-hewn walls and giant pillars of that hidden way.
+He might have been lost with ease in any of the lower processes of
+the palace which they had that morning visited; but he could not
+be deceived about the chambers which he had once seen, and this
+subterranean course was new to him. Was it, he wondered, new to
+Olivia, and to Jarvo? Else why had it been omitted in that
+morning's search? And was this strange guide going on at random,
+or did he know--something? A suspicion leaped to St. George's mind
+that made his heart beat. The king--might he be down here
+after all, and might this weird old man know where? His own
+consciousness became chiefly conjecture, and every nerve was alert
+in the pursuit; not the less because he realized that if he were
+to lose this strange conductor who went on before, either in
+secure knowledge or in utter madness, he himself might wander for
+the rest of his life in that nether world.
+
+Past grim latchless doors sealing, with appropriate gestures, their
+forgotten secrets, past outlying passages winding into the heart of
+the mountain, past niches filled with shapeless crumbling rubbish
+they hurried--the mad old man and his bewildered pursuer. Twice the
+way turned, gradually narrowing until two could hardly have passed
+there, and at last apparently terminated in a short flight of
+steps. Old Malakh mounted with difficulty and St. George, waiting,
+saw him standing before a blank stone wall. Immediately and without
+effort the old man's scanty strength served to displace one of the
+wall's huge stones which hung upon a secret pivot and rolled
+noiselessly within. He stepped through the aperture, and St. George
+sprang behind him, watched his moment to cross the threshold,
+crouched in the leaping shadow of the displaced stone and
+looked--looked with the undistinguishing amazement that a man feels
+in the panorama of his dreams.
+
+The room was small and low and set with a circular bench, running
+about a central pillar. On the table was a confusion of things
+brilliantly phosphorescent, emitting soft light, and mingled with
+bulbs, coils and crucibles lying in a litter of egg-shells,
+feathers, ivory and paper. But it was not these that held St. George
+incredulous; it was the fire that glowed in their midst--a fire that
+leaped and trembled and blazed inextinguishable colour, smouldering,
+sparkling, tossing up a spray of strange light, lambent with those
+wizard hues of the pennons and streamers floating joyously from the
+dome of the Palace of the Litany--the fire from the subject hearts
+of a thousand jewels. There could be no doubting what he saw. There,
+flung on the table from the mouth of a carven casket and harbouring
+the captive light of ages gone, glittered what St. George knew
+would be the gems of the Hereditary Treasure of the kings of Yaque.
+
+But for old Malakh to know where the jewels were--that was as
+amazing as was their discovery. St. George, breathing hard in his
+corner, watched the long, fine hands of the old man trembling among
+the delicate tubes and spindles, lingering lovingly among the
+stones, touching among the necklaces and coronals of the dead queens
+whose dust lay not far away. It was as if he were summoning and
+discarding something shining and imponderable, like words. The
+contents of the casket which all Yaque had mourned lay scattered in
+this secret place of which only this strange, mad creature, a chance
+pensioner at the palace, had knowledge.
+
+Suddenly the memory of Balator's words smote St. George with new
+perception. "He walks the streets of Med," Balator had told him at
+the banquet, "saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say 'king,' and so
+he is seeking the king. But he is mad, and he weeps; and therefore
+they pretend to believe that he says, 'Malakh,' which is to say
+'salt,' and they call him that, for his tears."
+
+Could old Malakh possibly know something of the king? The hope
+returned to St. George insistently, and he watched, spending his
+thought in new and extravagant conjecture, his mental vision
+blurring the details of that heaped-up, glistening confusion; and on
+the opposite side of the table the old man lifted and laid down
+that rainbow stuff of dreams, delighting in it, speaking softly
+above it. Had he been the king's friend, St. George was asking--but
+why did no one know anything of him? Or had he been an enemy who had
+done the king violence--but how was that possible, in his age and
+feebleness? Mystifying as the matter was, St. George exulted as much
+as he marveled; for it would be his, at all events, to place the
+jewels in Olivia's hands and clear her father's name; he longed to
+step out of the dark and confront the old man and seize the casket
+out of hand, and he would probably have done so and taken his
+chances at getting back to the upper world, had he not been chained
+to his corner by the irresistible hope that the old man knew
+something more--something about the king. And while he wondered,
+reflecting that at any cost he must prevent the replacing of the
+pivotal stone, he saw old Malakh take up his taper, turn away from
+the table, and open a door which the room's central pillar had cut
+from his view.
+
+He was around the table in an instant. The open door revealed three
+stone steps which the old man was ascending, one at a time.
+Following him cautiously St. George heard a door grate outward at
+the head of the stair, saw the taper move forward in darkness, and
+the next moment found himself standing in the room of the tombs of
+the kings of Yaque. And he saw that the panel which had swung
+inward to admit them was set low in the monolithic tomb of King
+Abibaal himself.
+
+Old Malakh had crossed swiftly to the wall opposite the tomb, and
+stood before the vacant niche which was to be occupied, as Jarvo had
+announced, by "His Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of God." There,
+setting aside his taper, the old man stretched his arms upward to
+the empty shelf and with a gesture of inconceivable weariness bowed
+his head upon them and stood silent, the leaping candle-light
+silvering his hair.
+
+"Upon my soul," thought St George with finality, "he's murdered him.
+Old Malakh has murdered the king, and it's driven him crazy."
+
+With that he did step out of the dark, and he laid his hand suddenly
+upon the old man's shoulder.
+
+"Malakh," he said, "what have you done with the king?"
+
+The old man lifted his head and turned toward St. George a face of
+singular calm. It was as if so many phantoms vexed his brain that a
+strange reality was of little consequence. But as his eyes met those
+of St. George a sudden dimness came over them, the lids fluttered
+and dropped, and his lips barely formed his words:
+
+"The king," he said. "I did not leave the king. It was the king who
+somehow went away and left me here--"
+
+He threw out his hands blindly, tottered and swayed from the wall;
+and St. George received him as he fell, measuring his length upon
+the stones before King Otho's future tomb.
+
+St. George caught down the light and knelt beside him. Death seemed
+to have come "pressing within his face," and breathing hardly
+disquieted his breast. St. George fumbled at the old man's robe, and
+beneath his fingers the heart fluttered never so faintly. He
+loosened the cloth at the withered throat, passed his hand over the
+still forehead, and looked desperately about him.
+
+The other inmates of the palace were, he reflected, about two good
+city blocks from him; and he doubted if he could ever find his
+unaided way back to them. Mechanically, though he knew that he
+carried no flask, he felt conscientiously through his pockets--a
+habit of the boy in perplexity which never deserts the man
+in crises. In the inside pocket of the coat that he was
+wearing--Amory's coat--his fingers suddenly closed about
+something made of glass. He seized it and drew it forth.
+
+It was a little vase of rock-crystal, ornamented with gold
+medallions, covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+beauty and variety of design--gryphons, serpents, winged discs, men
+contending with lions. St. George stared at it uncomprehendingly. In
+the press of events of the last eight-and-forty hours Amory had
+quite forgotten to mention to him the prince's intended gift of
+wine, almost three thousand years old, sealed in Phoenicia.
+
+St. George drew the stopper. In an instant an odour, spicy,
+penetrating, delicious, saluted him and gave life to the dead air of
+the room. For a moment he hesitated. He knew that the flask had not
+been among Amory's belongings and that he himself had never seen it
+before. But the odour was, he thought, unmistakable, and so powerful
+that already he felt as if the liquor were racing through his own
+veins. He touched it to his lips; it was like a full draught of some
+marvelous elixir. Sudden confidence sat upon St. George, and
+thanking his guiding stars for the fortunate chance, he
+unhesitatingly set the flask to the old man's lips.
+
+There was a long-drawn, shuddering breath, a fluttering of the
+eyelids, a movement of the limbs, and after that old Malakh lay
+quite still upon the stones. Once more St. George thrust his hand
+within the bosom of the loose robe, and the heart was beating
+rapidly and regularly and with amazing force. In a moment deep
+breaths succeeded one another, filling the breast of the unconscious
+man; but the eyelids did not unclose, and St. George took up the
+taper and bent to scan the quiet face.
+
+St. George looked, and sank to his knees and looked again, holding
+the light now here, now there, and peering in growing bewilderment.
+What he saw he was wholly unable to define. It was as if a mask were
+slowly to dissolve and yet to lie upon the features which it had
+covered, revealing while it still made mock of concealing. Colour
+was in the lips, colour was stealing into the changed face. The
+_changed_ face--changed, St. George could not tell how; and the
+longer he looked, and though he rubbed his eyes and turned them
+toward the dark and then looked again, moving the taper, he could
+neither explain nor define what had happened.
+
+He set the candle on the floor and sprang away from the quiet
+figure, searching the dark. The great silent place, with its
+shoulders of sarcophagi jutting from the gloom was black save for
+the little ring of pallid light about that prostrate form. St.
+George sent his hand to his forehead, and shook himself a bit, and
+straightened his shoulders with a smile.
+
+"It must be the stuff you've tasted," he addressed himself solemnly.
+"Heaven knows what it was. It's the stuff you've tasted."
+
+Though he had barely touched his lips to the rock-crystal vase St.
+George's blood was pounding through his veins, and a curious
+exhilaration filled him. He looked about at the rims and corners of
+the tombs caught by the light, and he laughed a little--though this
+was not in the least what he intended--because it passed through
+his mind that if King Abibaal and Queen Mitygen, for example, might
+be treated with the contents of the mysterious vase they would no
+doubt come forth, Abibaal with memories of the Queen of Sheba in his
+eyes, and Queen Mitygen with her casket of Alexander's letters. Then
+St. George went down on his knees again, and raised the old man's
+head until it rested upon his own breast, and he passed the candle
+before his face, his hand trembling so that the light flickered and
+leaped up.
+
+This time there was no mistaking. The tissues of old Malakh's ashen
+face and throat and pallid hands were undergoing some subtle
+transfiguration. It was as if new blood had come encroaching in
+their veins. It was as if the muscles were become firm and full, as
+if the wrinkled skin had been made smooth, the lips grown fresh, as
+if--the word came to St. George as he stared, spell-stricken--as if
+_youth_ had returned.
+
+St. George slipped down upon the stones and sat motionless. There
+was a little blue, forked vein on the man's forehead, and upon this
+he fastened his eyes, mechanically following it downward and back.
+Lines had crossed it, and there had been a deep cleft between the
+eyes, but these had disappeared, leaving the brow almost smooth. The
+cheeks were now tinged with colour, and the throat, where he had
+pulled aside the robe, showed firm and white. Mechanically St.
+George passed his hand along the inert arm, and it was no more
+withered than his own--the arm of no greybeard, but of a man in the
+prime of life. What did it mean--what did it mean? St. George
+waited, the blood throbbing in his temples, a mist before his eyes.
+What did it mean?
+
+The minutes dragged by and still the unconscious man did not stir or
+unclose his eyes. From time to time St. George pressed his hand to
+the heart, and found it beating on rhythmically, powerfully. When he
+found himself sitting with averted head, as if he were afraid to
+look back at that changing face, a fear seized him that he had lost
+his reason and that what he imagined himself to see was a phase of
+madness. So he left the old man's side and sturdily tramped away
+into the huge dark of the room, resolutely explaining to himself
+that this was all very natural; the old man had been ill, improperly
+nourished, and the powerful stimulant of the wine had partly
+restored him. But even while he went over it St. George knew in his
+heart that what had happened was nothing that could be so explained,
+nothing that could be explained at all by anything within his ken.
+
+His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath
+of the place smote his face as he moved. He stumbled on a displaced
+tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and
+reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness. The taper rays
+struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet
+of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock. St. George remembered
+a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries,
+coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air. It
+seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far
+slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this
+ghost place. Back there, where the light glimmered beside the tomb
+of King Abibaal, nobody could tell what awaited him. If the man
+could change like this, might he not take on some shape too hideous
+to bear in the silence? St. George stood still, suddenly
+clenching his hands, trying to reach out through the dark and to
+grasp--himself, the self that seemed slipping away from him. But was
+he mad already, he wondered angrily, and hurried back to the far
+flickering light, stumbling, panting, not daring to look at the
+figure on the floor, not daring not to look.
+
+He resolutely caught up the candle and peered once more at the face.
+As steadily and swiftly as change in the aspect of the sky the face
+had gone on changing. St. George had followed to the chamber an old
+tottering man; the figure before him was a man of not more than
+fifty years.
+
+St. George let fall the candle, which flickered down, upright in its
+socket; and he turned away, his hand across his eyes. Since this was
+manifestly impossible he must be mad, something in the stuff that
+he had tasted had driven him mad. He felt strong as a lion, strong
+enough to lift that prostrate figure and to carry it through the
+winding passages into the midst of those above stairs, and to beg
+them in mercy to tell him how the man looked. What would _she_ say?
+He wondered what Olivia would say. Dinner would be over and they
+would be in the drawing-room--Olivia and Amory and Antoinette
+Frothingham; already the white room and the lights and Antoinette's
+laughter seemed to him of another world, a world from which he had
+irrevocably passed. Yet there they were above, the same roof
+covering them, and they did not know that down here in this place of
+the dead he, St. George, was beyond all question going mad.
+
+With a cry he pulled off Amory's coat, flung it over the unconscious
+man, and rushed out into the blackness of the corridor. He would not
+take the light--the man must not die alone there in the dark--and
+besides he had heard that the mad could see as well in the dark as
+in the light. Or was it the blind who could see in the dark? No
+doubt it was the blind. However, he could find his way, he thought
+triumphantly, and ran on, dragging his hand along the slippery
+stones of the wall--he could find his way. Only he must call out, to
+tell them who it was that was lost. So he called himself by name,
+aloud and sternly, and after that he kept on quietly enough, serene
+in the conviction that he had regained his self-control, fighting to
+keep his mind from returning to the face that changed before his
+eyes, like the appearances in the puppet shows. But suddenly he
+became conscious that it was his own name that he went shouting
+through the passages; and that was openly absurd, he reasoned, since
+if he wanted to be found he must call some one else's name. But he
+must hurry--hurry--hurry; no one could tell what might be happening
+back there to that face that changed.
+
+"Olivia!" he shouted, "Amory! Jarvo--oh, Jarvo! Rollo, you
+scoundrel--"
+
+Whereat the memory that Rollo was somewhere on a yacht assailed him,
+and he pressed on, blindly and in silence, until glimmering before
+him he saw a light shining from an open door. Then he rushed forward
+and with a groan of relief threw himself into the room. Opposite the
+door loomed the grim sarcophagus of King Abibaal, and beside it on
+the floor lay the figure with the face that changed. He had gone a
+circle in those tortuous passages, and this was the room of the
+tombs of the kings.
+
+He dragged himself across the chamber toward the still form. He must
+look again; no one could tell what might have happened. He pulled
+down the coat and looked. And there was surely nothing in the
+delicate, handsome, English-looking face upturned to his to give
+him new horror. It was only that he had come down here in the wake
+of a tottering old creature, and that here in his place lay a man
+who was not he. Which was manifestly impossible.
+
+Mechanically St. George's hand went to the man's heart. It was
+beating regularly and powerfully, and deep breaths were coming from
+the full, healthily-coloured lips. For a moment St. George knelt
+there, his blood tingling and pricking in his veins and pulsing in
+his temples. Then he swayed and fell upon the stones.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When St. George opened his eyes it was ten o'clock of the following
+morning, though he felt no interest in that. There was before him a
+great rectangle of light. He lifted his head and saw that the light
+appeared to flow from the interior of the tomb of King Abibaal. The
+next moment Amory's cheery voice, pitched high in consternation and
+relief, made havoc among the echoes with a background of Jarvo's
+smooth thanksgiving for the return of adôn.
+
+St. George, coatless, stiff from the hours on the mouldy stones,
+dragged himself up and turned his eyes in fear upon the figure
+beside him. It flashed hopefully through his mind that perhaps it
+had not changed, that perhaps he had dreamed it all, that perhaps
+...
+
+By his first glance that hope was dispelled. From beneath Amory's
+coat on the floor an arm came forth, pushing the coat aside, and a
+man slenderly built, with a youthful, sensitive face and somewhat
+critically-drooping lids, sat up leisurely and looked about him in
+slow surprise, kindling to distinct amusement.
+
+"Upon my soul," he said softly, "what an admission--what an
+admission! I can not have made such a night of it in years."
+
+Upon which Jarvo dropped unhesitatingly to his knees.
+
+"Melek! Melek!" he cried, prostrating himself again and again. "The
+King! The King! The gods have permitted the possible."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A MORNING VISIT
+
+
+In an upper room in the Palace of the Litany, fair with all the
+burnished devices of the early light, Prince Tabnit paced on that
+morning of mornings of his marriage day. Because of his great
+happiness the whole world seemed to him like some exquisite intaglio
+of which this day was the design.
+
+The room, "walled with soft splendours of Damascus tiles," was laid
+with skins of forgotten animals and was hung with historic
+tapestries dyed by ancient fingers in the spiral veins of the Murex.
+There were frescoes uniting the dream with its actuality, columns
+carved with both lines and names of beauty, pilasters decorated with
+chain and checker-work and golden nets. A stairway led to a high
+shrine where hung the crucified Tyrian sphinx. The room was like a
+singing voice summoning one to delights which it described. But
+whatever way one looked all the lines neither pointed nor seemed to
+have had beginning, but being divorced from source and direction
+expressed merely beauty, like an altar "where none cometh to pray."
+
+Prince Tabnit, in his trailing robe of white embroidered by a
+thousand needles, looked so akin to the room that one suspected it
+of having produced him, Athena-wise, from, say, the great black
+shrine. When he paused before the shrine he seemed like a child come
+to beseech some last word concerning the Riddle, rather than a man
+who believed himself to have mastered all wisdom and to have nailed
+the world-sphinx to her cross.
+
+     "Surely there is a vein for the silver
+      And a place for the gold where they fine it.
+      Iron is taken out of the earth
+      And brass is moulton out of the stone.
+      Man setteth an end to darkness
+      And searcheth out all perfection:
+      The stones of darkness and of the shadow of death,"
+
+he was repeating softly. "So it is," he added, "'and searcheth to
+the farthest bound.' Have I not done so? And do I not triumph?"
+
+Then the youth who had once admitted St. George and his friends to
+that far-away house in McDougle Street--with the hokey-pokey man
+outside the door--entered with the poetry of deference; and if, as
+he bent low, there was a lift and droop of his eyelids which tokened
+utter bewilderment, not to say agitation, he was careful that the
+prince should not see that.
+
+"Her Highness, the Princess of Yaque, Mrs. Hastings, Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham and Miss Frothingham ask audience, your Highness," he
+announced clearly.
+
+Prince Tabnit turned swiftly.
+
+"Whom do you say, Matten?" he questioned and when the boy had
+repeated the names, meditated briefly. He was at a loss to fathom
+what this strange visit might portend; beyond doubt, he reflected
+(in a world which was an intaglio of his own designing) it portended
+nothing at all. He hastened forward to wait upon them and paused
+midway the room, for the highest tribute that a Prince of the Litany
+could pay to another was to receive him in this chamber of the
+Crucified Sphinx.
+
+"Conduct them here, Matten," he commanded, and took up his station
+beside an hundred-branched candlestick made in Curium. There he
+stood when, having been led down corridors of ivory and through
+shining anterooms, Mrs. Hastings and Olivia and Antoinette appeared
+on the threshold of the chamber, followed by Mr. Frothingham. As the
+prince hastened forward to meet them with sweepings of his gown
+embroidered by a thousand needles and bent above their hands
+uttering gracious words, assuredly in all the history of Med and of
+the Litany the room of the Crucified Sphinx had never presented a
+more peculiar picture.
+
+Into that tranquil atmosphere, dream-pervaded, Mrs. Medora Hastings
+swept with all the certainty of an opinion bludgeoning the frail
+security of a fact. She had refused to have her belongings sent to
+the apartments in the House of the Litany placed that day at her
+disposal, preferring to dress for the coronation before she
+descended from Mount Khalak. She was therefore in a robe of black
+samite, trimmed with the fur of a whole chapter of extinct animals,
+and bangles and pendants of jewels bobbed and ticked all about her.
+But on her head she wore the bonnet trimmed with a parrot, set, as
+usual, frightfully awry. Beside her, with all the timidity of
+charming reality in the presence of fantasy, came Olivia and
+Antoinette--Olivia in a walking frock of white broadcloth, with an
+auto coat of hunting pink, and a cap held down by yards of cloudy
+veiling; Antoinette in a blue cloth gown, and about them both--stout
+little boots and suede gloves and smart shirt-waists--such an air of
+actuality as this chamber, prince and Sphinx and tradition and all,
+could not approach. Mr. Augustus Frothingham had struck his usual
+incontestable middle-ground by appearing in the blue velvet of a
+robe of State, over which he had slipped his light covert top-coat,
+and he carried his immaculate top-hat and a silver-headed stick.
+
+"Prince Tabnit," said Mrs. Medora Hastings without ceremony, "what
+have they done with that poor young man? Ask him, Olivia," she
+besought, sinking down upon a chair of verd antique and extending a
+limp, plump hand to the niece who always did everything executive.
+
+Olivia was very pale. She had hardly slept, night-long. Alarm at the
+inexplicable disappearance of St. George at dinner-time the day
+before and at the discovery that old Malakh was nowhere about had,
+by morning, deepened to unreasoning fear among them all. And then
+Olivia, knowing nothing of what had taken place in the room of the
+tombs, had resolved upon a desperate expedient, had bundled into an
+airship her almost prostrate aunt, Mr. Frothingham and his excited
+little daughter, and had borne down upon the Palace of the Litany
+two hours before noon. Amory, frantic with apprehension, had stayed
+behind with Jarvo, certain that St. George could not have left the
+mountain. But now that Olivia stood before the prince it required
+but a moment to convince her that Prince Tabnit really knew nothing
+of St. George's whereabouts. Indeed, since his gift of Phoenician
+wine, sealed three thousand years ago, and the immediate evanishment
+of the two Americans, his Highness had no longer vexed his thought
+with them, and he was genuinely amazed to know that (in a world
+which was an intaglio of his own designing) these two had actually
+spent yesterday at the king's palace on Mount Khalak. He perceived
+that he must give them more definite attention than his half-idle
+device of the wine--intended as that had been as a mere hyperspatial
+practical joke, not in the least irreconcilable with his office of
+host.
+
+"Mr. St. George came to Yaque to help me find my father," Olivia was
+concluding earnestly, "and if anything has happened to him, Prince
+Tabnit, I alone am responsible."
+
+The prince reflected for a moment, his eyes fixed upon the
+hundred-branched candlestick. Then:
+
+"Mr. St. George's disappearance," he said, "has prevented a still
+more unpleasant catastrophe."
+
+"Catastrophe!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, quite without tucking in her
+voice at the corners, "I have thought of no other word since I got
+to be royalty."
+
+"A world experience, a world experience, dear Madame," contributed
+Mr. Frothingham, his hands laid trimly along his blue velvet lap.
+
+"But that doesn't make it any easier to bear, no matter what anybody
+says," retorted the lady.
+
+"Inasmuch," pursued Prince Tabnit with infinite regret, "as these
+Americans have, as you say, assisted in the search for your father,
+the king, they have most unfortunately violated that ancient law
+which provides that no State or satrapy shall receive aid, whether
+of blood or of bond, from an alien. The Royal House alone is
+exempt."
+
+"And the penalty," demanded Olivia fearfully. "Is there a penalty?
+What is that, Prince Tabnit?"
+
+The voice of the prince was never more mellow.
+
+"Do not be alarmed, I beg," he hastened his reassurance. "Upon the
+return of Mr. St. George, he and his friend will simply be set
+adrift in a rudderless airship, an offering to the great idea of
+space."
+
+Mrs. Hastings swayed toward the prince in her chair of verd antique,
+and her voice seemed to become brittle in the air.
+
+"Oh, is that what you call being ahead of the time," she demanded
+shrilly, "getting behind science to behave like Nero? And for my
+part I don't see anything whatever about the island that is ahead of
+the times. You haven't even got silk shoe-laces. I actually had to
+use a cloth-of-gold sandal strap to lace my oxfords, and when I lost
+a cuff-link I was obliged to make shift with two sides of one of
+Queen Agothonike's ear-rings that I found in the museum at the
+palace. And that isn't all," went on the lady, wrong kindling wrong,
+"what do you do for paper and envelopes? There is not a quire to be
+found in Med. They offered me _wireless blanks_--an ultra form that
+Mr. Hastings would never have considered in good taste. And how
+about visiting cards? I tried to have a plate made, and they showed
+me a wireless apparatus for flashing from the doorstep the name of
+the visitor--an electrical entrance which Mr. Hastings would have
+considered most inelegant. Ahead of the times, with your rudderless
+airships! I have always said that the electric chair is a way to be
+barbarous and good form at the same time, and that is what I think
+about Yaque!"
+
+Mr. Frothingham's hands worked forward convulsively on his blue
+velvet knees.
+
+"My dear Madame," he interposed earnestly, "the history of criminal
+jurisprudence, not to mention the remarkable essay of the Marquis
+Beccaria--proves beyond doubt that the extirpation of the offender
+is the only possible safety for the State--"
+
+Olivia rose and stood before the prince, her eyes meeting his.
+
+"You will permit this sentence?" she asked steadily. "As head of the
+House of the Litany, you will execute it, Prince Tabnit?"
+
+"Alas!" said the prince humbly, "it is customary on the day of the
+coronation to set adrift all offenders. I am the servant of the
+State."
+
+"Then, Prince Tabnit, I can not marry you."
+
+At this Mrs. Hastings looked blindly about for support, and Mr.
+Frothingham and Antoinette flew to her side. In that moment the lady
+had seen herself, prophetically, in black samite and her parrot
+bonnet, set adrift in the penitential airship with her rebellious
+niece.
+
+For a moment Prince Tabnit hesitated: he looked at Olivia, who was
+never more beautiful than as she defied him; then he walked slowly
+toward her, with sweep and fall of his garments embroidered by a
+thousand needles. Antoinette and her father, ministering to Mrs.
+Hastings, heard only the new note that had crept into his voice, a
+thrill, a tremour--
+
+"Olivia!" he said.
+
+Her eyes met his in amazement but no fear.
+
+"In a land more alien to me than the sun," said the prince, "I saw
+you, and in that moment I loved you. I love you more than the life
+beyond life upon which I have laid hold. I brought you to this
+island to make you my wife. Do you understand what it is that I
+offer you?"
+
+Olivia was silent. She was trembling a little at the sheer enormity
+of the moment. Suddenly, Prince Tabnit seemed to her like a name
+that she did not know.
+
+"Will you not understand what I mean?" he besought with passionate
+earnestness. "Can I make my words mean nothing to you? Do you not
+see that it is indeed as I say--that I have grasped the secret of
+life within life, beyond life, transcending life, as his
+understanding transcends the man? The wonder of the island is but
+the alphabet of wisdom. The secrets of life and death and being
+itself are in my grasp. The hidden things that come near to you in
+beauty, in dream, in inspiration are mine and my people's. All
+these I can make yours--I offer you life of a fullness such as the
+people of the world do not dream. I will love you as the gods love,
+and as the gods we will live and love--it may be for ever. Nothing
+of high wisdom shall be unrevealed to us. We shall be what the world
+will be when it nears the close of time. Come to me--trust me--be
+beside me in all the wonder that I know. But above all, love me, for
+I love you more than life, and wisdom, and mystery!"
+
+Olivia understood, and she believed. The mystery of life had always
+been more real to her than its commonplaces, and all her years she
+had gone half-expecting to meet some one, unheralded, to whom all
+things would be clear, and who should make her know by some secret
+sign that this was so, and should share with her. She had no doubt
+whatever that Prince Tabnit spoke the truth--just as the daughter of
+the river-god Inachus knew perfectly that she was being wooed by a
+voice from the air. Indeed, the world over, lovers promise each
+other infinite things, and are infinitely believed.
+
+"I do understand you, Prince Tabnit," Olivia said simply, "I do
+understand something of what you offer me. I think that these things
+were not meant to be hidden from men always, so I can even believe
+that you have all that you say. But--there is something more."
+
+Olivia paused--and swiftly, as if some little listening spirit had
+released the picture from the air, came the memory of that night
+when she had stood with St. George on that airy rampart beside the
+wall of blossoming vines.
+
+"There is something more," she repeated, "when two love each other
+very much I think that they have everything that you have said, and
+more."
+
+He looked at her in silence. The stained light from some high window
+caught her veil in meshes of rose and violet--fairy colours,
+witnessing the elusive, fairy, invincible truth of what she said.
+
+"You mean that you do not love me?" said the prince gently.
+
+"I do not love you, your Highness," said Olivia, "and as for the
+wisdom of which you speak, that is worse than useless to you if you
+can do as you say with two quite innocent men." She hesitated,
+searching his face. "Is there no way," she said, "that I, the
+daughter of your king, can save them? I will appeal to the people!"
+
+The prince met her eyes steadily, adoringly.
+
+"It would avail nothing," he said, "they are at one with the law.
+Yet there is a way that I can help you. If Mr. St. George returns,
+as he must, he and his friends shall be set adrift with due
+ceremony--but in an imperial airship, with a man secretly in
+control. By night they can escape to their yacht. This I will
+do--upon one condition."
+
+"Oh--what is that?" she asked, and for all the reticence of her
+eagerness, her voice was a betrayal.
+
+Prince Tabnit turned to the window. Below, in the palace grounds,
+and without, in the Eurychôrus, a thousand people awaited the
+opening of the palace doors. They filled the majestic avenue, poured
+up the shadowed alleys that taught the necessity of mystery, were
+grouped beneath the honey-sweet trees; and above their heads, from
+every dome and column in the fair city, flowed and streamed the
+joyous, wizard, nameless colours of the pennons blown heavenward
+against the blue. They were come, this strange, wise, elusive
+people, to her marriage.
+
+The prince was smiling as he met her eyes; for the world was always
+the exquisite intaglio, and to-day was its design.
+
+"They know," he said simply, "what was to have been at noon to-day.
+Do you not understand my condition?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+IN THE HALL OF KINGS
+
+
+Somewhat before noon the great doors of the Palace of the Litany and
+of the Hall of Kings were thrown open, and the people streamed in
+from the palace grounds and the Eurychôrus. Abroad among
+them--elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs
+to dawn, not dusk--was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of
+expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself. Especially the youths
+and maidens--who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells--waited
+with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind
+of god even to the immortals. But there were also those who weighed
+the departures incident to the coming of the strange people from
+over-seas; and there were not lacking conservatives of the old
+régime to shake wise heads and declare that a barbarian is a
+barbarian, the world over.
+
+All that rainbow multitude, clad for festival, rose with the first
+light music that stole, winged and silken, from hidden cedar
+alcoves, and some minutes past the sounding of the hour of noon the
+chamfered doors set high in the south wall of the Hall of Kings were
+swung open, and at the head of the stair appeared Olivia.
+
+She was alone, for the custom of Yaque required that the island
+princesses should on the day of their recognition first appear alone
+before their people in token of their mutual faith. From the
+wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of
+Queen Mitygen herself. It was of fine lace woven in a single piece,
+and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of
+shadow. On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in
+the Phoenician fashion, once taken from a king's casket and sent
+secretly, upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy, to be bartered in
+the marts of Coele-Syria. Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay
+about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead
+queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder
+dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust. Girdling her
+waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered
+light. With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies--vivid,
+graphic, delineated not by light but by line.
+
+The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white,
+and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate
+few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the
+stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia's women, led by
+Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were
+entering by an opposite door. In the raised seats near the High
+Council, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham leaned to wave a
+sustaining greeting. Until that high moment Mrs. Medora Hastings had
+been by no means certain that Olivia would appear at all, though she
+openly nourished the hope that "everything would go off smoothly."
+("I don't care much for foreigners and never have," she confided to
+Mr. Frothingham, "still, I was thinking while I was at breakfast,
+after all, to the prince _we are_ the foreigners. There is something
+in that, don't you think? And then the dear prince--he is so very
+metaphysical!")
+
+Upon the beetling throne Olivia took her place, and her women sank
+about her like tiers of sunset clouds. She was so little and so
+beautiful and so unconsciously appealing that when Prince Tabnit and
+Cassyrus and the rest of the court entered, it is doubtful if an eye
+left Olivia, to homage them. But Prince Tabnit was the last to note
+that, for he saw only Olivia; and the world--the world was an
+intaglio of his own designing.
+
+With due magnificence the preliminary ceremonies of the coronation
+proceeded--musty necessities, like oaths and historical truths,
+being mingled with the most delicate observances, such as the
+naming of the former princesses of the island, from Adija, daughter
+of King Abibaal, to Olivia, daughter of King Otho; and such as
+counting the clouds for the misfortunes of the régime. This last
+duty fell to the office of the lord chief-chancellor, and from an
+upper porch he returned quickening with the intelligence that there
+was not a cloud in the sky, a state of the heavens known to no
+coronation since Babylon was ruled by Assyrian viceroys. The lord
+chief-chancellor and Cassyrus themselves brought forth the crown--a
+beautiful crown, shining like dust-in-the-sun--and Cassyrus, in a
+voice that trumpeted, rehearsed its history: how it had been made of
+jewels brought from the coffers of Amasis and Apries, when King
+Nebuchadnezzar wrested Phoenicia from Egypt, and, too, of all manner
+of precious stones sent by Queen Atossa, wife of Darius, when the
+Crotoniat Democedes, with two triremes and a trading vessel, visited
+Yaque before they went to survey Hellenic shores, with what
+disastrous result. And Olivia, standing in the queen's gown,
+listened without hearing one word, and turned to have her veil
+lifted by Antoinette and the daughter of a peer of Yaque; and she
+knelt before the people while the lord chief-chancellor set the
+crown on her bright hair. It was a picture that thrilled the lord
+chief-chancellor himself--who was a worshiper of beauty, and a man
+given to angling in the lagoon and making metric translations of the
+inscriptions.
+
+Then it was in the room as if a faint flame had been breathed upon
+and had upleaped in a thousand ways of expectancy, and as if a
+secret sign had been set in the lift and dip of the music--the music
+that was so like the great chamber with its lift and dip of carven
+line. The thrill with which one knows the glad news of an unopened
+letter was upon them all, and they heard that swift breath of an
+event that stirs before its coming. When Olivia's women fell back
+from the dais with wonder and murmur, the murmur was caught up in
+the great hall, and ran from tier to tier as amazement, as
+incredulity, and as thanksgiving.
+
+For there, beside the beetling throne, was standing a man, slenderly
+built, with a youthful, sensitive face and critically-drooping lids,
+and upon them all his eyes were turned in faint amusement warmed by
+an idle approbation.
+
+"Perfect--perfect. Quite perfect," he was saying below his breath.
+
+Olivia turned. The next moment she stood with outstretched arms
+before her father; and King Otho, in his long, straight robe,
+encrusted with purple amethysts, bent with exquisite courtesy above
+his daughter's hands.
+
+"My dear child," he murmured, "the picture that you make entirely
+justifies my existence, but hardly my absence. Shall we ask his
+Highness to do that?"
+
+It mattered little who was to do that so long as it was done. For to
+that people, steeped in dream, risen from the crudity of mere events
+to breathe in the rarer atmosphere of their significance, here was a
+happening worthy their attention, for it had the dignity of mystery.
+Even Mrs. Medora Hastings, billowing toward the throne with cries,
+was less poignantly a challenge to be heard. Upon her the king laid
+a tranquillizing hand and, with a droop of eyelids in recognition of
+Mr. Frothingham, he murmured: "Ah, Medora--Medora! Delight in the
+moment--but do not embrace it," while beside him, star-eyed, Olivia
+stood waiting for Prince Tabnit to speak.
+
+To Olivia, trembling a little as she leaned upon his arm, King Otho
+bent with some word, at which she raised to his her startled face,
+and turned from him uncertainly, and burned a heavenly colour from
+brow to chin. Then, her father's words being insistent in her ear,
+and her own heart being tumultuous with what he had told her, she
+turned as he bade her, and, following his glance, slipped beneath a
+shining curtain that cut from the audience chamber the still
+seclusion of the King's Alcove, a chamber long sacred to the
+sovereigns of Yaque.
+
+Confused with her wonder and questioning, hardly daring to
+understand the import of her father's words, Olivia went down a
+passage set between two high white walls of the palace, open
+to-day to the upper blue and to the floating pennons of the dome.
+Here, prickly-leaved plants had shot to the cornices with
+uncouth contorting of angled boughs, and in their inner green
+ruffle-feathered birds looked down on her with the uncanny
+interest of myriapods. She caught about her the lace of her skirts
+and of her floating veil, and the way echoed musically to the
+touch of her little sandals and was bright with the shining of her
+diadem. And at the end of the passage she lifted a swaying curtain
+of soft dyes and entered the King's Alcove.
+
+The King's Alcove laid upon one the delicate demands of calm open
+water--for its floor of white transparent tiles was cunningly traced
+with the reflected course of the carven roof, and one seemed to look
+into mirrored depths of disappearing line between spaces shaped like
+petals and like chevrons. In the King's Alcove one stood in a world
+of white and one's sight was exquisitely won, now by a niche open to
+a blue well of sea and space, now by silver plants lucent in high
+casements. And there one was spellbound with this mirroring of the
+Near which thus became the Remote, until one questioned gravely
+which was "there" and which was "here," for the real was extended
+into vision, and vision was quickened to the real, and nothing lay
+between. But to Olivia, entering, none of these things was clearly
+evident, for as the curtain of many dyes fell behind her she was
+aware of two figures--but the one, with a murmured word which she
+managed somehow to answer without an idea what she said or what it
+had said either, vanished down the way that she had come. And she
+stood there face to face with St. George.
+
+He had risen from a low divan before a small table set with figs and
+bread and a decanter of what would have been bordeaux if it had not
+been distilled from the vineyards of Yaque. He was very pale and
+haggard, and his eyes were darkly circled and still fever-bright.
+But he came toward her as if he had quite forgotten that this is a
+world of danger and that she was a princess and that, little more
+than a week ago, her name was to him the unknown music. He came
+toward her with a face of unutterable gladness, and he caught and
+crushed her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he could
+look to the distant soul of her. He led her to a great chair hewn
+from quarries of things silver and unremembered, and he sat at her
+feet upon a bench that might have been a stone of the altar of some
+forgotten deity of dreams, at last worshiped as it should long have
+been worshiped by all the host that had passed it by. He looked up
+in her face, and the room was like a place of open water where
+heaven is mirrored in earth, and earth reflects and answers heaven.
+
+St. George laughed a little for sheer, inextinguishable happiness.
+
+"Once," he said, "once I breakfasted with you, on tea and--if I
+remember correctly--gold and silver muffins. Won't you breakfast
+with me now?"
+
+Olivia looked down at him, her heart still clamourous with its
+anxiety of the night and of the morning.
+
+"Tell me where you can have been," she said only; "didn't you know
+how distressed we would be? We imagined everything--in this dreadful
+place. And we feared everything, and we--" but yet the "we" did not
+deceive St. George; how could it with her eyes, for all their
+avoidings, so divinely upon him?
+
+"Did you," he said, "ah--did you wonder? I wish I knew!"
+
+"And my father--where did you find him?" she besought. "It was you?
+You found him, did you not?"
+
+St. George looked down at a fold of her gown that was fallen across
+his knee. How on earth was he ever to move, he wondered vaguely, if
+the slightest motion meant the withdrawing of that fold. He looked
+at her hand, resting so near, so near, upon the arm of the chair;
+and last he looked again into her face; and it seemed wonderful and
+before all things wonderful, not that she should be here, jeweled
+and crowned, but that he should so unbelievably be here with her.
+And yet it might be but a moment, as time is measured, until this
+moment would be swept away. His eyes met hers and held them.
+
+"Would you mind," he said, "now--just for a little, while we wait
+here--not asking me that? Not asking me anything? There will be time
+enough in there--when _they_ ask me. Just for now I only want to
+think how wonderful this is."
+
+She said: "Yes, it is wonderful--unbelievable," but he thought that
+she might have meant the white room or her queen's robe or any one
+of all the things which he did not mean.
+
+"_Is_ it wonderful to you?" he asked, and he said again: "I wish--I
+wish I knew!"
+
+He looked at her, sitting in the moon of her laces and the stars of
+her gems, and the sense of the immeasurableness of the hour came
+upon him as it comes to few; the knowledge that the evanescent
+moment is very potent, the world where the siren light of the Remote
+may at any moment lie quenched in some ashen present. To him, held
+momentarily in this place that was like shoreless, open water, the
+present was inestimably precious and it lay upon St. George like the
+delicate claim of his love itself. What the next hour held for them
+neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him
+crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand
+lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her
+fingers to his lips.
+
+"Olivia--dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do--what
+will happen--oh, may I tell you _now_?"
+
+There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not
+withdrawn from his. And so he did tell her, told her all his heart
+as he had known his heart to be that last night on _The Aloha_, and
+in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those
+hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the
+vigil that followed, and always--always, ever since he could
+remember, only that he hadn't known that he was waiting for her, and
+now he knew--now he knew.
+
+"Must you not have known, up there in the palace," he besought her,
+"the night that I got there? And yesterday, all day yesterday, you
+must have known--didn't you know? I love you, Olivia. I couldn't
+have told you, I couldn't have let you know, only now, when we can't
+know what may come or what they may do--oh, say you forgive me.
+Because I love you--I love you."
+
+She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold
+of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the
+strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at
+him in almost unearthly beauty. He stood before her, waiting for the
+moment when she should lift her eyes. And the eyes were lifted, and
+he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the
+coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque.
+He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine
+moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that
+world that was like the shoreless open sea where earth reflects
+heaven, and heaven comes down.
+
+They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St. George half knelt
+beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and
+there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear.
+And because this fragment of the past since they had met was
+incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before
+them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that
+future, clinging to each other's hands. The little chamber of
+translucent white, where one looked down to a mirrored dome and up
+to a kind of sky, became to them a place bounded by the touch and
+the look and the voice of each other, as every place in the world is
+bounded for every heart that beats.
+
+"Sweetheart," said St. George presently, "do you remember that you
+are a princess, and I'm merely a kind of man?"
+
+Was it not curious, he thought, that his lips did not speak a new
+language of their own accord?
+
+"I know," corrected Olivia adorably, "that I'm a kind of princess.
+But what use is that when it only makes trouble for us?"
+
+"Us"--"makes trouble for us." St. George wondered how he could ever
+have thought that he even guessed what happiness might be when
+"trouble for us" was like this. He tried to say so, and then:
+
+"But do you know what you are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you
+see--dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world
+that you can never, never get back?"
+
+Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It
+seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his
+forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it
+back. To prove that _that_ was not incredible, St. George turned
+until his lips brushed her wrist.
+
+"Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very
+possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the
+rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming
+they will sometime know?"
+
+Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.
+
+"I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of
+that."
+
+"You'll never be sorry--never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely
+denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.
+
+"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
+
+That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he
+whimsically remembered something else:
+
+"You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is
+another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a
+queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And
+in New York--in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."
+
+"No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I _insist_ upon a
+flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the
+altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour
+dissolving to mirrored point and light--the mystic union of sight
+with dream--and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine
+resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different--a flat," she said
+shyly.
+
+Wouldn't it--wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?
+
+"Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.
+
+"But it will be different, just different enough to like better,"
+she admitted then. "You know that I think so," she said.
+
+"If only you knew how much I think so," he told her, "how I have
+thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris.
+Olivia, dear heart--when did you think so first--"
+
+She shook her head and laid her hands upon his and drew them to her
+face.
+
+"Now, now--now!" she cried, "and there never was any time but now."
+
+"But there will be--there will be," he said, his lips upon her hair.
+
+After a time--for Time, that seems to have no boundaries in the
+abstract, is a very fiend for bounding the divine concrete--after a
+time Amory spoke hesitatingly on the other side of the curtain of
+many dyes.
+
+"St. George," he said, "I'm afraid they want you. Mr. Holland--the
+king, he's got through playing them. He wants you to get up and give
+'em the truth, I think."
+
+"Come in--come in, Amory," St. George said and lifted the curtain,
+and "I beg your pardon," he added, as his eyes fell upon Antoinette
+in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated. She had followed
+Olivia from the hall, and had met Amory midway the avenue of prickly
+trees, and they had helpfully been keeping guard. Now they went on
+before to the Hall of Kings, and St. George, remembering what must
+happen there, turned to Olivia for one crowning moment.
+
+"You know," she said fearfully, "before father came the prince
+intended the most terrible things--to set you and Mr. Amory adrift
+in a rudderless airship--"
+
+St. George laughed in amusement. The poor prince with his impossible
+devices, thinking to harm him, St. George--_now_.
+
+"He meant to marry you, he thought," he said, "but, thank Heaven, he
+has your father to answer to--and me!" he ended jubilantly.
+
+And yet, after all, Heaven knew what possibilities hemmed them
+round. And Heaven knew what she was going to think of him when she
+heard his story. He turned and caught her to him, for the crowning
+moment.
+
+"You love me--you love me," he said, "no matter what happens or what
+they say--no matter what?"
+
+She met his eyes and, of her own will, she drew his face down to
+hers.
+
+"No matter what," she answered. So they went together toward the
+chamber which they had both forgotten.
+
+When they reached the Hall of Kings they heard King Otho's
+voice--suave, mellow, of perfect enunciation:
+
+"--some one," the king was concluding, "who can tell this
+considerably better than I. And it seems to me singularly fitting
+that the recognition of the part eternally played by the 'possible'
+be temporarily deferred while we listen to--I dislike to use the
+word, but shall I say--the facts."
+
+It seemed to St. George when he stood beside the dais, facing that
+strange, eager multitude with his strange unbelievable story upon
+his lips--the story of the finding of the king--as if his own voice
+were suddenly a part of all the gigantic incredibility. Yet the
+divinely real and the fantastic had been of late so fused in his
+consciousness that he had come to look upon both as the
+normal--which is perhaps the only sane view. But how could he tell
+to others the monstrous story of last night, and hope to be
+believed?
+
+None the less, as simply as if he had been narrating to
+Chillingworth the high moment of a political convention, St. George
+told the people of Yaque what had happened in that night in the room
+of the tombs with that mad old Malakh whom they all remembered. It
+came to him as he spoke that it was quite like telling to a field of
+flowers the real truth about the wind of which they might be
+supposed to know far more than he; and yet, if any one were to tell
+the truth about the wind who would know how to listen? He was not
+amazed that, when he had done, the people of Yaque sat in a profound
+silence which might have been the silence of innocent amazement or
+of utter incredulity.
+
+But there was no mistaking the face of Prince Tabnit. Its cool
+tolerant amusement suddenly sent the blood pricking to St. George's
+heart and filled him with a kind of madness. What he did was the
+last thing that he had intended. He turned upon the prince, and his
+voice went cutting to the farthest corner of the hall:
+
+"Men and women of Yaque," he cried, "I accuse your prince of the
+knowledge that can take from and add to the years of man at will. I
+accuse him of the deliberate and criminal use of that knowledge to
+take King Otho from his throne!"
+
+St. George hardly knew what effect his words had. He saw only
+Olivia, her hands locked, her lips parted, looking in his face in
+anguish; and he saw Prince Tabnit smile. Prince Tabnit sat upon the
+king's left hand, and he leaned and whispered a smiling word in the
+ear of his sovereign and turned a smiling face to Olivia upon her
+father's right.
+
+"I know something of your American newspapers, your Majesty," the
+prince said aloud, "and these men are doing their part excellently,
+excellently."
+
+"What do you mean, your Highness?" demanded St. George curtly.
+
+"But is it not simple?" asked the prince, still smiling. "You have
+contrived a sensation for the great American newspaper. No one can
+doubt."
+
+King Otho leaned back in the beetling throne.
+
+"Ah, yes," he said, "it is true. Something has been contrived.
+But--is the sensation of _his_ contriving, Prince?"
+
+Olivia stood silent. It was not possible, it was not possible, she
+said over mechanically. For St. George to have come with this story
+of a potion--a drug that had restored youth to her father, had
+transformed him from that mad old Malakh--
+
+"Father!" she cried appealingly, "don't you remember--don't you
+know?"
+
+King Otho, watching the prince, shook his head, smiling.
+
+"At dawn," he said, "there are few of us to be found remaining still
+at table with Socrates. I seem not to have been of that number."
+
+"Olivia!" cried St. George suddenly.
+
+She met his eyes for a moment, the eyes that had read her own, that
+had given message for message, that had seen with her the glory of a
+mystic morning willingly relinquished for a diviner dawn. Was she
+not princess here in Yaque? She laid her hand upon her father's
+hand; the crown that they had given her glittered as she turned
+toward the multitude.
+
+"My people," she said ringingly, "I believe that that man speaks the
+truth. Shall the prince not answer to this charge before the High
+Council now--here--before you all?"
+
+At this King Otho did something nearly perceptible with his
+eyebrows. "Perfect. Perfect. Quite perfect," he said below his
+breath. The next instant the eyelids of the sovereign drooped
+considerably less than one would have supposed possible. For from
+every part of the great chamber, as if a storm long-pent had forced
+the walls of the wind, there came in a thousand murmurs--soft,
+tremulous, definitive--the answering voice to Olivia's question:
+
+"Yes. Yes. Yes..."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
+
+
+In Prince Tabnit's face there was a curious change, as if one were
+suddenly to see hieroglyphics upon a star where before there had
+been only shining. But his calm and his magnificent way of authority
+did not desert him, as so grotesque a star would still stand lonely
+and high in the heavens. He spoke, and upon the multitude fell
+instant silence, not the less absolute that it harboured foreboding.
+
+"Whatever the people would say to me," said the prince simply, "I
+will hear. My right hand rests in the hand of the people. In return
+I decree allegiance to the law. Your princess stands before you,
+crowned. This most fortunate return of his Majesty, the King, can
+not set at naught the sacred oath which has just left her lips.
+Henceforth, in council and in audience, her place shall be at his
+Majesty's right hand, as was the place of that Princess Athalme,
+daughter of King Kab, in the dynasty of the fall of Rome. Is it not,
+therefore, but the more incumbent upon your princess to own her
+allegiance to the law of the island by keeping her troth with
+me--that troth witnessed and sanctioned by you yourselves? This
+ceremony concluded I will answer the demands of the loyal subjects
+whose interests alone I serve. For we obey that which is higher than
+authority--the law, born in the Beginning--"
+
+Prince Tabnit's voice might almost have taken his place in his
+absence, it was so soft, so fine of texture, no more consciously
+modulated than is the going of water or the way of a wing. It was
+difficult to say whether his words or, so to say, their fine fabric
+of voice, begot the silence that followed. But all eyes were turned
+upon Olivia. And, Prince Tabnit noting this, before she might speak
+he suddenly swept his flowing robes embroidered by a thousand
+needles to a posture of humility before his sovereign.
+
+"Your Majesty," he besought, "I pray your consent to the bestowal
+upon my most unworthy self of the hand of your daughter, the
+Princess Olivia."
+
+King Otho leaned upon the arm of his carven throne. Against its
+strange metal his hand was cameo-clear.
+
+"For the king," he was remembering softly, "'the Pyrenees, or so he
+fancied, ceased to exist.' For another 'the mountains of Daphne are
+everywhere.' Each of us has his impossible dream to prove that he
+is an impossible creature. Why not I? To be normal is the cry of all
+the hobgoblins ... And what does the princess say?" he asked aloud.
+
+"Her Highness has already given me the great happiness to plight me
+her troth," said Prince Tabnit.
+
+King Otho's eyebrows flickered from their parallel of repose.
+
+"In Yaque or in America," he murmured, "the Americans do as the
+Americans do. None of us is mentioned in Deuteronomy, but what is
+the will of the princess?" the American Sovereign asked.
+
+Mrs. Hastings, seated near the dais, heard; and as she turned, a
+rhinestone side-comb slipped from her hair, tinkled over the jewels
+of her corsage and shot into the lap of a member of the High
+Council. He, never having seen a side-comb, fancied that it might be
+an infernal machine which he had never seen either, and,
+palpitating, flashed it to the guardian hand of Mr. Frothingham. At
+the same moment:
+
+"Ah, why, Otho," said Mrs. Hastings audibly, "we had two ancestors
+at Bannockburn!"
+
+"Bannockburn!" argued Mr. Augustus Frothingham, below the voice,
+"Bannockburn. But what, my dear Mrs. Hastings, is Bannockburn beside
+the Midianites and the Moabites and the Hittites and the Ammonites
+and the Levites?"
+
+In this genealogical moment the prince leaned toward Olivia.
+
+"Choose," he said significantly, but so softly that none might hear,
+"oh, my beloved, choose!"
+
+The faces of the great assembly blurred and wavered before Olivia,
+and the low hum of the talk in the room was relative, like the
+voices of passers-by. She looked up at the prince and away from him
+in mute appeal to something that ought to help her and would not.
+For Olivia was of those who, never having seen the face of Destiny
+very near, are accustomed to look upon nothing as wholly
+irrevocable; and--for one of her graces--she had the feminine
+expectation that, if only events can be sufficiently postponed,
+something will intervene; which is perhaps a heritage of the
+gentlest women descended from Homeric days. If the island was so
+historic, little Olivia may have said, where was the interfering
+goddess? She looked unseeingly toward St. George and toward her
+father, and the sense of the bitter actuality of the choice suddenly
+wounded her, as the Actual for ever wounds the woman and the dream.
+
+Then suddenly, above the stir of expectation of the people, and the
+associate bustling of the High Council there came a vague confusion
+and trampling from outside, and the far outer doors of the hall were
+thrown open with a jar and a breath, vibrant as a murmur. There was
+a cry, the determined resistance of some of the Golden Guard, and
+shouts of expostulation and warning as they were flung aside by a
+powerful arm. In the disorder that followed, a miraculously-familiar
+figure--that familiarity and strangeness are both miracles ought to
+explain certain mysteries--was beside St. George and a thankful
+voice said in his ear:
+
+"Mr. St. George, sir, for the mercy of Heaven, sir--come back to the
+yacht. No person can tell what may happen ten minutes ahead, sir!"
+
+The oracle of this universal truth was Rollo, palpitating, his
+immaculate coat stained with earth, earth-stains on his cheeks, and
+his breast labouring in an excitement which only anxiety for his
+master could effect. But St. George hardly saw him. His eyes were
+fixed on some one who stood towering before the dais, like the old
+prints of the avenging goddesses. Clad in the hideous stripes which
+boards of directors consider _de rigueur_ for the soul that is to be
+won back to the normal, stood the woman Elissa, who, by all counts
+of Prince Tabnit, should have been singing a hymn with Mrs. Manners
+and Miss Bella Bliss Utter in the Bitley Reformatory, in Westchester
+County, New York.
+
+"Stop!" she cried in that perfect English which is not only a rare
+experience but a pleasant adventure, "what new horror is this?"
+
+To Prince Tabnit's face, as he looked at her, came once more that
+indefinable change--only this time nearer and more intimately
+explainable, as if something ethereal, trained to delicate lines,
+like smoke, should suddenly shape itself to a menace. St. George saw
+the woman step close to the dais, he saw Olivia's eyes questioning
+him, and in the hurried rising of the peers and of the High Council
+he heard Rollo's voice in his ear:
+
+"It's a gr'it go, sir," observed Rollo respectfully, "the woman has
+things to tell, sir, as people generally don't know. She's flew the
+coop at the place she was in--it seems she's been shut up some'eres
+in America, sir; an' she got 'old of the capting of a tramp boat o'
+some kind--one o' them boats as smells intoxicating round the
+'atches--an' she give 'im an' the mate a 'andful o' jewelry that
+she'd on 'er when she was took in an' 'ad someways contrived to 'ang
+on to, an' I'm blessed hif she wasn't able fer to steer fer the
+island, sir--we took 'er aboard the yacht only this mornin' with 'er
+'air down her back, an' we've brought 'er on here. An' she says--men
+can be gr'it beasts, sir, an' no manner o' mistake," concluded Rollo
+fervently.
+
+And a little hoarse voice said in St. George's ear:
+
+"Mr. St. George, sir--we ain't late, are we? We been flirtin' de
+ger-avel up dat ka-liff since de car-rack o' day."
+
+And there was Bennietod, with an edge of an old horse pistol
+showing beneath his cuff; and, round-eyed and alert as a bird newly
+alighted on a stranger sill, Little Cawthorne stood; and the sight
+put strength into St. George, and so did Little Cawthorne's words:
+
+"I didn't know whether they'd let us in or not," he said, "unless we
+had on a plaited décolletté, with biases down the back."
+
+Clearly and confidently in the silent room rang the voice of the
+woman confronting Prince Tabnit, and her eyes did not leave his
+face. St. George was struck with the change in her since that day in
+the Reformatory chapel. Then she had been like a wild, alien thing
+in dumb distress; now she was unchained and native. Her first words
+explained why, in the extreme dilemma in which St. George had last
+seen her, she had yet remained mute.
+
+"I release myself," she cried, "from my oath of silence, though
+until to-day I have spoken only to those who helped me to come back
+to you--my master. Have you nothing to say to me? Has the time
+seemed long? Is it a weary while since I left you to do your will
+and murder the woman whom you were now about to make your wife?"
+
+A cry of horror rose from the people, and then stillness came again.
+
+"Take the woman away," said Prince Tabnit only, "she is speaking
+madness."
+
+"I am speaking the truth," said the woman clearly. "I was of
+Melita--there are those here who will know my face. And it is not I
+alone who have served the State. I challenge you, Tabnit--here,
+before them all! Where are Gerya and Ibera, Cabulla and Taura? Have
+not their people, weeping, besought news of them in vain? And what
+answer have you given them?"
+
+Murmurs and sobs rose from the assembly, stilled by the tranquil
+voice of the prince.
+
+"Where are they?" he repeated gently, his voice vibrant in its rise
+and fall, its giving of delicate values. "But the people know where
+they are. They have attained to the perfect life and died the
+perfect death. For I have raised them to the supreme estate."
+
+Prince Tabnit, with uplifted face, sat motionless, looking out over
+the throng from beneath lowered lids; then his eyes, confident and a
+little mocking, returned to the woman. But they had for her no
+terror. She turned from him, confronting the pale, eager faces of
+the people; and in her beauty and distinction she was like Olivia's
+women, crowded beside the dais.
+
+"Men and women of Yaque," cried Elissa, "I will tell you to what
+'supreme estate' these friends whom you seek have long been raised.
+For here in Med and in Melita you will find many of those whom you
+have mourned as dead--you will find them as you yourselves have met
+and passed them, it may have been countless times, on your streets
+of Yaque--not young and beautiful as when they left you, but men and
+women of incredible age. Withered, shaken by palsy, infirm, they
+creep upon their lonely ways or go at will to drag themselves
+unrecognized along your highways, as helpless as the dead
+themselves. They number scores, and they are those who have
+displeased your prince by some little word, some little wrong, or,
+more than these, by some thwarting of the way of his ambition: Oblo,
+who disappeared from his place as keeper at the door; Ithobal,
+satrap of Melita; young Prince Kaal--ay, and how many more? You do
+not understand my words? I say that your prince has knowledge of
+some secret, accursed drug that can call back youth or make actual
+age--_age_, do you understand--just as we of Yaque bring both
+flowers and fruit to swift maturity!"
+
+Olivia uttered a little cry, not at the grotesque horror of what the
+woman had said but at the miracle of its unconscious support of the
+story and theory of St. George. And St. George heard; and suddenly,
+because another had voiced his own fantastic message, its
+incredibility and unreality became appalling, and yet he felt
+infinitely reconciled to both because he interpreted aright that
+little muffled exclamation from Olivia. What did it matter--oh, what
+did it matter whether or not the reality were grotesque? What seems
+to be happening is always the reality, if only one understands it
+sufficiently. And at all events there had been that hour in the
+King's Alcove. At last, as he weighed that hour against the fantasy
+of all the rest, St. George understood and lived the divine madness
+of all great moments, the madness that realizes one star and is
+content that all the heavens shall march unintelligibly past so long
+as that single shining is not dimmed.
+
+But King Otho was riding no such griffin with sun-gold wings. King
+Otho was genuinely and personally interested in the woman's words.
+He turned to Prince Tabnit with animation.
+
+"Really, Prince," he said, "is it so? Pray do not deny it unless
+there is no other way, for I am before all things interested. It is
+far more important to me that you tell me as much as you can tell,
+than that you deny or even disprove it."
+
+Prince Tabnit smiled in the eagerly interested face of his
+sovereign, and rose and came to the edge of the dais, his garments
+embroidered by a thousand needles touching and floating about him;
+and it was as if he reached those before him by a kind of spiritual
+magnetism, not without sublimity.
+
+"My people," he said--and his voice had all the tenderness that they
+knew so well--"this is some conspiracy of those to whom we have
+shown the utmost hospitality. I would have shielded your king, for
+he was also my sovereign and I owed him allegiance. But now that is
+no longer possible, and the time is come. Know then, oh my people of
+Yaque, that which my loyalty has led me wrongfully to conceal: that
+in the strange disappearance and return of your sovereign, King
+Otho, he who will may trace the loss of that which the island has
+mourned without ceasing. I accuse your king--he is no longer
+mine--of being now in possession of the Hereditary Treasure of
+Yaque."
+
+Then St. George came back with a thrill to actuality. In the press
+of the events of this morning, after his awakening in the room of
+the tombs, he had completely forgotten the soft fire of gems that
+had burned beneath the hands of old Malakh in that dark chamber
+under King Abibaal's tomb. He and Amory and Jarvo had, with the
+king, left the chamber by the upper passages, and Amory and Jarvo
+knew nothing of the jewels. Yet St. George was certain that he could
+not have been mistaken, and he listened breathlessly for what the
+king would say.
+
+King Otho, with a smile, nodded in perfect imperturbability.
+
+"That is true," he said, "I had forgotten all about it."
+
+They waited for him to speak, the people in amazed silence, Mrs.
+Medora Hastings saying unintelligible things in whispers, for which
+she had a genius.
+
+"It is true," said King Otho, "that I am responsible for the
+disappearance of the Hereditary Treasure. You will find it at this
+moment in a basement dungeon of the palace on Mount Khalak. On the
+very day, three months ago, that I dined with your prince I had made
+a discovery of considerable importance to me, namely, that the
+little island of Yaque is richer in most of the radio-active
+substances than all the rest of the world. The discovery gave me
+keener pleasure than I had known in years--I had suspected it for
+some time after I found the noctilucous stars on the ceiling of my
+sitting-room at the palace. And in the work-shop of the Princess
+Simyra I came upon a quantity of metallic uranium, and a great many
+other things which I question the taste of taking the time to
+describe. But my experiments there with the very perfect gems of
+your admirable collection had evidently been antedated by some of
+your own people, for the apparatus was intact. I shall be glad to
+show some charming effects to any one who cares to see them. I have
+succeeded in causing the diamonds of Darius to phosphoresce most
+wonderfully."
+
+The phosphorescence of the diamonds of Darius was to the people far
+less important than the joyous fact which they were not slow to
+grasp, that the Hereditary Treasure was, if they might believe the
+king's words, restored to them, and the burden of the tax averted.
+They did not understand, nor did they seek to understand; because
+they knew the inefficiency of details and they also knew the value
+of mere import.
+
+But the king, child of a social order that wreaks itself on
+particularizations, returned to his quest for a certain recounting.
+
+"Prince Tabnit," he said, "the High Council and the people of Yaque
+are impatient for your answer to this woman's words."
+
+"I rejoice with them and with your Majesty," replied Prince Tabnit
+softly, "that the treasure is safe. My own explanation is far less
+simple. If what this woman says is true, yet it is true in such wise
+as, strive as I may, I can not speak; nor, strive as you may, can
+you fathom. Therefore I say that the claim which she has made is
+idle, and not within my power to answer."
+
+At this St. George bounded to his feet. Amory looked up at him in
+terror, and Little Cawthorne and Bennietod went a step or two after
+him as he sprang forward, and Rollo's lean shadowed face, obvious as
+his way of speech, was wrinkled in terrified appeal.
+
+"An idle claim!" St. George thundered as he strode before the dais.
+"Is this woman's story and mine an idle claim, and one not within
+your power to answer? Then I will tell you how to answer, Prince
+Tabnit. I challenge you now, in the presence of your people--taste
+this!"
+
+Upon the carven arm of Prince Tabnit's throne St. George set
+something that he had taken from his pocket. It was the vase of
+rock-crystal from which, the night before in the room of the tombs,
+the king had drunk.
+
+What followed was the last thing that St. George had expected. It
+was as if his defiance had unlocked flood-gates. In an instant the
+vast assembly was in motion. With a sound of garments that was like
+far wind they were upon their feet and pressing toward the throne.
+With all the passion of their "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in response to
+Olivia's appeal they came, resistlessly demanding the answer to some
+dreadful question long shrouded in their hearts. Their armour was
+their silence; they made no sound save that ominous sweep of their
+robes and the conspiracy of their sandaled feet upon the tiles.
+
+St. George did not turn. Indeed, it did not once cross his mind that
+their hostility could possibly be toward him. Besides, his look was
+fixed upon the prince's face, and what he read there was enough. The
+peers, the High Council and those nearest the throne wavered and
+swerved from the man, leaving him to face what was to come.
+
+Whatever was to come he would have met nobly. He was of those
+infrequent folk of some upper air who exhibit a certain purity even
+in error, or in worse. He stood with his exquisite pale face
+uplifted, his white hair in a glory about it, his white gown
+embroidered by a thousand needles falling in virginal lines against
+the warm, pure colour of that room with its wraiths of hue and
+light. And he opened the heart of the green jewel that burned upon
+his breast.
+
+"Not for me the wine of youth," he said slowly, "but the poison of
+age. The poison which, without me to unlock the secret, all mankind
+must drink alone. May you drink it late, my friends!" he cried. "I,
+who hold in my soul the secret of the passing of time and youth,
+drink now to those among you and among all men who have won and kept
+the one thing dearer than these."
+
+He touched the green gem to his lips, and let it fall upon the
+embroidered laces on his breast. Then quietly and in another voice
+he began to speak.
+
+With the first words there came to St. George the thrill of
+something that had possessed him--when? In that ecstatic moment on
+_The Aloha_ when he had seen the light in the king's palace; in the
+instant when the Isle of Yaque had first lain subject before him, "a
+land which no one can define or remember--only desire;" in the
+divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the
+palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour
+of his joy in the King's Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes
+and touched his lips. Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies
+barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own--a shell, a duty, a
+vista--he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying. He
+listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched
+hands with the elemental and saw the ancient kindliness of all those
+people naked in their faces and knew himself for what he was.
+
+He listened, and yet there was no making captive the words of the
+prince in understanding. Prince Tabnit was speaking the English, and
+every word was clearly audible and, moreover, was probably daily
+upon St. George's lips. But if it had been to ransom the rest of the
+world from its night he could not have understood what the prince
+was saying. Every word was a word that belonged as much to St.
+George as to the prince; but in some unfathomable fashion the inner
+sense of what he said for ever eluded, dissolving in the air of
+which it was a part. And yet, past all doubting, St. George knew
+that he was hearing the essence of that strange knowledge which the
+Isle of Yaque had won while all the rest of mankind struggled for
+it--he knew with the certainty with which we recognize strange
+forces in a dozen of the every-day things of life, in electricity,
+in telepathy, in dreams. With the same certainty he realized that
+what the prince was saying would, if he could understand, lift a
+certain veil. Here, put in words at last, was manifestly the secret,
+that catch of understanding without which men are groping in the
+dark, perhaps that mere pointing of relations which would make
+clear, without blasphemy, time and the future, rebirth and old
+existence, it might be; and certainly the accident of personality.
+Here, crystallized, were the things that men almost know, the dream
+that has just escaped every one, the whisper in sleep that would
+have explained if one could remember when one woke, the word that
+has been thrillingly flashed to one in moments of absorption and has
+fled before one might catch the sound, the far hope of science, the
+glimpse that comes to dying eyes and is voiced in fragments by dying
+lips. Here without penetrating the great reserve or tracing any
+principle to its beginning, was the truth about both. And St. George
+was powerless to receive it.
+
+He turned fearfully to Olivia. Ah--what if she did not guess
+anything of the meaning of what she was hearing? For one instant he
+knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star. But
+when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and
+her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she
+might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near,
+how near they Stood; and to be with her on this side was
+dearer--nay, was nearer the Secret--than without her to pass the
+veil that they touched. Then he looked at Amory; wouldn't old Amory
+know, he wondered. Wouldn't his mere understanding of news teach him
+what was happening? But old Amory, the light flashing on his
+pince-nez, was keeping one eye on the prince and wondering if the
+chair that he had just placed for Antoinette was not in the draught
+of the dome; and little Antoinette was looking about her like a
+rosebud, new to the butterflies of June; and King Otho was
+listening, languid, heavy-lidded, sensitive to little values,
+sophisticating the moment; and Little Cawthorne stood with eyes
+raised in simple, tolerant wonder; and the others, Bennietod, Mrs.
+Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, showed faces like the pools
+in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples--one must
+suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly such
+faces. St. George saw how it was. Here, spoken casually by the
+prince, just as the Banal would speak of the visible and invisible
+worlds, here was the Sesame of understanding toward which the
+centuries had striven, the secret of the link between two worlds;
+and here, of all mankind, were only they two to hear--they two and
+that motionless company who knew what the prince knew and who kept
+it sealed within their eyes.
+
+St. George looked at the multitude in swift understanding. They
+were like a Greek chorus, signifying what is. They knew what the
+prince was saying, they had the secret and yet--they were _no
+nearer, no nearer_ than he. With their ancient kindliness naked in
+their faces, St. George knew that through his love he was as near to
+the Source as were they. And it was suddenly as it had been that
+first night when he had stridden buoyantly through the island; for
+he could not tell which was the secret of the prince and of these
+people and which was the blessedness of his love.
+
+None the less he clung desperately to the last words of Prince
+Tabnit in a vain effort to hold, to make clear, to sophisticate one
+single phrase, as one waking in the night says over, in a vain
+effort to fix it, some phantom sentence cried to him in dreams by a
+shadowy band destined to be dissolved when, in bright day, he would
+reclaim it. He even managed frantically to write down a jumble of
+words of which he could make nothing, save here and there a phrase
+like a touch of hands from the silence: "...the infinite moment that
+is pending" ... "all is become a window where had been a wall" ...
+"the wintry vision" ... they were all words that beckon without
+replying. And all the time it was curiously as if the Something
+Silent within St. George himself, that so long had striven to speak,
+were crying out at last in the prince's words--and he could not
+understand. Yet in spite of it all, in spite of this imminent
+satisfying of the strange, dreadful curiosity which possesses all
+mankind, St. George, even now, was far less keen to comprehend than
+he was to burst through the throng with Olivia in his arms, gain the
+waiting _Aloha_ and sail into the New York harbour with the prize
+that he had won. "I drink now to those among you and among all men
+who have won and kept that which is greater than these," the prince
+had said, and St. George perfectly understood. He had but to look at
+Olivia to be triumphantly willing that the gods should keep their
+secrets about time and the link between the two worlds so long as
+they had given him love. What should he care about time? He had this
+hour.
+
+When the prince ceased speaking the hall was hushed; but because of
+the tempest in the hearts of them all the silence was as if a strong
+wind, sweeping powerfully through a forest, were to sway no boughs
+and lift no leaves, only to strive noiselessly round one who walked
+there.
+
+Prince Tabnit wrapped his white mantle about him and sat upon his
+throne. Spell-stricken, they watched him, that great multitude, and
+might not turn away their eyes. Slowly, imperceptibly, as Time
+touches the familiar, the face of the prince took on its change--and
+one could not have told wherein the change lay, but subtly as the
+encroachment of the dark, or the alchemy of the leaves, or the
+betrayal of certain modes of death, the finger was upon him. While
+they watched he became an effigy, the hideous face of a fantasy of
+smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among
+the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death--the horror was
+that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying and withering
+at the bones.
+
+A long, whining cry came from Cassyrus, who covered his face with
+his mantle and fled. The spell being broken, by common consent the
+great hall was once more in motion--St. George would never forget
+that tide toward all the great portals and the shuddering backward
+glances at the white heap upon the beetling throne. They fled away
+into the reassuring sunlight, leaving the echoless hall deserted,
+save for that breathing one upon the throne.
+
+There was one other. From somewhere beside the dais the woman Elissa
+crept and knelt, clasping the knees of the man.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+OPEN SECRETS
+
+
+"Will you have tea?" asked Olivia.
+
+St. George brought a deck cushion and tucked it in the willow
+steamer chair and said adoringly that he would have tea. Tea. In a
+world where the essentials and the inessentials are so deliciously
+confused, to think that tea, with some one else, can be a kind of
+Heaven.
+
+"Two lumps?" pursued Olivia.
+
+"Three, please," St. George directed, for the pure joy of watching
+her hands. There were no tongs.
+
+"Aren't the rest going to have some?" Olivia absently shared her
+attention, tinkling delicately about among the tea things. "Doesn't
+every one want a cup of tea?" she inquired loud enough for nobody to
+hear. St. George, shifting his shoulder from the rail, looked
+vaguely over the deck of _The Aloha_, sighed contentedly, and smiled
+back at her. No one else, it appeared, would have tea; and there was
+none to regret it.
+
+St. George's cursory inspection had revealed the others variously
+absorbed, though they were now all agreed in breathing easily since
+Barnay, interlarding rational speech with Irishisms of thanksgiving,
+had announced five minutes before that the fires were up and that in
+half an hour _The Aloha_ might weigh anchor. The only thing now left
+to desire was to slip clear of the shadow of the black reaches of
+Yaque, shouldering the blue.
+
+Meanwhile, Antoinette and Amory sat in the comparative seclusion of
+the bow with their backs to the forward deck, and it was definitely
+manifest to every one how it would be with them, but every one was
+simply glad and dismissed the matter with that. Mr. Frothingham, in
+his steamer chair, looked like a soft collapsible tube of something;
+Bennietod, at ease upon the uncovered boards of the deck, was
+circumspectly having cheese sandwiches and wastefully shooting the
+ship's rockets into the red sunset, in general celebration; and
+Rollo, having taken occasion respectfully to submit to whomsoever it
+concerned that fact is ever stranger than fiction, had gone below.
+Mr. Otho Holland and Little Cawthorne--but their smiles were like
+different names for the same thing--were toasting each other in
+something light and dry and having a bouquet which Mr. Holland, who
+ought to know, compared favourably with certain vintages of 1000
+B.C. In a hammock near them reclined Mrs. Medora Hastings, holding
+two kinds of smelling salts which invariably revived her simply by
+inducing the mental effort of deciding which was the better. Her
+hair, which was exceedingly pretty, now rippled becomingly about her
+flushed face and was guiltless of side-combs--she had lost them both
+down a chasm in that headlong flight from the cliff's summit, and
+they irrecoverably reposed in the bed of some brook of the Miocene
+period. And Mrs. Hastings, her hand in that of her brother, lay in
+utter silence, smiling up at him in serene content.
+
+For King Otho of Yaque was turning his back upon his island domain
+for ever. In that hurried flight across the Eurychôrus among his
+distracted subjects, his resolution had been taken. Jarvo and Akko,
+the adieux to whom had been every one's sole regret in leaving the
+island, had miraculously found their way to the king and his party
+in their flight, and were despatched to Mount Khalak for such of
+their belongings as they could collect, and the island sovereign was
+well content.
+
+"Ah well now," he had just observed, languidly surveying the
+tropical horizon through a cool glass of winking amber bubbles, "one
+must learn that to touch is far more delicate than to lift. It is
+more wonderful to have been the king of one moment than the ruler of
+many. It is better to have stood for an instant upon a rainbow than
+to have taken a morning walk through a field of clouds. The
+principle has long been understood, but few have had--shall I
+say the courage?--to practise it. Yet 'courage' is a term
+from-the-shoulder, and what I require is a word of finger-tips,
+over-tones, ultra-rays--a word for the few who understand that to
+leave a thing is more exquisite than to outwear it. It is by its
+very fineness circumscribed--a feminine virtue. Women understand it
+and keep it secret. I flatter myself that I have possessed the high
+moment, vanished against the noon. Ah, my dear fellow--" he added,
+lifting his glass to St. George's smile.
+
+But little Cawthorne--all reality in his heliotrope outing and duck
+and grey curls--raised a characteristic plaint.
+
+"Oh, but I've done it," he mournfully reviewed. "When'll I ever be
+in another island, in front of another vacated throne? Why didn't I
+move into the palace, and set up a natty, up-to-date little
+republic? I could have worn a crown as a matter of taste--what's the
+use of a democracy if you aren't free to wear a crown? And what kind
+of American am I, anyway, with this undeveloped taste for acquiring
+islands? If they ever find this out at the polls my vote'll be
+challenged. What?"
+
+"Aw whee!" said Bennietod, intent upon a Roman candle, "wha' do you
+care, Mr. Cawt'orne? You don't hev to go back fer to be a
+child-slave to Chillingwort'. Me, I've gotta good call to jump
+overboard now an' be de sonny of a sea-horse, dead to rights!"
+
+St. George looked at them all affectionately, unconscious that
+already the experience of the last three days was slipping back into
+the sheathing past, like a blade used. But he was dawningly aware,
+as he sat there at Olivia's feet in glorious content, that he was
+looking at them all with new eyes. It was as if he had found new
+names for them all; and until long afterward one does not know that
+these moments of bestowing new names mark the near breathing of the
+god.
+
+The silence of Mrs. Hastings and her quiet devotion to her brother
+somehow gave St. George a new respect for her. Over by the
+wheel-house something made a strange noise of crying, and St. George
+saw that Mr. Frothingham sat holding a weird little animal, like a
+squirrel but for its stumpy tail and great human eyes, which he had
+unwittingly stepped on among the rocks. The little thing was licking
+his hand, and the old lawyer's face was softened and glowing as he
+nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. As he looked, St. George warmed
+to them all in new fellowship and, too, in swift self-reproach; for
+in what had seemed to him but "broad lines and comic masks" he
+suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts. The better
+and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his
+grasp were more important than Yaque itself. He remembered, with a
+thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must
+walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of
+the heart, before he can put much in or take much from the
+market-place. And lo! this fairy-land of his finding had
+proved--must it not always prove?--the essence of all Reality.
+
+His eyes went to Olivia's face in a flash of understanding and
+belief.
+
+"Don't you see?" he said, quite as if they two had been talking what
+he had thought.
+
+She waited, smiling a little, thrilled by his certainty of her
+sympathy.
+
+"None of this happened really," triumphantly explained St. George,
+"I met you at the Boris, did I not? Therefore, I think that since
+then you have graciously let me see you for the proper length of
+time, and at last we've fallen in love just as every one else does.
+And true lovers always do have trouble, do they not? So then, Yaque
+has been the usual trouble and happiness, and here we are--engaged."
+
+"I'm not engaged," Olivia protested serenely, "but I see what you
+mean. No, none of it happened," she gravely agreed. "It couldn't,
+you know. Anybody will tell you that."
+
+In her eyes was the sparkle of understanding which made St. George
+love her more every time that it appeared. He noted, the white cloth
+frock, and the coat of hunting pink thrown across her chair, and he
+remembered that in the infinitesimal time that he had waited for her
+outside the Palace of the Litany, she must have exchanged for these
+the coronation robe and jewels of Queen Mitygen. St. George liked
+that swift practicality in the race of faery, though he was
+completely indifferent to Mrs. Hastings' and Antoinette's claims to
+it; and he wondered if he were to love Olivia more for everything
+that she did, how he could possibly live long enough to tell her.
+When one has been to Yaque the simplest gifts and graces resolve
+themselves into this question.
+
+_The Aloha_ gently freed herself from the shallow green pocket where
+she had lain through three eventful days, and slipped out toward the
+waste of water bound by the flaunting autumn of the west. An island
+wind, fragrant of bark and secret berries, blew in puffs from the
+steep. A gull swooped to her nest in a cranny of the basalt. From
+below a servant came on deck, his broad American face smiling over a
+tray of glasses and decanters and tinkling ice. It was all very
+tranquil and public and almost commonplace--just the high tropic
+seas at the moment of their unrestrained sundown, and the odour of
+tea-cakes about the pleasantly-littered deck. And for the moment,
+held by a common thought, every one kept silent. Now that _The
+Aloha_ was really moving toward home, the affair seemed suddenly
+such a gigantic impossibility that every one resented every one
+else's knowing what a trick had been played. It was as if the
+curtain had just fallen and the lights of the auditorium had flashed
+up after the third act, and they had all caught one another
+breathless or in tears, pretending that the tragedy had really
+happened.
+
+"Promise me something," begged St. George softly, in sudden alarm,
+born of this inevitable aspect; "promise me that when we get to New
+York you are not going to forget all about Yaque--and me--and
+believe that none of us ever happened."
+
+Olivia looked toward the serene mystery of the distance.
+
+"New York," she said only, "think of seeing you in New York--now."
+
+"Was I of more account in Yaque?" demanded St. George anxiously.
+
+"Sometimes," said Olivia adorably, "I shall tell you that you were.
+But that will be only because I shall have an idea that in Yaque you
+loved me more."
+
+"Ah, very well then. And sometimes," said St. George contentedly,
+"when we are at dinner I shall look down the table at you sitting
+beside some one who is expounding some baneful literary theory, and
+I shall think: What do I care? He doesn't know that she is really
+the Princess of Far-Away. But I do."
+
+"And he won't know anything about our motor ride, alone, the night
+that I was kidnapped, either--the literary-theory person," Olivia
+tranquilly took away his breath by observing.
+
+St. George looked up at her quickly and, secretly, Olivia thought
+that if he had been attractive when he was courageous he was doubly
+so with the present adorably abashed look in his eyes.
+
+"When--alone?" St. George asked unconvincingly.
+
+She laughed a little, looking down at him in a reproof that was all
+approbation, and to be reproved like that is the divinest praise.
+
+"How did you know?" protested St. George in fine indignation.
+"Besides," he explained, "I haven't an idea what you mean."
+
+"I guessed about that ride," she went on, "the night before last,
+when you were walking up and down outside my window. I don't know
+what made me--and I think it was very forward of me. Do you want to
+know something?" she demanded, looking away.
+
+"More than anything," declared St. George. "What?"
+
+"I think--" Olivia said slowly, "that it began--then--just when I
+first thought how wonderful that ride would have been. Except--that
+it had begun a great while before," she ended suddenly.
+
+And at these enigmatic words St. George sent a quick look over the
+forward deck. It was of no use. Mr. Frothingham was well within
+range.
+
+"Heavens, good heavens, how happy I am," said St. George instead.
+
+"And then," Olivia went on presently, "sometimes when there are a
+lot of people about--literary-theory persons and all--I shall look
+across at you, differently, and that will mean that you are to
+remember the exact minute when you looked in the window up at the
+palace, on the mountain, and I saw you. Won't it?"
+
+"It will," said St. George fervently. "Don't try to persuade me that
+there wasn't any such mountain," he challenged her. "I suppose," he
+added in wonder, "that lovers have been having these secret signs
+time out of mind--and we never knew."
+
+Olivia drew a little breath of content.
+
+"Bless everybody," she said.
+
+So they made invasion of that pure, dim world before them; and the
+serene mystery of the distance came like a thought, drawn from a
+state remote and immortal, to clasp the hand of There in the hand of
+Here.
+
+"And then sometimes," St. George went on, his exultation proving
+greater than his discretion, "we'll take the yacht and pretend
+we're going back--"
+
+He stopped abruptly with a quick indrawn breath and the hope that
+she had not noticed. He was, by several seconds, too late.
+
+"Whose yacht is it?" Olivia asked promptly. "I wondered."
+
+St. George had dreaded the question. Someway, now that it was all
+over and the prize was his, he was ashamed that he had not won it
+more fairly and humiliated that he was not what she believed him, a
+pillar of the _Evening Sentinel_. But Amory had miraculously heard
+and turned himself about.
+
+"It's his," he said briefly, "I may as well confess to you, Miss
+Holland," he enlarged somewhat, "he's a great cheat. _The Aloha_ is
+his, and so am I, busy body and idle soul, for using up his yacht
+and his time on a newspaper story. You were the 'story,' you know."
+
+"But," said Olivia in bewilderment, "I don't understand. Surely--"
+
+"Nothing whatever is sure, Miss Holland," Amory sadly assured her,
+but his eyes were smiling behind his pince-nez. "You would think one
+might be sure of him. But it isn't so. Me, you may depend upon me,"
+he impressed it lightly. "I'm what I say I am--a poor beggar of a
+newspaper man, about to be held to account by one Chillingworth for
+this whole millenial occurrence, and sent off to a political
+convention to steady me, unless I'm fired. But St. George, he's a
+gay dilettante."
+
+Then Amory resumed a better topic of his own; and Olivia, when she
+understood, looked down at her lover as miserably as one is able
+when one is perfectly happy.
+
+"Oh," she said, "and up there--in the palace to-day--I did think for
+a minute that perhaps you wanted me to marry the prince so
+that--they could--."
+
+One could smile now at the enormity of that.
+
+"So that I could put it in the paper?" he said. "But, you see, I
+never could put it in any paper, even if I didn't love you. Who
+would believe me? A thousand years from now--maybe less--the
+_Evening Sentinel_, if it is still in existence, can publish the
+story, perhaps. Until then I'm afraid they'll have to confine
+themselves to the doings of the precincts."
+
+Olivia waived the whole matter for one of vaster importance.
+
+"Then why did you come to Yaque?" she demanded.
+
+Mr. Frothingham had left his place by the wheel-house and wandered
+forward. The steamer chair had a back that was both broad and high,
+and one sitting in its shadow was hermetically veiled from the rest
+of the deck. So St. George bent forward, and told her.
+
+After that they sat in silence, and together they looked back
+toward the island with its black rocks smitten to momentary gold by
+a last javelin of light. There it lay--the land locking away as
+realities all the fairy-land of speculation, the land of the
+miracles of natural law. They had walked there, and had glimpsed the
+shadowy threshold of the Morning. Suppose, St. George thought, that
+instead of King Otho, with his delicate sense of the merely visible,
+a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque? And instead
+of Mr. Frothingham, slave to the contestable, and Little Cawthorne
+in bondage to humour, and Amory and himself swept off their feet by
+a heavenly romance, suppose a party of savants and economists had
+arrived in Yaque, with a poet or two to bring away the fire--what
+then? St. George lost the doubt in the noon of his own certainty.
+There could be no greater good, he chanted to the god who had
+breathed upon him, than this that he and Amory shared now with the
+wise and simple world, the world of the resonant new names. He even
+doubted that, save in degree, there could be a purer talisman than
+the spirit that inextinguishably shone in the face of the childlike
+old lawyer as the strange little animal nestled in his coat and
+licked his hand. And these were open secrets. Open secrets of the
+ultimate attainment.
+
+They watched the land dissolving in the darkness like a pearl in
+wine of night. But at last, when momentarily they had turned happy
+eyes to each other's faces, they looked again and found that the
+dusk, taking ancient citadels with soundless tread, had received the
+island. And where on the brow of the mountain had sprung the white
+pillars of the king's palace glittered only the early stars.
+
+"Crown jewels," said Olivia softly, "for everybody's head."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Romance Island, by Zona Gale
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13731 ***
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+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of
+    Romance Island,
+    by Zona Gale
+</title>
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+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13731 ***</div>
+
+<div style="height: 8em;"><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<a name="image-0001"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image1.jpg" width="310" height="450"
+alt="frontispiece, uncaptioned, Olivia in white, standing">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<hr>
+<br>
+
+<h1>
+    ROMANCE ISLAND
+</h1>
+<br>
+     <h4><i>By</i></h4>
+<h2>
+    ZONA GALE
+</h2>
+<br>
+
+<h4>
+<small>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY</small><br>
+ HERMANN C. WALL</h4>
+
+<br>
+ <h5>
+    INDIANAPOLIS<br>
+    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY<br>
+    1906
+</h5>
+
+<hr>
+<br>
+<p class="note2">
+  "Who that remembers the first kind glance of her<br>
+   whom he loves can fail to believe in magic?"
+</p>
+<p class="ar">
+                &mdash;&nbsp;N<small>OVALIS</small>
+</p>
+<br>
+
+<hr>
+<br>
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0001">
+  I</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; DINNER TIME</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0002">
+  II</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; A SCRAP OF PAPER </p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0003">
+  III</a> &nbsp; &nbsp; ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0004">
+  IV</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0005">
+  V</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; OLIVIA PROPOSES</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0006">
+  VI</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; TWO LITTLE MEN</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0007">
+  VII</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; DUSK, AND SO ON</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0008">
+  VIII</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; THE PORCH OF THE MORNING</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0009">
+  IX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE LADY OF KINGDOMS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0010">
+  X</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; TYRIAN PURPLE</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0011">
+  XI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE END OF THE EVENING</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0012">
+  XII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; BETWEEN-WORLDS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0013">
+  XIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE LINES LEAD UP</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0014">
+  XIV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE ISLE OF HEARTS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0015">
+  XV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; A VIGIL</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0016">
+  XVI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; GLAMOURIE</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0017">
+  XVII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; BENEATH THE SURFACE</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0018">
+  XVIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; A MORNING VISIT</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0019">
+  XIX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; IN THE HALL OF KINGS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0020">
+  XX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0021">
+  XXI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; OPEN SECRETS</p>
+<br>
+<hr class="short">
+
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<b>Illustrations</b>: <a href="#image-0001"><i>Frontispiece</i></a>,
+<a href="#image-0002">2</a>, <a href="#image-0003">3</a>, <a href="#image-0004">4</a>, <a href="#image-0005">5</a>
+</p>
+<br>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+
+<a name="2H_TOC"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+
+
+<a name="2H_4_0001"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    ROMANCE ISLAND
+</h2>
+<a name="2HCH0001"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER I
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    DINNER TIME
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    As <i>The Aloha</i> rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the
+    harbour, St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous
+    parody upon capital letters:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
+    observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her&mdash;do you see? She
+    belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
+    of rope."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Instead&mdash;mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
+    own glorie"&mdash;he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and
+    was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might
+    three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch
+    counter. For in America, dreams of gold&mdash;not, alas, golden
+    dreams&mdash;do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly
+    happenings in this pleasant land of larvæ, few are so spectacular as
+    the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a
+    toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his <i>bien</i>. However, to
+    none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to
+    himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
+    humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do
+    if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
+    marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
+    among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen
+    his mother&mdash;an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
+    mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune&mdash;set
+    off for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop
+    Arthur Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look
+    upon whose portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain
+    of his charities seen St. George through college; and it made the
+    million worth while to his nephew merely to send him to Tübingen to
+    set his soul at rest concerning the date of one of the canonical
+    gospels. Next to the rich delight of planning that voyage, St.
+    George placed the buying of his yacht.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the dusty, inky office of the <i>New York Evening Sentinel</i> he had
+    been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting
+    words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his
+    typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone
+    bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought
+    and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes
+    remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked
+    toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass
+    slipping to the river's mouth; whereupon he had been seized by such
+    a passion to work hard and earn a white-and-brass craft of his own
+    that the story which he was hurrying for the first edition was quite
+    ruined.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had
+    gnarled, "we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up
+    this wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph
+    reads like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less
+    than fifteen minutes to do it in."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
+    ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
+    had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like
+    that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had
+    received for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
+    him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
+    common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
+    craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
+    He had found himself estimating the value&mdash;in money&mdash;of the
+    bric-à-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
+    alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
+    yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
+    bric-à-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
+    interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
+    night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
+    photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
+    comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
+    disagreeable task.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
+    transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
+    the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
+    things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
+    unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had
+    been <i>The Aloha</i>, which only that day had slipped to the river's
+    mouth in the view from his old window at the <i>Sentinel</i> office. St.
+    George had the grace to be ashamed to remember how smoothly the
+    social ills had adjusted themselves.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected
+    triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St.
+    George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys
+    which his fortune had brought to him. For although he had accurately
+    painted, for example, the delight of a cruise in a sea-going yacht
+    of his own, yet to step into his dory in the sunset, to watch <i>The
+    Aloha's</i> sides shine in the late light as he was rowed ashore past
+    the lesser crafts in the harbour; to see the man touch his cap and
+    put back to make the yacht trim for the night, and then to turn his
+    own face to his apartment where virtually the entire day-staff of
+    the <i>Evening Sentinel</i> was that night to dine&mdash;these were among the
+    pastimes of the lesser angels which his fancy had never compassed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A glow of firelight greeted St. George as he entered his apartment,
+    and the rooms wore a pleasant air of festivity. A table, with covers
+    for twelve, was spread in the living-room, a fire of cones was
+    tossing on the hearth, the curtains were drawn, and the sideboard
+    was a thing of intimation. Rollo, his man&mdash;St. George had easily
+    fallen in all the habits which he had longed to assume&mdash;was just
+    closing the little ice-box sunk behind a panel of the wall, and he
+    came forward with dignified deference.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everything is ready, Rollo?" St. George asked. "No one has
+    telephoned to beg off?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," answered Rollo, "and no, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George had sometimes told himself that the man looked like an
+    oval grey stone with a face cut upon it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is the claret warmed?" St. George demanded, handing his hat. "Did
+    the big glasses come for the liqueur&mdash;and the little ones will set
+    inside without tipping? Then take the cigars to the den&mdash;you'll have
+    to get some cigarettes for Mr. Provin. Keep up the fire. Light the
+    candles in ten minutes. I say, how jolly the table looks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," returned Rollo, "an' the candles 'll make a great
+    difference, sir. Candles do give out an air, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    One month of service had accustomed St. George to his valet's gift
+    of the Articulate Simplicity. Rollo's thoughts were doubtless
+    contrived in the cuticle and knew no deeper operance; but he always
+    uttered his impressions with, under his mask, an air of keen and
+    seasoned personal observation. In his first interview with St.
+    George, Rollo had said: "I always enjoy being kep' busy, sir. <i>To
+    me</i>, the busy man is a grand sight," and St. George had at once
+    appreciated his possibilities. Rollo was like the fine print in an
+    almanac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the candles were burning and the lights had been turned on in
+    the little ochre den where the billiard-table stood, St. George
+    emerged&mdash;a well-made figure, his buoyant, clear-cut face accurately
+    bespeaking both health and cleverness. Of a family represented by
+    the gentle old bishop and his own exquisite mother, himself
+    university-bred and fresh from two years' hard, hand-to-hand
+    fighting to earn an honourable livelihood, St. George, of sound body
+    and fine intelligence, had that temper of stability within vast
+    range which goes pleasantly into the mind that meets it. A symbol of
+    this was his prodigious popularity with those who had been his
+    fellow-workers&mdash;a test beside which old-world traditions of the
+    urban touchstones are of secondary advantage. It was deeply
+    significant that in spite of the gulf which Chance had digged the
+    day-staff of the <i>Sentinel</i>, all save two or three of which were not
+    of his estate, had with flattering alacrity obeyed his summons to
+    dine. But, as he heard in the hall the voice of Chillingworth, the
+    difficulty of his task for the first time swept over him. It was
+    Chillingworth who had advocated to him the need of wooden type to
+    suit his literary style and who had long ordered and bullied him
+    about; and how was he to play the host to Chillingworth, not to
+    speak of the others, with the news between them of that million?
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the bell rang, St. George somewhat gruffly superseded Rollo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll go," he said briefly, "and keep out of sight for a few
+    minutes. Get in the bath-room or somewhere, will you?" he added
+    nervously, and opened the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At one stroke Chillingworth settled his own position by dominating
+    the situation as he dominated the city room. He chose the best chair
+    and told a good story and found fault with the way the fire burned,
+    all with immediate ease and abandon. Chillingworth's men loved to
+    remember that he had once carried copy. They also understood all the
+    legitimate devices by which he persuaded from them their best
+    effort, yet these devices never failed, and the city room agreed
+    that Chillingworth's fashion of giving an assignment to a new man
+    would force him to write a readable account of his own entertainment
+    in the dark meadows. Largely by personal magnetism he had fought his
+    way upward, and this quality was not less a social gift.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Toby Amory, who had been on the Eleven with St. George at
+    Harvard, looked along his pipe at his host and smiled, with
+    flattering content, his slow smile. Amory's father had lately had a
+    conspicuous quarter of an hour in Wall Street, as a result of which
+    Amory, instead of taking St. George to the cemetery at Clusium as he
+    had talked, himself drifted to Park Row; and although he now knew
+    considerably less than he had hoped about certain inscriptions, he
+    was supporting himself and two sisters by really brilliant work, so
+    that the balance of his power was creditably maintained. Surely the
+    inscriptions did not suffer, and what then was Amory that he should
+    object? Presently Holt, the middle-aged marine man, and Harding
+    who, since he had lost a lightweight sparring championship, was
+    sporting editor, solemnly entered together and sat down with the
+    social caution of their class. So did Provin, the "elder giant," who
+    gathered news as he breathed and could not intelligibly put six
+    words together. Horace, who would listen to four lines over the
+    telephone and therefrom make a half-column of American newspaper
+    humour or American newspaper tears, came in roaring pacifically and
+    marshaling little Bud, that day in the seventh heaven of his first
+    "beat." Then followed Crass, the feature man, whose interviews were
+    known to the new men as literature, although he was not above
+    publicly admitting that he was not a reporter, but a special writer.
+    Mr. Crass read nothing in the paper that he had not written, and St.
+    George had once prophesied that in old age he would use his
+    scrap-book for a manual of devotions, as Klopstock used his
+    <i>Messiah</i>. With him arrived Carbury, the telegraph editor, and later
+    Benfy, who had a carpet in his office and wrote editorials and who
+    came in evening clothes, thus moving Harding and Holt to instant
+    private conversation. The last to appear was Little Cawthorne who
+    wrote the fiction page and made enchanting limericks about every one
+    on the staff and went about singing one song and behaving, the
+    dramatic man flattered him, like a motif. Little Cawthorne entered
+    backward, wrestling with some wiry matter which, when he had
+    executed a manoeuvre and banged the door, was thrust through the
+    passage in the form of Bennie Todd, the head office boy,
+    affectionately known as Bennietod. Bennietod was in every one's
+    secret, clipped every one's space and knew every one's salary, and
+    he had lately covered a baseball game when the man whose copy he was
+    to carry had, outside the fence, become implicated in allurements.
+    He was greeted with noise, and St. George told him heartily that he
+    was glad he had come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He made me," defensively claimed Bennietod; frowning deferentially
+    at Little Cawthorne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello, St. George," said the latter, "come on back to the office.
+    Crass sits in your place and he wears cravats the colour of goblin's
+    blood. Come back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not he," said Chillingworth, smoking; "the Dead-and-Done-with
+    editor is too keen for that; I won't give him a job. He's ruined.
+    Egg sandwiches will never stimulate him now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George joined in the relieved laugh that followed. They were
+    remembering his young Sing Sing convict who had completed his
+    sentence in time to step in a cab and follow his mother to the
+    grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And
+    St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words
+    of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed
+    for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat
+    of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things
+    in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the
+    composing room had shaken mailed fists.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hi, you!" said Little Cawthorne, who was born in the South, "this
+    is a mellow minute. I could wish they came often. This shall be a
+    weekly occurrence&mdash;not so, St. George?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cawthorne," Chillingworth warned, "mind your manners, or they'll
+    make you city editor."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A momentary shadow was cast by the appearance of Rollo, who was
+    manifestly a symbol of the world Philistine about which these guests
+    knew more and in which they played a smaller part than any other
+    class of men. But the tray which Rollo bore was his passport.
+    Thereafter, they all trooped to the table, and Chillingworth sat at
+    the head, and from the foot St. George watched the city editor break
+    bread with the familiar nervous gesture with which he was wont to
+    strip off yards of copy-paper and eat it. There was a tacit
+    assumption that he be the conversational sun of the hour, and in
+    fostering this understanding the host took grateful refuge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is shameful," Chillingworth began contentedly. "Every one of
+    you ought to be out on the Boris story."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is the Boris story?" asked St. George with interest. But in
+    all talk St. George had a restful, host-like way of playing the rôle
+    of opposite to every one who preferred being heard.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll wager the boy hasn't been reading the papers these three
+    months," Amory opined in his pleasant drawl.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," St. George confessed; "no, I haven't. They make me homesick."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't maunder," said Chillingworth in polite criticism. "This is
+    Amory's story, and only about a quarter of the facts yet," he added
+    in a resentful growl. "It's up at the Boris, in West Fifty-ninth
+    Street&mdash;you know the apartment house? A Miss Holland, an heiress,
+    living there with her aunt, was attacked and nearly murdered by a
+    mulatto woman. The woman followed her to the elevator and came
+    uncomfortably near stabbing her from the back. The elevator boy was
+    too quick for her. And at the station they couldn't get the woman to
+    say a word; she pretends not to understand or to speak anything
+    they've tried. She's got Amory hypnotized too&mdash;he thinks she can't.
+    And when they searched her," went on Chillingworth with enjoyment,
+    "they found her dressed in silk and cloth of gold, and loaded down
+    with all sorts of barbarous ornaments, with almost priceless jewels.
+    Miss Holland claims that she never saw or heard of the woman before.
+    Now, what do you make of it?" he demanded, unconcernedly draining
+    his glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Splendid," cried St. George in unfeigned interest. "I say,
+    splendid. Did you see the woman?" he asked Amory.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," he said, "Andy fixed that for me. But she never said a word.
+    I <i>parlez-voused</i> her, and <i>verstehen-Sied</i> her, and she sighed and
+    turned her head."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you see the heiress?" St. George asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not I," mourned Amory, "not to talk with, that is. I happened to be
+    hanging up in the hall there the afternoon it occurred;" he modestly
+    explained.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What luck," St. George commented with genuine envy. "It's a
+    stunning story. Who is Miss Holland?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's lived there for a year or more with her aunt," said
+    Chillingworth. "She is a New Yorker and an heiress and a great
+    beauty&mdash;oh, all the properties are there, but they're all we've got.
+    What do you make of it?" he repeated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George did not answer, and every one else did.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mistaken identity," said Little Cawthorne. "Do you remember
+    Provin's story of the woman whose maid shot a masseuse whom she took
+    to be her mistress; and the woman forgave the shooting and seemed to
+    have her arrested chiefly because she had mistaken her for a
+    masseuse?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Too easy, Cawthorne," said Chillingworth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The woman is probably an Italian," said the telegraph editor,
+    "doing one of her Mafia stunts. It's time they left the politicians
+    alone and threw bombs at the bonds that back them."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey, Carbury. Stop writing heads," said Chillingworth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Has Miss Holland lived abroad?" asked Crass, the feature man.
+    "Maybe this woman was her nurse or ayah or something who got fond of
+    her charge, and when they took it away years ago, she devoted her
+    life to trying to find it in America. And when she got here she
+    wasn't able to make herself known to her, and rather than let any
+    one else&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No more space-grabbing, Crass," warned Chillingworth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe," ventured Horace, "the young lady did settlement work and
+    read to the woman's kid, and the kid died, and the woman thought
+    she'd said a charm over it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Chillingworth grinned affectionately.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hold up," he commanded, "or you'll recall the very words of the
+    charm."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Bennietod gasped and stared.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, Bennietod?" Amory encouraged him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I t'ink," said the lad, "if she's a heiress, dis yere
+    dagger-plunger is her mudder dat's been shut up in a mad-house to a
+    fare-you-well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Chillingworth nodded approvingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your imagination is toning down wonderfully," he flattered him. "A
+    month ago you would have guessed that the mulatto lady was an
+    Egyptian princess' messenger sent over here to get the heart from an
+    American heiress as an ingredient for a complexion lotion. You're
+    coming on famously, Todd."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The German poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has,
+    in his epic of the <i>Oberon</i> made admirable use of much the same
+    idea, Mr. Chillingworth&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yells interrupted him. Mr. Benfy was too "well-read" to be wholly
+    popular with the staff.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well, the woman was crazy. That's about all," suggested
+    Harding, and blushed to the line of his hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I guess so," assented Holt, who lifted and lowered one
+    shoulder as he talked, "or doped."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Chillingworth sighed and looked at them both with pursed lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You two," he commented, "would get out a paper that everybody would
+    know to be full of reliable facts, and that nobody would buy. To be
+    born with a riotous imagination and then hardly ever to let it riot
+    is to be a born newspaper man. Provin?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The elder giant leaned back, his eyes partly closed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is she engaged to be married?" he asked. "Is Miss Holland engaged?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Chillingworth shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," he said, "not engaged. We knew that by tea-time the same day,
+    Provin. Well, St. George?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George drew a long breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By Jove, I don't know," he said, "it's a stunning story. It's the
+    best story I ever remember, excepting those two or three that have
+    hung fire for so long. Next to knowing just why old Ennis
+    disinherited his son at his marriage, I would like to ferret out
+    this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, tut, St. George," Amory put in tolerantly, "next to doing
+    exactly what you will be doing all this week you'd rather ferret out
+    this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On my honour, no," St. George protested eagerly, "I mean quite what
+    I say. I might go on fearfully about it. Lord knows I'm going to see
+    the day when I'll do it, too, and cut my troubles for the luck of
+    chasing down a bully thing like this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    If there was anything to forgive, every one forgave him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But give up ten minutes on <i>The Aloha</i>," Amory skeptically put it,
+    adjusting his pince-nez, "for anything less than ten minutes on <i>The
+    Aloha</i>?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll do it now&mdash;now!" cried St. George. "If Mr. Chillingworth will
+    put me on this story in your place and will give you a week off on
+    <i>The Aloha</i>, you may have her and welcome."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne pounded on the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where do I come in?" he wailed. "But no, all I get is another wad
+    o' woe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you say, Mr. Chillingworth?" St. George asked eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know," said Chillingworth, meditatively turning his glass.
+    "St. George is rested and fresh, and he feels the story. And
+    Amory&mdash;here, touch glasses with me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory obeyed. His chief's hand was steady, but the two glasses
+    jingled together until, with a smile, Amory dropped his arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I <i>am</i> about all in, I fancy," he admitted apologetically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A week's rest on the water," said Chillingworth, "would set you on
+    your feet for the convention. All right, St. George," he nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George leaped to his feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hooray!" he shouted like a boy. "Jove, won't it be good to get
+    back?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He smiled as he set down his glass, remembering the day at his desk
+    when he had seen the white-and-brass craft slip to the river's
+    mouth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo, discreet and without wonder, footed softly about the table,
+    keeping the glasses filled and betraying no other sign of life. For
+    more than four hours he was in attendance, until, last of the
+    guests, Little Cawthorne and Bennietod departed together, trying to
+    remember the dates of the English kings. Finally Chillingworth and
+    Amory, having turned outdoors the dramatic critic who had arrived
+    at midnight and was disposed to stay, stood for a moment by the fire
+    and talked it over.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Remember, St. George," Chillingworth said, "I'll have no
+    monkey-work. You'll report to me at the old hour, you won't be late;
+    and you'll take orders&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As usual, sir," St. George rejoined quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon," Chillingworth said quickly, "but you see this
+    is such a deuced unnatural arrangement."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I understand," St. George assented, "and I'll do my best not to get
+    thrown down. Amory has told me all he knows about it&mdash;by the way,
+    where is the mulatto woman now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why," said Chillingworth, "some physician got interested in the
+    case, and he's managed to hurry her up to the Bitley Reformatory in
+    Westchester for the present. She's there; and that means, we need
+    not disguise, that nobody can see her. Those Bitley people are like
+    a rabble of wild eagles."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right," said St. George. "I'll report at eight o'clock. Amory can
+    board <i>The Aloha</i> when he gets ready and take down whom he likes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On my life, old chap, it's a private view of Kedar's tents to me,"
+    said Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. "I'll probably
+    win wide disrespect by my inability to tell a mainsail from a
+    cockpit, but I'm a grateful dog, in spite of that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they were gone St. George sat by the fire. He read Amory's
+    story of the Boris affair in the paper, which somewhere in the
+    apartment Rollo had unearthed, and the man took off his master's
+    shoes and brought his slippers and made ready his bath. St. George
+    glanced over his shoulder at the attractively-dismantled table, with
+    its dying candles and slanted shades.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gad!" he said in sheer enjoyment as he clipped the story and saw
+    Rollo pass with the towels.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was so absurdly like a city room's dream of Arcady.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0002"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER II
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    A SCRAP OF PAPER
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing
+    breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were
+    novel preparations for work in the <i>Sentinel</i> office. The
+    impossibility of it all delighted St. George rather more than the
+    reality, for there is no pastime, as all the world knows, quite like
+    that of practising the impossible. The days when, "like a man
+    unfree," he had fared forth from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely
+    to partake of an evil omelette, seemed enchantingly far away. It
+    was, St. George reflected, the experience of having been released
+    from prison, minus the disgrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the
+    printers' ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the
+    elation of the return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets.
+    When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its
+    fascination, but now he understood. "A newspaper office," so a
+    revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once
+    imparted to St. George, "is a place where a man with the
+    temperament of a savant and a recluse may bring his American vice of
+    commercialism and worship of the uncommon, and let them have it out.
+    Newspapers have no other use&mdash;except the one I began on." When St.
+    George entered the city room, Crass, of the goblin's blood cravats,
+    had vacated his old place, and Provin was just uncovering his
+    typewriter and banging the tin cover upon everything within reach,
+    and Bennietod was writhing over a rewrite, and Chillingworth was
+    discharging an office boy in a fashion that warmed St. George's
+    heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of
+    Chillingworth, the guest. He waved both arms at the foreman who
+    ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he
+    frowned a greeting at St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Get right out on the Boris story," he said. "I depend on you. The
+    chief is interested in this too&mdash;telephoned to know whom I had on
+    it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George knew perfectly that "the chief" was playing golf at Lenox
+    and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland
+    story, for he was a close friend of the bishop's, and St. George
+    knew his ways; but Chillingworth's methods always told, and St.
+    George turned away with all the old glow of his first assignment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances
+    and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman;
+    but he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one
+    apostate Chance who open great good luck of any sort. So, though the
+    journey to Westchester County was almost certain to result in
+    refusal, he meant to be confronted by that certainty before he
+    assumed it. To the warden on the wire St. George put his inquiry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are your visitors' days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thursdays," came the reply, and the warden's voice suggested
+    handcuffs by way of hospitality.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is St. George of the <i>Sentinel</i>. I want very much to see one
+    of your people&mdash;a mulatto woman. Can you fix it for me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Certainly not," returned the warden promptly. "The <i>Sentinel</i> knows
+    perfectly that newspaper men can not be admitted here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, of course," St. George conceded, "but if you have a
+    mysterious boarder who talks Patagonian or something, and we think
+    that perhaps we can talk with her, why then&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It doesn't matter whether you can talk every language in South
+    America," said the warden bruskly. "I'm very busy now, and&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See here, Mr. Jeffrey," said St. George, "is no one allowed there
+    but relatives of the guests?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nobody,"&mdash;crisply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon, that is literal?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Relatives, with a permit," divulged the warden, who, if he had had
+    a sceptre would have used it at table, he was so fond of his little
+    power, "and the Readers' Guild."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah&mdash;the Readers' Guild," said St. George. "What days, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-day and Saturdays, ten o'clock. I'm sorry, Mr. St. George, but
+    I'm a very busy man and now&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-by," St. George cried triumphantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In half an hour he was at the Grand Central station, boarding a
+    train for the Reformatory town. It was a little after ten o'clock
+    when he rang the bell at the house presided over by Chillingworth's
+    "rabble of wild eagles."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Reformatory, a boastful, brick building set in grounds that
+    seemed freshly starched and ironed, had a discoloured door that
+    would have frowned and threatened of its own accord, even without
+    the printed warnings pasted to its panels stating that no
+    application for admission, with or without permits, would be
+    honoured upon any day save Thursday. This was Tuesday.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently, the chains having fallen within after a feudal rattling,
+    an old man who looked born to the business of snapping up a
+    drawbridge in lieu of a taste for any other exclusiveness peered at
+    St. George through absurd smoked glasses, cracked quite across so
+    that his eyes resembled buckles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good morning," said St. George; "has the Readers' Guild arrived
+    yet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man grated out an assent and swung open the door, which
+    creaked in the pitch of his voice. The bare hall was cut by a wall
+    of steel bars whose gate was padlocked, and outside this wall the
+    door to the warden's office stood open. St. George saw that a
+    meeting was in progress there, and the sight disturbed him. Then the
+    click of a key caught his attention, and he turned to find the old
+    man quietly and surprisingly swinging open the door of steel bars.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This way, sir," he said hoarsely, fixing St. George with his buckle
+    eyes, and shambled through the door after him locking it behind
+    them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    If St. George had found awaiting him a gold throne encircled by
+    kneeling elephants he could have been no more amazed. Not a word had
+    been said about the purpose of his visit, and not a word to the
+    warden; there was simply this miraculous opening of the barred door.
+    St. George breathlessly footed across the rotunda and down the dim
+    opposite hall. There was a mistake, that was evident; but for the
+    moment St. George was going to propose no reform. Their steps echoed
+    in the empty corridor that extended the entire length of the great
+    building in an odour of unspeakable soap and superior disinfectants;
+    and it was not until they reached a stair at the far end that the
+    old man halted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Top o' the steps," he hoarsely volunteered, blinking his little
+    buckle eyes, "first door to the left. My back's bad. I won't go up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, inhumanely blessing the circumstance, slipped something
+    in the old man's hand and sprang up the stairs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The first door at the left stood ajar. St. George looked in and saw
+    a circle of bonnets and white curls clouded around the edge of the
+    room, like witnesses. The Readers' Guild was about leaving; almost
+    in the same instant, with that soft lift and touch which makes a
+    woman's gown seem sewed with vowels and sibilants, they all arose
+    and came tapping across the bare floor. At their head marched a
+    woman with such a bright bonnet, and such a tinkle of ornaments on
+    her gown that at first sight she quite looked like a lamp. It was
+    she whom St. George approached.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon, madame," he said, "is this the Readers' Guild?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was nothing in St. George's grave face and deferential
+    stooping of shoulders to betray how his heart was beating or what a
+    bound it gave at her amazing reply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," she said, "how do you do?"&mdash;and her manner had that violent
+    absent-mindedness which almost always proves that its possessor has
+    trained a large family of children&mdash;"I am so glad that you can be
+    with us to-day. I am Mrs. Manners&mdash;forgive me," she besought with
+    perfectly self-possessed distractedness, "I'm afraid that I've
+    forgotten your name."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual
+    speechlessness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs.
+    Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to
+    compensate her total lack of attention.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and
+    caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and
+    muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter,
+    a little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a
+    wonderful meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately
+    for us you are just in time for our third floor council."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and
+    was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns
+    on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have
+    amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions
+    when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the
+    temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost
+    St. George an effort, which he was afterward glad to remember having
+    made, to turn to Mrs. Manners, who had that air of appointing
+    committees and announcing the programme by which we always recognize
+    a leader, and try to explain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am afraid," St. George said as they reached the stairs, "that you
+    have mistaken me, Mrs. Manners. I am not&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pray, pray do not mention it," cried Mrs. Manners, shaking her
+    little lamp-shade of a hat at him, "we make every allowance, and I
+    am sure that none will be necessary."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I am with the <i>Evening Sentinel</i>," St. George persisted, "I am
+    afraid that&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As if one's profession made any difference!" cried Mrs. Manners
+    warmly. "No, indeed, I perfectly understand. We all understand," she
+    assured him, going over some papers in one hand and preparing to
+    mount the stairs. "Indeed, we appreciate it," she murmured, "do we
+    not, Miss Utter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little brown nut seemed to crack in a capacious smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Indeed, indeed!" she said fervently, accenting her emphasis by
+    briefly-closed eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hymn books. Now, have we hymn books enough?" plaintively broke in
+    Mrs. Manners. "I declare, those new hymn books don't seem to have
+    the spirit of the old ones, no matter what <i>any one</i> says," she
+    informed St. George earnestly as they reached an open door. In the
+    next moment he stood aside and the Readers' Guild filed past him. He
+    followed them. This was pleasantly like magic.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They entered a large chamber carpeted and walled in the garish
+    flowers which many boards of directors suppose will joy the
+    cheerless breast. There were present a dozen women inmates,&mdash;sullen,
+    weary-looking beings who seemed to have made abject resignation
+    their latest vice. They turned their lustreless eyes upon the
+    visitors, and a portly woman in a red waist with a little American
+    flag in a buttonhole issued to them a nasal command to rise. They
+    got to their feet with a starched noise, like dead leaves blowing,
+    and St. George eagerly scanned their faces. There were women of
+    several nationalities, though they all looked raceless in the ugly
+    uniforms which those same boards of directors consider <i>de rigueur</i>
+    for the soul that is to be won back to the normal. A little negress,
+    with a spirit that soared free of boards of directors, had tried to
+    tie her closely-clipped wool with bits of coloured string; an
+    Italian woman had a geranium over her ear; and at the end of the
+    last row of chairs, towering above the others, was a creature of a
+    kind of challenging, unforgetable beauty whom, with a thrill of
+    certainty, St. George realized to be her whom he had come to see.
+    So strong was his conviction that, as he afterward recalled, he even
+    asked no question concerning her. She looked as manifestly not one
+    of the canaille of incorrigibles as, in her place, Lucrezia Borgia
+    would have looked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder
+    and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned. She was young,
+    hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar
+    litheness which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was
+    of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of
+    the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more
+    penetrable. Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she
+    divined that in some way his coming affected her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We will have our hymn first." Mrs. Manners' words were buzzing and
+    pecking in the air. "What can I have done with that list of numbers?
+    We have to select our pieces most carefully," she confided to St.
+    George, "so to be sure that <i>Soul's Prison</i> or <i>Hands Red as
+    Crimson</i>, or, <i>Do You See the Hebrew Captive Kneeling?</i> or anything
+    personal like that doesn't occur. Now what can I have done with that
+    list?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her words reached St. George but vaguely. He was in a fever of
+    anticipation and enthusiasm. He turned quickly to Mrs. Manners.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "During the hymn," he said simply, "I would like to speak with one
+    of the women. Have I your permission?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Manners looked momentarily perplexed; but her eyes at that
+    instant chancing upon her lost list of hymns, she let fall an
+    abstracted assent and hurried to the waiting organist. Immediately
+    St. George stepped quietly down among the women already fluttering
+    the leaves of their hymn books, and sat beside the mulatto woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her eyes met his in eager questioning, but she had that temper of
+    unsurprise of many of the eastern peoples and of some animals. Yet
+    she was under some strong excitement, for her hands, large but
+    faultlessly modeled, were pressed tensely together. And St. George
+    saw that she was by no means a mulatto, or of any race that he was
+    able to name. Her features were classic and of exceeding fineness,
+    and her face was sensitive and highly-bred and filled with repose,
+    like the surprising repose of breathing arrested in marble. There
+    was that about her, however, which would have made one, constituted
+    to perceive only the arbitrary balance of things, feel almost
+    afraid; while one of high organization would inevitably have been
+    smitten by some sense of the incalculably higher organization of her
+    nature, a nature which breathed forth an influence, laid a
+    spell&mdash;did something indefinable. Sometimes one stands too closely
+    to a statue and is frightened by the nearness, as by the nearness
+    of one of an alien region. St. George felt this directly he spoke to
+    her. He shook off the impression and set himself practically to the
+    matter in hand. He had never had greater need of his faculty for
+    directness. His low tone was quite matter-of-fact, his manner
+    deferentially reassuring.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think," he said softly and without preface, "that I can help you.
+    Will you let me help you? Will you tell me quickly your name?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The woman's beautiful eyes were filled with distress, but she shook
+    her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your name&mdash;name&mdash;name?" St. George repeated earnestly, but she had
+    only the same answer. "Can you not tell me where you live?" St.
+    George persisted, and she made no other sign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "New York?" went on St. George patiently. "New York? Do you live in
+    New York?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a sudden gleam in the woman's eyes. She extended her hands
+    quickly in unmistakable appeal. Then swiftly she caught up a hymn
+    book, tore at its fly-leaf, and made the movement of writing. In an
+    instant St. George had thrust a pencil in her hand and she was
+    tracing something.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He waited feverishly. The organ had droned through the hymn and the
+    women broke into song, with loose lips and without restraint, as
+    street boys sing. He saw them casting curious, sullen glances, and
+    the Readers' Guild whispering among themselves. Miss Bella Bliss
+    Utter, looking as distressed as a nut can look, nodded, and Mrs.
+    Manners shook her head and they meant the same thing. Then St.
+    George saw the attendant in the red waist descend from the platform
+    and make her way toward him, the little American flag rising and
+    falling on her breast. He unhesitatingly stepped in the aisle to
+    meet her, determined to prevent, if possible, her suspicion of the
+    message. "Is it the barbarism of a gentleman," Amory had once
+    propounded, "or is it the gentleman-like manners of a barbarian
+    which makes both enjoy over-stepping a prohibition?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I compliment you," St. George said gravely, with his deferential
+    stooping of the shoulders. "The women are perfectly trained. This,
+    of course, is due to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The hard face of the woman softened, but St. George thought that one
+    might call her very facial expression nasal; she smiled with evident
+    pleasure, though her purpose remained unshaken.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They do pretty good," she admitted, "but visitors ain't best for
+    'em. I'll have to request you"&mdash;St. George vaguely wished that she
+    would say "ask"&mdash;"not to talk to any of 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is a great privilege," he said warmly if a bit incoherently,
+    and held her in talk about an institution of the sort in Canada
+    where the women inmates wore white, the managers claiming that the
+    effect upon their conduct was perceptible, that they were far more
+    self-respecting, and so on in a labyrinth of defensive detail. "What
+    do you think of the idea?" he concluded anxiously, manfully holding
+    his ground in the aisle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think it's mostly nonsense," returned the woman tartly, "a big
+    expense and a sight of work for nothing. And now permit me to say&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George vaguely wished that she would say "let."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I agree with you," he said earnestly, "nothing could be simpler and
+    neater than these calico gowns."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The attendant looked curiously at him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They are gingham," she rejoined, "and you'll excuse me, I hope, but
+    visitors ain't supposed to converse with the inmates."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was vanquished by "converse."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon," he said, "pray forgive me. I will say good-by
+    to my friend."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He turned swiftly and extended his hand to the strange woman behind
+    him. With the cunning upon which he had counted she gave her own
+    hand, slipping in his the folded paper. Her eyes, with their
+    haunting watchfulness, held his for a moment as she mutely bent
+    forward when he left her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The hymn was done and the women were seating themselves, as St.
+    George with beating heart took his way up the aisle. What the paper
+    contained he could not even conjecture; but there <i>was</i> a paper and
+    it <i>did</i> contain something which he had a pleasant premonition would
+    be invaluable to him. Yet he was still utterly at loss to account
+    for his own presence there, and this he coolly meant to do.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was spared the necessity. On the platform Mrs. Manners had risen
+    to make an announcement; and St. George fancied that she must
+    preside at her tea-urn and try on her bonnets with just that same
+    formal little "announcement" air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My friends," she said, "I have now an unexpected pleasure for you
+    and for us all. We have with us to-day Mr. St. George, of New York.
+    Mr. St. George is going to sing for us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George stood still for a moment, looking into the expectant
+    faces of Mrs. Manners and the other women of the Readers' Guild, a
+    spark of understanding kindling the mirth in his eyes. This then
+    accounted both for his admittance to the home and for his welcome by
+    the women upon their errand of mercy. He had simply been very
+    naturally mistaken for a stranger from New York who had not arrived.
+    But since he had accomplished something, though he did not know
+    what, inasmuch as the slip of paper lay crushed in his hand unread,
+    he must, he decided, pay for it. Without ado he stepped to the
+    platform.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have explained to Mrs. Manners and to these ladies," he said
+    gravely, "that I am not the gentleman who was to sing for you.
+    However, since he is detained, I will do what I can."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This, mistaken for a merely perfunctory speech of self-depreciation,
+    was received in polite, contradicting silence by the Guild. St.
+    George, who had a rich, true barytone, quickly ran over his little
+    list of possible songs, none of which he had ever sung to an
+    audience that a canoe would not hold, or to other accompaniment than
+    that of a mandolin. Partly in memory of those old canoe-evenings St.
+    George broke into a low, crooning plantation melody. The song, like
+    much of the Southern music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the
+    college men had loved, something&mdash;or so one might have said who took
+    the canoe-music seriously&mdash;of the wildness and fierceness of old
+    tribal loves and plaints and unremembered wooings with a desert
+    background: a gallop of hoof-beats, a quiver of noon light above
+    saffron sand&mdash;these had been, more or less, in the music when St.
+    George had been wont to lie in a boat and pick at the strings while
+    Amory paddled; and these he must have reëchoed before the crowd of
+    curious and sullen and commonplace, lighted by that one wild,
+    strange face. When he had finished the dark woman sat with bowed
+    head, and St. George himself was more moved by his own effort than
+    was strictly professional.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dear Mr. St. George," said Mrs. Manners, going distractedly through
+    her hand-bag for something unknown, "our secretary will thank you
+    formally. It was she who sent you our request, was it not? She
+    <i>will</i> so regret being absent to-day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She did not send me a request, Mrs. Manners," persisted St. George
+    pleasantly, "but I've been uncommonly glad to do what I could. I am
+    here simply on a mission for the <i>Evening Sentinel</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Manners drew something indefinite from her bag and put it back
+    again, and looked vaguely at St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your voice reminds me so much of my brother, younger," she
+    observed, her eyes already straying to the literature for
+    distribution.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With soft exclamatory twitters the Readers' Guild thanked St.
+    George, and Miss Bella Bliss Utter, who was of womankind who clasp
+    their hands when they praise, stood thus beside him until he took
+    his leave. The woman in the red waist summoned an attendant to show
+    him back down the long corridor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the grated door within the entrance St. George found the warden
+    in stormy conference with a pale blond youth in spectacles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Impossible," the warden was saying bluntly, "I know you. I know
+    your voice. You called me up this morning from the <i>New York
+    Sentinel</i> office, and I told you then&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But, my dear sir," expostulated the pale blond youth, waving a
+    music roll, "I do assure you&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What he says is quite true, Warden," St. George interposed
+    courteously, "I will vouch for him. I have just been singing for the
+    Readers' Guild myself."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The warden dropped back with a grudging apology and brows of tardy
+    suspicion, and the old man blinked his buckle eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gentlemen," said St. George, "good morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Outside the door, with its panels decorated in positive
+    prohibitions, he eagerly unfolded the precious paper. It bore a
+    single name and address: Tabnit, 19 McDougle Street, New York.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0003"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER III
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    St. George lunched leisurely at his hotel. Upon his return from
+    Westchester he had gone directly to McDougle Street to be assured
+    that there was a house numbered 19. Without difficulty he had found
+    the place; it was in the row of old iron-balconied apartment houses
+    a few blocks south of Washington Square, and No. 19 differed in no
+    way from its neighbours even to the noisy children, without toys,
+    tumbling about the sunken steps and dark basement door. St. George
+    contented himself with walking past the house, for the mere
+    assurance that the place existed dictated his next step.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was to write a note to Mrs. Medora Hastings, Miss Holland's
+    aunt. The note set forth that for reasons which he would, if he
+    might, explain later, he was interested in the woman who had
+    recently made an attempt upon her niece's life; that he had seen the
+    woman and had obtained an address which he was confident would lead
+    to further information about her. This address, he added, he
+    preferred not to disclose to the police, but to Mrs. Hastings or
+    Miss Holland herself, and he begged leave to call upon them if
+    possible that day. He despatched the note by Rollo, whom he
+    instructed to deliver it, not at the desk, but at the door of Mrs.
+    Hastings' apartment, and to wait for an answer. He watched with
+    pleasure Rollo's soft departure, recalling the days when he had sent
+    a messenger boy to some inaccessible threshold, himself stamping up
+    and down in the cold a block or so away to await the boy's return.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo was back almost immediately. Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland
+    were not at home. St. George eyed his servant severely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Rollo," he said, "did you go to the door of their apartment?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sir," said Rollo stiffly, "the elevator boy told me they was
+    out, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Showing," thought St. George, "that a valet and a gentleman is a
+    very poor newspaper man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now go back," he said pleasantly, "go up in the elevator to their
+    door. If they are not in, wait in the lower hallway until they
+    return. Do you get that? Until they return."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll want me back by tea-time, sir?" ventured Rollo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait," St. George repeated, "until they return. At three. Or six.
+    Or nine o'clock. Or midnight."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Very good, sir," said Rollo impassively, "it ain't always wise,
+    sir, for a man to trust to his own judgment, sir, asking your
+    pardon. His judgment," he added, "may be a bit of the ape left in
+    him, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled at this evolutionary pearl and settled himself
+    comfortably by the open fire to await Rollo's return. It was after
+    three o'clock when he reappeared. He brought a note and St. George
+    feverishly tore it open.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whom did you see? Were they civil to you?" he demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I saw a old lady, sir," said Rollo irreverently. "She didn't say a
+    word to me, sir, but what she didn't say was civiler than many
+    people's language. There's a great deal in manner, sir," declaimed
+    Rollo, brushing his hat with his sleeve, and his sleeve with his
+    handkerchief, and shaking the handkerchief meditatively over the
+    coals.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George read the note at a glance and with unspeakable relief.
+    They would see him. A refusal would have delayed and annoyed him
+    just then, in the flood-tide of his hope.
+</p>
+<p class="block">
+     "My Dear Mr. St. George," the note ran. "My niece is not at
+     home, and I can not tell how your suggestion will be received
+     by her, though it is most kind. I may, however, answer for
+     myself that I shall be glad to see you at four o'clock this
+     afternoon.
+</p>
+<p class="note">                   "Very truly yours, </p>
+<p class="ar">
+                               "M<small>EDORA</small> H<small>ASTINGS</small>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Grateful for her evident intention to waste no time, St. George
+    dressed and drove to the Boris, punctually sending up his card at
+    four o'clock. At once he was ushered to Mrs. Hastings' apartment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George entered her drawing-room incuriously. Three years of
+    entering drawing-rooms which he never thereafter was to see had
+    robbed him of that sensation of indefinable charm which for many a
+    strange room never ceases to yield. He had found far too many tables
+    upholding nothing which one could remember, far too many pictures
+    that returned his look, and rugs that seemed to have been selected
+    arbitrarily and because there was none in stock that the owner
+    really liked. He was therefore pleasantly surprised and puzzled by
+    the room which welcomed him. The floor was tiled in curious blocks,
+    strangely hieroglyphed, as if they had been taken from old tombs.
+    Over the fireplace was set a panel of the same stone, which, by the
+    thickness of the tiles, formed a low shelf. On this shelf and on
+    tables and in a high window was the strangest array of objects that
+    St. George had ever seen. There were small busts of soft rose stone,
+    like blocks of coral. There was a statue or two of some indefinable
+    white material, glistening like marble and yet so soft that it had
+    been indented in several places by accidental pressure. There were
+    fans of strangely-woven silk, with sticks of carven rock-crystal,
+    and hand mirrors of polished copper set in frames of gems that he
+    did not recognize. Upon the wall were mended bits of purple
+    tapestry, embroidered or painted or woven in singular patterns of
+    flora and birds that St. George could not name. There were rolls of
+    parchment, and vases of rock-crystal, and a little apparatus, most
+    delicately poised, for weighing unknown, delicate things; and jars
+    and cups without handles, all baked of a soft pottery having a nap
+    like the down of a peach. Over the windows hung curtains of lace,
+    woven by hands which St. George could not guess, in patterns of such
+    freedom and beauty as western looms never may know. On the floor and
+    on the divans were spread strange skins, some marked like peacocks,
+    some patterned like feathers and like seaweed, all in a soft fur
+    that was like silk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mingled with these curios were the ordinary articles of a cultivated
+    household. There were many books, good pictures, furniture with
+    simple lines, a tea-table that almost ministered of itself, a
+    work-basket filled with "violet-weaving" needle-work, and a gossipy
+    clock with well-bred chimes. St. George was enormously attracted by
+    the room which could harbour so many pagan delights without itself
+    falling their victim. The air was fresh and cool and smelled of the
+    window primroses.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a few moments Mrs. Hastings entered, and if St. George had been
+    bewildered by the room he was still more amazed by the appearance
+    of his hostess. She was utterly unlike the atmosphere of her
+    drawing-room. She was a bustling, commonplace little creature, with
+    an expressionless face, indented rather than molded in features. Her
+    plump hands were covered with jewels, but for all the richness of
+    her gown she gave the impression of being very badly dressed; things
+    of jet and metal bobbed and ticked upon her, and her side-combs were
+    continually falling about. She sat on the sofa and looked at the
+    seat which St. George was to have and began to talk&mdash;all without
+    taking the slightest heed of him or permitting him to mention the
+    <i>Evening Sentinel</i> or his errand. If St. George had been painted
+    purple he felt sure that she would have acted quite the same.
+    Personality meant nothing to her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now this distressing matter, Mr. St. George," began Mrs. Hastings,
+    "of this frightful mulatto woman. I didn't see her myself&mdash;no, I had
+    stopped in on the first floor to visit my lawyer's wife who was ill
+    with neuralgia, and I didn't see the creature. If I had been with my
+    niece I dare say it wouldn't have occurred. That's what I always say
+    to my niece. I always say, 'Olivia, nothing <i>need</i> occur to vex one.
+    It always happens because of pure heedlessness.' Not that I accuse
+    my own niece of heedlessness in this particular. It was the elevator
+    boy who was heedless. That is the trouble with life in a great
+    city. Every breath you draw is always dependent on somebody else's
+    doing his duty, and when you consider how many people habitually
+    neglect their duty it is a wonder&mdash;I always say that to Olivia&mdash;it
+    is a wonder that anybody is alive to <i>do</i> a duty when it presents
+    itself. 'Olivia,' I always say, 'nobody needs to die.' And I really
+    believe that they nearly all do die out of pure heedlessness. Well,
+    and so this frightful mulatto creature: you know her, I understand?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings leaned back and consulted St. George through her
+    tortoise-shell glasses, tilting her head high to keep them on her
+    nose and perpetually putting their gold chain over her ear, which
+    perpetually pulled out her side-combs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I saw her this morning," St. George said. "I went up to the
+    Reformatory in Westchester, and I spoke with her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mercy!" ejaculated Mrs. Hastings, "I wonder she didn't tear your
+    eyes out. Did they have her in a cage or in a cell? What was the
+    creature about?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She was in a missionary meeting at the moment," St. George
+    explained, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mercy!" said Mrs. Hastings in exactly the same tone. "Some trick, I
+    expect. That's what I warn Olivia: 'So few things nowadays are done
+    through necessity or design.' Nearly everything is a trick. Every
+    invention is a trick&mdash;a cultured trick, one might say. Murder is a
+    trick, I suppose, to a murderer. That's why civilization is bad for
+    morals, don't you think? Well, and so she talked with you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "she did not say one word. But
+    she wrote something, and that is what I have come to bring you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What was it&mdash;some charm?" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Oh, nobody knows
+    what that kind of people may do. I'll meet any one face to face, but
+    these juggling, incantation individuals appal me. I have a brother
+    who travels in the Orient, and he tells me about hideous things they
+    do&mdash;raising wheat and things," she vaguely concluded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah!" said St. George quickly, "you have a brother&mdash;in the Orient?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes. My brother Otho has traveled abroad I don't know how many
+    years. We have a great many stamps. I can't begin to pronounce all
+    the names," the lady assured him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And this brother&mdash;is he your niece, Miss Holland's father?" St.
+    George asked eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Certainly," said Mrs. Hastings severely; "I have only one brother,
+    and it has been three years since I have seen him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pardon me, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "this may be most
+    important. Will you tell me when you last heard from him and where
+    he was?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I should have to look up the place," she answered, "I couldn't
+    begin to pronounce the name, I dare say. It was somewhere in the
+    South Atlantic, ten months or more ago."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," St. George quietly commented.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, and now this frightful creature," resumed Mrs. Hastings, "do,
+    pray, tell me what it was she wrote."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George produced the paper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is it," he said. "I fancy you will not know the street. It is
+    19 McDougle Street, and the name is simply Tabnit."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. And is it a letter?" his hostess demanded, "and whatever does
+    it say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is not a letter," St. George explained patiently, "and this is
+    all that it says. The name is, I suppose, the name of a person. I
+    have made sure that there is such a number in the street. I have
+    seen the house. But I have waited to consult you before going
+    there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, what is it you think?" Mrs. Hastings besought him. "Do you
+    think this person, whoever it is, can do something? And whatever can
+    he do? Oh dear," she ended, "I do want to act the way poor dear Mr.
+    Hastings would have acted. Only I know that he would have gone
+    straight to Bitley, or wherever she is, and held a revolver at that
+    mulatto creature's head, and <i>commanded</i> her to talk English. Mr.
+    Hastings was a very determined character. If you could have seen the
+    poor dear man's chin! But of course I can't do that, can I? And
+    that's what I say to Olivia. 'Olivia, one doesn't <i>need</i> a man's
+    judgment if one will only use judgment oneself.' What is it you
+    think, Mr. St. George?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before St. George could reply there entered the room, behind a low
+    announcement of his name, a man of sixty-odd years, nervous,
+    slightly stooped, his smooth pale face unlighted by little deep-set
+    eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, Mr. Frothingham!" said Mrs. Hastings in evident relief, "you
+    are just in time. Mr. St. John was just telling me horrible things
+    about this frightful mulatto creature. This is Mr. St. John. Mr.
+    Frothingham is my lawyer and my brother Otho's lawyer. And so I
+    telephoned him to come in and hear all about this. And now do go on,
+    Mr. St. John, about this hideous woman. What is it you think?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you do, Mr. St. John?" said the lawyer portentously. His
+    greeting was almost a warning, and reminded St. George of the way in
+    which certain brakemen call out stations. St. George responded as
+    blithely to this name as to his own and did not correct it. "And
+    what," went on the lawyer, sitting down with long unclosed hands
+    laid trimly along his knees, "have you to contribute to this most
+    remarkable occurrence, Mr. St. John?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George briefly narrated the events of the morning and placed the
+    slip of paper in the lawyer's hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah! We have here a communication in the nature of a confession,"
+    the lawyer observed, adjusting his gold pince-nez, head thrown back,
+    eyebrows lifted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Only the address, sir," said St. George, "and I was just saying to
+    Mrs. Hastings that some one ought to go to this address at once and
+    find out whatever is to be got there. Whoever goes I will very
+    gladly accompany."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham had a fashion of making ready to speak and
+    soliciting attention by the act, and then collapsing suddenly with
+    no explosion, like a bad Roman candle. He did this now, and whatever
+    he meant to say was lost to the race; but he looked very wise the
+    while. It was rather as if he discarded you as a fit listener, than
+    that he discarded his own comment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know but I ought to go myself," rambled Mrs. Hastings,
+    "perhaps Mr. Hastings would think I ought. Suppose, Mr. Frothingham,
+    that we both go. Dear, dear! Olivia always sees to my shopping and
+    flowers and everything executive, but I can't let her go into these
+    frightful places, can I?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a rustling at the far end of the room, and some one
+    entered. St. George did not turn, but as her soft skirts touched and
+    lifted along the floor he was tinglingly aware of her presence. Even
+    before Mrs. Hastings heard her light footfall, even before the clear
+    voice spoke, St. George knew that he was at last in the presence of
+    the arbiter of his enterprise, and of how much else he did not know.
+    He was silent, breathlessly waiting for her to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May I come in, Aunt Dora?" she said. "I want to know to what place
+    it is impossible for me to go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She came from the long room's boundary shadow. There was about her a
+    sense of white and gray with a knot of pale colour in her hat and an
+    orchid on her white coat. Mrs. Hastings, taking no more account of
+    her presence than she had of St. George's, tilted back her head and
+    looked at the primroses in the window as closely as at anything, and
+    absently presented him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia," she said, "this is Mr. St. John, who knows about that
+    frightful mulatto creature. Mr. St. George," she went on, correcting
+    the name entirely unintentionally, "my niece, Miss Holland. And I'm
+    sure I wish I knew what the necessary thing to be done <i>is</i>. That is
+    what I always tell you, you know, Olivia. 'Find out the necessary
+    thing and do it, and let the rest go.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It reminds me very much," said the lawyer, clearing his throat, "of
+    a case that I had on the April calendar&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland had turned swiftly to St. George:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know the mulatto woman?" she asked, and the lawyer passed by
+    the April calendar and listened.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I went to the Bitley Reformatory this morning to see her," St.
+    George replied. "She gave me this name and address. We have been
+    saying that some one ought to go there to learn what is to be
+    learned."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham in a silence of pursed lips offered the paper. Miss
+    Holland glanced at it and returned it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you tell us what your interest is in this woman?" she asked
+    evenly. "Why you went to see her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, Miss Holland," St. George replied, "you know of course that
+    the police have done their best to run this matter down. You know it
+    because you have courteously given them every assistance in your
+    power. But the police have also been very ably assisted by every
+    newspaper in town. I am fortunate to be acting in the interests of
+    one of these&mdash;the <i>Sentinel</i>. This clue was put in my hands. I came
+    to you confident of your coöperation."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings threw up her hands with a gesture that caught away the
+    chain of her eye-glass and sent it dangling in her lap, and her
+    side-combs tinkling to the tiled floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mercy!" she said, "a reporter!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I never receive reporters!" she cried, "Olivia&mdash;don't you
+    know? A newspaper reporter like that fearful man at Palm Beach, who
+    put me in the Courtney's ball list in a blue silk when I never wear
+    colours."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now really, really, this intrusion&mdash;" began Mr. Frothingham, his
+    long, unclosed hands working forward on his knees in undulations, as
+    a worm travels.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland turned to St. George, the colour dyeing her face and
+    throat, her manner a bewildering mingling of graciousness and
+    hauteur.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My aunt is right," she said tranquilly, "we never have received any
+    newspaper representative. Therefore, we are unfortunate never to
+    have met one. You were saying that we should send some one to
+    McDougle Street?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was aware of his heart-beats. It was all so unexpected
+    and so dangerous, and she was so perfectly equal to the
+    circumstance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was asking to be allowed to go myself, Miss Holland," he said
+    simply, "with whoever makes the investigation."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings was looking mutely from one to another, her forehead
+    in horizons of wrinkles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure, Olivia, I think you ought to be careful what you say,"
+    she plaintively began. "Mr. Hastings never allowed his name to go in
+    any printed lists even, he was so particular. Our telephone had a
+    private number, and all the papers had instructions never to mention
+    him, even if he was murdered, unless he took down the notice
+    himself. Then if anything important did happen, he often did take it
+    down, nicely typewritten, and sometimes even then they didn't use
+    it, because they knew how very particular he was. And of course we
+    don't know how&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's eyes blazed, but he did not lift them. The affront was
+    unstudied and, indeed, unconscious. But Miss Holland understood how
+    grave it was, for there are women whose intuition would tell them
+    the etiquette due upon meeting the First Syndic of Andorra or a
+    noble from Gambodia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We want the truth about this as much as Mr. St. George does," she
+    said quickly, smiling for the first time. St. George liked her
+    smile. It was as if she were amused, not absent-minded nor yet a
+    prey to the feminine immorality of ingratiation. "Besides," she
+    continued, "I wish to know a great many things. How did the mulatto
+    woman impress you, Mr. St. George?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland loosened her coat, revealing a little flowery waist,
+    and leaned forward with parted lips. She was very beautiful, with
+    the beauty of perfect, blooming, colourful youth, without line or
+    shadow. She was in the very noon of youth, but her eyes did not
+    wander after the habit of youth; they were direct and steady and a
+    bit critical, and she spoke slowly and with graceful sanity in a
+    voice that was without nationality. She might have been the
+    cultivated English-speaking daughter of almost any land of high
+    civilization, or she might have been its princess. Her face showed
+    her imaginative; her serene manner reassured one that she had not,
+    in consequence, to pay the usury of lack of judgment; she seemed
+    reflective, tender, and of a fine independence, tempered, however,
+    by tradition and unerring taste. Above all, she seemed alive,
+    receptive, like a woman with ten senses. And&mdash;above all again&mdash;she
+    had charm. Finally, St. George could talk with her; he did not
+    analyze why; he only knew that this woman understood what he said in
+    precisely the way that he said it, which is, perhaps, the fifth
+    essence in nature.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May I tell you?" asked St. George eagerly. "She seemed to me a very
+    wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world. She
+    is not mulatto&mdash;her features are quite classic; and she is not a
+    fanatic or a mad-woman. She is, of her race, a strangely superior
+    creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that
+    at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some
+    tremendous secret. I think we must find out what that is, first, for
+    your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth
+    while."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," cried Miss Holland, "delightful. I begin to be glad that it
+    happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I
+    thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did
+    make me wonder, but I hardly believed that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The newspapers," Mr. Frothingham said acidly, "became very much
+    involved in their statements concerning this matter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This 'Tabnit,'" said Miss Holland, and flashed a smile of pretty
+    deference at the lawyer to console him for her total neglect of his
+    comment, "in McDougle Street. Who can he be?&mdash;he <i>is</i> a man, I
+    suppose. And where is McDougle Street?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George explained the location, and Mrs. Hastings fretfully
+    commented.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure, Olivia," she said, "I think it is frightfully unwomanly
+    in you&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To take so much interest in my own murder?" Miss Holland asked in
+    amusement. "Aunt Dora, I'm going to do more: I suggest that you and
+    Mr. Frothingham and I go with Mr. St. George to this address in
+    McDougle Street&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear Olivia!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, "it's in the very heart of
+    the Bowery&mdash;isn't it, Mr. St. John? And only think&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was as if Mrs. Hastings' frustrate words emerged in the fantastic
+    guise of her facial changes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, it isn't quite the Bowery, Mrs. Hastings," St. George
+    explained, "though it won't look unlike."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wish I knew what Mr. Hastings would have done," his widow
+    mourned, "he always said to me: 'Medora, do only the necessary
+    thing.' Do you think this <i>is</i> the necessary thing&mdash;with all the
+    frightful smells?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is perfectly safe," ventured St. George, "is it not, Mr.
+    Frothingham?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham bowed and tried to make non-partisanship seem a
+    tasteful resignation of his own will.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am at Mrs. Hastings' command," he said, waving both hands, once,
+    from the wrist.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know the place is really only a few blocks from Washington
+    Square," St. George submitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings brightened.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I have some friends in Washington Square," she said, "people
+    whom I think a great deal of, and always have. If you really feel,
+    Olivia&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do," said Miss Holland simply, "and let us go now, Aunt Dora. The
+    brougham has been at the door since I came in. We may as well drive
+    there as anywhere, if Mr. St. George is willing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall be happy," said St. George sedately, longing to cry:
+    "Willing! Willing! Oh, Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland&mdash;<i>willing</i>!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland and St. George and the lawyer were alone for a few
+    minutes while Mrs. Hastings rustled away for her bonnet. Miss
+    Holland sat where the afternoon light, falling through the corner
+    window, smote her hair to a glory of pale colour, and St. George's
+    eyes wandered to the glass through which the sun fell. It was a thin
+    pane of irregular pieces set in a design of quaint, meaningless
+    characters, in the centre of which was the figure of a sphinx,
+    crucified upon an upright cross and surrounded by a border of coiled
+    asps with winged heads. The window glittered like a sheet of gems.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What wonderful glass," involuntarily said St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is it not?" Miss Holland said enthusiastically. "My father sent it.
+    He sent nearly all these things from abroad."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wonder where such glass is made," observed St. George; "it is
+    like lace and precious stones&mdash;hardly more painted than carved."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She bent upon him such a sudden, searching look that St. George felt
+    his eyes held by her own.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you know anything of my father?" she demanded suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Only that Mrs. Hastings has just told me that he is abroad&mdash;in the
+    South Atlantic," St. George wonderingly replied.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, I am very foolish," said Miss Holland quickly, "we have not
+    heard from him in ten months now, and I am frightfully worried. Ah
+    yes, the glass is beautiful. It was made in one of the South
+    Atlantic islands, I believe&mdash;so were all these things," she added;
+    "the same figure of the crucified sphinx is on many of them."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you know what it means?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the symbol used by the people in one of the islands, my
+    father said," she answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "These symbols usually, I believe," volunteered Mr. Frothingham,
+    frowning at the glass, "have little significance, standing merely
+    for the loose barbaric ideas of a loose barbaric nation."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George thought of the ladies of Doctor Johnson's Amicable
+    Society who walked from the town hall to the Cathedral in Lichfield,
+    "in linen gowns, and each has a stick with an acorn; but for the
+    acorn they could give no reason."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked long at the glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She," he said finally, "our false mulatto, ought to stand before
+    just such glass."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland laughed. She nodded her head a little, once, every time
+    she laughed, and St. George was learning to watch for that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The glass would suit any style of beauty better than steel bars,"
+    she said lightly as Mrs. Hastings came fluttering back. Mrs.
+    Hastings fluttered ponderously, as humblebees fly. Indeed, when one
+    considered, there was really a "blunt-faced bee" look about the
+    woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The brougham had on the box two men in smart livery; the footman,
+    closing the door, received St. George's reply to Mrs. Hastings'
+    appeal to "tell the man the number of this frightful place."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dare say I haven't been careful," Mrs. Hastings kept anxiously
+    observing, "I have been heedless, I dare say. And I always think
+    that what one must avoid is heedlessness, don't you think? Didn't
+    Napoleon say that if only Cæsar had been first in killing the men
+    who wanted to kill him&mdash;something about Pompey's statue being kept
+    clean. What was it&mdash;why should they blame Cæsar for the condition of
+    the public statues?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear Mrs. Hastings," Mr. Frothingham reminded her, his long
+    gloved hands laid trimly along his knees as before, "you are in my
+    care."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The statue problem faded from the lady's eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Poor, dear Mr. Hastings always said you were so admirable at
+    cross-questioning," she recalled, partly reassured.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," cried Miss Holland protestingly, "Aunt Dora, this is an
+    adventure. We are going to see 'Tabnit.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent, ecstatically reviewing the events of the last
+    six hours and thinking unenviously of Amory, rocking somewhere with
+    <i>The Aloha</i> on a mere stretch of green water:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If Chillingworth could see me now," he thought victoriously, as the
+    carriage turned smartly into McDougle Street.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0004"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER IV
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    No. 19 McDougle Street had been chosen as a likely market by a
+    "hokey-pokey" man, who had wheeled his cart to the curb before the
+    entrance. There, despite Mrs. Hastings' coach-man's peremptory
+    appeal, he continued to dispense stained ice-cream to the little
+    denizens of No. 19 and the other houses in the row. The brougham,
+    however, at once proved a counter-attraction and immediately an
+    opposition group formed about the carriage step and exchanged
+    penetrating comments upon the livery.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mrs. Hastings, you and Miss Holland would better sit here,
+    perhaps," suggested St. George, alighting hurriedly, "until I see if
+    this man is to be found."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Please," said Miss Holland, "I've always been longing to go into
+    one of these houses, and now I'm going. Aren't we, Aunt Dora?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you think&mdash;" ventured Mr. Frothingham in perplexity; but Mr.
+    Frothingham's perplexity always impressed one as duty-born rather
+    than judicious, and Miss Holland had already risen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" protested Mrs. Hastings faintly, accepting St. George's
+    hand, "do look at those children's aprons. I'm afraid we'll all
+    contract fever after fever, just coming this far."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Unkempt women were occupying the doorstep of No. 19. St. George
+    accosted them and asked the way to the rooms of a Mr. Tabnit. They
+    smiled, displaying their wonderful teeth, consulted together, and
+    finally with many labials and uncouth pointings of shapely hands
+    they indicated the door of the "first floor front," whose wooden
+    shutters were closely barred. St. George led the way and entered the
+    bare, unclean passage where discordant voices and the odours of
+    cooking wrought together to poison the air. He tapped smartly at the
+    door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Immediately it was opened by a graceful boy, dressed in a long,
+    belted coat of dun-colour. He had straight black hair, and eyes
+    which one saw before one saw his face, and he gravely bowed to each
+    of the party in turn before answering St. George's question.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Assuredly," said the youth in perfect English, "enter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They found themselves in an ample room extending the full depth of
+    the house; and partly because the light was dim and partly in sheer
+    amazement they involuntarily paused as the door clicked behind them.
+    The room's contrast to the squalid neighbourhood was complete. The
+    apartment was carpeted in soft rugs laid one upon another so that
+    footfalls were silenced. The walls and ceiling were smoothly covered
+    with a neutral-tinted silk, patterned in dim figures; and from a
+    fluted pillar of exceeding lightness an enormous candelabrum shed
+    clear radiance upon the objects in the room. The couches and divans
+    were woven of some light reed, made with high fantastic backs, in
+    perfect purity of line however, and laid with white mattresses. A
+    little reed table showed slender pipes above its surface and these,
+    at a touch from the boy, sent to a great height tiny columns of
+    water that tinkled back to the square of metal upon which the table
+    was set. A huge fan of blanched grasses automatically swayed from
+    above. On a side-table were decanters and cups and platters of a
+    material frail and transparent. Before the shuttered window stood an
+    observable plant with coloured leaves. On a great table in the
+    room's centre were scattered objects which confused the eye. A light
+    curtain stirring in the fan's faint breeze hung at the far end of
+    the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a career which had held many surprises, some of which St. George
+    would never be at liberty to reveal to the paper in whose service he
+    had come upon them, this was one of the most alluring. The mere
+    existence of this strange and luxurious habitation in the heart of
+    such a neighbourhood would, past expression, delight Mr. Crass, the
+    feature man, and no doubt move even Chillingworth to approval.
+    Chillingworth and Crass! Already they seemed strangers. St. George
+    glanced at Miss Holland; she was looking from side to side, like a
+    bird alighted among strange flowers; she met his eyes and dimpled
+    in frank delight. Mrs. Hastings sat erectly beside her, her
+    tortoise-rimmed glasses expressing bland approval. The improbability
+    of her surroundings had quite escaped her in her satisfied discovery
+    that the place was habitable. The lawyer, his thin lips parted, his
+    head thrown back so that his hair rested upon his coat collar,
+    remained standing, one long hand upon a coat lapel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," said Miss Holland softly, "it <i>is</i> an adventure, Aunt Dora."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George liked that. It irritated him, he had once admitted, to
+    see a woman live as if living were a matter of life and death. He
+    wished her to be alive to everything, but without suspiciously
+    scrutinizing details, like a census-taker. To appreciate did not
+    seem to him properly to mean to assess. Miss Holland, he would have
+    said, seemed to live by the beats of her heart and not by the waves
+    of her hair&mdash;but another proof, perhaps, of "if thou likest her
+    opinions thou wilt praise her virtues."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was but a moment before the curtain was lifted, and there
+    approached a youth, apparently in the twenties, slender and
+    delicately formed as a woman, his dark face surmounted by a great
+    deal of snow-white hair. He was wearing garments of grey, cut in
+    unusual and graceful lines, and his throat was closely wound in
+    folds of soft white, fastened by a rectangular green jewel of
+    notable size and brilliance. His eyes, large and of exceeding beauty
+    and gentleness, were fixed upon St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sir," said St. George, "we have been given this address as one
+    where we may be assisted in some inquiries of the utmost importance.
+    The name which we have is simply 'Tabnit.' Have I the honour&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Their host bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am Prince Tabnit," he said quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, filled with fresh amazement, gravely named himself and,
+    making presentation of the others, purposely omitted the name of
+    Miss Holland. However, hardly had he finished before their host
+    bowed before Miss Holland herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you," he said, "you to whom I owe an expiation which I can
+    never make,&mdash;do you know it is my servant who would have taken your
+    life?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the brief interval following this naïve assertion, his guests
+    were not unnaturally speechless. Miss Holland, bending slightly
+    forward, looked at the prince breathlessly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have suffered," he went on, "I have suffered indescribably since
+    that terrible morning when I missed her and understood her mission.
+    I followed quickly&mdash;I was without when you entered, but I came too
+    late. Since then I have waited, unwilling to go to you, certain that
+    the gods would permit the possible. And now&mdash;what shall I say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He hesitated, his eyes meeting Miss Holland's. And in that moment
+    Mrs. Hastings found her voice. She curved the chain of her
+    eye-glasses over her ear, threw back her head until the
+    tortoise-rims included her host, and spoke her mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, Prince Tabnit," she said sharply&mdash;quite as if, St. George
+    thought, she had been nursery governess to princes all her life&mdash;"I
+    must say that I think your regret comes somewhat late in the day.
+    It's all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has
+    tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a
+    servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous
+    and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her voice, never modulated in her excitements, was so full that no
+    one heard at that instant a quick, indrawn breath from St. George,
+    having something of triumph and something of terror. Even as he
+    listened he had been running swiftly over the objects in the room to
+    fasten every one in his memory, and his eyes had rested upon the
+    table at his side. A disc of bronze, supported upon a carven tripod,
+    caught the light and challenged attention to its delicate traceries;
+    and within its border of asps and goat's horns he saw cut in the
+    dull metal a sphinx crucified upon an upright cross&mdash;an exact
+    facsimile of the device upon that strange opalized glass from some
+    far-away island which he had lately noted in the window in Mrs.
+    Hastings' drawing-room. Instantly his mind was besieged by a volley
+    of suppositions and imaginings, but even in his intense excitement
+    as to what this simple discovery might bode, he heard the prince's
+    soft reply to Mrs. Hastings:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Madame," said the prince, "she is a loyal creature. Whatever she
+    does, she believes herself to be doing in my service. I trusted her.
+    I believed that such error was impossible to her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Error!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, looking about her for support and
+    finding little in the aspect of Mr. Augustus Frothingham, who
+    appeared to be regarding the whole proceeding as one from which he
+    was to extract data to be thought out at some future infinitely
+    removed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As for St. George, he had never had great traffic with a future
+    infinitely removed; he had a youthful and somewhat imaginative
+    fashion of striking before the iron was well in the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your servant believed, then, your Highness," he said clearly,
+    "that in taking Miss Holland's life she was serving you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must regretfully conclude so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George rose, holding the little brazen disc which he had taken
+    from the table, and confronted his host, compelling his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps you will tell us, Prince Tabnit," he said coolly, "what it
+    is that the people who use this device find against Miss Holland's
+    father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George heard Olivia's little broken cry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the same!" she exclaimed. "Aunt Dora&mdash;Mr. Frothingham&mdash;it is
+    the crucified sphinx that was on so many of the things that father
+    sent. Oh," she cried to the prince, "can it be possible that you
+    know him&mdash;that you know anything of my father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    To St. George's amazement the face of the prince softened and glowed
+    as if with peculiar delight, and he looked at St. George with
+    admiration.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is it possible," he murmured, half to himself, "that your race has
+    already developed intuition? Are you indeed so near to the Unknown?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He took quick steps away and back, and turned again to St. George, a
+    strange joy dawning in his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If there be some who are ready to know!" he said. "Ah," he recalled
+    himself penitently to Miss Holland, "your father&mdash;Otho Holland, I
+    have seen him many times."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Seen Otho</i>!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, as pink and trembling and
+    expressionless as a disturbed mold of jelly. "Oh, poor, dear Otho!
+    Did he live where there are people like your frightful servant?
+    Olivia, think! Maybe he is lying at the bottom of a gorge, all
+    wounded and bloody, with a dagger in his back! Oh, my poor, dear
+    Otho, who used to wheel me about!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings collapsed softly on the divan, her glasses fallen in
+    her lap, her side-combs slipping silently to the rug. Olivia had
+    risen and was standing before Prince Tabnit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me," she said trembling, "when have you seen him? Is he well?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit swept the faces of the others and his eyes returned to
+    Miss Holland and dropped to the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The last time that I saw him, Miss Holland," he answered, "was
+    three months ago. He was then alive and well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Something in his tone chilled St. George and sent a sudden thrill of
+    fear to his heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He was then alive and well?" St. George repeated slowly. "Will you
+    tell us more, your Highness? Will you tell us why the death of his
+    daughter should be considered a service to the prince of a country
+    which he had visited?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are very wonderful," observed the prince, smiling meditatively
+    at St. George, "and your penetration gives me good news&mdash;news that
+    I had not hoped for, yet. I can not tell you all that you ask, but I
+    can tell you much. Will you sit down?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He turned and glanced at the curtain at the far end of the room.
+    Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were
+    placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties
+    not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and
+    Finnish and all but Icelandic cafés in every block.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pray do me the honour," the prince besought, taking the dishes from
+    the hands of the boy. "It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell
+    you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before
+    him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the
+    smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business
+    toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He
+    impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from
+    the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer
+    atmosphere. The lawyer's face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+    never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of
+    affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a
+    tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that
+    had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and
+    with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white
+    berries, such as the Japanese call "pinedews"; there was a tea
+    distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury
+    and fantastic. So potent was the spell of the prince's hospitality,
+    and so gracious the insistence with which he set before them the
+    strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia, eager almost to tears
+    for news of her father, and Mrs. Hastings, as critical and
+    suspicious as some beetle with long antennæ, might not refuse them.
+    As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might be Cagliostro's
+    spagiric food, or "extract of Saturn," for aught that his previous
+    experience equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and was
+    constrained to nibble again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they had been served, Prince Tabnit abruptly began speaking,
+    the while turning the fine stem of his glass in his delicate
+    fingers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You do not know," he said simply, "where the island of Yaque lies?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings sat erect.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yaque!" she exclaimed. "That was the name of the place where your
+    father was, Olivia. I know I remembered it because it wasn't like
+    the man What's-his-name in <i>As You Like It</i>, and because it didn't
+    begin with a J."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The island is my home," Prince Tabnit continued, "and now, for the
+    first time, I find myself absent from it. I have come a long
+    journey. It is many miles to that little land in the eastern seas,
+    that exquisite bit of the world, as yet unknown to any save the
+    island-men. We have guarded its existence, but I have no fear to
+    tell you, for no mariner, unaided by an islander, could steer a
+    course to its coasts. And I can tell you little about the island for
+    reasons which, if you will forgive me, you would hardly understand.
+    I must tell you something of it, however, that you may know the
+    remarkable conditions which led to the introduction of Mr. Holland
+    to Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The island of Yaque," continued the prince, "or Arqua, as the name
+    was written by the ancient Ph&oelig;nicians, has been ruled by hereditary
+    monarchs since 1050 B.C., when it was settled."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What date did I understand you to say, sir?" demanded Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled faintly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am well aware," he said, "that to the western mind&mdash;indeed, to
+    any modern mind save our own&mdash;I shall seem to be speaking in
+    mockery. None the less, what I am saying is exact. It is believed
+    that the enterprises of the Ph&oelig;nicians in the early ages took them
+    but a short distance, if at all, beyond the confines of the
+    Mediterranean. It is merely known that, in the period of which I
+    speak, a more adventurous spirit began to be manifested, and the
+    Straits of Gibraltar were passed and settlements were made in
+    Iberia. But how far these adventurers actually penetrated has been
+    recorded only in those documents that are in the hands of my
+    people&mdash;descendants of the boldest of these mariners who pushed
+    their galleys out into the Atlantic. At this time the king of Tyre
+    was Abibaal, soon to be succeeded by his son Hiram, the friend, you
+    will remember, of King David,&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham, who did not go to the theatre for fear of exciting
+    his imagination, uttered the soft non-explosion which should have
+    been speech.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "King Abibaal," continued the prince, "who maintained his court in
+    great pomp, had a younger and favourite son who bore his own name.
+    He was a wild youth of great daring, and upon the accession of
+    Hiram to the throne he left Tyre and took command of a galley of
+    adventuresome spirits, who were among the first to pass the
+    straits and gain the open sea. The story of their wild voyage I
+    need not detail; it is enough to say that their trireme was
+    wrecked upon the coast of Yaque; and Abibaal and those who joined
+    him&mdash;among them many members of the court circle and even of the
+    royal family&mdash;settled and developed the island. And there the race
+    has remained without taint of admixture, down to the present day.
+    Of what was wrought on the island I can tell you little, though
+    the time will come when the eyes of the whole world will be
+    turned upon Yaque as the forerunner of mighty things. Ruled over
+    by the descendants of Abibaal, the islanders have dwelt in peace
+    and plenty for nearly three thousand years&mdash;until, in fact, less
+    than a year ago. Then the line thus traceable to King Hiram
+    himself abruptly terminated with the death of King Chelbes,
+    without issue."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again Mr. Frothingham attempted to speak, and again he collapsed
+    softly, without expression, according to his custom. As for St.
+    George, he was remembering how, when he first went to the paper, he
+    had invariably been sent to the anteroom to listen to the daily
+    tales of invention, oppression and projects for which a continual
+    procession of the more or less mentally deficient wished the
+    <i>Sentinel</i> to stand sponsor. St. George remembered in particular one
+    young student who soberly claimed to have invented wireless
+    telegraphy and who molested the staff for months. Was this olive
+    prince, he wondered, going to prove himself worth only a half-column
+    on a back page, after all?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I understand you to say," said St. George, with the weary
+    self-restraint of one who deals with lunatics, "that the line of
+    King Hiram, the friend of King David of Israel, became extinct less
+    than a year ago?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do not conceal your incredulity," he said liberally, "for I
+    forgive it. You see, then," he went on serenely, "how in Yaque the
+    question of the succession became engrossing. The matter was not
+    merely one of ascendancy, for the Yaquians are singularly free from
+    ambition. But their pride in their island is boundless. They see in
+    her the advance guard of civilization, the peculiar people to whom
+    have come to be intrusted many of the secrets of being. For I should
+    tell you that my people live a life that is utterly beyond the ken
+    of all, save a few rare minds in each generation. My people live
+    what others dream about, what scientists struggle to fathom, what
+    the keenest philosophers and economists among you can not formulate.
+    We are," said Prince Tabnit serenely, "what the world will be a
+    thousand years from now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings broke in plaintively, "that I hope
+    your servant, for instance, is not a sample of what the world is
+    coming to!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled indulgently, as if a child had laid a little,
+    detaining hand upon his sleeve.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be that as it may," he said evenly, "the throne of Yaque was still
+    empty. Many stood near to the crown, but there seemed no reason for
+    choosing one more than another. One party wished to name the head of
+    the House of the Litany, in Med, the King's city, who was the chief
+    administrator of justice. Another, more democratic than these,
+    wished to elevate to the throne a man from whose family we had won
+    knowledge of both perpetual motion and the Fourth Dimension&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled angelically, as one who resignedly sees the last
+    fragments of a shining hope float away. This quite settled it. The
+    olive prince was crazy. Did not St. George remember the old man in
+    the frayed neckerchief and bagging pockets who had brought to the
+    office of the <i>Sentinel</i> chart after chart about perpetual motion,
+    until St. George and Amory had one day told him gravely that they
+    had a machine inside the office then that could make more things go
+    for ever than he had ever dreamed of, though they had <i>not</i> said
+    that the machine was named Chillingworth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You have knowledge of both these things?" asked St. George
+    indulgently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yaque understood both those laws," said the prince quietly, "when
+    William the Conqueror came to England."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He hesitated for a moment and then, regardless of another soft
+    explosion from Mr. Frothingham's lips, he added:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you not see? Will you not understand? It is our knowledge of the
+    Fourth Dimension which has enabled us to keep our island a secret."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George suddenly thrilled from head to foot. What if he were
+    speaking the truth? What if this man were speaking the truth?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Moreover," resumed the prince, "there were those among us who had
+    long believed that new strength would come to my people by the
+    introduction of an inhabitant of one of the continents. His coming
+    would, however, necessitate his sovereignty among us, in fulfilment
+    of an ancient Ph&oelig;nician law, providing that the state, and every
+    satrapy therein, shall receive no service, either of blood or of
+    bond, nor enter into the marriage contract with an alien; from which
+    law only the royal house is exempt. Thus were the two needs of our
+    land to be served by the means to which we had recourse. For there
+    being no way to settle the difficulty, we vowed to leave the matter
+    to Chance, that great patient arbiter of destinies of which your
+    civilization takes no account, save to reduce it to slavery.
+    Accordingly each inhabitant of the island took a solemn oath to
+    await, with an open mind free from choice or prejudice, the
+    settlement of the event, certain that the gods would permit the
+    possible. Five days after this decision our watchers upon the hills
+    sighted a South African transport bound for the Azores to coal. A
+    hundred miles from our coast she was wrecked, and it was thought
+    that all on board had been lost. A submarine was ordered to the
+    spot&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mean," interrupted St. George, "that you were able to see
+    the wreck at that distance?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Certainly," said the prince. "Pray forgive me," he added winningly,
+    "if I seem to boast. It is difficult for me to believe that your
+    appliances are so immature. We were using steamship navigation and
+    limiting our vision at the time of Pericles, but the futility of
+    these was among our first discoveries."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Involuntarily St. George turned to Miss Holland. What would she
+    think, he found himself wondering. Her eyes were luminous and her
+    breath was coming quickly; he was relieved to find that she had not
+    the infectious vulgarity to doubt the possibility of what seemed
+    impossible. This was one of the qualities of Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham, who had assumed an air of polite interest and an
+    accurately cynical smile, and the manner of generously lending his
+    professional attention to any of the vagaries of the client. Mrs.
+    Hastings stirred uneasily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure," she said fretfully, "that I must be very stupid, but I
+    simply can <i>not</i> follow you. Why, you talk about things that don't
+    exist! My husband, who was a very practical and advanced man, would
+    have shown you at once that what you say is impossible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here was the attitude of the Commonplace the world over, thought St.
+    George: to believe in wireless telegraphy simply because it has
+    been found out, and to disbelieve in the Fourth Dimension because it
+    has not been.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can not explain these things," admitted the prince gravely, "and
+    I dare say that you could prove that they do not exist, just as a
+    man from another planet could show us to his own satisfaction that
+    there are no such things as music or colour."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Go on, please," said Olivia eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia, I'm sure," protested Mrs. Hastings, "I think it's very
+    unwomanly of you to show such an interest in these things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you bear with me for one moment, Mrs. Hastings?" begged the
+    prince, "and perhaps I shall be able to interest you. The submarine
+    returned, bringing the sole survivor of the wreck of the African
+    transport."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, now," Mrs. Hastings assured him blandly, "you are dealing with
+    things that can happen. My brother Otho, my niece's father, was just
+    this last year the sole survivor of the wreck of a very important
+    vessel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have the honour, Mrs. Hastings, to be narrating to you the
+    circumstances attending the discovery of your brother and Miss
+    Holland's father, after the wreck of that vessel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My father?" cried Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "After this manner, Chance had rewarded us. We crowned your father
+    King of Yaque."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0005"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER V
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    OLIVIA PROPOSES
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit's announcement was received by his guests in the
+    silence of amazement. If they had been told that Miss Holland's
+    father was secretly acting as King of England they could have been
+    no more profoundly startled than to hear stated soberly that he had
+    been for nearly a year the king of a cannibal island. For the
+    cannibal phase of his experience seemed a foregone conclusion. To
+    St. George, profoundly startled and most incredulous, the possible
+    humour of the situation made first appeal. The picture of an
+    American gentleman seated upon a gold throne in a leopard-skin coat,
+    ordering "oysters and foes" for breakfast, was irresistible.
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "But he shaved with a shell when he chose,<br>
+          'Twas the manner of Primitive Man"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+    floated through his mind, and he brought himself up sharply.
+    Clearly, somebody was out of his head, but it must not be he.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What?" cried Mrs. Hastings in two inelegant syllables, on the
+    second of which her uncontrollable voice rose. "My brother Otho, a
+    vestry-man at St. Mark's&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aunt Dora!" pleaded Olivia. "Tell us," she besought the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "King Otho I of Yaque," the prince was begining, but the title was
+    not to be calmly received by Mrs. Hastings.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>King</i> Otho!" she articulated. "Then&mdash;am I royalty?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All who may possibly succeed to the throne Blackstone holds to be
+    royalty," said the lawyer in an edictal voice, and St. George looked
+    away from Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>The Princess Olivia</i>!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "King Otho," continued the prince, "ruled wisely and well for seven
+    months, and it was at the beginning of that time that the imperial
+    submarine was sent to the Azores with letters and a packet to you.
+    The enterprise, however, was attended by so great danger of
+    discovery that it was never repeated. This is why, for so long, you
+    have had no word from the king. And now I come," said the prince
+    with hesitation, "to the difficult part of my narrative."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He paused and Mr. Frothingham rushed to his assistance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As the family solicitor," said the lawyer, pursing his lips, and
+    waving his hands, once, from the wrists, "would you not better
+    divulge to my ear alone, the&mdash;a&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;no!" flashed Olivia. "No, Mr. Frothingham&mdash;please."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince inclined his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will it surprise you, Miss Holland," he said, "to learn that I made
+    my voyage to this country expressly to seek you out?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To seek me?" exclaimed Olivia. "But&mdash;has anything happened to my
+    father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We hope not," replied the prince, "but what I have to tell will
+    none the less occasion you anxiety. Briefly, Miss Holland, it is
+    more than three months since your father suddenly and mysteriously
+    disappeared from Yaque, leaving absolutely no clue to his
+    whereabouts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A little cry broke from Olivia's lips that went to St. George's
+    heart. Mrs. Hastings, with a gesture that was quite wild and sent
+    her bonnet hopelessly to one side, burst into a volley of
+    exclamations and demands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who did it?" she wailed. "Who did it? Otho is a gentleman. He
+    would never have the bad taste to disappear, like all those
+    dreadful people's wives, if somebody hadn't&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear Madame," interposed Mr. Frothingham, "calm&mdash;calm
+    yourself. There are families of undisputed position which
+    record disappearances in several generations."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Please," pleaded Olivia. "Ah, tell us," she begged the prince
+    again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is, unfortunately, but little to tell, Miss Holland," said
+    the prince with sympathetic regret. "I had the honour, three months
+    ago, to entertain the king, your father, at dinner. We parted at
+    midnight. His Majesty seemed&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "His Majesty!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, smiling up at the opposite
+    wall as if her thought saw glories.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;in the best of health and spirits," continued the prince. "A
+    meeting of the High Council was to be held at noon on the following
+    day. The king did not appear. From that moment no eye in Yaque has
+    fallen upon him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One moment, your Highness," said St. George quickly; "in the
+    absence of the king, who presides over the High Council?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As the head of the House of the Litany, the chief administrator of
+    justice, it is I," said the prince with humility.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes," St. George said evenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But what have you done?" cried Olivia. "Have you had search made?
+    Have you&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everything," the prince assured her. "The island is not large. Not
+    a corner of it remains unvisited. The people, who were devoted to
+    the king, your father, have sought night and day. There is, it is
+    hardly right to conceal from you," the prince hesitated, "a
+    circumstance which makes the disappearance the more alarming."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell us. Keep nothing from us, I beg, Prince Tabnit," besought
+    Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For centuries," said the prince slowly, "there has been in the
+    keeping of the High Council of the island a casket, containing what
+    is known as the Hereditary Treasure. This casket, with some of the
+    finest of its jewels, was left by King Abibaal himself. Since his
+    time every king of the island has upon his death bequeathed to the
+    casket the finest jewel in his possession; and its contents are now
+    therefore of inestimable value. The circumstance to which I refer is
+    that two days after the disappearance of the king, your father,
+    which spread grief and alarm through all Yaque, it was discovered
+    that the Hereditary Treasure was gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gone!" burst from the lips of the prince's auditors.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As utterly as if the Fifth Dimension had received it," the prince
+    gravely assured them. "The loss, as you may imagine, is a grievous
+    one. The High Council immediately issued a proclamation that if the
+    treasure be not restored by a certain date&mdash;now barely two weeks
+    away&mdash;a heavy tax will be levied upon the people to make good, in
+    the coin of the realm, this incalculable loss. Against this the
+    people, though they are a people of peace, are murmurous."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Indeed!" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Great loyalty it is that sets up the
+    loss of their trumpery treasure over and above the loss of their
+    king, my brother Otho! If," she shrilled indignantly, "we are not
+    unwise to listen to this at all. What is it you think? What is it
+    your people think?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She raised her head until she had framed the prince in
+    tortoise-shell. Mrs. Hastings never held her head quite still. It
+    continually waved about a little, so that usually, even in peace, it
+    intimated indignation; and when actual indignation set in, the jet
+    on her bonnet tinkled and ticked like so many angry sparrows.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Madame," said the prince, "there are those among his Majesty's
+    subjects who would willingly lay down their lives for him. But he is
+    a stranger to us&mdash;come of an alien race; and the double
+    disappearance is a most tragic occurrence, which the burden of the
+    tax has emphasized. To be frank, were his Majesty to reappear in
+    Yaque without the treasure having been found&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh!" breathed Mrs. Hastings, "they would kill him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince shuddered and set his white teeth in his nether lip.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The gods forbid," he said. "Such primeval punishment is as unknown
+    among us as is war itself. How little you know my people; how
+    pitifully your instincts have become&mdash;forgive me&mdash;corrupted by
+    living in this barbarous age of yours, fumbling as you do at
+    civilization. With us death is a sacred rite, the highest tribute
+    and the last sacrifice to the Absolute. Our dying are carried to the
+    Temple of the Worshipers of Distance, and are there consecrated.
+    The limit of our punishment would be aerial exposure&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean?" cried St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I mean that in extreme cases we have, with due rite and ceremonial,
+    given a victim to an airship, without ballast or rudder, and
+    abundantly provisioned. Then with solemn ritual we have set him
+    adrift&mdash;an offering to the great spirits of space&mdash;so that he may
+    come to know. This," the prince paused in emotion, "this is the
+    worst that could befall your father."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How horrible!" cried Olivia. "Oh, how horrible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh," Mrs. Hastings moaned, "he was born to it. He was born to it.
+    When he was six he tied kites to his arms and jumped out the window
+    of the cupola and broke his collar bone&mdash;oh, Otho,&mdash;oh Heaven,&mdash;and
+    I made him eat oatmeal gruel three times a day when he was getting
+    well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit," said St. George, "I beg you not to jest with us.
+    Have consideration for the two to whom this man is dear."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am speaking truth to you," said the prince earnestly. "I do not
+    wish to alarm these ladies, but I am bound in honour to tell you
+    what I know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah then," said St. George, his narrowed eyes meeting those of the
+    prince, "since the taking of life is unknown to you in Yaque, will
+    you explain how it was that your servant adopted such unerring
+    means to take the life of Miss Holland? And why?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My servant," said the prince readily, "belongs to the lahnas or
+    former serfs of the island. Upon her people, now the owners of rich
+    lands, the tax will fall heavily. Crazed by what she considers her
+    people's wrongs following upon the coming of the stranger sovereign,
+    the poor creature must have developed the primitive instincts of
+    your race. Before coming to this country my servant had never heard
+    of murder save as a superseded custom of antiquity, like the
+    crucifying of lions. Her discovery of your daily practice of murder,
+    and of murder practised as a cure for crime&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sir," began the lawyer imposingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;wakened in her the primitive instincts of humanity, and her
+    instinct took the deplorable and fanatic form of your own courts,"
+    finished the prince. "Her bitterness toward his Majesty she sought
+    to visit upon his daughter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia sprang to her feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must go to my father. I must go to Yaque," she cried ringingly.
+    "Prince Tabnit, will you take me to him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Into the prince's face leaped a fire of admiration for her beauty
+    and her daring. He bowed before her, his lowered lashes making thick
+    shadows on his dark cheeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I insist upon this," cried little Olivia firmly, "and if you do not
+    permit it, Prince Tabnit, we must publish what you have told us
+    from one end of the city to the other."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, by Jove," thought St. George, "and one's country will have a
+    Yaque exhibit in its own department at the next world's fair."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia! My child! Miss Holland&mdash;," began the lawyer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince spoke tranquilly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is precisely this errand," he said, "that has brought me to
+    America. Do you not see that, in the event of your father's failure
+    to return to his people, you will eventually be Queen of Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George found himself looking fixedly at Mrs. Hastings' false
+    front as the only reality in the room. If in a minute Rollo was
+    going to waken him by bringing in his coffee, he was going to
+    throttle Rollo&mdash;that was all. Olivia Holland, an American heiress,
+    the hereditary princess of a cannibal island! St. George still
+    insisted upon the cannibal; it somehow gave him a foothold among the
+    actualities.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I!" cried Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings, brows lifted, lips parted, winked with lightning
+    rapidity in an effort to understand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George pulled himself together.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your Highness," he said sternly, "there are several things upon
+    which I must ask you to enlighten us. And the first, which I hope
+    you will forgive, is whether you have any direct proof that what
+    you tell us of Miss Holland's father is true."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's it! That's it!" Mr. Frothingham joined him with all the
+    importance of having made the suggestion. "We can hardly proceed in
+    due order without proofs, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince turned toward the curtain at the room's end and the youth
+    appeared once more, this time bearing a light oval casket of
+    delicate workmanship. It was of a substance resembling both glass
+    and metal of changing, rainbow tints, and it passed through St.
+    George's mind as he observed it that there must be, to give such a
+    dazzling and unreal effect, more than seven colours in the spectrum.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A spectrum of seven colours," said the prince at the same moment,
+    "could not, of course, produce this surface. I confess that until I
+    came to this country I did not know that you had so few colours. Our
+    spectrum already consists of twelve colours visible to the naked
+    eye, and at least five more are distinguishable through our powerful
+    magnifying glasses."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. It was as if he had suddenly been permitted
+    to look past the door that bars and threatens all knowledge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince unlocked the casket. He drew out first a quantity of
+    paper of extreme thinness and lightness on which, embossed and
+    emblazoned, was the coat of arms of the Hollands&mdash;a sheaf of wheat
+    and an unicorn's head&mdash;and this was surmounted by a crown.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This," said the prince, "is now the device upon the signet ring of
+    the King of Yaque, the arms of your own family. And here chances to
+    be a letter from your father containing some instructions to me. It
+    is true that writing has with us been superseded by wireless
+    communication, excepting where there is need of great secrecy. Then
+    we employ the alphabet of any language we choose, these being almost
+    disused, as are the Cuneiform and Coptic to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And how is it," St. George could not resist asking, "that you know
+    and speak the English?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled swiftly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To you," he said, "who delve for knowledge and who do not know that
+    it is absolute and to be possessed at will, this can not now be made
+    clear. Perhaps some day..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia had taken the paper from the prince and pressed it to her
+    lips, her eyes filling with tears. There was no mistaking that
+    evidence, for this was her father's familiar hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Otho always did write a fearful scrawl," Mrs. Hastings commented,
+    "his l's and his t's and his vowels were all the same height. I used
+    to tell him that I didn't know whatever people would think."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I may, moreover," continued the prince, "call to mind several
+    articles which were included in the packet sent from the Azores by
+    his Majesty. You have, for example, a tapestry representing an ibis
+    hunt; you have an image in pink sutro, or soft marble, of an ancient
+    Ph&oelig;nician god&mdash;Melkarth. And you have a length of stained glass
+    bearing the figure of the Tyrian sphinx, crucified, and surrounded
+    by coiled asps."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it is true," said Olivia, "we have all these things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, the trash must be quite expensive," observed Mrs. Hastings. "I
+    don't care much for so many colours myself, perhaps because I always
+    wear black; though I did wear light colours a good deal when I was a
+    girl."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What else, Mr. St. George?" inquired the prince pleasantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothing else," cried Olivia passionately. "I am satisfied. My
+    father is in danger, and I believe that he is in Yaque, for he would
+    never of his own will desert a place of trust. I must go to him.
+    And, Aunt Dora, you and Mr. Frothingham must go with me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Olivia!" wailed Mrs. Hastings, a different key for every
+    syllable, "think&mdash;consider! Is it the necessary thing to do? And
+    what would your poor dear uncle have done? And is there a better way
+    than his way? For I always say that it is not really necessary to do
+    as my poor dear husband would have done, providing only that we can
+    find a better way. Oh," she mourned, lifting her hands, "that this
+    frightful thing should come to me at my age. Otho may be married to
+    a cannibal princess, with his sons catching wild goats by the hair
+    like Tennyson and the whistling parrots&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Madame," said the prince coldly, "forgets what I have been saying
+    of my country."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do not forget," declared Mrs. Hastings sharply, "but being behind
+    civilization and being ahead of civilization comes to the same thing
+    more than once. In morals it does."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. Olivia's splendid daring in her passionate
+    decision to go to her father stirred him powerfully; moreover, her
+    words outlined a possible course of his own whose magnitude startled
+    him, and at the same time filled him with a sudden, dazzling hope.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But where is your island, Prince Tabnit?" he asked. "You've
+    naturally no consul there and no cable, since you are not even on
+    the map."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yaque," said the prince readily, "lies almost due southwest from
+    the Azores."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham stirred skeptically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But such an island," he said pompously, "so rich in material for
+    the archaeologist, the anthropologist, the explorer in all fields of
+    antiquity&mdash;ah, it is out of the question, out of the question!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is difficult," said the prince patiently, "most difficult for me
+    to make myself intelligible to you&mdash;as difficult, if you will
+    forgive me, as if you were to try to explain calculus to one of the
+    street boys outside. But directly your phase of civilization has
+    opened to you the secrets of the Fourth Dimension, much will be
+    discovered to you which you do not now discern or dream, and among
+    these, Yaque. I do not jest," he added wearily, "neither do I expect
+    you to believe me. But I have told you the truth. And it would be
+    impossible for you to reach Yaque save in the company of one of the
+    islanders to whom the secret is known. I can not explain to you, any
+    more than I can explain harmony or colour."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'm sure," cried Mrs. Hastings fretfully, "I don't know why
+    you all keep wandering from the subject so. Now, my brother Otho&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit,"&mdash;Olivia's voice never seemed to interrupt, but
+    rather to "divide evidence finely" at the proper moment&mdash;"how long
+    will it take us to reach Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George thrilled at that "us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My submarine," replied the prince, "is plying about outside the
+    harbour. I arrived in four days."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By the way," St. George submitted, "since your wireless system is
+    perfected, why can not we have news of your island from here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The curve of the earth," explained the prince readily, "prevents.
+    We have conquered only those problems with which we have had to
+    deal. The curve of the earth has of course never entered our
+    calculation. We have approached the problem from another
+    standpoint."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We have much to do, Prince Tabnit," said Olivia; "when may we
+    leave?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Command me," said Prince Tabnit, bowing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-morrow!" cried Olivia, "to-morrow, at noon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings' voice broke over the name like ice upon a
+    warm promontory. Mrs. Hastings' voice was suited to say "Keziah" or
+    "Katinka," not Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you go, Mr. Frothingham?" demanded Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham's long hands hung down and he looked as if she had
+    proposed a jaunt to Mars.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My physician has ordered a sea-change," he mumbled doubtfully, "my
+    daughter Antoinette&mdash;I&mdash;really&mdash;there is nothing in all my
+    experience&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings in tears was superintending the search for
+    both side-combs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aunt Dora," said Olivia, "you're not going to fail me now. Prince
+    Tabnit&mdash;at noon to-morrow. Where shall we meet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George listened, glowing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May I have the honour," suggested the prince, "of waiting upon you
+    at noon to conduct you? And I need hardly say that we undertake the
+    journey under oath of secrecy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anything&mdash;anything!" cried Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, my dear Olivia," breathed Mrs. Hastings weakly, "taking me, at
+    my age, into this awful place of Four Dimentias&mdash;or whatever it was
+    you said."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We will be ready to go with you at noon," said Olivia steadily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George held his peace as they made their adieux. A great many
+    things remained to be thought out, but one was clear enough.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The boy servant ran before them to the door. They made their way to
+    the street in the early dusk. A hurdy-gurdy on the curb was bubbling
+    over with merry discords, and was flanked by garrulous Italians with
+    push-carts, lighted by flaring torches. Men were returning from
+    work, children were quarreling, women were in doorways, and a
+    policeman was gossiping with the footman in a knot of watching
+    idlers. With a sigh that was like a groan, Mrs. Hastings sank back
+    on the cushions of the brougham.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel," she said, eyes closed, "as if I had been in a pagan temple
+    where they worship oracles and what's-his-names. What time is it? I
+    haven't an idea. Dear, dear, I want to get home and feel as if my
+    feet were on land and water again. I want some strong sleep and a
+    good sound cup of coffee, and then I shall know what's actually
+    what."
+</p>
+<p>
+    To St. George the slow drive up town was no less unreal than their
+    visit. His head was whirling, a hundred plans and speculations
+    filled his mind, and through these Mrs Hastings' chatter of
+    forebodings and the lawyer's patterned utterance hardly found their
+    way. At his own street he was set down, with Mrs. Hastings'
+    permission to call next day.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland gave him her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can not thank you," she said, "I can not thank you. But try to
+    know, won't you, what this has been to me. Until to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Until to-morrow. St. George stood in the brightness of the street
+    looking after the vanishing carriage, his hand tingling from her
+    touch. Then he went up to his apartment and met Rollo&mdash;sleek,
+    deferential, the acme of the polite barbarism in which the prince
+    had made St. George feel that he and his world were living. Ah, he
+    thought, as Rollo took his hat, this was no way to live, with the
+    whole world singing to be discovered anew.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He sat down before the trim little white table with its pretty china
+    and silver and its one rose-shaded candle, but the doubtful content
+    of comfort was suddenly not enough. The spirit of the road and of
+    the chase was in his veins, and he was aglow with "the taste for
+    pilgriming." He looked about on the simple luxury with which he had
+    surrounded himself, and he welcomed his farewell to it. And when
+    Rollo had gone up stairs to complain in person of the shad-roe, St.
+    George spoke aloud:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If Miss Holland sails for Yaque to-morrow on the prince's
+    submarine," he said, "<i>The Aloha</i> and I will follow her."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0006"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    TWO LITTLE MEN
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Next morning St. George was early astir. He had slept little and his
+    dreams had been grotesques. He threw up his blind and looked across
+    buildings to the grey park. The sky was marked with rose, the still
+    reservoir gave back colour upon its breast, and the tower upon its
+    margin might have been some guttural-christened castle on the Rhine.
+    St. George drew a deep breath of good, new air and smiled for the
+    sake of the things that the day was to bring him. He was in the
+    golden age when the youthful expectation of enjoyment is just
+    beginning to be savoured by the inevitable longing for more light,
+    and he seemed to himself to be alluringly near the verge of both.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His first care the evening before had been to hunt out
+    Chillingworth. He had found him in a theatre and had got him out to
+    the foyer and kept him through the third act, pouring in his ears as
+    much as he felt that it was well for him to know. Chillingworth had
+    drawn his square, brown hands through his hair and, in lieu of
+    copy-paper, had nibbled away his programme and paced the corner by
+    the cloak-room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It looks like a great big thing," said the city editor; "don't you
+    think it looks like a great big thing?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Extraordinarily so," assented St. George, watching him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you handle it alone, do you think?" Chillingworth demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, that depends," replied St. George. "I'll see it
+    through, if it takes me to Yaque. But I'd like you to promise, Mr.
+    Chillingworth, that you won't turn Crass loose at it while I'm gone,
+    with his feverish head-lines. Mrs. Hastings and her niece must be
+    spared that, at all events."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you be a sentimental idiot," snapped Chillingworth, "and
+    spoil the biggest city story the paper ever had. Why, this may draw
+    the whole United States into a row, and mean war and a new
+    possession and maybe consulates and governorships and one thing or
+    another for the whole staff. St. George, don't spoil the sport.
+    Remember, I'm dropsical and nobody can tell what may happen. By the
+    way, where did you say this prince man is?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, I didn't say," St. George had answered quietly. "If you'll
+    forgive me, I don't think I shall say."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you don't," ejaculated Chillingworth. "Well, you please be
+    around at eight o'clock in the morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George watched him walking sidewise down the aisle as he always
+    walked when he was excited. Chillingworth was a good sort at heart,
+    too; but given, as the bishop had once said of some one else, to
+    spending right royally a deal of sagacity under the obvious
+    impression that this is the only wisdom.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At his desk next morning Chillingworth gave to St. George a note
+    from Amory, who had been at Long Branch with <i>The Aloha</i> when the
+    letter was posted and was coming up that noon to put ashore
+    Bennietod.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May Cawthorne have his day off to-morrow and go with me?" the
+    letter ended. "I'll call up at noon to find out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yah!" growled Chillingworth, "it's breaking up the whole staff,
+    that's what it's doin'. You'll all want cut-glass typewriters next."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If I should sail to-day," observed St. George, quite as if he were
+    boarding a Sound steamer, "I'd like to take on at least two men. And
+    I'd like Amory and Cawthorne. You could hardly go yourself, could
+    you, Mr. Chillingworth?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I couldn't," growled Chillingworth, "I've got to keep my tastes
+    down. And I've got to save up to buy kid gloves for the staff. Look
+    here&mdash;" he added, and hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes?" St. George complied in some surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bennietod's half sick anyway," said Chillingworth, "he's thin as
+    water, and if you would care&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By all means then," St. George assented heartily, "I would care
+    immensely. Bennietod sick is like somebody else healthy. Will you
+    mind getting Amory on the wire when he calls up, and tell him to
+    show up without fail at my place at noon to-day? And to wait there
+    for me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne, with a pair of shears quite a yard long, was
+    sitting at his desk clipping jokes for the fiction page. He was
+    humming a weary little tune to the effect that "Billy Enny took a
+    penny but now he hadn't many&mdash;Lookie They!" with which he whiled
+    away the hours of his gravest toil, coming out strongly on the
+    "Lookie They!" until Benfy on the floor above pounded for quiet
+    which he never got.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cawthorne," said St. George, "it may be that I'm leaving to-night
+    on the yacht for an island out in the southeast. And the chief says
+    that you and Amory are to go along. Can you go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne's blue eyes met St. George's steadily for a moment,
+    and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can get the page done in an hour," he promised, "and I can pack
+    my thirty cents in ten minutes. Will that do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, this goes," he said. "Ask Chillingworth. Don't tell
+    any one else."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Billy Enny took a penny,'" hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect
+    tranquillity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand
+    doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to
+    face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away.
+    Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world
+    which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present
+    knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced
+    his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk
+    more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early
+    morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand
+    Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only
+    avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out
+    incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For
+    only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to
+    be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid
+    wonderment at crêpe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed
+    woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in
+    McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive
+    comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour
+    gone astray.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted
+    him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons
+    brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the
+    latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of
+    furniture remained.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find
+    the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and
+    he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could
+    have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls,
+    to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so
+    emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured
+    a title. But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted
+    and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable
+    characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the
+    prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and
+    questioned a group of boys in the passage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yup," shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation
+    distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement
+    as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, "he means de
+    bloke wid de black block. Aw, he lef' early dis mornin' wid 's junk
+    follerin.' Dey's two of 'em. Wot's he t'ink? Dis ain't no Nigger's
+    Rest. Dis yere's all Eyetalian."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street. It was not yet ten
+    o'clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and
+    for his life he could not have waited longer. Perhaps it was not
+    true at all; perhaps none of it had happened. The McDougle Street
+    part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth? But as he
+    sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better.
+    The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time,
+    and she had said "Until to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to
+    her apartment. He found the drawing-room in confusion&mdash;the furniture
+    covered with linen, the bric-à-brac gone, and three steamer trunks
+    strapped and standing outside the door. All of which mattered to him
+    less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and
+    very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had
+    been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober
+    little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he
+    could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.
+    She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To
+    complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before
+    the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and
+    a muffin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."
+</p>
+<p>
+    For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the
+    little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Really leaving," she assented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham
+    sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great
+    comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added
+    naïvely, "but he must take her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he
+    reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the
+    daughter of its sovereign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place
+    below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince,
+    it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to assure them
+    that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no
+    impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt
+    withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St.
+    George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a
+    world of uncertainty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided
+    between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear
+    lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have a muffin&mdash;do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in
+    America for a time&mdash;let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St.
+    George, I want&mdash;oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you
+    see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now
+    to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was
+    a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through
+    the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds
+    without packing a bag and feeding the peacocks and leaving, pinned
+    to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought.
+    "Forgive me&mdash;what are you going to do all alone there in that
+    strange land, and such a land?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he
+    was lost in anticipative admiration; when she was neither he admired
+    more than ever.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know," said Olivia gravely, "I only know that I must go.
+    You see that, do you not&mdash;that I must go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes," St. George assured her, "I do indeed, believe me. Don't
+    you think," he said, "that I might give you a lamp to rub if you
+    need help? And then I'll appear."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, in Yaque. I shall rise out of a jar like the Evil Genie; and
+    though I shall be quite helpless you will still have the lamp. And I
+    shall be no end glad to have appeared."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But suppose," said Olivia merrily, "that when I have eaten a
+    pomegranate or a potato or something in Yaque I forget all about
+    America? And when you step out of the jar I say 'Off with his head,'
+    by mistake. How shall I know it is you when the jar is opened?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall ask you what the population of Yaque is," he assured her,
+    "and how the island compares with Manhattan, and if this is your
+    first visit, and how you are enjoying your stay; and then you will
+    recognize the talk of civilization and spare me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she protested, "I've longed to say 'Off with his head' to too
+    many people who have said all that to me. And you mustn't say that a
+    holiday always seems like Sunday, either."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereat they both laughed, and it seemed an uncommonly pleasant
+    world, and even the sad errand that was taking Olivia to Yaque
+    looked like a hope.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then the talk ran on pleasantly, and things went very briskly
+    forward, and there was no dearth of fleet little smiles at this and
+    that. What was she to bring him from Yaque&mdash;a pet ibis? No, he had
+    no taste for ibises&mdash;unless indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension
+    ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a
+    magic field-glass, with which one might see what is happening at an
+    infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he
+    wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her
+    errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the
+    puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor
+    children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of
+    science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with
+    mere tricks of jars of genii instead of applied electricity and its
+    daring. What an Arabian Nights' Entertainment we might have had if
+    only Scheherazade had ever heard of the Present! As for the
+    thousand-and-one-nights, they would not have contained all her
+    invention. No wonder that the time went trippingly for the two who
+    were concerned in such bewildering speculation as the prince had
+    made possible and who were furthering acquaintanceship besides.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, at all events," begged St. George at length, "will
+    you remember something while you are away?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your kindness, always," she returned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But will you remember," said St. George with his boy's eagerness,
+    "that there is some one who hopes no less than you for your success,
+    and who will be infinitely proud of any command at all from you? And
+    will you remember that, though I may not be successful, I shall at
+    least be doing something to try to help you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are very good," she said gently, "I shall remember. For already
+    you have not only helped me&mdash;you have made the whole matter
+    possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And what of that," propounded St. George gloomily, "if I can't help
+    you just when the danger begins? I insist, Miss Holland, that it
+    takes far more good nature to see some one else set off at adventure
+    than it takes to go one's self. Won't you let me come back here at
+    twelve o'clock and go down with you to the boat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By all means," Olivia assented, "my aunt and I shall both be glad,
+    Mr. St. George. Then you can wish us well. What is a submarine
+    like," she wanted to know; "were you ever on one?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never, excepting a number of times," replied St. George, supremely
+    unconscious of any vagueness. He was rapidly losing count of all
+    events up to the present. He was concerned only with these things:
+    that she was here with him, that the time might be measured by
+    minutes until she would be caught away to undergo neither knew what
+    perils, and that at any minute Mrs. Hastings might escape from the
+    chemist's.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was
+    quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did
+    make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her
+    drawing-room had been untenanted. And in the meantime no one knows
+    what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so
+    perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon
+    the shore for a word of farewell. But, indeed, if it were not for
+    the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would
+    become very tame affairs. When the first man and maid said even the
+    most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the
+    right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion. Very likely
+    the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination.
+    Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the
+    preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it. And, enchantment
+    being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been
+    that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat
+    staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and
+    Olivia was taking her tea. Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very
+    literal interfering goddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so
+    that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent
+    and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness. But it
+    must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore
+    were "<i>les antipodes des grâces</i>." She was followed by a footman,
+    his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan
+    and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hastings
+    had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and
+    whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug. She sat
+    down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another
+    sort of energy and became fragments of talk. Mrs. Hastings was like
+    the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the goddess of silence, but
+    could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.
+</p>
+
+<a name="image-0002"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image2.jpg" width="314" height="450"
+alt="uncaptioned, St. George, Olivia, and Mrs. Hastings">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+
+<p>
+    "Good morning, Mr. St. George," she said. "I'm sure I've quite
+    forgotten everything. Olivia dear, I've had all the prescriptions
+    made up that I've ever taken to Rutledge's, because no one can tell
+    what the climate will be like, it's so low on the map. I've looked
+    up the Azores&mdash;that's where we get some of our choicest cheese. And
+    camphor&mdash;I've got a pound of camphor. And I must say positively that
+    I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the
+    camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now
+    it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound. And then the flaxseed,
+    Olivia dear. I've got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George doubted if she knew when he said good morning, although
+    she named him Mr. St. John, gave him permission to go to the boat,
+    hoped in one breath that he would come again to see them, and in the
+    next that he would send them a copy of whatever the <i>Sentinel</i> might
+    publish about them, in serene oblivion of the state of the
+    post-office department in Yaque. Mrs. Hastings, in short, was one of
+    the women who are thrown into violent mental convulsions by the
+    prospect of a journey; this was not at all because she was setting
+    sail specifically for Yaque, for the moment that she saw a porter or
+    a pier, though she was bound only for the Bronx or Staten Island,
+    she was affected in the same way.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As Olivia gave St. George her hand he came perilously near telling
+    her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he
+    were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the
+    submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator
+    bell for so long that the boy deliberately stopped on the floor
+    below and waited, with the diabolical independence of the American
+    lords of the lift, "for to teach 'im a lessing," this one explained
+    to a passing chamber-maid.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hurried to his apartment to leave a note for Amory who
+    was directed upon his arrival to bide there and await his host's
+    return. Then he paced the floor until it was time to go back to the
+    Boris, deaf to Rollo's solemn information that the dust comes up out
+    of the varnish of furniture during the night, like cream out of
+    milk. By the time he had boarded a down-town car, St. George had
+    tortured himself to distraction, and his own responsibility in this
+    submarine voyage loomed large and threatening. Therefore, it
+    suddenly assumed the proportion of mountains yet unseen when, though
+    it wanted ten minutes to twelve when he reached the Boris, his card
+    was returned by a faint polite clerk with the information that Mrs.
+    Hastings and Miss Holland had been gone from the hotel for half an
+    hour. There was a note for him in their box the clerk believed, and
+    presently produced it&mdash;a brief, regretful word from Olivia telling
+    him that the prince had found that they must leave fully an hour
+    earlier than he had planned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sick with apprehension, cursing himself for the ease and dexterity
+    with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St.
+    George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of
+    chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had
+    bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod
+    would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of
+    anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer
+    hallway and saw that which caused that confidence to balloon
+    smilingly back to support him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the vestibule of the Boris, deaf to the hovering attention of a
+    door-boy more curious than dutiful, stood two men of the stature and
+    complexion of Prince Tabnit of Yaque. They were dressed like the
+    youth who had answered the door of the prince's apartment, and they
+    were speaking softly with many gestures and evidently in some
+    perplexity. The drooping spirits of St. George soared to Heaven as
+    he hastened to them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are asking for Miss Holland, the daughter of King Otho of
+    Yaque," he said, with no time to smile at the pranks of the
+    democracy with hereditary titles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The men stared and spoke almost together.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We are," they said promptly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She is not here," explained St. George, "but I have attended to
+    some affairs for her. Will you come with me to my apartment where we
+    may be alone?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The men, who somehow made St. George think of tan-coloured
+    greyhounds with very gentle eyes, consulted each other, not with the
+    suspicion of the vulgar but with the caution of the thorough-bred.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pardon," said one, "if we may be quite assured that this is Miss
+    Holland's friend to whom we speak&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hesitated. The hall-boy listened with an air of polite
+    concern, and there were curious over-shoulder glances from the
+    passers-by. Suddenly St. George's face lighted and he went swiftly
+    through his pockets and produced a scrap of paper&mdash;the fragment that
+    had lain that morning on the floor of the prince's deserted
+    apartment, and that bore the arms of the King of Yaque. It was the
+    strangers' turn to regard him with amazement. Immediately, to St.
+    George's utmost embarrassment, they both bowed very low and
+    pronounced together:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pardon, adôn!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My name is St. George," he assured them, "and let's get into a
+    cab."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They followed him without demur.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George leaned back on the cushions and looked at them&mdash;lean
+    lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great
+    repose. They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had
+    felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley
+    Reformatory&mdash;as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way
+    rhymed with a word which he did not know.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is it," St. George asked as they rolled away, "what is it that
+    you have come to tell Miss Holland?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Only one of the men spoke, the other appearing content to show two
+    rows of exceptionally white teeth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May we not know, adôn," asked the man respectfully, "whether the
+    prince has given her his news? And if the prince is still in your
+    land?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The prince's servant, Elissa, has tried to stab Miss Holland and
+    has got herself locked up," St. George imparted without hesitation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    An exclamation of horror broke from both men.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To stab&mdash;to <i>kill</i>!" they cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so," said St. George, "and the prince, upon being discovered,
+    disclosed some very important news to Miss Holland, and she and her
+    friends started an hour ago for Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is well, that is well!" cried the little man, nodding, and
+    momentarily hesitated; "but yet his news&mdash;what news, adôn, has he
+    told her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    For a moment St. George regarded them both in silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, what news had he?" he asked briefly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The men answered readily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit was commissioned by the Yaquians to acquaint the
+    princess with the news of the strange disappearance of her father,
+    the king, and to supplicate her in his place to accept the
+    hereditary throne of Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jupiter!" said St. George under breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a flash the whole matter was clear to him. Prince Tabnit had
+    delivered no such message from the people of Yaque, but had
+    contented himself with the mere intimation that in some vanishing
+    future she would be expected to ascend the throne. And he had done
+    this only when Olivia herself had sought him out after an attempt
+    had been made upon her life by his servant. It seemed to St. George
+    far from improbable that the woman had been acting under the
+    prince's instructions and, that failing, he himself had appeared and
+    obligingly placed the daughter of King Otho precisely within the
+    prince's power. Now she was gone with him, in the hope of aiding her
+    father, to meet Heaven knew what peril in this pagan island; and he,
+    St. George, was wholly to blame from first to last.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good Heavens," he groaned, "are you sure&mdash;but are you sure?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is simple, adôn," said the man, "we came with this message from
+    the people of Yaque. A day before we were to land, Akko and I&mdash;I am
+    Jarvo&mdash;overheard the prince plan with the others to tell her
+    nothing&mdash;nothing that the people desire. When they knew that we had
+    heard they locked us up and we have only this morning escaped from
+    the submarine. If the prince has told her this message everything is
+    well. But as for us, I do not know. The prince has gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He told her nothing&mdash;nothing," said St. George, "but that her
+    father and the Hereditary Treasure have disappeared. And he has
+    taken her with him. She has gone with him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Deaf alike to their exclamations and their questions St. George sat
+    staring unseeingly through the window, his mind an abyss of fear.
+    Then the cab drew up at the door of his hotel and he turned upon the
+    two men precipitantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See," he cried, "in a boat on the open sea, would you two be at all
+    able to direct a course to Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Both men smiled suddenly and brilliantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But we have stolen a chart," announced Jarvo with great simplicity,
+    "not knowing what thing might befall."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George wrenched at the handle of the cab door. He had a glimpse
+    of Amory within, just ringing the elevator bell, and he bundled the
+    two little men into the lobby and dashed up to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on, old Amory," he told him exultingly. "Heaven on earth, put
+    out that pipe and pack. We leave for Yaque to-night!"
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0007"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    DUSK, AND SO ON
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Dusk on the tropic seas is a ceremony performed with reverence, as
+    if the rising moon were a priestess come among her silver vessels.
+    Shadows like phantom sails dip through the dark and lie idle where
+    unseen crafts with unexplained cargoes weigh anchor in mid-air. One
+    almost hears the water cunningly lap upon their invisible sides.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To Little Cawthorne, lying luxuriously in a hammock on the deck of
+    <i>The Aloha</i>, fancies like these crowded pleasantly, and slipped away
+    or were merged in snatches of remembered songs. His hands were
+    clasped behind his head, one foot was tapping the deck to keep the
+    hammock in motion while strange compounds of tune and time broke
+    aimlessly from his lips.
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "Meet me by moonlight alone,<br>
+           And then I will tell you a tale.<br>
+           Must be told in the moonlight alone<br>
+           In the grove at the end of the vale"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+    he caroled contentedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, the light of his pipe cheerfully glowing, lay at full length
+    in a steamer chair. <i>The Aloha</i> was bounding briskly forward, a
+    solitary speck on the bosom of darkening purple, and the men sitting
+    in the companionship of silence, which all the world praises and
+    seldom attains, had been engaging in that most entertaining of
+    pastimes, the comparison of present comfort with past toil. Little
+    Cawthorne's satisfaction flowered in speech.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Two weeks ago to-night," he said, running his hands through his
+    grey curls, "I took the night desk when Ellis was knocked out. And
+    two weeks ago to-morrow morning we were the only paper to be beaten
+    on the Fownes will story. Hi&mdash;you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Happy, Cawthorne?" Amory removed his pipe to inquire with idle
+    indulgence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Am I happy?" affirmed Little Cawthorne ecstatically in four tones,
+    and went on with his song:
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,<br>
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,<br>
+           But there's something about the moon's ray<br>
+           That is sweeter to you and to me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you make that up?" inquired Amory with polite interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I did if I want to," responded Little Cawthorne. "Everything's true
+    out here&mdash;go on, tell everything you like. I'll believe you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George came out of the dark and leaned on the rail without
+    speaking. Sometimes he wondered if he were he at all, and he liked
+    the doubt. He felt pleasantly as if he had been cut loose from all
+    old conditions and were sailing between skies to some unknown
+    planet. This was not only because of the strange waters rushing
+    underfoot but because of the flowering and singing of something
+    within him that made the world into which he was sailing an alien
+    place, heavenly desirable. A week ago that day <i>The Aloha</i> had
+    weighed anchor, and these seven days, in fairly fortunate weather,
+    her white nose had been cleaving seas to traverse which had so long
+    been her owner's dream; and yet her owner, in pleasant apostasy, had
+    turned his back upon the whole matter of what he had been used to
+    dream, and now ungratefully spent his time in trying to count the
+    hours to his journey's end.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Somewhere out yonder, he reflected, as he leaned on the rail, this
+    southern moonlight was flooding whatever scene <i>she</i> looked on; the
+    lapping of the same sea was in her ears; and his future and hers
+    might be dependent upon those two perplexed tan-coloured greyhounds
+    below. By which one would have said that matters had been going
+    briskly forward with St. George since the morning that he had
+    breakfasted with Olivia Holland.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Exactly when the end of the journey would be was not evident either
+    to him or to the two strange creatures who proposed to be his
+    guides. Or rather to Jarvo, who was still the spokesman; lean
+    little Akko, although his intelligence was unrivaled, being content
+    with monosyllables for stepping-stones while the stream of Jarvo's
+    soft speech flowed about him. Barnay, the captain, frankly
+    distrusted them both, and confided to St. George that "them two
+    little jool-eyed scuts was limbs av the old gint himself, and they
+    reminded him, Barnay, of a pair of haythen naygurs," than which he
+    could say no more. But then, Barnay's wholesale skepticism was his
+    only recreation, save talking about his pretty daughter "of school
+    age," and he liked to stand tucking his beard inside his collar and
+    indulging in both. In truth, Barnay, who knew the waters of the
+    Atlantic fairly well, was sorely tried to take orders from the two
+    little brown strangers who, he averred, consulted a "haythen
+    apparaytus" which they would cheerfully let him see but of which he
+    could "make no more than av the spach av a fish," and then directed
+    him to take courses which lay far outside the beaten tracks of the
+    high seas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, who had had several talks with them, was puzzled and
+    doubtful, and more than once confided to himself that the lives of
+    the passenger list of <i>The Aloha</i> might be worth no more than coral
+    headstones at the bottom of the South Atlantic. But he always
+    consoled himself with the cheering reflection that he had had to
+    come&mdash;there was no other way half so good. So <i>The Aloha</i> continued
+    to plow her way as serenely as if she were heading toward the white
+    cliffs of Dover and trim villas and a custom-house. And the sea lay
+    a blue, uninhabited glory save as land that Barnay knew about marked
+    low blades of smoke on the horizon and slipped back into blue
+    sheaths.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was the evening of the seventh day, and that noon Jarvo had
+    looked despondent, and Barnay had sworn strange oaths, and St.
+    George had been disquieted. He stood up now, going vaguely down into
+    his coat pockets for his pipe, his erect figure thrown in relief
+    against the hurrying purple. St. George was good to look at, and
+    Amory, with the moonlight catching the glass of his pince-nez,
+    smoked and watched him, shrewdly pondering upon exactly how much
+    anxiety for the success of the enterprise was occupying the breast
+    of his friend and how much of an emotion a good bit stronger. Amory
+    himself was not in love, but there existed between him and all who
+    were a special kinship, like that between a lover of music and a
+    musician.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne rose and shuffled his feet lazily across deck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where is that island, anyway?" he wanted to know, gazing
+    meditatively out to sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George turned as if the interruption was grateful.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The island. I don't see any island," complained Little Cawthorne.
+    "I tell you," he confided, "I guess it's just Chillingworth's little
+    way of fixing up a nice long vacation for us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They smiled at memory of Chillingworth's grudging and snarling
+    assents to even an hour off duty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From below came Bennietod, walking slowly. The seaman's life was not
+    for Bennietod, and he yearned to reach land as fervently as did St.
+    George, though with other anxiety. He sat down on the moon-lit deck
+    and his face was like that of a little old man with uncanny
+    shrewdness. His week among them had wrought changes in the head
+    office boy. For Bennietod was ambitious to be a gentleman. His
+    covert imitations had always amused St. George and Amory. Now in the
+    comparative freedom of <i>The Aloha</i> his fancy had rein and he had
+    adopted all the habits and the phrases which he had long reserved
+    and liked best, mixing them with scraps of allusions to things which
+    Benfy had encouraged him to read, and presenting the whole in his
+    native lower East-side dialect. Bennietod was Bowery-born and
+    office-bred, and this sad metropolitanism almost made of him a good
+    philosopher.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd like immensely to say something," observed St. George abruptly,
+    when his pipe was lighted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes. All right," shrilled Little Cawthorne with resignation, "I
+    suppose you all feel I'm the Jonah and you thirst to scatter me to
+    the whales."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I want to know," St. George went on slowly, "what you think. On my
+    life, I doubt if I thought at all when we set out. This all promised
+    good sport, and I took it at that. Lately, I've been wondering, now
+    and then, whether any of you wish yourselves well out of it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    For a moment no one spoke. To shrink from expression is a
+    characteristic in which the extremes of cultivation and mediocrity
+    meet; the reserve of delicacy in St. George and Amory would have
+    been a reserve of false shame in Bennietod, and of an exaggerated
+    sense of humour in Little Cawthorne. It was not remarkable that from
+    the moment the enterprise had been entered upon, its perils and its
+    doubtful outcome had not once been discussed. St. George vaguely
+    reckoned with this as he waited, while Amory smoked on and blew
+    meditative clouds and regarded the bowl of his pipe, and Little
+    Cawthorne ceased the motion of his hammock, and Bennietod hugged his
+    knees and looked shrewdly at the moon, as if he knew more about the
+    moon than he would care to tell. St. George felt his heart sink a
+    little. Then Little Cawthorne rose and squared valiantly up to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What," inquired the little man indignantly, "are you trying to do?
+    Pick a fight?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at him in surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Because if you are," continued little Cawthorne without preamble,
+    "we're three to one. And three of us are going to Yaque. We'll put
+    you ashore if you say so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled at him gratefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;Bennietod?" inquired Little Cawthorne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Bennietod, pale and manifestly weak, grinned cheerfully and fumbled
+    in sudden abashment at an amazing checked Ascot which he had derived
+    from unknown sources.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bes' t'ing t'ever I met up wid," he assented, "ef de deck'd lay
+    down levil. I'm de sonny of a sea-horse if it ain't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Amory?" demanded the little man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked along his pipe and took it briefly from his lips and
+    shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't say these things," he pleaded in his pleasant drawl, "or I'll
+    swear something horrid."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George merely held his pipe by the bowl and nodded a little, but
+    the hearts of all of them glowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After dinner they sat long on deck. Rollo, at his master's
+    invitation, joined them with a mandolin, which he had been
+    discovered to play considerably better than any one else on board.
+    Rollo sat bolt upright in a reclining chair to prove that he did not
+    forget his station and strummed softly, and acknowledged approval
+    with:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir. A little music adds an air to any occasion, <i>I</i> always
+    think, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The moon was not yet full, but its light in that warm world was
+    brilliant. The air was drowsy and scented with something that might
+    have been its own honey or that might have come from the strange
+    blooms, water-sealed below. Now and then St. George went aside for a
+    space and walked up and down the deck or sent below for Jarvo. Once,
+    as Jarvo left St. George's side, Little Cawthorne awoke and sat
+    upright and inquiring, in his hammock.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What <i>is</i> the matter with his feet?" he inquired peevishly. "I
+    shall certainly ask him directly."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's the seventh day out," Amory observed, "and still nobody
+    knows."
+</p>
+<p>
+    For Jarvo and Akko had another distinction besides their diminutive
+    stature and greyhound build. Their feet, clad in soft soleless
+    shoes, made of skins, were long and pointed and of almost uncanny
+    flexibility. It had become impossible for any one to look at either
+    of the little men without letting his eyes wander to their curiously
+    expressive feet, which, like "courtier speech," were expressive
+    without revealing anything.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I t'ink," Bennietod gave out, "dat dey're lost Eyetalian
+    organ-grinder monkeys, wid huming intelligence, like Bertran's
+    Bimi."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What a suspicious child it is," yawned Little Cawthorne, and went
+    to sleep again. Toward midnight he awoke, refreshed and happy, and
+    broke into instant song:
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,<br>
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,<br>
+           But there's something about the moon's ray&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+    he was chanting in perfect tonelessness, when St. George cried out.
+    The others sprang to their feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lights!" said St. George, and gave the glass to Amory, his hand
+    trembling, and very nearly snatched it back again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Far to the southeast, faint as the lost Pleiad, a single golden
+    point pricked the haze, danced, glimmered, was lost, and reappeared
+    to their eager eyes. The impossibility of it all, the impossibility
+    of believing that they could have sighted the lights of an island
+    hanging there in the waste and hitherto known to nobody simply
+    because nobody knew the truth about the Fourth Dimension did not
+    assail them. So absorbed had St. George become in the undertaking,
+    so convincing had been the events that led up to it, and so ready
+    for anything in any dimension were his companions, that their
+    excitement was simply the ancient excitement of lights to the
+    mariner and nothing more; save indeed that to St. George they spoke
+    a certain language sweeter than the language of any island lying in
+    the heart of mere science or mere magic either.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When it became evident that the lights were no will-o'-the-wisps,
+    born of the moon and the void, but the veritable lights that shine
+    upon harbours, Bennietod tumbled below for Jarvo, who came on deck
+    and gazed and doubted and well-nigh wept for joy and poured forth
+    strange words and called aloud for Akko. Akko came and nodded and
+    showed white teeth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-morrow," he said only.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Barnay came.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fwhat matther?" He put it cynically, scowling critically at Jarvo
+    and Akko. "All in the way av fair fight, that'll be about Mor-rocco,
+    if I've the full av my wits about me, an' music to my eyes, by the
+    same token."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo fixed him with his impenetrable look.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the light of the king's palace on the summit of Mount
+    Khalak," he announced simply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The light of the king's palace. St. George heard and thrilled with
+    thanksgiving. It would be then the light at her very threshold,
+    provided the impossible is possible, as scientists and devotees have
+    every reason to think. But was she there&mdash;was she there? If there
+    was an oracle for the answer, it was not St. George. The little
+    white stars danced and signaled faintly on the far horizon. Whatever
+    they had to reveal was for nearer eyes than his.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The glass passed from hand to hand, and in turn they all swept the
+    low sky where the faint points burned; but when some one had cried
+    that the lights were no longer visible, and the others had verified
+    the cry by looking blankly into a sudden waste of milky black&mdash;black
+    water, pale light&mdash;and turned baffled eyes to Jarvo, the little man
+    spoke smoothly, not even reaching a lean, brown hand for the glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But have no fear, adôn," he reassured them, "the chart is not
+    exact&mdash;it is that which has delayed us. It will adjust itself. The
+    light may long disappear, but it will come again. The gods will
+    permit the possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They looked at one another doubtfully when the two little brown men
+    had gone below, where Barnay had immediately retired, tucking his
+    beard in his collar and muttering sedition. If the two strange
+    creatures were twin Robin Goodfellows perpetrating a monstrous
+    twentieth century prank, if they were gigantic evolutions of Puck
+    whose imagination never went far beyond threshing corn with shadowy
+    flails, at least this very modern caper demanded respect for so
+    perfectly catching the spirit of the times. At all events it was
+    immensely clever of them to have put their finger upon the public
+    pulse and to have realized that the public imagination is ready to
+    believe anything because it has seen so much proved. Still, "science
+    was faith once"; and besides, to St. George, charts and compasses of
+    all known and unknown systems of seamanship were suddenly become
+    but the dead letter of the law. The spirit of the whole matter was
+    that Olivia might be there, under the lights that his own eyes would
+    presently see again. "Who, remembering the first kind glance of her
+    whom he loves, can fail to believe in magic?" It is very likely that
+    having met Olivia at all seemed at that moment so wonderful to St.
+    George that any of the "frolic things" of science were to be
+    accepted with equanimity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For an hour or more the moon, flooding the edge of the deck of <i>The
+    Aloha</i>, cast four shadows sharply upon the smooth boards. Lined up
+    at the rail stood the four adventurers, and the glass passed from
+    one to another like the eye of the three Grey Sisters. The far
+    beacon appeared and disappeared, but its actuality might not be
+    doubted. If Jarvo and Akko were to be trusted, there in the velvet
+    distance lay Yaque, and Med, the King's City, and the light upon the
+    very palace of its American sovereign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's pulses leaped and trembled. Amory lifted lazy lids and
+    watched him with growing understanding and finally, upon a pretext
+    of sleep, led the others below. And St. George, with a sense of
+    joyful companionship in the little light, paced the deck until dawn.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0008"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VIII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    By afternoon the island of Yaque was an accomplished fact of
+    distinguishable parts. There it lay, a thing of rock and green, like
+    the islands of its sister latitudes before which the passing ships
+    of all the world are wont to cast anchor. But having once cast
+    anchor before Yaque the ships of all the world would have had great
+    difficulty in landing anybody.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sheer and almost smoothly hewn from the utmost coast of the island
+    rose to a height of several hundred feet one scarcely deviating wall
+    of rock; and this apparently impregnable wall extended in either
+    direction as far as the sight could reach. Above the natural rampart
+    the land sloped upward still in steep declivities, but cut by
+    tortuous gorges, and afar inland rose the mountain upon whose summit
+    the light had been descried. There the glass revealed white towers
+    and columns rising from a mass of brilliant tropical green, and now
+    smitten by the late sun; but save these towers and columns not a
+    sign of life or habitation was discernible. No smoke arose, no
+    wharf or dock broke the serene outline of the black wall lapped by
+    the warm sea; and there was no sound save that of strong torrents
+    afar off. Lonely, inscrutable, the great mass stood, slightly
+    shelved here and there to harbour rank and blossomy growths of green
+    and presenting a rugged beauty of outline, but apparently as
+    uninhabitable as the land of the North Silences.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Consternation and amazement sat upon the faces of the owner of <i>The
+    Aloha</i> and his guests as they realized the character of the
+    remarkable island. St. George and Amory had counted upon an
+    adventure calling for all diplomacy, but neither had expected the
+    delight of hazard that this strange, fairy-like place seemed about
+    to present. Each felt his blood stirring and singing in his veins at
+    the joy of the possibilities that lay folded before them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We shall be obliged to land upon the east coast then, Jarvo?"
+    observed St. George; "but how long will it take us to sail round the
+    island?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Very long," Jarvo responded, "but no, adôn, we land on this coast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How is that possible?" St. George asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, hi&mdash;you," said Little Cawthorne, "I'm a goat, but I'm no
+    mountain goat. See the little Swiss kid skipping from peak to peak
+    and from crag to crag&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do we scale the wall?" inquired St. George, "or is there a passage
+    in the rock?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Bennietod hugged himself in uncontrollable ecstasy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hully Gee, a submarine passage, in under de sea, like Jules Werne,"
+    he said in a delight that was almost awe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is a way over the rock," said Jarvo, "partly hewn, partly
+    natural, and this is known to the islanders alone. That way we must
+    take. It is marked by a White Blade blazoned on the rock over the
+    entrance of the submarines. The way is cunningly concealed&mdash;hardly
+    will the glass reveal it, adôn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Barnay shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've a bad time comin' with the home-sickness," he prophesied,
+    tucking his beard far down in his collar until he looked, for
+    Barnay, smooth-shaven. "I've sailed the sou' Atlantic up an' down
+    fer a matther av four hundhred years, more or less, an' I niver as
+    much as seed hide <i>nor</i> hair av the place before this prisint. There
+    ain't map or chart that iver dhrawed breath that shows ut, new or
+    old. Ut's been lifted out o' ground to be afther swallowin' us in&mdash;a
+    sweet dose will be the lot av us, mesilf with as foine a gir-rl av
+    school age as iver you'll see in anny counthry."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah yes, Barnay," said St. George soothingly&mdash;but he would have
+    tried now to soothe a man in the embrace of a sea-serpent in just
+    the same absent-minded way, Amory thought indulgently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sun was lowering and birds of evening were beginning to brood
+    over the painted water when <i>The Aloha</i> cast anchor. In the late
+    light the rugged sides of the island had an air of almost sinister
+    expectancy. There was a great silence in their windless shelter
+    broken only by the boom and charge of the breakers and the gulls and
+    choughs circling overhead, winging and dipping along the water and
+    returning with discordant cries to their crannies in the black rock.
+    Before the yacht, blazoned on a dark, water-polished stratum of the
+    volcanic stone, was the White Blade which Jarvo told them marked the
+    subterranean entrance to the mysterious island.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George and his companions and Barnay, Jarvo and Akko were on
+    deck. Rollo, whose soul did not disdain to be valet to a steam
+    yacht, was tranquilly mending a canvas cushion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The adôn will wait until sunrise to go ashore?" asked Jarvo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Sunrise</i>!" cried St. George. "Heaven on earth, no. We'll go now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was no need to ask the others. Whatever might be toward, they
+    were eager to be about, though Rollo ventured to St. George a
+    deprecatory: "You know, sir, one can't be too careful, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you prefer to stay aboard?" St. George put it quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, no, sir," said Rollo with a grieved face, "one should meet
+    danger with a light heart, sir," and went below to pack the
+    oil-skins.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hear me now," said Barnay in extreme disfavour. "It's I that am to
+    lay hereabouts and wait for you, sorr? Lord be good to me, an' fwhat
+    if she lays here tin year', and you somewheres fillin' the eyes av
+    the aygles with your brains blowed out, neat?" he demanded
+    misanthropically. "Fwhat if she lays here on that gin'ral theory
+    till she's rotted up, sorr?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now, Barnay," said St. George grimly, "you couldn't have an
+    easier career."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne, from leaning on the rail staring out at the
+    island, suddenly pulled himself up and addressed St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here we are," he complained, "here has been me coming through the
+    watery deep all the way from Broadway, with an octopus clinging to
+    each arm and a dolphin on my back, and you don't even ask how I
+    stood the trip. And do you realize that it's sheer madness for the
+    five of us to land on that island together?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?" asked St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little man shook his grey curls.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What if it's as Barnay says?" he put it. "What if they should bag
+    us all&mdash;who'll take back the glad news to the harbour? Lord, you
+    can't tell what you're about walking into. You don't even know the
+    specific gravity of the island," he suggested earnestly. "How do
+    you know but your own weight will flatten you out the minute you
+    step ashore?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed. "He thinks he is reading the fiction page," he
+    observed indulgently. "Still, I fancy there is good sense on the
+    page, for once. We don't know anything about anything. I suppose we
+    really ought not to put all five eggs in one basket. But, by Jove&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked over at Amory with troubled eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As host of this picnic," he said, "I dare say I ought to stay
+    aboard and let you fellows&mdash;but I'm hanged if I will."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne reflected, frowning; and you could as well have
+    expected a bird to frown as Little Cawthorne. It was rather the name
+    of his expression than a description of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Suppose," he said, "that Bennietod and I sit rocking here in this
+    bay&mdash;if it is a bay&mdash;while you two rest your chins on the top of
+    that ledge of rock up there, and look over. And about to-morrow or
+    day after we two will venture up behind you, or you could send one
+    of the men back&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My thunder," said Bennietod wistfully, "ain't I goin' to get to
+    climb in de pantry window at de palace&mdash;nor fire out of a
+    loophole&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bennietod an' I couldn't talk to a prince anyway," said Little
+    Cawthorne; "we'd get our language twisted something dizzy, and
+    probably tell him 'yes, ma'am.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's eyes softened as he looked at the little man. He knew
+    well enough what it cost him to make the suggestion, which the good
+    sense of them all must approve. Not only did Little Cawthorne always
+    sacrifice himself, which is merely good breeding, but he made
+    opportunities to do so, which is both well-bred and virtuous. When
+    Rollo came up with the oil-skins they told him what had been
+    decided, and Rollo, the faithful, the expressionless, dropped his
+    eyelids, but he could not banish from his voice the wistfulness that
+    he might have been one to stay behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sometimes it <i>is</i> best for a person to change his mind, sir," was
+    his sole comment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently the little green dory drew away from <i>The Aloha</i>, and they
+    left her lying as much at her ease as if the phantom island before
+    her were in every school-boy's geography, with a scale of miles and
+    a list of the principal exports attached.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If we had diving dresses, adôn," Jarvo suggested, "we might have
+    gone down through the sluice and entered by the lagoon where the
+    submarines pass."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jove," said Amory, trying to row and adjust his pince-nez at the
+    same time, "Chillingworth will never forgive us for missing that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You couldn't have done it," shouted Little Cawthorne derisively,
+    from the deck of the yacht, "you didn't wear your rubbers. If
+    anybody sticks a knife in you send up a r-r-r-ocket!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The landing, effected with the utmost caution, was upon a flat
+    stone already a few inches submerged by the rising tide. Looking up
+    at the jagged, beetling world above them their task appeared
+    hopeless enough. But Jarvo found footing in an instant, and St.
+    George and Amory pressed closely behind him, Rollo and little Akko
+    silently bringing up the rear and carrying the oil-skins. Slowly and
+    cautiously as they made their way it was but a few minutes until the
+    three standing on the deck, and Barnay open-mouthed in the dory, saw
+    the sinuous line of the five bodies twist up the tortuous course
+    considerably above the blazoned emblem of the White Blade.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever
+    before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble
+    and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent,
+    perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from
+    below it had appeared. But it seemed interminable. Even when the sea
+    lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of
+    <i>The Aloha</i> were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued
+    to stretch upward, melting into the sky's late blue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk
+    came swiftly out of the east. At snail's pace, now with heads bent
+    to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up by the arms or to
+    leap a wicked-looking crevice, the four took their way up the black
+    side of the rock. Birds of the cliffs, disturbed from long rest,
+    wheeled and screamed about them, almost brushing their faces with
+    long, fearless wings. There was an occasional shelf where, with
+    backs against the wall spotted with crystals of feldspar, they
+    waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge. Great
+    slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of
+    calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava
+    covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp
+    shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray. Gradually rock-slides
+    and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches,
+    but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral crevasses
+    made the vague trail slippery and the occasional earth sodden and
+    treacherous. For a quarter of a mile their way lay over a kind of
+    porous gravel into which their feet sank, and beyond at the summit
+    of a ridge Jarvo halted and threw back to them a summary warning to
+    prepare for "a long leap." A sharp angle of rock, jutting out, had
+    been split down the middle by some ancient force&mdash;very likely a
+    Paleozoic butterfly had brushed it with its wing&mdash;and the edges had
+    been worn away in a treacherous slope to the very lip of the
+    crumbling promontory. From this edge to the edge of the opposite
+    abutment there was a gap of wicked width, and between was a sheer
+    drop into space wherefrom rose the sound of tumbling waters. When
+    Jarvo had taken the leap, easily and gracefully, alighting on the
+    other side like the greyhound that he resembled, and the others,
+    following, had cleared the edge by as safe a margin as if the abyss
+    were a minor field-day event, St. George and Amory looked back with
+    sudden wonder over the path by which they had come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel as if I weighed about ninety pounds," said St. George; "am I
+    fading away or anything?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory stood still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was thinking the same thing," he said. "By Jove&mdash;do you
+    suppose&mdash;what if Little Cawthorne hit the other end of the
+    nail, as usual? Suppose the specific gravity&mdash;suppose there is
+    something&mdash;suppose it doesn't hold good in this dimension that
+    a body&mdash;by Jove," said Amory, "wouldn't that be the deuce?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at Jarvo, bounding up the stony way as easily as
+    if he were bounding down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now," he said, "you know on the moon an ordinary man would
+    weigh only twenty-six or seven pounds. Why not here? We aren't held
+    down by any map!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They laughed at the pleasant enormity of the idea and were hurrying
+    on when Akko, behind them, broke his settled silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In America," he said, "a man feels like a mountain. Here he feels
+    like a man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean by that?" demanded St. George uneasily. But Akko
+    said no more, and St. George and Amory, with a disquieting idea that
+    each was laughing at the other, let the matter drop.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From there on the way was easier, leveling occasionally, frequently
+    swelling to gentle ridges, and at last winding up a steep trail that
+    was not difficult to keep in spite of the fast falling night. And at
+    length Jarvo, rounding a huge hummock where converging ridges met,
+    scrambled over the last of these and threw himself on the ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now," he said simply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The two men stood beside him and looked down. It seemed to St.
+    George that they looked not at all upon a prospect but upon the
+    sudden memory of a place about which he might have dreamed often and
+    often and, waking, had not been able to remember, though its
+    familiarity had continued insistently to beat at his heart; or that
+    in what was spread before him lay the satisfaction of Burne-Jones'
+    wistful definition of a picture: "... a beautiful, romantic dream of
+    something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any
+    light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only
+    desire..." yet it was to St. George as if he had reached no strange
+    land, no alien conditions; but rather that he had come home. It was
+    like a home-coming in which nothing is changed, none of the little
+    improvements has been made which we resent because no one has
+    thought to tell us of them; but where everything is even more as one
+    remembers than one knew that one remembered.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0003"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image3.jpg" width="294" height="450"
+alt="uncaptioned, view of city and mountain castle">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<p>
+    At his feet lay a pleasant valley filled with the purple of deep
+    twilight. Far below a lagoon caught the late light and spread it in
+    a pattern among hidden green. In the midst of the valley towered the
+    mountain whose summit, royally crowned by shining towers, had been
+    visible from the open sea. At its feet, glittering in the abundant
+    light shed upon its white wall and dome and pinnacle, stood Med, the
+    King's City&mdash;but its light was not the light of the day, for that
+    was gone; nor of the moon, not risen; and no false lights vexed the
+    dark. Yet he was looking into a cup of light, as clear as the light
+    in a gazing-crystal and of a quality as wholly at variance with
+    reality. The rocky coast of Yaque was literally a massive, natural
+    wall; and girt by it lay the heart of the island, fertile and
+    populous and clothed in mystery. This new face which Nature turned
+    to him was a glorified face, and some way <i>it meant what he meant</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was off for a few steps, trampling impatiently over the
+    coarse grass of the bank. Somewhere in that dim valley&mdash;was she
+    there, was she there? Was she in trouble, did she need him, did she
+    think of him? St. George went through the ancient, delicious list
+    as conscientiously as if he were the first lover, and she were the
+    first princess, and this were the first ascent of Yaque that the
+    world had ever known. For by some way of miracle, the mystery of the
+    island was suddenly to him the very mystery of his love, and the two
+    so filled his heart that he could not have told of which he was
+    thinking. That which had lain, shadowy and delicious, in his soul
+    these many days&mdash;not so very many, either, if one counts the
+    suns&mdash;was become not only a thing of his soul but a thing of the
+    outside world, almost of the visible world, something that had
+    existed for ever and which he had just found out; and here, wrapped
+    in nameless light, lay its perfect expression. When a shaft of
+    silver smote the long grass at his feet, and the edge of the moon
+    rose above the mountain, St. George turned with a poignant
+    exultation&mdash;did a mere victory over half a continent ever make a man
+    feel like that?&mdash;and strode back to the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on," he called ringingly in a voice that did everything but
+    confess in words that something heavenly sweet was in the man's
+    mind, "let's be off!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory was carefully lighting his pipe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel sort of tense," he explained, "as if the whole place would
+    explode if I threw down my match. What do you think of it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George did not answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a place where all the lines lead up," he was saying to
+    himself, "as they do in a cathedral."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The four went the fragrant way that led to the heart of the island.
+    First the path followed the high bank the branches of whose tropical
+    undergrowth brushed their faces with brief gift of perfume. On the
+    other side was a wood of slim trunks, all depths of shadow and
+    delicacies of borrowed light in little pools. Everywhere, everywhere
+    was a chorus of slight voices, from bark and air and secret moss,
+    singing no forced notes of monotone, but piping a true song of the
+    gladness of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It
+    came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would
+    always sound if, somehow, one were able to hear the sweetness that
+    poured itself out. Even that familiar sense in the night-woods that
+    something is about to happen was deliciously present with him; and
+    though Amory went on quietly enough, St. George swam down that green
+    way, much as one dreams of floating along a street, above-heads.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The path curved, and went hesitatingly down many terraces. Here,
+    from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged
+    into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering
+    upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to
+    meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than
+    any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a
+    veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the
+    censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and
+    curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see
+    about them. Yet it did not occur to either to distrust the
+    phenomenon, or to regard it as unnatural or the fruit of any
+    unnatural law. It was somehow quite as convincing to them as is his
+    first sight of electric light to the boy of the countryside, and no
+    more to be regarded as witchcraft.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. It was as if he were on the threshold of
+    Far-Away, within the Porch of the Morning of some day divine. The
+    place was so poignantly like the garden of a picture that one has
+    seen as a child, and remembered as a place past all speech
+    beautiful, and yet failed ever to realize in after years, or to make
+    any one remember, or, save fleetingly in dreams to see once more,
+    since the picture-book is never, never chanced upon again. Sometimes
+    he had dreamed of a great sunny plain, with armies marching;
+    sometimes he had awakened at hearing the chimes, and fancied
+    sleepily that it was infinite music; sometimes, in the country in
+    the early morning, he had had an unreasonable, unaccountable moment
+    of perfect happiness: and now the fugitive element of them all
+    seemed to have been crystallized and made his own in that floating
+    walk down the wooded terraces of this unknown world. And yet he
+    could not have told whether the element was contained in that
+    beauty, or in his thought of Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At last they emerged upon a narrow, grassy terrace where white steps
+    mounted to a wide parapet. Jarvo ran up the steps and turned:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Behold Med, adôn," he said modestly, as if he had at that moment
+    stirred it up in a sauce-pan and baked it before their astonished
+    eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were standing at the top of an immense flight of steps
+    extending as far to right and left as they could see, and leading
+    down by easy stages and wide landings to the white-paved city
+    itself. The clear light flooded the scene&mdash;lucid, vivid,
+    many-peopled. Far as the eye could see, broad streets extended,
+    lined with structures rivaling in splendour and beauty those
+    unforgotten "topless towers." Temples, palaces, and public buildings
+    rose, storey upon storey, built of hewn stones of great size; and
+    noble arches faced an open square before a temple of colossal
+    masonry crowning an eminence in the centre of the city. Directly in
+    line with this eminence rose the mountain upon whose summit stood
+    the far-seen pillars where burned the solitary light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    If an enchanted city had risen from the waves because some one had
+    chanced to speak the right word, it could have been no more
+    bewildering; and yet the look of this city was so substantial, so
+    adapted to all commonplace needs, so essentially the scene of
+    every-day activity and purpose, that dozens of towns of petty
+    European principalities seem far less actual and practicable homes
+    of men. Busy citizens hurrying, the bark of a dog, the mere tone of
+    a temple bell spoke the ordinary occupations of all the world; and
+    upon the chief street the moon looked down as tranquilly as if the
+    causeway were a continuation of Fifth Avenue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But it was as if the spirit of adventure in St. George had suddenly
+    turned and questioned him, saying:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What of Olivia?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    For Olivia gone to a far-away island to find her father was subject
+    of sufficient anxiety; but Olivia in the power of a pretender who
+    might have at command such undreamed resources was more than cool
+    reason could comprehend. That was the principal impression that Med,
+    the King's City, made upon St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To the right, adôn," Jarvo was saying, "where the walls are
+    highest&mdash;that is the palace of the prince, the Palace of the
+    Litany."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the king's palace?" St. George asked eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo lifted his face to the solitary summit light upon the
+    mountain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But how does one ascend?" cried St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By permission of Prince Tabnit," replied Jarvo, "one is borne up
+    by six imperial carriers, trained in the service from birth. One
+    attempting the ascent alone would be dashed in pieces."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No municipal line of airships?" ventured Amory in slow
+    astonishment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo did not quite get this.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The airships, adôn," he said, "belong to the imperial household and
+    are kept at the summit of Mount Khalak."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A trust," comprehended Amory; "an absolute monarchy is a bit of a
+    trust, anyhow. Of course, it's sometimes an outraged trust..." he
+    murmured on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The adôn," said Jarvo humbly, "will understand that we, I and Akko,
+    have borne great risk. It is necessary that we make our peace with
+    all speed, if that may be. The very walls are the ears of Prince
+    Tabnit, and it is better to be behind those walls. May the gods
+    permit the possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mean to say," asked St. George, "that we too would better
+    look out the prince at once?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The adôn is wise," said Jarvo simply, "but nothing is hid from
+    Prince Tabnit."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George considered. In this mysterious place, whose ways were as
+    unknown to him and to his companions as was the etiquette of the
+    court of the moon, clearly diplomacy was the better part of valour.
+    It was wiser to seek out Prince Tabnit, if he had really arrived on
+    the island, than to be upon the defensive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, very well," he said briefly, "we will visit the prince."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farewell, adôn," said Jarvo, bowing low, "may the gods permit the
+    possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course you will communicate with us to-morrow," suggested St.
+    George, "so that if we wish to send Rollo down to the yacht&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The gods will permit the possible, adôn," Jarvo repeated gently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a flash of Akko's white teeth and the two little men were
+    gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George and Amory turned to the descending of the wide white
+    steps. Such immense, impossible white steps and such a curious place
+    for these two to find themselves, alone, with a valet. Struck by the
+    same thought they looked at each other and nodded, laughing a
+    little.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Alone in the distance," said Amory, emptying his pipe, "and not a
+    cab to be seen."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo thrust forward his lean, shadowed face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shall I look about for a 'ansom, sir?" he inquired with perfect
+    gravity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly heard.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's like cutting into a great, smooth sheet of white paper," he
+    said whimsically, "and making any figure you want to make."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before they reached the bottom of the steps they divined, issuing
+    from an isolated, temple-seeming building below, a train of
+    sober-liveried attendants, all at first glance resembling Jarvo and
+    Akko. These defiled leisurely toward the strangers and lined up
+    irregularly at the foot of the steps.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Enter Trouble," said Amory happily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They found themselves confronting, in the midst of the attendants,
+    an olive man with no angles, whose face, in spite of its health and
+    even wealth of contour, was ridiculously grave, as if the
+    <i>papier-mâché</i> man in the down-town window should have had a sudden
+    serious thought just before his <i>papier-mâché</i> incarnation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Permit me," said the man in perfect English and without bowing, "to
+    bring to you the greeting of his Highness, Prince Tabnit, and his
+    welcome to Yaque. I am Cassyrus, an officer of the government. At
+    the command of his Highness I am come to conduct you to the palace."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The prince is most kind," said St. George, and added eagerly: "He
+    is returned, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Assuredly. Three days ago," was the reply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the king&mdash;is he returned?" asked St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The man shook his head, and his very anxiety seemed important.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "His Majesty, the King," he affirmed, "is still most lamentably
+    absent from his throne and his people."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And his daughter?" demanded St. George then, who could not
+    possibly have waited an instant longer to put that question.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The daughter of his Majesty, the King," said Cassyrus, looking
+    still more as if he were having his portrait painted, "will in three
+    days be recognized publicly as Princess of Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's heart gave a great bound. Thank Heaven, she was here,
+    and safe. His hope and confidence soared heavenward. And by some
+    miracle she was to take her place as the people of Yaque had
+    petitioned. But what was the meaning of that news of the prince's
+    treachery which Jarvo and Akko had come bearing? The prince had
+    faithfully fulfilled his mission and had conducted the daughter of
+    the King of Yaque safely to her father's country. What did it all
+    mean?
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly noted the majestic square through which they
+    were passing. Impressions of great buildings, dim white and misty
+    grey and bathed in light, bewilderingly succeeded one another;
+    but, as in the days which followed the news of his inheritance, he
+    found himself now in a temper of unsurprise, in that mental
+    atmosphere&mdash;properly the normal&mdash;which regards all miracle as
+    natural law. He even omitted to note what was of passing
+    strangeness: that neither the retinue of the minister nor the
+    others upon the streets cast more than casual glances at their
+    unusual visitors. But when the great gates of the palace were
+    readied his attention was challenged and held, for though mere
+    marvels may become the air one breathes, beauty will never cease
+    to amaze, and the vista revealed was of almost disconcerting
+    beauty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Avenues of brightness, arches of green, glimpses of airy columns, of
+    boundless lawns set with high, pyramidal shrines, great places of
+    quiet and straight line, alleys whose shadow taught the necessity of
+    mystery, the sound of water&mdash;the pure, positive element of it
+    all&mdash;and everywhere, above, below and far, that delicate, labyrinth
+    light, diffused from no visible source. It was as if some strange
+    compound had changed the character of the dark itself, transmuting
+    it to a subtle essence more exquisite than light, inhabiting it with
+    wonders. And high above their heads where this translucence seemed
+    to mix with the upper air and to fuse with moonbeams, sprang almost
+    joyously the pale domes and cornices of the palace, sending out
+    floating streamers and pennons of colours nameless and unknown.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jupiter," said the human Amory in awe, "what a picture for the
+    first page of the supplement."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly heard him. The picture held so perfectly the
+    elusive charm of the Question&mdash;the Question which profoundly
+    underlies all things. It was like a triumphant burst of music which
+    yet ends on a high note, with imperfect close, hinting passionately
+    at some triumph still loftier.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From either side of the wall of the palace yard came glittering a
+    detachment of the Royal Golden Guard, clad in uniforms of unrelieved
+    cloth-of-gold. These halted, saluted, wheeled, and between their
+    shining ranks St. George and Amory footed quietly on, followed by
+    Rollo carrying the yellow oil-skins. To St. George there was relief
+    in the motion, relief in the vastness, and almost a boy's delight in
+    the pastime of living the hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yet Royal Golden Guard, majestic avenues, and towered palace with
+    its strange banners floating in strange light, held for him but one
+    reality. And when they had mounted the steps of the mighty entrance,
+    and the sound of unrecognized music reached him&mdash;a very myth of
+    music, elusive, vagrant, fugued&mdash;and the palace doors swung open to
+    receive them, he could have shouted aloud on the brilliant
+    threshold:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He says she is here in Yaque."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0009"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER IX
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    So there were St. George and Amory presently domiciled in a prince's
+    palace such as Asia and Europe have forgotten, as by and by they
+    will forget the Taj Mahal and the Bon Marché. And at nine o'clock
+    the next morning in a certain Tyrian purple room in the west wing of
+    the Palace of the Litany the two sat breakfasting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One always breakfasts," observed St. George. "The first day that
+    the first men spend on Mars I wonder whether the first thing they do
+    will be to breakfast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Poor old Mars has got to step down now," said Amory. "We are one
+    farther on. I don't know how it will be, but if I felt on Mars the
+    way I do now, I should assent to breakfast. Shouldn't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On my life, Toby," said St. George, "as an idealist you are
+    disgusting. Yes, I should."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The table had been spread before an open window, and the window
+    looked down upon the palace garden, steeped in the gold of the sunny
+    morning, and formal with aisles of mighty, flowering trees. Within,
+    the apartment was lofty, its walls fashioned to lift the eye to
+    light arches, light capitals, airy traceries, and spaces of the hue
+    of old ivory, held in heavenly quiet. The sense of colour, colour
+    both captive and atmospheric, was a new and persistent delight, for
+    it was colour purified, specialized, and infinitely extended in
+    either direction from the crudity of the seven-winged spectrum. The
+    room was like an alcove of outdoors, not divorced from the open air
+    and set in contra-distinction, but made a continuation of its space
+    and order and ancient repose&mdash;a kind of exquisite porch of light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Across this porch of light Rollo stepped, bearing a covered dish.
+    The little breakfast-table and the laden side-table were set with
+    vessels of rock-crystal and drinking-cups of silver gilt, and
+    breakfast consisted of delicately-prepared sea-food, a pulpy fruit,
+    thin wine and a paste of delicious powdered gums. These things Rollo
+    served quite as if he were managing oatmeal and eggs and china. One
+    would have said that he had been brought up between the covers of an
+    ancient history, nothing in consequence being so old or so new as to
+    amaze him. Upon their late arrival the evening before he had
+    instantly moved about his duties in all the quiet decorum with which
+    he officiated in three rooms and a bath, emptying the oil-skins,
+    disposing of their contents in great cedar chests, and, from
+    certain rich and alien garments laid out for the guests, pretending
+    as unconcernedly to fleck lint as if they had been broadcloth from
+    Fifth Avenue. He stood bending above the breakfast-table, his lean,
+    shadowed hands perfectly at home, his lean, shadowed face all
+    automatic attention.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Rollo," said St. George, "go and look out the window and see if
+    Sodom is smoking."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," said Rollo, and moved to the nearest casement and bent
+    his look submissively below.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everything quiet, sir," he reported literally; "a very warm day,
+    sir. But it's easy to sleep, sir, no matter how warm the days are if
+    only the nights are cool. Begging your pardon, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't see Jezebel down there in the trees," he pressed him, "or
+    Elissa setting off to found Carthage? Chaldea and Egypt all calm?"
+    he anxiously put it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo stirred uneasily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's a couple o' blue-tailed birds scrappin' in a palm tree,
+    sir," he submitted hopefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," said St. George, "yes. There would be. Now, if you like," he
+    gave his servant permission, "you may go to the festivals or the
+    funeral games or wherever you choose to-day. Or perhaps," he
+    remembered with solicitude, "you would prefer to be present at the
+    wedding-of-the-land-water-with-the-sea-water, providing, as I
+    suspect, Tyre is handy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you, sir," said Rollo doubtfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mind you put your money on the crack disc-thrower, though," warned
+    St. George, "and you might put up a couple of darics for me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," languidly begged Amory, "pray no. You are getting your periods
+    mixed something horrid."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A person's recreation is as good for him as his food, sir,"
+    proclaimed Rollo, sententious, anxious to agree.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Food," said Amory languidly, "this isn't food&mdash;it's molten history,
+    that's what it is. Think&mdash;this is what they had to eat at the cafés
+    boulevardes of Gomorrah. And to think we've been at Tony's, before
+    now. Do you remember," he asked raptly, "those brief and savoury
+    banquets around one o'clock, at Tony's? From where Little Cawthorne
+    once went away wearing two omelettes instead of his overshoes? Don't
+    tell me that Tonycana and all this belong to the same system in
+    space. Don't tell me&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped abruptly and his eyes sought those of St. George. It was
+    all so incredible, and yet it was all so real and so essentially,
+    distractingly natural.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel as if we had stepped through something, to somewhere else.
+    And yet, somehow, there is so little difference. Do you suppose when
+    people die <i>they</i> don't notice any difference, either?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's
+    going to look in print. Think of Crass&mdash;digging for head-lines."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl;
+    but there were times&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the
+    absolute."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an
+    Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out
+    with the camera, while the light is good."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The lateness of the hour of their arrival at the palace the evening
+    before had prevented the prince from receiving them, but he had sent
+    a most courteous message announcing that he himself would wait upon
+    them at a time which he appointed. While they were abiding his
+    coming, Rollo setting aside the dishes, Amory smoking, strolling up
+    and down, and examining the faint symbolic devices upon the walls'
+    tiling, St. George stood before one of the casements, and looked
+    over the aisles of flowering tree-tops to the grim, grey sides of
+    Mount Khalak, inscrutable, inaccessible, now not even hinting at the
+    walls and towers upon its secret summit. He was thinking how
+    heavenly curious it was that the most wonderful thing in his
+    commonplace world of New York&mdash;that is, his meeting with
+    Olivia&mdash;should, out here in this world of things wonderful beyond
+    all dream, still hold supreme its place as the sovereign wonder, the
+    sovereign delight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dare say that means something," he said vaguely to himself, "and
+    I dare say all the people who are&mdash;in love&mdash;know what it does mean,"
+    and at this his spirit of adventure must have nodded at him, as if
+    it understood, too.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When, in a little time, Prince Tabnit appeared at the open door of
+    the "porch of light," it was as if he had parted from St. George in
+    McDougle Street but the night before. He greeted him with exquisite
+    cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He
+    was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem
+    burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly
+    tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One
+    might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested
+    certain of his smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wonder," he asked with engaging hesitation when he was seated,
+    "whether I may have a&mdash;cigarette? That is the name? Yes, a
+    cigarette. Tobacco is unknown in Yaque. We have invented no colonies
+    useful for the luxury. How can it be&mdash;forgive me&mdash;that your people,
+    who seem remote from poetry, should be the devisers and popularizers
+    of this so poetic pastime? To breathe in the green of earth and the
+    light of the dead sun! The poetry of your American smoke delights
+    me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled as he offered the prince his case.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In America," he said, "we devised it as a vice, your Highness. We
+    are obliged to do the same with poetry, if we popularize it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And St. George was thinking:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Miss Holland. He has seen Miss Holland&mdash;perhaps yesterday. Perhaps
+    he will see her to-day. And how in this world am I ever to mention
+    her name?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the prince was in the idlest and most genial of humours. He
+    spoke at once of the matters uppermost in the minds of his guests,
+    gave them news of the party from New York, told how they were in
+    comfort in the palace on the summit of Mount Khalak, struck a
+    momentary tragic note in mention of the mystery still mantling the
+    absence of the king and repeated the announcement already made by
+    Cassyrus, the premier, that in two days' time, failing the return of
+    the sovereign, the king's daughter would be publicly recognized,
+    with solemn ceremonial, as Princess of Yaque. Then he turned to St.
+    George, his eyes searching him through the haze of smoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your own coming to Yaque," he said abruptly, "was the result of a
+    sudden decision?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so, your Highness," replied St. George. "It was wholly
+    unexpected."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then we must try to make it also an unexpected pleasure," suggested
+    the prince lightly. "I am come to ask you to spend the day with me
+    in looking about Med, the King's City."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He dropped the monogrammed stub of his cigarette in a little jar of
+    smaragdos, brought, he mentioned in passing, from a despoiled temple
+    of one of the Chthonian deities of Tyre, and turned toward his
+    guests with a winning smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come," he said, "I can no longer postpone my own pleasure in
+    showing you that our nation is the Lady of Kingdoms as once were
+    Babylon and Chaldea."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was as if the strange panorama of the night before had once more
+    opened its frame, and they were to step within. As the prince left
+    them St. George turned to Rollo for the novelty of addressing a
+    reality.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you wish to spend the day, Rollo?" he asked him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo looked pensive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Could I stroll about a bit, sir?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stroll!" commanded St. George cheerfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you, sir," said Rollo. "I always think a man can best learn
+    by observation, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Observe!" supplemented his master pleasantly, as a detachment of
+    the guard appeared to conduct Amory and him below.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't black up the sandals," Amory warned Rollo as he left him,
+    "and be back early. We may want you to get us ready for a mastodon
+    hunt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," said Rollo with simplicity, "I'll be back quite some
+    time before tea-time, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was smiling as they went down the corridor. He had been
+    vain of his love that, in Yaque as in America, remained the thing it
+    was, supreme and vital. But had not the simplicity of Rollo taken
+    the leap in experience, and likewise without changing? For a moment,
+    as he went down the silent corridors, lofty as the woods, vocal with
+    faint inscriptions on the uncovered stone, the old human doubt
+    assailed him. The very age of the walls was a protest against the
+    assumption that there is a touchstone that is ageless. Even if there
+    is, even if love is unchanging, the very temper of unconcern of his
+    valet might be quite as persistent as love itself. But the gallery
+    emptying itself into a great court open to the blue among graven
+    rafters, St. George promptly threw his doubt to the fresh,
+    heaven-kissing wind that smote their faces, and against mystery and
+    argument and age alike he matched only the happy clamour of his
+    blood. Olivia Holland was on the island, and all the age was gold.
+    In Yaque or on the continents there can be no manner of doubt that
+    this is love, as Love itself loves to be.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They emerged in the appeasing air of that perfect morning, and the
+    sweetness of the flowering trees was everywhere, and wide roads
+    pointed invitingly to undiscovered bournes, and overhead in the
+    curving wind floated the flags and streamers of those joyous, wizard
+    colours.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went out into the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating
+    at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds
+    captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals
+    itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey
+    that he has taken long ago&mdash;Long Ago and Far Away are the great
+    touchstones&mdash;and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget
+    the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and forget
+    the fabric, then he will understand the spirit that informed that
+    first morning in Yaque. It was a morning all compact of wonder and
+    delight&mdash;wonder at that which half-revealed itself, delight in the
+    ever-present possibility that here, there, at any moment, Olivia
+    Holland might be met. As for the wonder, that had taken some three
+    thousand years to accumulate, as nearly as one could compute; and as
+    for the delight, that had taken less than ten days to make possible;
+    and yet there is no manner of doubt which held high place in the
+    mind of St. George as the smooth miles fled away from hurrying
+    wheels.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Such wheels! Motors? St. George asked himself the question as he
+    took his place beside the prince in the exquisitely light vehicle,
+    Amory following with Cassyrus, and the suites coming after, like the
+    path from a lanthorn. For the vehicles were a kind of electric
+    motor, but constructed exquisitely in a fashion which, far from
+    affronting taste, delighted the eye by leading it to lines of
+    unguessed beauty. They were motors as the ancients would have built
+    them if they had understood the trick of science, motors in which
+    the lines of utility were veiled and taught to be subordinate. The
+    speed attained was by no means great, and the motion was gentle and
+    sacrificed to silence. And when St. George ventured to ask how they
+    had imported the first motors, the prince answered that as Columbus
+    was sailing on the waters of the Atlantic at adventure, the people
+    of Yaque were touring the island in electric motors of much the same
+    description, though hardly the clumsiness, of those which he had
+    noticed in New York.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was the first astonishment, and other astonishments were to
+    follow. For as they went about the island it was revealed that the
+    remainder of the world is asleep with science for a pillow and the
+    night-lamp of philosophy casting shadows. Yet as the prince
+    exhibited wonders, one after another, St. George, dimly conscious
+    that these are the things that men die to discover, would have given
+    them all for one moment's meeting with Olivia on that high-road of
+    Med. If you come to think of it, this may be why science always has
+    moved so slowly, creeping on from point to point.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Thus it came about that when Prince Tabnit indicated a low,
+    pillared, temple-like building as the home of perpetual motion,
+    which gave the power operating the manufactures and water supply of
+    the entire island, St. George looked and understood and resolved to
+    go over the temple before he left Yaque, and then fell a-wondering
+    whether, when he did so, Olivia would be with him. When the prince
+    explained that it is ridiculous to suppose that combustion is the
+    chief means of obtaining light and heat, or that Heaven provided
+    divinely-beautiful forests for the express purpose of their being
+    burned up; and when he told him that artificial light and heat were
+    effected in a certain reservoir (built with a classic regard for the
+    dignity of its use as a link with unspoken forces) St. George
+    listened, and said over with attention the name of the substance
+    acted upon by emanations&mdash;and wondered if Olivia were not afraid of
+    it. So it was all through the exhibition of more wonders scientific
+    and economic than any one has dreamed since every one became a
+    victim of the world's habit of being afraid to dream. Although it is
+    true that when St. George chanced to observe that there were about
+    Med few farms of tilled ground, the prince's reply did startle him
+    into absorbed attention:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are referring to agriculture?" Prince Tabnit said after a
+    moment's thought. "I know the word from old parchments brought from
+    Ph&oelig;nicia by our ancestors. But I did not know that the art is in
+    practice anywhere in the world. Do you mean to assure me," cried the
+    prince suddenly, "that the vegetables which I ate in America were
+    raised by what is known as 'tilling the soil'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How else, your Highness?" doubted St. George, wondering if he were
+    responsible for the fading mentality of the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit looked away toward the splendour of some new thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How beautiful," he said, "to subsist on the sun and the dust.
+    Beautiful and lost, like the dreams of Mitylene. But I feel as if I
+    were reading in Genesis," he declared. "Is it possible that in this
+    'age of science' of yours it has not occurred to your people that if
+    plants grow by slowly extracting their own elements from the soil,
+    those elements artificially extracted and applied to the seed will
+    render growth and fruitage almost instantaneous?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "At all events we've speculated about it," St. George hastened to
+    impart with pride, "just as we do about telephones that will let
+    people see one another when they talk. But nearly every one smiles
+    at both."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't smile," the prince warned him. "Yaque has perfected both
+    those inventions only since she ceased to smile at their
+    probability. Nothing can be simpler than instantaneous vegetation.
+    Any Egyptian juggler can produce it by using certain acids. We have
+    improved the process until our fruits and vegetables are produced as
+    they are needed, from hour to hour. This was one of the so-called
+    secrets of the ancient Ph&oelig;nicians&mdash;has it never occurred to you as
+    important that the Ph&oelig;nician name for Dionysos, the god of
+    wine-growers, was lost?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mentally St. George added another barrel to the cargo of <i>The
+    Aloha</i>, and wondered if the <i>Sentinel</i> would start botanical gardens
+    and a lighting plant and turn them to the account of advertisers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    All the time, mile upon mile, was unrolling before them the
+    unforgetable beauty of the island. So perfectly were its features
+    marshaled and so exact were its proportions that, as in many great
+    experiences and as in all great poems, one might not, without
+    familiarity, recall its detail, but must instead remain wrapped in
+    the glory of the whole. The avenues, wide as a river, swept between
+    white banks of majestic buildings combining with the magic of great
+    mass the pure beauty of virginal line. Line, the joy of line, the
+    glory of line, almost, St. George thought, the divinity of line, was
+    everywhere manifest; and everywhere too the divinity of colour, no
+    longer a quality extraneous, laid on as insecure fancy dictates,
+    but, by some law long unrevealed, now actually identified with the
+    object which it not so much decorated as purified. The most
+    interesting of the thoroughfares led from the Eurychôrus, or public
+    square, along the lagoon. This fair water, extending from Med to
+    Melita, was greenly shored and dotted with strange little pleasure
+    crafts with exquisite sweeping prows and silken canopies. Before a
+    white temple, knee-deep in whose flowered ponds the ibises dozed
+    and contemplated, was anchored the imperial trireme, with
+    delicately-embroidered sails and prow and poop of forgotten metals.
+    From within, temple music sounded softly and was never permitted to
+    be silenced, as the flame of the Vestals might never be
+    extinguished. Here on the shores had begun the morning traffic of
+    itinerant merchants of Med and Melita, compelled by law to carry on
+    their exchange in the morning only, when the light is least lovely.
+    Upon canopied wagons drawn by strange animals, with shining horns,
+    were displayed for sale all the pleasantest excuses for
+    commerce&mdash;ostrich feathers, gums, gems, quicksilver, papyrus, bales
+    of fair cloth, pottery, wine and oranges. The sellers of salt and
+    fish and wool and skins were forced down under the wharfs of the
+    lagoon, and there endeavoured to attract attention by displaying
+    fanciful and lovely banners and by liberating faint perfumes of the
+    native orris and algum. Street musicians, playing tunefully upon the
+    zither and upon the crowd, wandered, wearing wreaths of fir, and
+    clustered about stalls where were offered tenuous blades, and
+    statues, and temple vessels filled with wine and flowers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the head of the street leading to the temple of Baaltis (My
+    Lady&mdash;Aphrodite) the prince's motor was checked while a procession
+    of pilgrims, white-robed and carrying votive offerings, passed
+    before them, the votive tablet to the Lady Tanith and the Face of
+    Baal being borne at the head of the line by a dignitary in a smart
+    electric victoria. This was one of the frequent Festival Embassies
+    to Melita, to combine religious rites with mourning games and the
+    dedication of the tablet, and there was considerable delay incident
+    to the delivery of a wireless message to the dignitary with the
+    tablet of the Semitic inscription. St. George wondered vaguely why,
+    in a world of marvels, progress should not already have outstripped
+    the need of any communication at all. This reminded him of something
+    at which the prince had hinted away off in another æon, in another
+    world, when St. George had first seen him, and there followed ten
+    minutes of talk not to be forgotten.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Would it be possible for you to tell me, your Highness," St. George
+    asked,&mdash;and thereafter even a lover must have forgiven the brief
+    apostasy of his thought&mdash;"how it can be that you know the English?
+    How you are able to speak it here in Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The motor moved forward as the procession passed, and struck into a
+    magnificent country avenue bordered by trees, tall as elms and
+    fragrant as acacias.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can tell you, yes," said the prince, "but I warn you that you
+    will not in the least understand me. I dare say, however, that I may
+    illustrate by something of which you know. Do there chance to be,
+    for example, any children in America who are regarded as prodigies
+    of certain understanding?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean," St. George asked, "children who can play on a musical
+    instrument without knowing how they do it, and so on?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so," said the prince with interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Many, your Highness," affirmed St. George. "I myself know a child
+    of seven who can play most difficult piano compositions without ever
+    having been taught, or knowing in the least how he does it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you think of any one else?" asked the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said St. George, "I know a little lad of about five, I should
+    say, who can add enormous numbers and instantly give the accurate
+    result. And he has no idea how he does that, and no one has ever
+    taught him to count above twelve. Oh&mdash;every one knows those cases, I
+    fancy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Has any one ever explained them, Mr. St. George?" asked the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How should they?" asked St. George simply. "They are prodigies."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so," said the prince again. "It is almost incredible that
+    these instances seem to suggest to no one that there must be other
+    ways to 'learn' music and mathematics&mdash;and, therefore, everything
+    else&mdash;than those known to your civilization. Let me assure you that
+    such cases as these, far from being miracles and prodigies, are
+    perfectly normal when once the principle is understood, as we of
+    Yaque understand it. It is the average intelligence among your
+    people which is abnormal, inasmuch as it is unable to perform these
+    functions which it was so clearly intended to exercise."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mean," asked St. George, "that we need not learn&mdash;as we
+    understand 'learn'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Precisely," said the prince simply. "You are accustomed, I was told
+    in New York, to say that there is 'no royal road to learning.' On
+    the contrary, I say to you that the possibilities of these children
+    are in every one. But to my intense surprise I find that we of Yaque
+    are the only ones in the world who understand how to use these
+    possibilities. Our system of education consists simply in mastering
+    this principle. After that, all knowledge&mdash;all languages, for
+    instance&mdash;everything&mdash;belongs to us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked away to the rugged sides of Mount Khalak, lying in
+    its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima
+    Thule. It was all right&mdash;what he had just been hearing was a part of
+    this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet <i>he</i>
+    was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic,
+    perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the
+    prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that
+    he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might
+    have been his of his own accord if only he had understood how to
+    call them in!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That would make a very jolly thing of college," he pensively
+    conceded. "You could not show me how it is managed, your Highness?"
+    he besought. "That will hardly come in bulk, too&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince shook his head, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I could not 'show you,' as you say," he answered, "any more than I
+    could, at present, send a wireless communication without the
+    apparatus&mdash;though it will be only a matter of time until that is
+    accomplished, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George pulled himself up sharply. He glanced over his shoulder
+    and saw Amory polishing his pince-nez and looking quite as if he
+    were leaning over hansom-doors in the park, and he turned quickly to
+    the prince, half convinced that he had been mocked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Suppose, your Highness," he said, "that I were to print what you
+    have just told me on the front page of a New York morning paper,
+    for people to glance over with their coffee? Do you think that even
+    the most open-minded among them would believe that there is such a
+    place as Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled curiously, and his long-fringed lids drooped in
+    momentary contemplation. The auto turned into that majestic avenue
+    which terminates in the Eurychôrus before the Palace of the Litany.
+    St. George's eye eagerly swept the long white way. At its far end
+    stood Mount Khalak. <i>She</i> must have passed over this very ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is," the prince's smooth voice broke in upon his dream, "no
+    such place as Yaque&mdash;as you understand 'place.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon, your Highness?" St. George doubted blankly. Good
+    Heavens. Maybe there had arrived in Yaque no Olivia, as he
+    understood Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You showed some surprise, I remember," continued the prince, "when
+    I told you, in McDougle Street, that we of Yaque understand the
+    Fourth Dimension."
+</p>
+<p>
+    McDougle Street. The sound smote the ear of St. George much as would
+    the clang of the fire patrol in the midst of light opera.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, yes," he said, his attention now completely chained. Yet even
+    then it was not that he cared so absorbingly about the Fourth
+    Dimension. But what if this were all some trick and if, in this
+    strange land, Olivia had simply been flashed before his eyes by the
+    aid of mirrors?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I find," said the prince with deliberation, "that in America you
+    are familiar with the argument that, if your people understood
+    only length and breadth and did <i>not</i> understand the Third
+    Dimension&mdash;thickness&mdash;you could not then conceive of lifting, say,
+    a square or a triangle and laying it down upon another square or
+    triangle. In other words, you would not know anything of <i>up</i> and
+    <i>down</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded. This was the familiar talk of college
+    class-rooms.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As it is," pursued the prince, "your people do perfectly understand
+    lifting a square and placing it upon a square, or a triangle upon a
+    triangle. But you do not know anything about placing a cube upon a
+    cube, or a pyramid upon a pyramid <i>so that both occupy the same
+    space at the same time</i>. We of Yaque have mastered that principle
+    also," the prince tranquilly concluded, "and all that of which this
+    is the alphabet. That is why we are able to keep our island unknown
+    to the world&mdash;not to say 'invisible.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    For a moment St. George looked at him speechlessly; then, in spite
+    of himself, a slow smile overspread his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But," he said, "your Highness, there is not a mathematician in the
+    civilized world who has not considered that problem and cast it
+    aside, with the word that if fourth-dimensional space does exist it
+    can not possibly be inhabited."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so," said the prince, "and yet here we are."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And, if you come to think of it&mdash;as St. George did&mdash;that is the only
+    answer to a world of impossibilities already proved possible. But
+    the vista which all this opened smote him with irresistible humour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now, I suppose, your Highness," he said, "that our ocean
+    liners sail clean through the island of Yaque, then, and never even
+    have their smoke pushed sidewise?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince laughed pleasantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have you ever," he asked, "had occasion to explain the principles
+    of hydraulics, or chess, or philosophical idealism to a
+    three-year-old child, or a charwoman? You must forgive me, but
+    really I can think of no better comparison. I am quite as powerless
+    now as you have been if you have ever attempted it. I can only
+    assure you that such things <i>are</i>. Without Jarvo or Akko or some one
+    who understood, you might have sailed the high seas all your life
+    and never have come any nearer to Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George reflected.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is Yaque the only example of this kind of thing," he asked, "that
+    the Fourth Dimension would reveal?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By no means," said the prince in surprise, "the world is
+    literally teeming with like revelations, once the key is in your
+    hands. The Fourth Dimension is only the beginning. We utilize that
+    to isolate our island. But the higher dimensions are gradually
+    being conquered, too. Nearly all of us can pass into the Fifth at
+    will, 'disappearing,' as you have the word, from the lower
+    dimensions. It is well-known to you that in a land whose people
+    knew length and breadth, but no <i>up</i> and <i>down</i>, an object might
+    be pushed, but never lifted <i>up</i> or put <i>down</i>. If it were to be
+    lifted, such a people would believe it to have 'disappeared.' So,
+    from you who know only three dimensions, Yaque has 'disappeared,'
+    until one of us guides you here. Also we pass at will into the
+    Fifth Dimension and even higher, and seem to 'disappear'; the only
+    difference is that, there, we should not be able yet to guide one
+    who did not himself understand how to pass there. Just as one who
+    understands how to die and to come to life, as you have the
+    phrase, would not be able to take with him any one who did not
+    understand how to take himself there..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George listened, grasping at straws of comprehension,
+    remembering how he had heard all this theorized about and smiled at;
+    but most of all he was beset by a practical consideration.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then," he said suddenly, the question leaping to his lips almost
+    against his will, "if you hold this key to all knowledge, how is it
+    that the king&mdash;Mr. Holland&mdash;could get away from you, and the
+    Hereditary Treasure be lost?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince sighed profoundly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We have by no means," he said, "perfected our knowledge. We are at
+    one with the absolute in knowledge&mdash;true. But the affairs of every
+    day most frequently elude us. Not even the most advanced among us
+    are perfect intuitionists. We have by no means reached that
+    desirable and inevitable day when our minds shall flow together,
+    without need of communication, without possibility of secret. We
+    still suffer the disadvantage of a slight barrier of personality."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And it is into one of these lapses," thought St. George
+    irreverently, "that the king has disappeared." Aloud he asked
+    curiously concerning a matter which was every moment becoming more
+    incomprehensible.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But how, your Highness," he said simply, "did your people ever
+    consent to have an American for your king?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before the prince could reply there occurred a phenomenon that sent
+    all thought of such insubstantialities as the secrets of the Fourth
+    Dimension far in the background.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince's motor, closely followed by the others of the train, had
+    reached a little eminence from which the island unrolled in fair
+    patterns. Before them the smooth road unwound in varied light. At
+    their left lay a still grove from whose depths was glimpsed a slim
+    needle of a tower, rising, arrow-like, from the green. In the
+    distance lay Med, with shining domes. The water of the lagoon gave
+    brightness here and there among the hills. And as St. George and the
+    prince looked over the prospect they saw, far down the avenue toward
+    Med, a little, moving speck&mdash;a speck moving with a rapidity which
+    neither the prince's motor nor any known motor of Yaque had ever
+    before permitted itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In an instant the six members of the Royal Golden Guard, who upon
+    beautiful, spirited horses rode in advance of the train of the
+    prince, wheeled and thundered back, lifting glittering hands of
+    warning. "Aside! Aside!" shrieked the main Golden Guard, "a motor is
+    without control!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Immediately there was confusion. At a touch the prince's car was
+    drawn to the road's extreme edge, and the Golden Guards rode
+    furiously back along the train, hailing the peaceful, slow-going
+    machines into orderly retreat. They were all sufficiently amenable,
+    for at sight of the alarming and unprecedented onrush of the growing
+    speck that was bearing full down upon them, anxiety sat upon every
+    face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George watched. And as the car drew nearer the thought which, at
+    first sight of its speed, had vaguely flashed into being, took
+    definite shape, and his blood leaped to its music. Whose hand would
+    be upon that lever, whose daring would be directing its flight,
+    whose but one in all Yaque&mdash;and that Olivia's?
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was Olivia. That was plain even in the mere instant that it took
+    the great, beautiful motor, at thirty miles an hour, to flash past
+    them. St. George saw her&mdash;coat of hunting pink and fluttering veil
+    and shining eyes; he was dimly conscious of another little figure
+    beside her, and of the unmistakable and agonized Mrs. Hastings in
+    the tonneau; but it was only Olivia's glance that he caught as it
+    swept the prince. There was the faintest possible smile, and she was
+    gone; and St. George, his heart pounding, sat staring stupidly after
+    that shining cloud of dust, frantically wondering whether she could
+    just possibly have seen him. For this was no trick of the
+    imagination, his galloping heart told him that. And whether or not
+    Yaque was a place, the world, the world was within his grasp,
+    instinct with possibilities heavenly sweet. His eyes met Amory's in
+    the minute when Cassyrus, prime minister of Yaque, had it borne in
+    upon him that this was no runaway machine, but the ordinary and
+    preferred pace of the daughter of their king; and while Cassyrus, at
+    the enormity of the conception, breathed out expostulations in
+    several languages&mdash;some of them known to us only by means of
+    inscriptions on tombs&mdash;Amory spoke to St. George:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who was the other girl?" he asked comprehensively.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What other girl?" St. George blankly murmured.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And at this, Amory turned away with a look that could be made to
+    mean whatever Amory meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On went the imperial train faring back to Med over the road lately
+    stirred to shining dust by the wheels of Olivia's auto. Olivia's
+    auto. St. George was secretly saying over the words with a kind of
+    ecstatic non-comprehension, when the prince spoke:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That," he said, "may explain why an American has been able to
+    govern us. Chance crowned him, but he made himself king."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit hesitated and his eyes wandered&mdash;and those of St.
+    George followed&mdash;to a far winding dot in that opal valley, a mere
+    speck of silver with a prick of pink, fleeing in a cloud of sunny
+    dust.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do not know if you will know what I mean," said the prince, "but
+    hers is the spirit, and the spirit of her father, the king, which
+    Yaque had never known. It is the spirit which we of Ph&oelig;nicia seem
+    to have lost since the wealth of the world accumulated at her ports
+    and she gave her trust to the hands of mariners and mercenaries, and
+    later bowed to the conqueror. It is the spirit that not all the
+    continental races, I fancy, have for endowment, but yours possesses
+    in rich measure. For this we would exchange half that we have
+    achieved."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded, glowing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is a great tribute, your Highness," he said simply, and in his
+    heart he laid it at Olivia's feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Thereafter, in the long ride to Melita, during luncheon upon a high
+    white terrace overlooking the sailless sea, and in the hours on the
+    unforgetable roads of the islands, St. George, while incommunicable
+    marvels revealed themselves linked with incommunicable beauty, sat
+    in the prince's motor, his eyes searching the horizon for that
+    fleeing speck of silver and pink. It did not appear again. And when
+    the train of the prince rolled into the yard of the Palace of the
+    Litany it trembled upon St. George's lips to ask whether the
+    formalities of the court would permit him that day to scale the
+    skies and call upon the royal household.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For whatever he says, I've got to do," thought St. George, "but no
+    matter what he says, I shall go. Doesn't Amory realize that we've
+    been more than twelve hours on this island, and that nothing has
+    been done?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And then as they crossed the grassy court in the delicate hush of
+    the merging light&mdash;the nameless radiance already penetrating the
+    dusk&mdash;the prince spoke smoothly, as if his words bore no import
+    deeper than his smile:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are come," he said courteously, "in time for one of the
+    ceremonies of our régime most important&mdash;to me. You will, I hope, do
+    honour to the occasion by your presence. This evening, in the Hall
+    of Kings in the Palace of the Litany, will occur the ceremony of my
+    betrothal."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your betrothal, your Highness?" repeated St. George uncertainly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You will be attended by an escort," the prince continued, "and
+    Balator, the commander of the guard, will receive you in the hall.
+    May the gods permit the possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He swept through the portico before them, and they followed dumbly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The betrothal of the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George heard, and his eager hope went down in foreboding. He
+    turned, hardly daring to read his own dread in the eyes of Amory.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, as St. George had said, was delicious, especially his drawl;
+    but there were times&mdash;now, for example, when all that the eyes of
+    Amory expressed was what his lips framed, <i>sotto-voce</i>:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An American heiress, betrothed to the prince of a cannibal island!
+    Wouldn't Chillingworth turn in his grave at his desk?"
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0010"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER X
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    TYRIAN PURPLE
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    The "porch of light" proved to be an especially fascinating place at
+    evening. Evening, which makes most places resemble their souls
+    instead of their bodies, had a grateful task in the beautiful room
+    whose spirit was always uppermost, and Evening moved softly in its
+    ivory depths, preluding for Sleep. Here, his lean, shadowed face all
+    anxiety, Rollo stood, holding at arm's length a parti-coloured robe
+    with floating scarfs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It seems to me, sir," he said doubtfully, "that this one would 'ave
+    done better. Beggin' your pardon, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George shook his head distastefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It doesn't matter," he said, and broke into a slow smile as he
+    looked at Amory. The robes which the prince had provided for the
+    evening were rather harder to become accustomed to than the notion
+    of intuitive knowledge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's an air about this one though, sir," opined Rollo firmly,
+    "there's a cut&mdash;a sort of <i>way</i> with the seams, so to speak, sir,
+    that the other can't touch. And cut is what counts, sir, cut counts
+    every time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes, I dare say, Rollo," said St. George, "and as a judge of
+    'cut' I don't say you can be equaled. But I do say that in the
+    styles of Deuteronomy you aren't necessarily what you might call
+    up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," said Rollo, dropping his eyes, "but a well-dressed man
+    was a well-dressed man, sir, then <i>as</i> now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As a matter of fact the well-knit, athletic young figures looked
+    uncommonly well in the garments <i>à la mode</i> in Yaque. One would have
+    said that if the garments followed Deuteronomy fashions they had at
+    all events been cut by the scissors of a court tailor to Louis XV.
+    The result was beautiful and bizarre, but it did not suggest
+    stageland because the colours were so good.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dare say," said St. George, examining the exquisitely fine cloth
+    whose shades were of curious depth and richness, "that this may be
+    regular Tyrian purple."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory waved his long sleeves.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop," he languidly begged, "you make me feel like a golden text."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George went back to the row of open casements and resumed his
+    walk up and down before the windows that looked away to the huge
+    threatening bulk of Mount Khalak. Since the prince's announcement
+    that afternoon St. George had done little besides continuing that
+    walk. Now it wanted hardly half an hour to the momentous ceremony of
+    the evening, big with at least one of the dozen portents of which he
+    accused it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Amory," he burst out as he walked, "if you didn't know anything
+    about it, would you say that the prince could possibly have made her
+    consent to marry him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, left in the middle of the great room, stood polishing his
+    pince-nez exactly as if he had been waiting at the end of
+    Chillingworth's desk of a bright, American morning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If I didn't know anything about it," he said cheerfully, "I should
+    say that he had. As it is, having this afternoon watched a certain
+    motor wear its way past me, I should say that nothing in Yaque is
+    more unlikely. And that's about as strong as you could put it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We don't know what the man may have threatened," said St. George
+    morosely, "he may have played upon her devotion to her father to
+    some ridiculous extent. He may have refused to land the submarine at
+    Yaque at all otherwise&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George broke off suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Toby!" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked over and nodded. He had seen that look before on St.
+    George's face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's not going to marry the prince," said St. George, "and if her
+    father is alive and in a hole, he's going to be pulled out. And
+    she's <i>not</i> going to marry the prince."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, no," assented Amory, "no."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had guessed a good deal of the truth since he had been watching
+    St. George flee over seas upon a yacht, shod, so to speak, with
+    fire, and he had arrived at the suspicion that <i>The Aloha</i> was
+    winged by little Loves and guided under water by plenty of blue and
+    green dragons. But he had not, until now, been thoroughly certain
+    that St. George's spirit of adventure had another name; and though
+    theoretically his sympathies leaped to the look in his friend's
+    eyes, yet he found himself wondering practically what effect romance
+    would be having upon their enterprise. After all, from a newspaper
+    point of view, to relinquish any part of the adventure was a kind of
+    tragedy, and it cost Amory something to emphasize his assent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course she won't," he said, "and now let's toddle down and see
+    about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the tread of the feet of a detachment of the Royal Golden Guard
+    was heard without, Rollo advanced to the door with a dignity which
+    amounted to melancholy. The setting of a palace and the proximity of
+    a prince had raised his office to the majesty of skilled labour. He
+    always threw open the door now as who should say, "Enter. But mind
+    you have a reason."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At sight of the long liberty of the corridor where the light lay
+    mysteriously touching tiles and tapestries to festal colours,
+    Amory's spirits rose contagiously, and his eyes shone behind his
+    pince-nez.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me," he said, looking ahead with enjoyment at the glittering
+    escort, "me&mdash;done in a fabric of about the eleventh shade of the
+    Yaque spectrum&mdash;made loose and floppy, after a modish Canaanitish
+    model. I'll wager that when the first-born of Canaan was in the
+    flood-tide of glory, this very gown was worn by one of the most
+    beautiful women in the pentapolis of Philistia. I'm going to
+    photograph the model for the Sunday supplement, and name it <i>The
+    Nebuchadnezzar</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory murmured on, and St. George hardly heard him. He could almost
+    count by minutes now the time until he should see her. Would she see
+    him, and might he just possibly speak with her, and what would the
+    evening hold for her? As he went forth where she would be, the spell
+    of the place was once more laid upon him, as it had been laid in the
+    hour of his coming. Once more, as in the hour when he had first
+    looked down upon the valley brimming with a light "better than any
+    light that ever shone" he was at one with the imponderable things
+    which, always before, had just eluded him. Now, as then, the thought
+    of Olivia was the symbol for them all. So the two went on through
+    the winding galleries&mdash;silent, haunted&mdash;to the great staircase, and
+    below into the crowded court. And when they reached the threshold
+    of the audience-chamber they involuntarily stood still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The hall was like a temple in its sense of space and height and
+    clear air, but its proportions did not impress one, and indeed one
+    could not remember its boundaries as one does not consider the
+    boundaries of a grove. It was amphitheatre-shaped, and about it ran
+    a splendid colonnade, in the niches of whose cornices were beautiful
+    grotesques&mdash;but Yaque seemed to be a land whose very grotesques had
+    all the dignity of the ultimate instead of crying for the indulgence
+    due a phase. The roof was inlaid with prisms of clear stone, and on
+    high were pilasters carved with the Tyrian sphinxes crucified upon
+    upright crosses, surmounted by parhelions of burnished metal. All
+    the seats faced a great dais at the chamber's far end where three
+    thrones were set.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But it was the men and women in the great chamber who filled St.
+    George with wonder. The women&mdash;they were beautiful women,
+    slow-moving, slow-eyed, of soft laughter and sudden melancholy, and
+    clear, serene profiles and abundant hair. And they were all <i>alive</i>,
+    fully and mysteriously alive, alive to their finger-tips. It was as
+    if in comparison all other women acted and moved in a kind of
+    half-consciousness. It was as if, St. George thought vaguely, one
+    were to step through the frame of a pre-Raphaelite tapestry and
+    suddenly find its strange women rejoicing in fulfillment instead of
+    yearning, in noon instead of dusk. As he stood looking down the vast
+    chamber, all springing columns and light lines lifting through the
+    honey-coloured air, it smote St. George that these people, instead
+    of being far away, were all near, surprisingly, unbelievably near to
+    him,&mdash;in a way, nearer to his own elusive personality than he was
+    himself. They were all obviously of his own class; he could
+    perfectly imagine his mother, with her old lace and Roman mosaics,
+    moving at home among them, and the bishop, with his wise, kindly
+    smile. Yet he was irresistibly reminded of a certain haunting dream
+    of his childhood in which he had seemed to himself to walk the world
+    alone, with every one else allied against him because they all knew
+    something that he did not know. That was it, he thought suddenly,
+    and felt his pulse quickening at the intimation: <i>They all knew
+    something that he did not know</i>, that he could not know. But, as
+    they swept him with their clear-eyed, impersonal look, a look
+    that seemed in some exquisite fashion to take no account of
+    individuality, he was gratefully aware of a curious impression
+    that they would like to have had him know, too.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They wish I knew&mdash;they'd rather I did know," St. George found
+    himself thinking in a strange excitement, "if only I could know&mdash;if
+    only I could know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked about him, smiling a little at his folly. He saw the
+    light flash on Amory's glasses as they turned inquisitively on this
+    and that, and somehow the sight steadied him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well," he assured himself, "I'll look them up in a thousand
+    years or so, and we'll dine together, and then we'll say: 'Don't you
+    remember how I didn't know?'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Immediately there presented himself to them a little man who proved
+    to be Balator, lord-chief-commander of the Royal Golden Guard, and
+    now especially directed by the prince, he pleasantly told them, to
+    be responsible for their entertainment and comfort during the
+    ceremony to follow. They were, in fact, his guests for the evening,
+    but St. George and Amory were uncertain whether, considering his
+    office, this was a high honour or a kind of exalted durance.
+    However, as the man was charming the doubt was not important. He had
+    an attenuated face, so conveniently brown by race as to suggest the
+    most soldierly exposure, and he had great, peaceable, slow-lidded
+    eyes. He was, they subsequently learned, an authority upon insect
+    life in Yaque, for he had never had the smallest opportunity to go
+    to war.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As Balator led his guests to their seats near the throne every one
+    looked on them, as they passed, with the serenest fellowship, and no
+    regard persisted longer than a glance, friendly and fugitive.
+    Balator himself not only refrained from stoning the barbarians with
+    commonplaces, but he did not so much as mention America to them or
+    treat them otherwise than as companions, as if his was not only the
+    cosmopolitanism that knows no municipal or continental aliens of its
+    own class, but a kind of inter-dimensional cosmopolitanism as well.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Which," said Amory afterward, "was enviable. The next man from
+    Trebizond or Saturn or Fez whom I meet I'm going to greet and treat
+    as if he lived the proverbial 'twenty minutes out.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A great clock boomed and throbbed through the palace, striking an
+    hour that was no more intelligible than the jargon of a ship's clock
+    to a landsman. Somewhere an orchestra thrilled into haunting sound,
+    poignant with disclosures barely missed. Overhead, through the
+    mighty rafters of the conical roof, the moon looked down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That'll be the same old moon," said Amory. "By Jove! Won't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will, please Heaven," said St. George restlessly; "I don't know.
+    Will it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Near the throne was seated a company of dignitaries who wore upon
+    their breasts great stars and were soberly dressed in a kind of
+    scholar's gown. Some whispered together and nodded and looked as
+    solemn as tithing men; and others were feverishly restless and
+    continually took papers from their graceful sleeves. By
+    developments these were revealed to be the High Council of Yaque,
+    conservative and radical, even in dimensional isolation. Farther
+    back rose tier upon tier of seats sacred to the wives and daughters
+    of the ministry, and St. George even looked hopelessly and
+    mechanically among these for the face that he sought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To some seats slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his
+    attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of
+    purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to
+    have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs.
+    Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham, in indescribably gorgeous apparel elaborately bent to
+    receive&mdash;and a member of the High Council bent to hand&mdash;two
+    glittering articles which St. George was certain were side-combs.
+    There the lady sat, tilting her head to keep her tortoise-shell
+    glasses on her nose, perpetually curving their chain over her ear, a
+    gesture by which the side-combs were perpetually displaced. If the
+    island people had been painted purple, St. George felt sure that she
+    would have acted quite the same. Personality meant nothing to
+    her&mdash;not, as with them, because it had been merged in something
+    greater, but because, with her, it was overborne by self. And there
+    sat Mr. Frothingham (who did not attend the play during court
+    because he believed that a man of affairs should not unduly
+    stimulate the imagination), his head thrown back so that his long
+    hair rested on his amazing collar, his hands laid trimly along his
+    knees. In that crystal air, instinct with its delicate, dominant
+    implication of things imponderable, the personality of each
+    persisted undisturbed, in a kind of adamantine unconsciousness.
+    Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St. George
+    smiled a shade bitterly. Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?
+    Is love's uttermost gift so little? But as the music swelled with
+    premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very
+    transitoriness disclosed: the persistence of love, love's mere
+    immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is
+    elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to
+    which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by
+    the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about
+    the walls and from the alcoves of the lofty roof. Then a veil
+    hanging between two pillars was drawn aside, and the prince's train
+    appeared. There were a detachment of the guard, splendid in their
+    unrelieved gold, and the officers of the court, at their head
+    Cassyrus, the premier, who had manifestly been compounded of Heaven
+    to be a drum-major, and had so undeviating a look that he seemed
+    always to have been caught, red-handed, at his post. Last came
+    Prince Tabnit, dressed in pure white save for a collar of precious
+    stones from which hung the strange green gem that St. George
+    remembered. His clear face and the whiteness of his hair lent to him
+    an air of almost unearthly distinction. His delicate hands wearing
+    no jewels were at his sides, and his head was magnificently erect.
+    He mounted the dais as the music sank to silence, and without
+    preface began to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My people," he said, and St. George felt himself thrilling with the
+    strength and tenderness of that voice, "in the continuance of this
+    our time of trial we come among you that we may win strength and
+    courage from your presence. Since one mind dwells in us all, we have
+    no need of words of cheer. That no message from his Majesty, the
+    King, has come to us is known to you all, with mourning. But the
+    gods&mdash;to whom 'here' is the same as 'there'&mdash;will permit the
+    possible, and they have permitted to us the presence of the daughter
+    of our sovereign, by the grace of the infinite, heir to the throne
+    of Yaque. In two days, should his Majesty not then have returned to
+    his sorrowing people, she will, in accordance with our custom, be
+    crowned Hereditary Princess of Yaque and, after one year, Queen of
+    Yaque and your rightful sovereign."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the prince paused, a little breath of assent was in the room,
+    more potent than any crudity of applause.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Next," pursued the prince, "we would invite your attention to our
+    own affairs, which are of importance solely as they are affected by
+    the immemorial tradition of the House of the Litany. Therefore, in
+    accordance with the custom of our predecessors for two thousand
+    years," lightly pursued the prince, "we have named this day as the
+    day of our betrothal. Moreover, this is determined upon in justice
+    to the daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque, whose marriage the
+    law forbids until the choice of the head of the House of the Litany
+    has been made..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George listened, and his hope soared heavenward as the hope of
+    young love will soar, in spite of itself, at the mere sight of open
+    sky. The daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque! Of course they were
+    to be considered. Why should he fear that, because Olivia was in
+    Yaque, the mere mention of a betrothal referred to Olivia? He was
+    bold enough to smile at his fears, to smile even when, as the prince
+    ceased speaking, the music sounded again, as it were from the air,
+    in a chorus of pure young voices with a ripple of unknown strings in
+    accompaniment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly, at the opening of great doors, a flood of saffron light
+    was poured upon a stair, and at the summit appeared the leisurely
+    head of a procession which the two men were destined never to
+    forget. Across the gallery and down the stair&mdash;it might have been
+    the Golden Stair linking Near with Far&mdash;came a score of exquisite
+    women in all the glory of their youth, of perfect physical beauty
+    and splendid strength and fullness of life; and the wonder was not
+    their beauty more than a kind of dryad delicacy of that beauty,
+    which was yet not frailty but a look of angelic strength. But they
+    were not remote&mdash;they were gloriously human, almost, one would say,
+    divinely human, all gentle movement and warmth and tender breath.
+    They were not remote, save as one's own soul would be remote by its
+    very excess of intimacy with life, Little maids, so shy that their
+    actuality was certain, came before them carrying flowers, and these
+    were followed by youths scattering fragrant burning powder whose
+    fallen flames were instantly pounced upon and extinguished by small
+    furry lemurs trained to lay silver discs upon the flames. And as
+    they all ranged themselves about the throne a little figure appeared
+    at the top of the stairway alone, beneath the lifted curtain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She was veiled; but the elastic step, the girlish grace, the poise
+    and youthful dignity were not to be mistaken. The room whirled round
+    St. George, and then closed in about him and grew dark. For this was
+    the woman advancing to her betrothal; from the manner of her
+    entrance there could be no doubt of that. And it was none of the
+    daughters of the twenty peers. It was Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She wore a trailing gown of rainbow hues, more like the hues of
+    water than of texture, and the warm light fell upon these as she
+    descended and variously multiplied them to beauty. Her little feet
+    were sandaled and a veil of indescribable thinness was wound about
+    her abundant hair and fell across her face, but the gold of her hair
+    escaped the veil and rippled along her gown. Carven chains and
+    necklaces were upon her throat, and bracelets of beaten gold and
+    jewels upon her arms. About her forehead glittered a jeweled band
+    with pendent gems which, at her moving, were like noon sun upon
+    water.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As he realized that this was indeed she whom he had come to seek,
+    only to find her hedged about with difficulties&mdash;and it might be by
+    divinities&mdash;which he had not dreamed of coping, a kind of madness
+    seized St. George. The lights danced before his eyes, and his
+    impulse had to do with rushing up to the dais and crying everybody
+    defiance but Olivia. On the moon-lit deck of <i>The Aloha</i> he had
+    dreamed out the island and the rescue of the island princess, and a
+    possible home-going on his yacht to a home about which he had even
+    dared to dream, too. But it had not once occurred to him to forecast
+    such a contingency as this, or, later, so to explain to himself
+    Prince Tabnit's change of purpose in permitting her recognition as
+    Princess of Yaque&mdash;indeed, if what Jarvo and Akko had told him in
+    New York were accurate, in bringing her to the island at all. And
+    yet what, he thought crazily, if his guess at her part in this
+    betrothal were far wrong? What if her father's safety were not the
+    only consideration? What if, not unnaturally dazzled by the
+    fairy-land which had opened to her ... even while he feared, St.
+    George knew far better. But the number of terrors possible to a man
+    in love is equal to those of battle-fields.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory bent toward him, murmuring excitedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jupiter," he said, "is she the American girl?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's Miss Holland," answered St. George miserably.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;no, not the princess," said Amory, "the other."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked. On the stair was a little figure in rose and
+    silver&mdash;very tiny, very fair, and no doubt the lawyer's daughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dare say it is," he told him, as one would say, "Now what the
+    deuce of it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit had risen to receive Olivia, and St. George had to see
+    him extend his hand and assist her beside him upon the dais. In the
+    absence of her father she was obliged to stand alone. Then the
+    little figure in rose and silver and one of the daughters of the
+    peers advanced and lifted her veil, and St. George wanted to shout
+    with sudden exultation. This then was she&mdash;so near, so near. Surely
+    no great harm could come to them so long as the sea and the mystery
+    of the island no longer lay between them. Did she know of his
+    presence? Although he and Amory were seated so near the throne, they
+    were at one side, and her clear, pure profile was turned toward
+    them. And Olivia did not lift her eyes throughout the prime
+    minister's long address, of which St. George and Amory, so lapped
+    were they in wild projects and importunities, heard nothing until,
+    uttered with indescribable pompousness, as if Cassyrus were a
+    dowager and had made the match himself, the concluding words beat
+    upon St. George's heart like stones. They were the formal
+    announcement of the betrothal of Olivia, daughter of his Majesty,
+    Otho I of Yaque, to Tabnit, Prince of Yaque and Head of the House of
+    the Litany.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George saw Prince Tabnit kneel before Olivia and place a ring
+    upon her hand&mdash;no doubt the ring which had betrothed the island
+    princesses for three thousand years. He saw the High Council
+    standing with bowed heads, like the necessary archangels in an old
+    painting; he caught the flash of the turquoise-blue ephod of the
+    head of the religious order, as the benediction was pronounced by
+    its wearer. And through it all he said to himself that all would be
+    well if only she understood, if only she had the supreme
+    self-consciousness to play the game. After all he knew her so
+    little. He was certain of her exquisite, playful fancy, but had she
+    imagination? Would she see the value of the moment and watch herself
+    moving through it? Or would she live it with that feminine,
+    unhumourous seriousness which is woman's weakness? She had an
+    exquisite independence, he was certain that she had humour, and he
+    remembered how alive she had seemed to him, receptive, like a woman
+    with ten senses. But after all, would not her graceful sanity of
+    view, that sense of tradition and unerring taste which he so
+    reverenced, yet handicap her now and prevent her from daring
+    whatever she must dare?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory was beside himself. It was all very well to feel a great
+    sympathy for St. George, but the sight was more than journalistic
+    flesh and blood could look upon with sympathetic calm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An American girl!" he breathed in spite of himself. "Why, St.
+    George, if we can leave this island alive&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, <i>you</i> won't," St. George explained, with brutal directness,
+    "unless you can cut that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before silence had again fallen, the prime minister, all his fever
+    of importance still upon him, once more faced the audience. This
+    time his words came to St. George like a thunderbolt:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In three days' time, at noon, in this the Hall of Kings," he cried,
+    letting each phrase fall as if he were its proud inventor,
+    "immediately following the official recognition of Olivia, daughter
+    of Otho I, as Hereditary Princess of Yaque, there will be
+    solemnized, according to the immemorial tradition of the island last
+    observed six hundred and eighty-four years ago by Queen Pentellaria,
+    the marriage of Olivia of Yaque, to his Highness, Prince Tabnit,
+    head of the House of the Litany, and chief administrator of justice.
+    <i>For the law prescribes that no unmarried woman shall sit upon the
+    throne of Yaque.</i> At noon of the third day will be observed the
+    double ceremony of the recognition and the marriage. May the gods
+    permit the possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a soft insistence of music from above, a stir and breath
+    about the room, the premier backed away to his seat, and St. George,
+    even with the horrified tightening at his heart, was conscious of a
+    vague commotion from the vicinity of Mrs. Medora Hastings. Then he
+    saw the prince rise and turn to Olivia, and extend his hand to
+    conduct her from the hall. The great banquet room beyond the
+    colonnade was at once thrown open, and there the court circle and
+    the ministry were to gather to do honour to the new princess, whom
+    Prince Tabnit was to lead to the seat at his right hand at the
+    table's head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To the amazement of his Highness, Olivia made no movement to accept
+    the hand that he offered. Instead, she sat slightly at one side of
+    the great glittering throne, looking up at him with something like
+    the faintest conceivable smile which, while one saw, became once
+    more her exquisite, girlish gravity. When the music sank a little
+    her voice sounded above it with a sweet distinctness:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One moment, if you please, your Highness," she said clearly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was the first time that St. George had heard her voice since its
+    good-by to him in New York. And before her words his vague fears for
+    her were triumphantly driven. The spirit that he had hoped for was
+    in her face, and something else; St. George could have sworn that he
+    saw, but no one else could have seen the look, a glimpse of that
+    delicate roguery that had held him captive when he had breakfasted
+    with her&mdash;several hundred years before, was it?&mdash;at the Boris. Ah,
+    he need not have feared for her, he told himself exultantly. For
+    this was Olivia&mdash;of America&mdash;standing in a company of the women who
+    seemed like the women of whom men dream, and whose presence, save in
+    glimpses at first meetings, they perhaps never wholly realize. These
+    were the women of the land which "no one can define or remember."
+    And yet, as he watched her now, St. George was gloriously conscious
+    that Olivia not only held her own among them, but that in some charm
+    of vividness and of <i>knowledge of laughter</i>, she transcended them
+    all.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A ripple of surprise had gone round the room. For all the air of the
+    ultimate about the island-women, St. George doubted whether ever in
+    the three thousand years of Yaque's history a woman had raised her
+    voice from that throne upon a like occasion. And such a tender,
+    beguiling, cajoling little voice it was. A voice that held little
+    remarques upon whatever it had just said, and that made one
+    breathless to know what would come next.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bully!" breathed Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If the princess wishes to speak with us&mdash;" he began, and Olivia
+    made a charming gesture of dissent, and all the jewels in her hair
+    and upon her white throat caught the light and were set glittering.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she said gently, "no, your Highness. I wish to speak in the
+    presence of my people."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She gave the "my" no undue value, yet it fell from her lips with
+    delicious audacity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Indeed," she said, "I think, your Highness, that I will speak to my
+    people myself."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0011"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE END OF THE EVENING
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    The Hall of Kings was very still as Olivia rose. She stood with one
+    hand touching her veil's hem, the other resting on the low, carved
+    arm of the throne, and at the coming and going of her breath her
+    jewels made the light lambent with the indeterminate colours of
+    those strange, joyous banners floating far above her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her voice was very sweet and a little tremulous&mdash;and it is the very
+    grace of a woman's courage that her voice tremble never so slightly.
+    It seemed to St. George that he loved her a thousand times the more
+    for that mere persuasive wavering of her words. And, while he
+    listened to what he felt to be the prelude of her message, it seemed
+    to him that he loved her another thousand times the more&mdash;what
+    heavenly ease there is in this arithmetic of love&mdash;for the tender
+    meaning which, upon her lips, her father's name took on. When,
+    speaking with simplicity and directness of the subject that lay
+    uppermost in the minds of them all, she asked their utmost endeavour
+    in their common grief, it was clear that what she said transcended
+    whatever phenomena of mere experience lay between her and those who
+    heard her, and they understood. The <i>rapport</i> was like that among
+    those who hear one music. But St. George listened, and though his
+    mind applauded, it ran on ahead to the terrifying future. This was
+    all very well, but how was it to help her in the face of what was to
+    happen in three days' time?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Therefore," Olivia's words touched tranquilly among the flying ends
+    of his own thought, "I am come before you to make that sacrifice
+    which my love for my father, and my grief and my anxiety demand. I
+    count upon your support, as he would count upon it for me. I ask
+    that one heart be in us all in this common sorrow. And I am come
+    with the unalterable determination both to renounce my throne
+    there"&mdash;never was anything more enchanting than the way those two
+    words fell from her lips&mdash;"and to postpone my marriage"&mdash;there never
+    was anything more profoundly disquieting than <i>those</i> two words in
+    such a connection&mdash;"until such time as, by your effort and by my
+    own, we may have news of my father, the king; and until, by your
+    effort or by my own, the Hereditary Treasure shall be restored."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So, serenely and with the most ingenuous confidence, did the
+    daughter of the absent King Otho make disposition of the hour's
+    events. Amory leaned forward and feverishly polished his pince-nez.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you think of that?" he put it, beneath his breath, "what
+    <i>do</i> you think of that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, watching that little figure&mdash;so adorably, almost
+    pathetically little in its corner of the great throne&mdash;knew that he
+    had not counted upon her in vain. Over there on the raised seats
+    Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham were looking on
+    matters as helplessly as they would look at a thunder-storm or a
+    circus procession, and they were taking things quite as seriously.
+    But Olivia, in spite of the tragedy that the hour held for her, was
+    giving the moment its exact value, guiltless of the feminine
+    immorality of panic. To give a moment its due without that panic,
+    is, St. George knew, a kind of genius, like creating beauty, and
+    divining another's meaning, and redeeming the spirit of a thing from
+    its actuality. But by that time the arithmetic of his love was by
+    way of being in too many figures to talk about. Which is the proper
+    plight of love.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Every one had turned toward Prince Tabnit, and as St. George looked
+    it smote him whimsically that that impassive profile was like the
+    profiles upon the ancient coins which, almost any day, might be cast
+    up by a passing hoof on the island mold. Indeed, St. George thought,
+    one might almost have spent the prince's profile at a fig-stall,
+    and the vender would have jingled it among his silver and never have
+    detected the cheat. But in the next moment the joyous mounting of
+    his blood running riot in audacious whimsies was checked by the even
+    voice of the prince himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The gratitude and love of this people," he said slowly, "are due to
+    the daughter of its sovereign for what she has proposed. It is,
+    however, to be remembered that by our ancient law the State and
+    every satrapy therein shall receive no service, whether of blood or
+    of bond, from an alien. The king himself could serve us only in that
+    he was king. To his daughter as Princess of Yaque and wife of the
+    Head of the House of the Litany, this service in the search for the
+    sovereign and the Hereditary Treasure will be permitted, but she may
+    serve us only from the throne."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Upon my soul, then that lets <i>us</i> out," murmured Amory.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And St. George remembered miserably how, in that dingy house in
+    McDougle Street, he and Olivia had listened once before to the
+    recital of that law from the prince's lips. If they had known how
+    next they would hear it! If they had known then what that law would
+    come to mean to her! What could she do now&mdash;what could even Olivia
+    do now but assent?
+</p>
+<p>
+    She could do a great deal, it appeared. She could incline her head,
+    with a bewitching droop of eyelids, and look up to meet the eyes of
+    the prince with a serenity that was like a smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In my country," said Olivia gravely, "when anything special arises
+    they frequently find that there is no law to cover it. It would seem
+    to us"&mdash;it was as though the humility of that "us" took from her
+    superb daring&mdash;"that this is a matter requiring the advice of the
+    High Council. Therefore," asked little Olivia gently, "will you not
+    appoint, your Highness, a special session of the High Council to
+    convene at noon to-morrow, to consider our proposition?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a scarcely perceptible stir among the members of the High
+    Council, for even the liberals were, it would seem, taken aback by a
+    departure which they themselves had not instituted. Olivia, still in
+    submission to tradition which she could not violate, had gained the
+    time for which she hoped. With a grace that was like the conferring
+    of a royal favour, Prince Tabnit appointed the meeting of the High
+    Council for noon on the following day.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May the gods permit the possible," he added, and once more extended
+    his hand to Olivia. This time, with lowered eyes, she gave him the
+    tips of her fingers and, as the beckoning music swelled a delicate
+    prelude, she stepped from the dais and suffered the prince to lead
+    her toward the banquet hall.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory drew a long breath, and it came to St. George that if he,
+    Amory, said anything about what he would give if he had a leased
+    wire to the <i>Sentinel</i> Office, there would no longer be room on the
+    island for them both. But Amory said no such thing. Instead, he
+    looked at St. George in distinct hesitation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I say," he brought out finally, "St. George, by Jove, do you know,
+    it seems to me I've seen Miss Frothingham before. And how jolly
+    beautiful she is," he added almost reverently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe it was when you were a Ph&oelig;nician galley slave and she went
+    by in a trireme," offered St. George, trying to keep in sight the
+    bright hair and the floating veil beyond the press of the crowd.
+    Would he see Olivia and would he be able to speak with her, and did
+    she know he was there, and would she be angry? Ah well, she could
+    not possibly be angry, he thought; but with all this in his mind it
+    was hardly reasonable of Amory to expect him to speculate on where
+    Miss Frothingham might have been seen before. If it weren't for this
+    Balator now, St. George said to himself restlessly, and suddenly
+    observed that Balator was expecting them to follow him. So, in the
+    slow-moving throng, all soft hues and soft laughter, they made their
+    way toward the colonnade that cut off the banquet room. And at every
+    step St. George thought, "she has passed here&mdash;and here&mdash;and here,"
+    and all the while, through the mighty open rafters in the conical
+    roof, were to be seen those strange banners joyously floating in the
+    delicate, alien light. The wine of the moment flowed in his veins,
+    and he moved under strange banners, with a strange ecstasy in his
+    heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Therefore, suddenly to hear Rollo's voice at his shoulder came as a
+    distinct shock.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's one of them little brown 'uns, sir," Rollo announced in his
+    best tone of mystery. "He's settin' upstairs, sir, an' he's all fer
+    settin' there <i>till</i> he sees you. He says it's most important, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory heard.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shall I go up?" he asked eagerly; "I'd like a whiff of a pipe,
+    anyway. It'll be something to tie to."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you go?" asked St. George in undisguised gratitude. He was
+    prepared to accept most risks rather than to lose sight of the star
+    he was following.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With a word to Balator who explained where, on his return, he could
+    find them, Amory turned with Rollo, and slipped through the crowd.
+    Having reasons of his own for getting back to the hall below, Amory
+    was prepared to speed well the interview with "the little brown 'un"
+    who, he supposed, was Jarvo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was Jarvo&mdash;Jarvo, in a state of excitement, profound and
+    incredible. The little man, from the annoyingly serene mode of mind
+    in which he had left them, was become, for him, almost agitated. He
+    sprang up from a divan in the great dressing-room of their apartment
+    and approached Amory almost without greeting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Adôn, adôn," he said earnestly, "you must leave the palace at
+    once&mdash;at once. But to-night!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory hunted for his pipe, found and lighted it, pressing a
+    cigarette upon Jarvo who accepted, and held it, alight, in the palm
+    of his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-night," he repeated, as if it were a game.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well, now," said Amory reasonably, "why, Jarvo? And we so
+    comfortable."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little man looked at Amory beseechingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know what I know," he said earnestly, "many things will happen.
+    There is danger about the palace to-night&mdash;danger it may be for you.
+    I do not know all, but I come to warn you, and to warn the adôn who
+    has been kind to us. You have brought us here when we were alone in
+    America," said Jarvo simply. "Akko and I will help you now. It was
+    Akko who remembered the tower."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked down at the bowl of his pipe, and shook his vestas in
+    their box, and turned his eyes to Rollo, listening near by with an
+    air of the most intense abstraction. Yes, all these things were
+    real. They were all real, and here was he, Amory, smoking. And yet
+    what was all this amazing talk about danger in the palace, and being
+    warned, and remembering the tower?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anybody would think I was Crass, writing head-lines," he told
+    himself, and blew a cloud of smoke through which to look at Jarvo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are you talking about?" he demanded sternly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo had a little key in his hand, which he shook. The key was on a
+    slender, carved ring, and it jingled. And when he offered it to him
+    Amory abstractedly took it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See, adôn," said Jarvo, "see! In the ilex grove on the road that we
+    took last night there is a white tower&mdash;it may be that you have
+    noticed it to-day. That tower is empty, and this is the key. There
+    may be guards, but I shall know how to pass among them. You must
+    come with me there to-night, the three. Even then it may be too
+    late, I do not know. The gods will permit the possible. But this I
+    know: the Royal Guard are of the lahnas, on whom the tax to make
+    good the Hereditary Treasure will fall most heavily. They are filled
+    with rage against your people&mdash;you and the king who is of your
+    people. I do not know what they will do, but you are not safe for
+    one moment in the palace. I come to warn you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory's pipe went out. He sat pulling at it abstractedly, trying to
+    fit together what St. George had told him of the Hereditary Treasure
+    situation. And more than at any other time since his arrival on the
+    island his heart leaped up at the prospect of promised adventure.
+    What if St. George's romantic apostasy were not, after all, to spoil
+    the flavour of the kind of adventure for which he, Amory, had been
+    hoping? He leaned eagerly forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What would you suggest?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo's eyes brightened. At once he sprang to his feet and stood
+    before Amory, taking soft steps here and there as he talked, in
+    movement graceful and tenuous as the greyhound of which he had
+    reminded St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In the palace yard," explained the little man rapidly, "is a motor
+    which came from Melita, bringing guests for the ceremony of
+    to-night. They will remain in the palace until after the marriage of
+    the prince, two days hence. But the motor&mdash;that must go back
+    to-night to Melita, adôn. I have made for myself permission to take
+    it there. But you&mdash;the three&mdash;must go with me. At the tower in the
+    ilex grove I shall leave you, and I shall return. Is this good?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Excellent. But what afterward?" demanded Amory. "Are we all to keep
+    house in the tower?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo shook his head, like a man who has thought of everything.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Through to-morrow, yes," he said, "but to-morrow night, when the
+    dark falls&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He bent forward and spoke softly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did not the adôn wish to ascend the mountain?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Rather," said Amory, "but how, good heavens?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I and Akko wish to ascend also; the prince has sent us no message,
+    and we fear him," said Jarvo simply. "There are on the island, adôn,
+    six carriers, trained from birth to make the ascent. They are the
+    sons of those whose duty it was to ascend, and they the sons for
+    many generations. The trail is very steep, very perilous. Six were
+    taught to go up with messages long before the knowledge of the
+    wireless way, long before the flight of the airships. They are
+    become a tradition of the island. It is with them that you must
+    ascend&mdash;if you have no fear."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fear!" cried Amory. "But these men, what of them? They are in the
+    employ of the State. How do you know they will take us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo dropped his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I and Akko," he said quietly, "we are two of these six carriers,
+    adôn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Amory leaped up, scattering the ashes of his pipe over the
+    tiles. This, then, was what was the matter with the feet of the two
+    men, about which they had all speculated on the deck of <i>The Aloha</i>,
+    the feet trained from birth to make the ascent of the steep trail,
+    feet become long, tenuous, almost prehensile&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's miracles, that's what it is," declared Amory solemnly. "How on
+    earth did they come to take you to New York?" he could not forbear
+    asking.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The prince knew nothing of your country, adôn," answered Jarvo
+    simply. "He might have needed us to enter it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To climb the custom-house," said Amory abstractedly, and laughed
+    out suddenly in sheer light-heartedness. Here was come to them an
+    undertaking to which St. George himself must warm as he had warmed
+    at the prospect of the voyage. To go up the mountain to the
+    threshold of the king's palace, where lived the daughter of the
+    king.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory bent himself with a will to mastering each detail of the
+    little man's proposals. Rollo, they decided, was at once to make
+    ready a few belongings in the oil-skins. Immediately after the
+    banquet St. George and Amory were to mingle with the throng and
+    leave the palace&mdash;no difficult matter in the press of the
+    departures&mdash;and, on the side of the courtyard beneath the windows of
+    the banquet room, Jarvo, already joined by Rollo, would be awaiting
+    them in the motor bound for Melita.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It sounds as if it couldn't be done," said Amory in intense
+    enjoyment. "It's bully."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He paced up and down the room, talking it over. He folded his arms,
+    and looked at the matter from all sides and wondered, as touching a
+    story being "covered" for Chillingworth, whether he were leaving
+    anything unthought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Chillingworth!" he said to himself in ecstasy. "Wouldn't
+    Chillingworth dote to idolatry upon this sight?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Amory stood still, facing something that he had not seen
+    before. He had come, in his walk, upon a little table set near the
+    room's entrance, and bearing a decanter and some cups.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello," he said, "Rollo, where did this come from?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo came forward, velvet steps, velvet pressing together of his
+    hands, face expressionless as velvet too.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A servant of 'is 'ighness, sir," he said&mdash;Rollo did that now and
+    then to let you know that his was the blood of valets&mdash;"left it some
+    time ago, with the compliments of the prince. It looks like a good,
+    nitzy Burgundy, sir," added Rollo tolerantly, "though the man did
+    say it was bottled in something B.C., sir, and if it was it's most
+    likely flat. You can't trust them vintages much farther back than
+    the French Revolootion, beggin' your pardon, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory absently lifted the decanter, and then looked at it with some
+    curiosity. The decanter was like a vase, ornamented with gold
+    medallions covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+    beauty and variety of design. Serpents, men contending with lions,
+    sacred trees and apes were chased in the gold, and the little cups
+    of sard were engraved in pomegranates and segments of fruit and
+    pendent acorns, and were set with cones of cornelian. The cups were
+    joined by a long cord of thick gold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory set his hand to the little golden stopper, perhaps
+    hermetically sealed, he thought idly, at about the time of the
+    accidental discovery of glass itself by the Ph&oelig;nicians. Amory was
+    not imaginative, but as he thought of the possible age of the wine,
+    there lay upon him that fascination communicable from any link
+    between the present and the living past.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Solomon and Sargon," he said to himself, "the geese in the capitol,
+    Marathon, Alexander, Carthage, the Norman conquest, Shakespeare and
+    Miss Frothingham!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He smiled and twisted the carven stopper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the girl is alive," he said almost wonderingly. "There has been
+    so much Time in the world, and yet she is alive now. Down there in
+    the banquet room."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The odour of the contents of the vase, spicy, penetrating,
+    delicious, crept out, and he breathed it gratefully. It was like no
+    odour that he remembered. This was nothing like Rollo's "good, nitzy
+    Burgundy"&mdash;this was something infinitely more wonderful. And the
+    odour&mdash;the odour was like a draught. And wasn't this the wine of
+    wines, he asked himself, to give them courage, exultation, the most
+    superb daring when they started up that delectable mountain? St.
+    George must know; he would think so too.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I say," said Amory to himself, "we must put some strength in
+    Jarvo's bones too&mdash;poor little brick!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    With that Amory drew the carven stopper, fitted in the little funnel
+    that hung about the neck of the vase, poured a half-finger of the
+    wine in each cup, and lifted one in his hand. But the mere odour was
+    enough to make a man live ten lives, he thought, smiling at his own
+    strange exultation. He must no more than touch it to his lips, for
+    he wanted a clear head for what was coming.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come, Jarvo," he cried gaily&mdash;was he shouting, he wondered, and
+    wasn't that what he was trying to do&mdash;to shout to make some far-away
+    voice answer him? "Come and drink to the health of the prince. Long
+    may he live, long may he live&mdash;without us!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory had stood with his back to the little brown man while he
+    poured the wine. As he turned, he lifted one cup to his lips and
+    Rollo gravely presented the other to Jarvo. But with a bound that
+    all but upset the velvet valet, the little man cleared the space
+    between him and Amory and struck the cup from Amory's hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Adôn!" he cried terribly, "adôn! Do not drink&mdash;do not drink!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The precious liquid splashed to the floor with the falling cup and
+    ran red about the tiles. Instantly a powerful and delightful
+    fragrance rose, and the thick fumes possessed the air. Amory threw
+    out his hands blindly, caught dizzily at Rollo, and was half dragged
+    by Jarvo to the open window.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I say, sir&mdash;" burst out Rollo, more upset over the loss of the
+    wine than he was alarmed at the occurrence. If it came to losing a
+    good, nitzy Burgundy, Rollo knew what that meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Adôn," cried Jarvo, shaking Amory's shoulders, "did you taste the
+    liquor&mdash;tell me&mdash;the liquor&mdash;did you taste?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory shook his head. Jarvo's face and the hovering Rollo and the
+    whole room were enveloped in mist, and the wine was hot on his lips
+    where the cup had touched them. Yet while he stood there, with that
+    permeating fragrance in the air, it came to him vaguely that he had
+    never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this,
+    he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old
+    days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy"
+    Burgundy was no more than a flabby, <i>vin ordinaire</i> beside it. Not
+    that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word
+    that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in
+    his veins, he summed it up to himself triumphantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But after all, the effect was only momentary. Almost as quickly as
+    those strange fumes had arisen they were dissipated. And when
+    presently Amory stood up unsteadily from the seat of the window, he
+    could see clearly enough that Jarvo, with terrified eyes, was
+    turning the vase in his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the same," he was saying, "it must be the same. The gods have
+    permitted the possible. I was here to tell you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me what?" demanded Amory with ungrateful irritation. "Is the
+    stuff poison?" he asked, tottering in spite of himself as he crossed
+    the floor toward him. But Jarvo turned his face, and upon it was
+    such an incongruous terror that Amory involuntarily stood still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There are known to be two," said Jarvo, holding the vase at arm's
+    length, "and the one is abundant life, if the draught is not
+    over-measured. But the other is ten thousand times worse than
+    death."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?" cried Amory roughly. "What are you talking
+    about? If the stuff is poison can't you say so?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo looked at him swiftly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "These things are not spoken aloud in Yaque," he said simply, and
+    after that he held his peace. Amory threatened him and laughed at
+    him, but Jarvo shook his head. At last Amory scoffed at the whole
+    matter and stretched out his hand for the vase.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come," he said, "at all events I'll take it with me. It can't be
+    very much worse than the American liqueurs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My word for it, sir, beggin' your pardon," said Rollo earnestly,
+    "it's a kind of what you might call med-i-eval Burgundy, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is not well," said Jarvo, handing the vase with reluctance, "yet
+    take it&mdash;but see that it touches no lips. I charge you that, adôn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory smiled and slipped the little vase in his coat pocket.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's all right," he said, "I won't let it get away from me. I can
+    find my legs now; I'll go back down. Look sharp, Rollo. Be down
+    there with the oil-skins. We put on this Tyrian purple stuff over
+    the whole outfit," he explained to Jarvo, "and I suppose, you know,
+    that you can get both robes back here for us, if we escape in them?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Assuredly, adôn," said Jarvo, "and you must escape without delay.
+    This wine must mean that the prince, too, wishes you harm. Now let
+    me be before you for a little, so that no one may see us together. I
+    shall go now, immediately, to the motor&mdash;it is waiting already by
+    the wall on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+    banquet hall. I shall not fail you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the banquet
+    room," repeated Amory. "Thanks, Jarvo. You're all kinds of a good
+    fellow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, adôn," gravely assented the little man from the threshold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ten minutes later Amory followed. Already Rollo had packed the
+    oil-skins, and Amory, his nerves steadied and the excitement of all
+    that the night promised come upon him, hurried before him down the
+    corridor, his thoughts divided in their allegiance between the
+    delight of telling St. George what was toward, and the new and
+    alluring delight of seeing Antoinette Frothingham near at hand in
+    the banquet room. After all, he had had only the vaguest glimpse of
+    a little figure in rose and silver, and he doubted if he could tell
+    her from the princess, but for the interpreting gown.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked up with an irrepressible thrill of delight. He was just
+    at that moment crossing the high white audience-hall, the anteroom
+    to the Hall of Kings&mdash;he, Amory, in Tyrian purple garments. If
+    anything were needed to complete the picture it would be to meet
+    face to face, there in that big, lonely room, a little figure in
+    rose and silver. It made his heart beat even to think of the
+    possibilities of that situation. He skirted the Hall of Kings, and
+    stood in one of the archways of the colonnade, facing the banquet
+    room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The banquet-table extended about three sides of the room, whose
+    centre the guests faced. The middle space was left pure, unvexed by
+    columns or furnishing. At the room's far end Amory glimpsed the
+    prince, at his side Olivia's white veil, and her women about her;
+    and, nearer, St. George and Balator in the place appointed. A guard
+    came to conduct him, and he crossed to his seat and sank down with
+    the look that could be made to mean whatever Amory meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I expect to be served," murmured the journalist in him, "by
+    beautiful tame megatheriums, in sashes. And is that glyptodon
+    salad?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's eyes were upon the guests, so tranquilly seated, aware
+    of the hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I fancy," he said in half-voice, "that presently we shall see
+    little flames issuing from their hair, as there used from the hair
+    of the ladies in Werner's ballets."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then as Balator leaned toward him in his splendid leisure, fostering
+    his charm, there came an amazing interruption.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The low key of the room was electrically raised by a cry, loosed
+    from some other plight of being, like an odour of burning
+    encroaching upon a garden.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why have you not waited?" some one called, and the voice&mdash;clear,
+    equal, imperious&mdash;evened its way upon the air and reduced to itself
+    the soft speech of the others. Silence fell upon them all, and
+    their eyes were toward a figure standing in the open interval of the
+    room&mdash;a figure whose aspect thrilled St. George with sudden,
+    inexplicable emotion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was an old man, incredibly old, so that one thought first of his
+    age. His beard and hair were not all grey, but he had grotesquely
+    brown and wrinkled flesh. His stuff robe hung in straight folds
+    about his singularly erect figure, and there was in his bearing the
+    dignity of one who has understood all fine and gentle things, all
+    things of quietude. But his look was vacant, as if the mind were
+    asleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why have you not waited?" he repeated almost wonderingly. "Why have
+    you not sent for me?" and his eyes questioned one and another, and
+    rested on the face of the prince upon the dais, with Olivia by his
+    side. The guard, whom in some fashion the strange old man had
+    eluded, hurried from the borders of the room. But he broke from them
+    and was off up half the length of the hall toward the prince's seat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you not know?" he cried as he went, "I am Malakh. Read one
+    another's eyes and you will know. I am Malakh."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the guards closed about him he tottered and would have fallen
+    save that they caught him roughly and pressed to a door, half
+    carrying him, and he did not resist. But as speech was renewed
+    another voice broke the murmur, and with great amazement St. George
+    knew that this was Olivia's voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she cried&mdash;but half as if she distrusted her own strange
+    impulse, "let him stay&mdash;let him stay."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George saw the prince's look question her. He himself was unable
+    to account for her unexpected intercession, and so, one would have
+    said, was Olivia. She looked up at the prince almost fearfully, and
+    down the length of the listening table, and back to the old man
+    whose eyes were upon her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He is an old man, your Highness," St. George heard her saying, "let
+    him stay."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit, who gave a curious impression of doing everything
+    that he did in obedience to inertia rather than in its defiance,
+    indicated some command to the puzzled guards, and they led old
+    Malakh to a stone bench not far from the dais, and there he sank
+    down, looking about him without surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is well," he said simply, "Malakh has come."
+</p>
+<p>
+    While St. George was marveling&mdash;but not that the old man spoke the
+    English, for in Yaque it was not surprising to find the very madmen
+    speaking one's own tongue&mdash;Balator explained the man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He is a poor mad creature," Balator said. "He walks the streets of
+    Med saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say, 'king,' and so he is
+    seeking the king. But he is mad, and they say that he always weeps,
+    and therefore they pretend to believe that he says 'Malakh,' which
+    is to say 'salt.' And they call him that for his tears. Doubtless
+    the princess does not understand. Her Highness has a tender heart."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. The incident was trivial, but Olivia had
+    never seemed so near.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sometimes in the world of commonplace there comes an extreme hour
+    which one afterward remembers with "Could that have been I? But
+    could it have been I who did that?" And one finds it in one's heart
+    to be certain that it was not one's self, but some one else&mdash;some
+    one very near, some one who is always sharing one's own
+    consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's moments. "Perhaps,"
+    St. George would have said, "there is some such person who is
+    nearly, but not quite, I myself. And if there is, it was he and not
+    I who was at that banquet!" It was one of the hours which seem to
+    have been made with no echo. It was; and then passed into other
+    ways, and one remembered only a brightness. For example, St. George
+    listened to what Balator said, and he heard with utmost
+    understanding, and with the frequent pleasure of wonder, and was now
+    and then exquisitely amused as one is amused in dreams. But even as
+    he listened, if he tried to remember the last thing that was said,
+    and the next to the last thing, he found that these had escaped him;
+    and as he rose from the table he could not recall ten words that had
+    been spoken. It was as if the some one very near, who is always
+    sharing one's consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's
+    moments, had taken St. George's part at the banquet while he,
+    himself, sat there in the rôle of his own outer consciousness. But
+    neither he nor that hypothetical "some one else," who was also he,
+    lost for one instant the heavenly knowledge that Olivia was up there
+    at the head of the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, in spite of diplomatic effort, had not succeeded in imparting
+    to St. George anything of his talk with Jarvo. Balator was too near,
+    and the place was somehow too generally attentive to permit a secret
+    word. So, as they rose from the table, St. George was still in
+    ignorance of what was toward and knew nothing of either the Ilex
+    Tower or the possibilities of the morrow. He had only one thought,
+    and that was to speak with Olivia, to let her know that he was there
+    on the island, near her, ready to serve her&mdash;ah well, chiefly, he
+    did not disguise from himself, what he wanted was to look at her and
+    to hear her speak to him. But Amory had depended on the confusion of
+    the rising to communicate the great news, and to tell about Jarvo,
+    waiting in a motor out there in the palace courtyard, by the wall on
+    the side opposite the windows of the banquet room. In an auspicious
+    moment Amory looked warily about, thrilling with premonition of his
+    friend's enthusiasm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before he could speak, St. George uttered a startled exclamation,
+    caught at Amory's arm, sprang forward, and was off up the long room,
+    dragging Amory with him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    About the dais there was suddenly an appalling confusion. Push of
+    feet, murmurs, a cry and, visible over the heads between, a
+    glistening of gold uniforms closing about the throne seats, flashing
+    back to the long, open windows, disappearing against the night...
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is it?" cried Amory as he ran. "What is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quick," said St. George only, "I don't know. They've gone with
+    her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory did not understand, but he saw that Olivia's seat was empty;
+    and when he swept the heads for her white veil, it was not there.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who has?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George swerved to the side of the room toward the windows, and
+    old Malakh stood there, crying out and pointing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The guard, I think," St. George answered, and was over the low sill
+    of a window, running headlong across the courtyard, Amory behind
+    him. "There they go," St. George cried. "Good God, what are we to
+    do? There they go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked. Down a side avenue&mdash;one of those tunnels of shadow
+    that taught the necessity of mystery&mdash;a great motor car was
+    speeding, and in the dimness the two men could see the white of
+    Olivia's floating veil.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this, Amory wheeled and searched the length of wall across the
+    yard. If only&mdash;if only&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    There on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+    banquet room stood the motor that was that night to go back to
+    Melita. Bolt upright on the seat was Jarvo, and climbing in the
+    tonneau, with his neck stretched toward the confusion of the palace,
+    was Rollo. Jarvo saw Amory, who beckoned; and in an instant the car
+    was beside them and the two men were over the back of the tonneau in
+    a flash.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That way," cried St. George, with no time to waste on the miracle
+    of Jarvo's appearance, "that way&mdash;there. Where you see the white."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At a touch the motor plunged away into the fragrant darkness. Amory
+    looked back. Figures crowded the windows of the palace, and streamed
+    from the banquet hall into the courtyard. Men hurried through the
+    hall, and there was clamour of voices, and in the honey-coloured air
+    the great bulk of the palace towered like a faithless sentinel, the
+    alien banners in nameless colours sending streamers into the
+    moon-lit upper spaces.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On before, down nebulous ways, went the whiteness of the floating
+    veil.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0012"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    BETWEEN-WORLDS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Down nebulous ways they went, the thin darkness flowing past them.
+    The sloping avenue ran all the width of the palace grounds, and here
+    among slim-trunked trees faint fringes of the light touched away the
+    dimness in the open spaces and expressed the borders of the dusk.
+    Always the way led down, dipping deeper in the conjecture of shadow,
+    and always before them glimmered the mist of Olivia's veil, an
+    eidolon of love, of love's eternal Vanishing Goal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And St. George was in pursuit. So were Amory and Jarvo, and Rollo of
+    the oil-skins, but these mattered very little, for it was St. George
+    whose eyes burned in his pale face and were striving to catch the
+    faintest motion in that fleeing car ahead.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Faster, Jarvo," he said, "we're not gaining on them. I think
+    they're gaining on us. Put ahead, can't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory vexed the air with frantic questionings. "How did it happen?"
+    he said. "Who did it? Was it the guard? What did they do it for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It looks to me," said St. George only, peering distractedly into
+    the gloom, "as if all those fellows had on uniforms. Can you see?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo spoke softly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is true, adôn," he said, "they are of the guard. This is what
+    they had planned," he added to Amory. "I feared the harm would be to
+    you. It is the same. Your turn would be the next."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?" St. George demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, with some incoherence, told him what Jarvo had come to them
+    to propose, and heightened his own excitement by plunging into the
+    business of that night and the next, as he had had it from the
+    little brown man's lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Up the mountain to-morrow night," he concluded fervently, "what do
+    you think of that? Do you see us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maniac, no," said St. George shortly, "what do we want to go up the
+    mountain for if Miss Holland is somewhere else? Faster, Jarvo, can't
+    you?" he urged. "Why, this thing is built to go sixty miles an hour.
+    We're creeping."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps it's better to start in gentle and work up a pace, sir,"
+    observed Rollo inspirationally, "like a man's legs, sir, beggin'
+    your pardon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at him as if he had first seen him, so that Amory
+    once more explained his presence and pointed to the oil-skins. And
+    St. George said only:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now we're coming up a little&mdash;don't you think we're coming up a
+    little? Throw it wide open, Jarvo&mdash;now, go!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are you going to do when you catch them?" demanded Amory. "We
+    can't lunge into them, for fear of hurting Miss Holland. And who
+    knows what devilish contrivance they've got&mdash;dum-dum bullets with a
+    poison seal attachment," prophesied Amory darkly. "What are you
+    going to do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know what we're going to do," said St. George doggedly,
+    "but if we can overtake them it won't take us long to find out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Never so slightly the pursuers were gaining. It was impossible to
+    tell whether those in the flying car knew that they were followed,
+    and if they did know, and if Olivia knew, St. George wondered
+    whether the pursuit were to her a new alarm, or whether she were
+    looking to them for deliverance. If she knew! His heart stood still
+    at the thought&mdash;oh, and if they had both known, that morning at
+    breakfast at the Boris, that <i>this</i> was the way the genie would come
+    out of the jar. But how, if he were unable to help her? And how
+    could he help her when these others might have Heaven knew what
+    resources of black art, art of all the colours of the Yaque
+    spectrum, if it came to that? The slim-trunked trees flew past them,
+    and the tender branches brushed their shoulders and hung out their
+    flowers like lamps. Warm wind was in their faces, sweet,
+    reverberant voices of the wood-things came chorusing, and ahead
+    there in the dimness, that misty will-o'-the-wisp was her veil,
+    Olivia's veil. St. George would have followed if it had led him
+    between-worlds.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a manner it did lead him between-worlds. Emerging suddenly upon a
+    broader avenue their car followed the other aside and shot through a
+    great gateway of the palace wall&mdash;a wall built of such massive
+    blocks that the gateway formed a covered passageway. From there,
+    delicately lighted, greenly arched, and on this festal night, quite
+    deserted, went the road by which, the night before, they had entered
+    Med.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now," said St. George between set teeth, "now see what you can do,
+    Jarvo. Everything depends on you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Evidently Jarvo had been waiting for this stretch of open road and
+    expecting the other car to take it. He bent forward, his wiry
+    little frame like a quivering spring controlling the motion. The
+    motor leaped at his touch. Away down the road they tore with the
+    wind singing its challenge. Second by second they saw their
+    gain increase. The uniforms of the guards in the car became
+    distinguishable. The white of Olivia's veil merged in the
+    brightness of her gown&mdash;was it only the shining of the gold of the
+    uniforms or could St. George see the floating gold of her hair?
+    Ah, wonderful, past all speech it was wonderful to be fleeing
+    toward her through this pale light that was like a purer element
+    than light itself. With the phantom moving of the boughs in the
+    wood on either side light seemed to dance and drip from leaf to
+    leaf&mdash;the visible spirit of the haunted green. The unreality of it
+    all swept over him almost stiflingly. Olivia&mdash;was it indeed Olivia
+    whom he was following down lustrous ways of a land vague as a
+    star; or was his pursuit not for her, but for the exquisite,
+    incommunicable Idea, and was he following it through a world
+    forth-fashioned from his own desire?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly indistinguishable sounds were in his ears, words from
+    Amory, from Jarvo certain exultant gutturals. He felt the car
+    slacken speed, he looked ahead for the swift beckoning of the veil,
+    and then he saw that where, in the delicate distance, the other
+    motor had sped its way, it now stood inactive in the road before
+    them, and they were actually upon it. The four guards in the motor
+    were standing erect with uplifted faces, their gold uniforms shining
+    like armour. But this was not all. There, in the highway beside the
+    car, the mist of her veil like a halo about her, Olivia stood alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George did not reckon what they meant to do. He dropped over the
+    side of the tonneau and ran to her. He stood before her, and all the
+    joy that he had ever known was transcended as she turned toward
+    him. She threw out her hands with a little cry&mdash;was it gladness, or
+    relief, or beseeching? He could not be certain that there was even
+    recognition in her eyes before she tottered and swayed, and he
+    caught her unconscious form in his arms. As he lifted her he looked
+    with apprehension toward the car that held the guards. To his
+    bewilderment there was no car there. The pursued motor, like a
+    winged thing of the most innocent vagaries, had taken itself off
+    utterly. And on before, the causeway was utterly empty, dipping idly
+    between murmurous green. But at the moment St. George had no time to
+    spend on that wonder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He carried Olivia to the tonneau of Jarvo's car, jealous when Rollo
+    lifted her gown's hem from the dust of the road and when Amory threw
+    open the door. He held her in his arms, half kneeling beside her,
+    profoundly regardless where it should please the others to dispose
+    themselves. He had no recollection of hearing Jarvo point the way
+    through the trees to a path that led away, as far from them as a
+    voice would carry, to the Ilex Tower whose key burned in Amory's
+    pocket, promising radiant, intangible things to his imagination. St.
+    George understood with magnificent unconcern that Amory and Rollo
+    were gone off there to wait for the return of him and Jarvo; he took
+    it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken
+    back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he
+    knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving
+    across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate
+    destination in which he found himself believing with infinite faith.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For this was Olivia, in his arms. St. George looked down at her, at
+    the white, exquisite face with its shadow of lashes, and it seemed
+    to him that he must not breathe, or remember, or hope, lest the gods
+    should be jealous and claim the moment, and leave him once more
+    forlorn. That was the secret, he thought, not to touch away the
+    elusive moment by hope or memory, but just to live it, filled with
+    its ecstasies, borne on the crest of its consciousness. It seemed to
+    him in some intimately communicated fashion, that the moment, the
+    very world of the island, was become to him a more intense object
+    of consciousness than himself. And somehow Olivia was its
+    expression&mdash;Olivia, here in his arms, with the stir of her breath
+    and the light, light pressure of her body and the fall of her hair,
+    not only symbols of the sovereign hour, but the hour's realities.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On either side the phantom wood pressed close about them, and its
+    light seemed coined by goblin fingers. Dissolving wind, persuading
+    little voices musical beyond the domain of music that he knew,
+    quick, poignant vistas of glades where the light spent itself in
+    its longed-for liberty of colour, labyrinthine ways of shadow that
+    taught the necessity of mystery. There was something lyric about it
+    all. Here Nature moved on no formal lines, understood no frugality
+    of beauty, but was lavish with a divine and special errantry to a
+    divine and special understanding. And it had been given St. George
+    to move with her merely by living this hour, with Olivia in his
+    arms.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sweet of life&mdash;the sweet of life and the world his own. The
+    words had never meant so much. He had often said them in exultation,
+    but he had never known their truth: the world was literally his own,
+    under the law. Nothing seemed impossible. His mind went back to the
+    unexplained disappearing of that other motor and, however it had
+    been, that did not seem impossible either. It seemed natural, and
+    only a new doorway to new points of contact. In this amazing land no
+    speculation was too far afield to be the food of every day. Here men
+    understood miracle as the rest of the world understands invention.
+    Already the mere existence of Yaque proved that the space of
+    experience is transcended&mdash;and with the thought a fancy, elusive and
+    profound, seized him and gripped at his heart with an emotion wider
+    than fear. What had become of the other car? Had it gone down some
+    road of the wood which the guards knew, or ... The words of Prince
+    Tabnit came back to him as they had been spoken in that wonderful
+    tour of the island. "The higher dimensions are being conquered.
+    Nearly all of us can pass into the fifth at will, 'disappearing,' as
+    you have the word." Was it possible that in the vanishing of the
+    pursued car this had been demonstrated before him? Into this space,
+    inclusive of the visible world and of Yaque as well, had the car
+    passed <i>without the pursuers being able to point</i> to the direction
+    which it had taken? St. George smiled in derision as this flashed
+    upon him, and it hardly held his thought for a moment, for his eyes
+    were upon Olivia's face, so near, so near his own ... Undoubtedly,
+    he thought vaguely, that other motor had simply swerved aside to
+    some private opening of the grove and, from being hard-pressed and
+    almost overtaken, was now well away in safety. Yet if this were so,
+    would they not have taken Olivia with them? But to that strange and
+    unapparent hyperspace they could not have taken her, because she did
+    not understand. "...just as one," Prince Tabnit had said, "who
+    understands how to die and come to life again would not be able to
+    take with him any one who himself did not understand how to
+    accompany him..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Some terrifying and exalting sense swept him into a new intimacy of
+    understanding as he realized glimmeringly what heights and depths
+    lay about his ceasing to see that car of the guard. Yet, with
+    Olivia's head upon his arm, all that he theorized in that flash of
+    time hung hardly beyond the border of his understanding. Indeed, it
+    seemed to St. George as if almost&mdash;almost he could understand, as if
+    he could pierce the veil and know utterly all the secrets of spirit
+    and sense that confound. "We shall all know <i>when we are able to
+    bear it</i>," he had once heard another say, and it seemed to him now
+    that at last he was able to bear it, as if the sense of the
+    uninterrupted connection between the two worlds was almost a part of
+    his own consciousness. A moment's deeper thought, a quicker flowing
+    of the imagination, a little more poignant projecting of himself
+    above the abyss and he, too, would understand. It came to him that
+    he had almost understood every time that he had looked at Olivia.
+    Ah, he thought, and how exquisite, how matchless she was, and what
+    Heaven beyond Heaven the world would hold for him if only she were
+    to love him. St. George lifted the little hand that hung at her
+    side, and stooped momentarily to touch his cheek to the soft hair
+    that swept her shoulder. Here for him lay the sweet of life&mdash;the
+    sweet of the world, ay, and the sweet of all the world's mysteries.
+    This alien land was no nearer the truth than he. His love was the
+    expression of its mystery. They went back through the great
+    archway, and entered the palace park. Once more the slim-trunked
+    trees flew past them with the fringes of light expressing the
+    borders of the dusk. St. George crouched, half-kneeling, on the
+    floor of the tonneau, his free hand protecting Olivia's face from
+    the leaning branches of heavy-headed flowers. He had been so
+    passionately anxious that she should know that he was on the island,
+    near her, ready to serve her; but now, save for his alarm and
+    anxiety about her, he felt a shy, profound gratitude that the hour
+    had fallen as it had fallen. Whatever was to come, this nearness to
+    her would be his to remember and possess. It had been his supreme
+    hour. Whether she had recognized him in that moment on the road,
+    whether she ever knew what had happened made, he thought, no
+    difference. But if she was to open her eyes as they reached the
+    border of the park, and if she was to know that it was like this
+    that the genie had come out of the jar&mdash;the mere notion made him
+    giddy, and he saw that Heaven may have little inner Heaven-courts
+    which one is never too happy to penetrate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Olivia did not stir or unclose her eyes. The great strain of the
+    evening, the terror and shock of its ending, the very relief with
+    which she had, at all events, realized herself in the hands of
+    friends were more than even an island princess could pass through in
+    serenity. And when at last from the demesne of enchantment the car
+    emerged in the court of the palace, Olivia knew nothing of it and,
+    as nearly as he could recall afterward, neither did St. George. He
+    understood that the courtyard was filled with murmurs, and that as
+    Olivia was lifted from the car the voice of Mrs. Medora Hastings, in
+    all its excesses of tone and pitch, was tilted in a kind of
+    universal reproving. Then he was aware that Jarvo, beseeching him
+    not to leave the motor, had somehow got him away from all the tumult
+    and the questioning and the crush of the other motors setting
+    tardily off down the avenue in a kind cf majestic pursuit of the
+    princess. After that he remembered nothing but the grateful gloom of
+    the wood and the swift flight of the car down that nebulous way,
+    thin darkness flowing about him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was to go back to join Amory in some kind of tower, he knew; and
+    he was infinitely resigned, for he remembered that this was in some
+    way essential to his safety, and that it had to do with the ascent
+    of Mount Khalak to-morrow night. For the rest St. George was certain
+    of nothing save that he was floating once more in a sea of light,
+    with the sweet of the world flowing in his veins; and upon his arm
+    and against his shoulder he could still feel the thrill of the
+    pressure of Olivia's head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The genie had come out of the jar&mdash;and never, never would he go
+    back.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0013"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE LINES LEAD UP
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    In the late hours of the next afternoon Rollo, with a sigh, uncoiled
+    himself from the shadow of the altar to the god Melkarth, in the
+    Ilex Temple, and stiffly rose. Vicissitudes were not for Rollo, who
+    had not fathomed the joys of adaptability; and the savour of the
+    sweet herbs which, from Jarvo's wallet, he had that day served, was
+    forgotten in his longing for a drop of tarragan vinegar and a bulb
+    of garlic with which to dress the herbs. His lean and shadowed face
+    wore an expression of settled melancholy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sorrow's nothing," he sententiously observed. "It's trouble that
+    does for a man, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, who lay at full length on a mossy sill of the king's
+    chapel counting the hours of his inaction, continued to look out
+    over the glistening tops of the ilex trees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Speaking of trouble," he said, "what would you say, Rollo, to
+    getting back to the yacht to-night, instead of going up the mountain
+    with us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo dropped his eyes, but his face brightened under, as it were,
+    his never-lifted mask.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, sir," he said humbly, "a person is always willing to do
+    whatever makes him the most useful."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Little Cawthorne and Bennietod," went on St. George, "ten to one
+    will take to the trail to-night, if they haven't already. They'll be
+    coming to Med and reorganizing the police force, or raising a
+    standing army or starting a subway. You'd do well to drop down and
+    give them some idea of what's happened, and I fancy you'd better all
+    be somewhere about on the day after to-morrow, at noon. Not that
+    there will be any wedding at that time," explained St. George
+    carefully, "although there may be something to see, all the same.
+    But you might tell them, you know, that Miss Holland is due to marry
+    the prince then. Can you get back to the yacht alone?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo hadn't thought of that, and his mask fell once more into its
+    lines of misery.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know, sir," he said doubtfully, "most men can go up a steep
+    place all right. It's comin' down that's hard on the knees. And if I
+    was to try it alone, sir&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo made a sign of reassurance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is not well," he said, "you would be dashed to pieces. Ulfin,
+    one of the six, will wait for us to-night on the edge of the grove.
+    He can conduct the way to the vessel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, sir," said Rollo, not without a certain self-satisfaction,
+    "something is always sure to turn up, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    From a tour of the temple Amory came listlessly back to the king's
+    chapel. There, where the descendants of Abibaal had worshiped until
+    their idols had been refined by Time to a kind of decoration, the
+    Americans and Jarvo had spent the night. They had slept stretched on
+    benches of beveled stone. They had waked to trace the figures in a
+    length of tapestry representing the capture of Io on the coast of
+    Argolis, doubtless woven by an eye-witness. They had bathed in a
+    brook near the entrance where stood the altar for the sacrifice
+    round which the priests and <i>hierodouloi</i> had been wont to dance,
+    and where huge architraves, metopes and tryglyphs, massive as those
+    at Gebeil and Tortosa and hewn from living rock, rose from the
+    fragile green of the wood like a huge arm signaling its eternal
+    "Alas!" They had partaken of Jarvo's fruit and sweet herbs, and
+    Rollo had served them, standing with his back to the niche where
+    once had looked augustly down the image of the god. And now Amory,
+    with a smile, leaned against a wall where old vines, grown
+    miraculously in crannies, spread their tendrils upon the friendly
+    hieroglyphic scoring of the crenelated stone, and summed up his
+    reflections of the night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've got it," he announced, "I think it was up in the Adirondacks,
+    summer before last. I think I was in a canoe when she went by in a
+    launch, with the Chiswicks. Why, do you know, I think I dreamed
+    about Miss Frothingham for weeks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled suddenly and radiantly, and his smile was for the
+    sake of both Rollo and Amory&mdash;Rollo whose sense of the commonplace
+    nothing could overpower, Amory who talked about the Chiswicks in the
+    Adirondacks. Why not? St. George thought happily. Here in the temple
+    certain precious and delicate idols were believed to be hidden in
+    alcoves walled up by mighty stone; and here, Jarvo was telling them,
+    were secret exits to the road contrived by the priests of the temple
+    at the time of their oppression by the worshipers of another god;
+    but yet what special interest could he and Amory have in brooding
+    upon these, or the ancient Ph&oelig;nicians having "invited to traffic by
+    a signal fire," when they could sit still and remember?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-night," he said aloud, feeling a sudden fellowship for both
+    Amory and Rollo, "to-night, when the moon rises, we shall watch it
+    from the top of the mountain."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then he wondered, many hundred times, whether Olivia could possibly
+    have recognized him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the dark had fallen they set out. The ilex grove was very still
+    save for a fugitive wind that carried faint spices, and they took a
+    winding way among trunks and reached the edge of the wood without
+    adventure. There Ulfin and another of the six carriers were waiting,
+    as Jarvo had expected, and it was decided that they should both
+    accompany Rollo down to the yacht.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo handed the oil-skins to St. George and Amory, and then stood
+    crushing his hat in his hands, doing his best to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look sharp, Rollo," St. George advised him, "don't step one foot
+    off a precipice. And tell the people on the yacht not to worry. We
+    shall expect to see them day after to-morrow, somewhere about. Take
+    care of yourself."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, sir," said Rollo with difficulty, "good-by, sir. I '<i>ope</i>
+    you'll be successful, sir. A person likes to succeed in what they
+    undertake."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then the three went on down the glimmering way where, last night,
+    they had pursued the floating pennon of the veil. There were few
+    upon the highway, and these hardly regarded them. It occurred to St.
+    George that they passed as figures in a dream will pass, in the
+    casual fashion of all unreality, taking all things for granted. Yet,
+    of course, to the passers-by upon the road to Med, there was nothing
+    remarkable in the aspect of the three companions. All that was
+    remarkable was the adventure upon which they were bound, and nobody
+    could possibly have guessed that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Almost a mile lay between them and the point where the ascent of
+    the mountain was to be begun. The road which they were taking
+    followed at the foot of the embankment which girt the island, and it
+    led them at last to a stretch of arbourescent heath, piled with
+    black basaltic rocks. Here, where the light was dim like the glow
+    from light reflected upon low clouds, they took their way among
+    great branching cacti and nameless plants that caught at their
+    ankles. A strange odour rose from the earth, mineral, metallic, and
+    the air was thick with particles stirred by their feet and more
+    resembling ashes than dust. This was a waste place of the island,
+    and if one were to lift a handful of the soil, St. George thought,
+    it was very likely that one might detect its elements; as, here the
+    dust of a temple, here of a book, here a tomb and here a sacrifice.
+    He felt himself near the earth, in its making. He looked away to the
+    sugar-loaf cone of the mountain risen against the star-lit sky.
+    Above its fortress-like bulk with circular ramparts burned the clear
+    beacon of the light on the king's palace. As he saw the light, St.
+    George knew himself not only near the earth but at one with the very
+    currents of the air, partaker of now a hope, now a task, now a
+    spell, and now a memory. It was as if love had made him one with the
+    dust of dead cities and with their eternal spiritual effluence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At length they crossed the broad avenue that led from the
+    Eurychôrus to Melita, and struck into the road that skirted the
+    mountain; and where a thicket of trees flung bold branches across
+    the way, three figures rose from the ground before them, and Akko
+    stepped forward and saluted, his white teeth gleaming. Immediately
+    Jarvo led the way through a strip of underbrush at the base of the
+    mountain, and they emerged in a glade where the light hardly
+    penetrated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here were distinguishable the palanquins in which the ascent was to
+    be made. These were like long baskets, upborne by a pole of great
+    flexibility broadening to a wider support beneath the body of the
+    basket and provided with rubber straps through which the arms were
+    passed. When St. George and Amory were seated, Jarvo spoke
+    hesitatingly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We must bandage your eyes, adôn," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh really, really," protested St. George, "we don't understand half
+    we do see. Do let us see what we can."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You must be blindfolded, adôn," repeated Jarvo firmly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, passing his arms reflectively through the rubber straps which
+    Akko held for him, spoke cheerfully:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll go up blindfold," he submitted, "if I can smoke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Neither of us will," said St. George with determination. "See
+    here, Jarvo, we are both level-headed. We pledge you our word of
+    honour, in addition, not to dive overboard. Now&mdash;lead on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It has never been done," said the little brown man with obstinacy,
+    "you will lose your reason, adôn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now, if we do," said St. George, "pitch us over and leave
+    us. Besides, I think we have. Lead on, please."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Against the will of the others, he prevailed. The light oil-skins
+    were placed in the baskets, each of which was shouldered by two men,
+    Jarvo bearing the foremost pole of St. George's palanquin. All the
+    carriers had drawn on long, soft shoes which, perhaps from some
+    preparation in which they had been dipped, glowed with light,
+    illuminating the ground for a little distance at every step.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you ready, adôn?" asked Jarvo and Akko at the same moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ready!" cried St. George impatiently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ready," said Amory languidly, and added one thought more: "I hope
+    for Chillingworth's sake," he said, "that Frothingham is a notary
+    public. We'll have to have somebody's seal at the bottom of all this
+    copy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The baskets were lightly lifted. Jarvo gave a sharp command, and all
+    four of the men broke into a rhythmic chant. Jarvo, leading the way,
+    sprang immediately upon the first foothold, where none seemed to
+    be, and without pause to the next. So perfectly were the men trained
+    that it was as if but one set of muscles were inspiring the
+    movements made to the beat of that monotonous measure. In their
+    strong hands the flexible pole seemed to give as their bodies gave,
+    and so lightly did they leap upward that the jar of their alighting
+    was hardly perceptible, as if, as had occurred to St. George as they
+    ascended the lip of the island, gravity were here another matter.
+    So, without pause, save in the rhythm of that strange march music,
+    the remarkable progress was begun.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George threw one swift glance upward and looked down,
+    shudderingly. Beetling above them in the great starlight hung the
+    gigantic pile, wall upon wall of rock hewn with such secret foothold
+    that it was a miracle how any living thing could catch and cling to
+    its forbidding surface. Only lifelong practice of the men, who from
+    childhood had been required to make the ascent and whose fathers and
+    fathers' fathers before them had done the same, could have accounted
+    for that catlike ability to cling to the trail where was no trail.
+    The sensation of the long swinging upward movement was unutterably
+    alien to anything in life or in dreams, and the sheer height above
+    and the momently-deepening chasm below were presences contending for
+    possession.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Strange fragrance stole from gum and bark of the decreasing
+    vegetation. Dislodged stones rolled bounding from rock to rock into
+    the abyss. To right and left the way went. There was not even the
+    friendly beacon of the summit to beckon them. It seemed to St.
+    George that their whole safety lay in motion, that a moment's
+    cessation from the advance would hurl them all down the sides of the
+    declivity. Since the ascent began he had not ceased to look down;
+    and now as they rose free of the tree-tops that clothed the base of
+    the mountain he could see across the plain, and beyond the bounding
+    embankment of the island to the dark waste of the sea. Somewhere out
+    there <i>The Aloha</i> was rocking. Somewhere, away to the northwest, the
+    lights of New York harbour shone. <i>Did</i> they, St. George wondered
+    vaguely; and, when he went back, how would they look to him? It
+    seemed to him in some indeterminate fashion that when he saw them
+    again there would be new lines and sides of beauty which he had
+    never suspected, and as if all the world would be changed, included
+    in this new world that he had found.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Half-way up the ascent a resting-place was contrived for the
+    carriers. The projection upon which the baskets were lowered was
+    hardly three feet in width. Its edge dropped into darkness. Within
+    reach, leaves rustled from the summit of a tree rooted somewhere in
+    the chasm. The blackness below was vast and to be measured only by
+    the memory of that upward course. Gemmed by its lighted hamlets the
+    fair plain of the island lay, with Med and Melita glowing like lamps
+    to the huge dusk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St. George," said Amory soberly, "if it's all true&mdash;if these people
+    do understand what the world doesn't know anything about&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It makes a man feel&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said St. George, "it does."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This, they afterward remembered, was all that they said on the
+    ascent. One wonders if two, being met among the "strengthless tribes
+    of the dead," would find much more to say.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then they went on, scaling that invisible way, with the twinkling
+    feet of the carriers drawing upward like a thread of thin gold which
+    they were to climb. What, St. George thought as the way seemed to
+    lengthen before them, what if there were no end? What if this were
+    some gigantic trick of Destiny to keep him for the rest of his life
+    in mid-air, ceaselessly toiling up, a latter-day Sisyphus, in a
+    palanquin? He had dreamed of stairs in the darkness which men
+    mounted and found to have no summits, and suppose this were such a
+    stair? Suppose, among these marvels that were related to his dreams,
+    he had, as it were, tossed a ball of twine in the air and, like the
+    Indian jugglers, climbed it? Suppose he had built a castle in the
+    clouds and tenanted it with Olivia, and were now foolhardily
+    attempting to scale the air? Ah well, he settled it contentedly,
+    better so. For this divine jugglery comes once into every life, and
+    one must climb to the castle with madness and singing if he would
+    attain to the temples that lie on the castle-plain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Gradually, as they approached the summit, the ascent became less
+    precipitous. As they neared the cone their way lay over a kind of
+    natural fosse at the cone's base; and, although the mountain did not
+    reach the level of perpetual snow, yet an occasional cool breath
+    from the dark told where in some natural cavern snow had lain
+    undisturbed since the unremembered eruption of the sullen, volcanic
+    peak. Then came a breath of over-powering sweetness from some secret
+    thicket, and something was struck from the feet of the bearers that
+    was like white pumice gravel. St. George no longer looked downward;
+    the plain and the waste of the sea were in a forgotten limbo, and he
+    searched eagerly on high for the first rays of the light that marked
+    the goal of his longing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yet he was unprepared when, swerving sharply and skirting an immense
+    shoulder of rock, Jarvo suddenly emerged upon a broad retaining wall
+    of stone bordering a smooth, moon-lit terrace extending by shallow
+    flights of steps to the white doors of the king's palace itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As St. George and Amory freed themselves and sprang to their feet
+    their eyes were drawn to a glory of light shining over the low
+    parapet which surrounded the terrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look," cried St. George victoriously, "the moon!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    From the sea the moon was momently growing, like a giant bubble, and
+    a bright path had issued to the mountain's foot. "See," she would
+    doubtless have said if she could, "I would have shown you the way
+    here all your life if only you had looked properly." But at all
+    events St. George's prophecy was fulfilled: From the top of Mount
+    Khalak they were watching the moon rise. St. George, however, was
+    not yet in the company whose image had pleasantly besieged him when
+    he had prophesied. He turned impatiently to the palace. Jarvo,
+    resting on the stones where he had sunk down, signaled them to go
+    on, and the two needed no second bidding. They set off briskly
+    across the plateau, Amory looking about him with eager curiosity,
+    St. George on the crest of his divine expectancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The palace was set on the west of the gentle slope to which the
+    mountain-top had been artificially leveled. The terrace led up on
+    three sides from the marge of the height to the great portals. Over
+    everything hung that imponderable essence that was clearer and purer
+    than any light&mdash;"better than any light that ever shone." In its
+    glamourie, with that far ocean background, the palace of pale stone
+    looked unearthly, a sky thing, with ramparts of air. The principle
+    of the builders seemed not to have been the ancient dictum that
+    "mass alone is admirable," for the great pile was shaped, with
+    beauty of unknown line, in three enormous cylinders, one rising from
+    another, the last magnificently curved to a huge dome on whose
+    summit burned with inconceivable brilliance the light which had been
+    a beacon to the longing eyes turned toward it from the deck of <i>The
+    Aloha</i>. In the shadow of the palace rose two high towers,
+    obelisk-shaped from the pure white stone. Scattered about the slope
+    were detached buildings, consisting of marble monoliths resting upon
+    double bases and crowned with carved cornices, or of truncated
+    pyramids and pyramidions. These had plinths of delicately-coloured
+    stone over which the light diffused so that they looked luminous,
+    and the small blocks used to fill the apertures of the courses shone
+    like precious things. Adjacent to one of the porches were two
+    conical shrines, for images and little lamps; and, near-by, a fallen
+    pillar of immense proportions lay undisturbed upon the court of
+    sward across which it had some time shivered down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if the palace had been discovered to be the preserved and
+    transported Temple of Solomon it could not have stayed St. George
+    for one moment of admiration. He was off up the slope, seeing only
+    the great closed portals, and with Amory beside him he ran boldly up
+    the long steps. It was a part of the unreality of the place that
+    there seemed absolutely no sign of life about the King's palace. The
+    windows glowed with the soft light within, but there were no guards,
+    no servants, no sign of any presence. For the first time, when they
+    reached the top of the steps, the two men hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Personally," said Amory doubtfully, "I have never yet tapped at a
+    king's front door. What does one do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at the long stone porches, uncovered and girt by a
+    parapet following the curve of the façade.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Would you mind waiting a minute?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With that he was off along the balcony to the south&mdash;and afterward
+    he wondered why, and if it is true that Fate tempts us in the way
+    that she would have us walk by luring us with unseen roses budding
+    from the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Where the porch abruptly widened to a kind of upper terrace, like a
+    hanging garden set with flowering trees, three high archways opened
+    to an apartment whose bright lights streamed across the grass-plots.
+    St. George felt something tug at his heart, something that urged him
+    forward and caught him up in an ecstasy of triumph and hope
+    fulfilled. He looked back at Amory, and Amory was leaning on the
+    parapet, apparently sunk in reflections which concerned nobody. So
+    St. George stepped softly on until he reached the first archway, and
+    there he stopped, and the moment was to him almost past belief.
+    Within the open doorway, so near that if she had lifted her eyes
+    they must have met his own, was the woman whom he had come across
+    the sea to seek.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly knew that he spoke, for it was as if all the world
+    were singing her name.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" he said.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0014"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIV
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE ISLE OF HEARTS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    The room in which St. George was looking was long and lofty and hung
+    with pale tapestries. White pillars supporting the domed white
+    ceiling were wound with garlands. The smoke from a little brazen
+    tripod ascended pleasantly, and about the windows stirred in the
+    faint wind draperies of exceeding thinness, woven in looms stilled
+    centuries ago.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia was crossing before the windows. She wore a white gown strewn
+    with roses, and she seemed as much at home on this alien
+    mountain-top as she had been in her aunt's drawing-room at the
+    Boris. But her face was sad, and there was not a touch of the
+    piquancy which it had worn the night before in the throne-room, nor
+    of its delicious daring as she had sped past him in the big Yaque
+    touring car. Save for her, the room was deserted; it was as if the
+    prince had come to the castle and found the Sleeping Princess the
+    only one awake.
+</p>
+<p>
+    If in that supreme moment St. George had leaped forward and taken
+    her in his arms no one&mdash;no one, that is, in the fairy-tale of what
+    was happening&mdash;would greatly have censured him. But he stood without
+    for a moment, hardly daring to believe his happiness, hardly knowing
+    that her name was on his lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had spoken, however, and she turned quickly, her look uncertainly
+    seeking the doorway, and she saw him. For a moment she stood still,
+    her eyes upon his face; then with a little incredulous cry that
+    thrilled him with a sudden joyous hope that was like belief, she
+    came swiftly toward him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George loved to remember that she did that. There was no waiting
+    for assurance and no fear; only the impulse, gloriously obeyed, to
+    go toward him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stepped in the room, and took her hands in his and looked into
+    her eyes as if he would never turn away his own. In her face was a
+    dawning of glad certainty and welcome which he could not doubt.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You," she cried softly, "you. How is it possible? But how is it
+    possible?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her voice trembled a little with something so sweet that it raced
+    through his veins with magic.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you rub the lamp?" he said. "Because I couldn't help coming."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She looked at him breathlessly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have you," he asked her gravely, "eaten of the potatoes of Yaque?
+    And are you going to say, 'Off with his head'? And can you tell me
+    what is the population of the island?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    At that they both laughed&mdash;the merry, irrepressible laugh of youth
+    which explains that the world is a very good place indeed and that
+    one is glad that one belongs there. And the memory of that breakfast
+    on the other side of the world, of their happy talk about what would
+    happen if they two were impossibly to meet in Yaque came back to
+    them both, and set his heart beating and flooded her face with
+    delicate colour. In her laugh was a little catching of the breath
+    that was enchanting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not yet," she said, "your head is safe till you tell me how you got
+    here, at all events. Now tell me&mdash;oh, tell me. I can't believe it
+    until you tell me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She moved a little away from the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come in," she said shyly, "if you've come all the way from America
+    you must be very tired."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come out," he pleaded, "I want to stand on top of a high mountain
+    and show you the whole world."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She went quite simply and without hesitation&mdash;because, in Yaque, the
+    maddest things would be the truest&mdash;and when she had stepped from
+    the low doorway she looked up at him in the tender light of the
+    garden terrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you are quite sure," she said, "that you will not disappear in
+    the dark?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed happily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall not disappear," he promised, "though the world were to turn
+    round the other way."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They crossed the still terrace to the parapet and stood looking out
+    to sea with the risen moon shining across the waters. The light wind
+    stirred in the cedrine junipers, shaking out perfume; the great
+    fairy pile of the palace rose behind them; and before them lay the
+    monstrous moon-lit abyss than whose depths the very stars, warm and
+    friendly, seemed nearer to them. To the big young American in blue
+    serge beside the little new princess who had drawn him over seas the
+    dream that one is always having and never quite remembering was
+    suddenly come true. No wonder that at that moment the patient Amory
+    was far enough from his mind. To St. George, looking down upon
+    Olivia, there was only one truth and one joy in the universe, and
+    she was that truth and that joy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can't believe it," he said boyishly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Believe&mdash;what?" she asked, for the delight of hearing him say so.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This&mdash;me&mdash;most of all, you!" he answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you must believe it," she cried anxiously, "or maybe it will
+    stop being."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I will, I will, I am now!" promised St. George in alarm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereat they both laughed again in sheer light-heartedness. Then,
+    resting his broad shoulders against a prism of the parapet, St.
+    George looked down at her in infinite content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You found the island," she said; "what is still more wonderful you
+    have come here&mdash;but <i>here</i>&mdash;to the top of the mountain. Oh, did you
+    bring news of my father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George would have given everything save the sweet of the moment
+    to tell her that he did.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But now," he added cheerfully, and his smile disarmed this of its
+    over-confidence, "I've only been here two days or so. And, though it
+    may look easy, I've had my hands full climbing up this. I ought to
+    be allowed another day or two to locate your father."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Please tell me how you got here," Olivia demanded then.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George told her briefly, omitting the yacht's ownership,
+    explaining merely that the paper had sent him and that Jarvo and
+    Akko had pointed the way and, save for that journey down nebulous
+    ways in the wake of her veil the night before, sketching the
+    incidents which had followed his arrival upon the island.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And one of the most agreeable hours I've had in Yaque," he
+    finished, "was last night, when you were chairman of the meeting.
+    That was magnificent."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You <i>were</i> there!" cried Olivia, "I thought&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That you saw me?" St. George pressed eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think that I thought so," she admitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you never looked at me," said St. George dolefully, "and I had
+    on a forty-two gored dress, or something."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," Olivia confessed, "but I had thought so before when I knew it
+    couldn't be you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's heart gave a great bound.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When before?" he wanted to know ecstatically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, before," she explained, "and then afterward, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When afterward?" he urged.
+</p>
+<p>
+    (Smile if you like, but this is the way the happy talk goes in Yaque
+    as you remember very well, if you are honest.)
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yesterday, when I was motoring, I thought&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was. You did," St. George assured her. "I was in the prince's
+    motor. The procession was temporarily tied up, you remember. Did you
+    really think it was I?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But this the lady passed serenely over.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Last night," she said, "when that terrible thing happened, who was
+    it in the other motor? Who was it, there in the road when I&mdash;was it
+    you? Was it?" she demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you think it was I?" asked St. George simply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Afterward&mdash;when I was back in the palace&mdash;I thought I must have
+    dreamed it," she answered, "and no one seemed to know, and <i>I</i>
+    didn't know. But I did fancy&mdash;you see, they think father has taken
+    the treasure," she said, "and they thought if they could hide me
+    somewhere and let it be known, that he would make some sign."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was monstrous," said St. George; "you are really not safe here
+    for one moment. Tell me," he asked eagerly, "the car you were
+    in&mdash;what became of that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I meant to ask you that," she said quickly. "I couldn't tell, I
+    didn't know whether it turned aside from the road, or whether they
+    dropped me out and went on. Really, it was all so quick that it was
+    almost as if the motor had stopped being, and left me there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps it did stop being&mdash;in this dimension," St. George could not
+    help saying.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this she laughed in assent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who knows," she said, "what may be true of us&mdash;<i>nous autres</i> in the
+    Fourth Dimension? In Yaque queer things are true. And of course you
+    never can tell&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this St. George turned toward her, and his eyes compelled hers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes, you can," he told her, "yes, you can."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then he folded his arms and leaned against the stone prisms again,
+    looking down at her. Evidently the magician, whoever he was, did not
+    mind his saying that, for the palace did not crumble or the moon
+    cease from shining on the white walls.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Still," she answered, looking toward the sea, "queer things <i>are</i>
+    true in Yaque. It is queer that you are here. Say that it is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Heaven knows that it is," assented St. George obediently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently, realizing that the terrace did not intend to turn into a
+    cloud out-of-hand, they set themselves to talk seriously, and St.
+    George had not known her so adorable, he was once more certain, as
+    when she tried to thank him for his pursuit the night before. He had
+    omitted to mention that he had brought her back alone to the Palace
+    of the Litany, for that was too exquisite a thing, he decided, to be
+    spoiled by leaving out the most exquisite part. Besides, there was
+    enough that was serious to be discussed, in all conscience, in spite
+    of the moon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me," said St. George instead, "what has happened to you since
+    that breakfast at the Boris. Remember, I have come all the way from
+    New York to interview you, Mademoiselle the Princess."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So Olivia told him the story of the passage in the submarine which
+    had arrived in Yaque two days earlier than <i>The Aloha</i>; of the first
+    trip up Mount Khalak in the imperial airship; of Mrs. Hastings'
+    frantic fear and her utter refusal ever to descend; and of what she
+    herself had done since her arrival. This included a most practical
+    account of effort that delighted and amazed St. George. No wonder
+    Mrs. Hastings had said that she always left everything "executive"
+    to Olivia. For Olivia had sent wireless messages all over the island
+    offering an immense reward for information about the king, her
+    father; she had assigned forty servants of the royal household to
+    engage in a personal search for such information and to report to
+    her each night; she had ordered every house in Yaque, not excepting
+    the House of the Litany and the king's palace itself, to be searched
+    from dungeon to tower; and, as St. George already knew, she had
+    brought about a special meeting of the High Council at noon that
+    day.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was very little," said the American princess apologetically,
+    "but I did what I could."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What about the meeting of the High Council?" asked St. George
+    eagerly; "didn't anything come of that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothing," she answered, "they were like adamant. I thought of
+    offering to raise the Hereditary Treasure by incorporating the
+    island and selling the shares in America. Nobody could ever have
+    found what the shares stood for, but that happens every day. Half
+    the corporations must be capitalized chiefly in the Fourth
+    Dimension. That is all," she added wearily, "save that day after
+    to-morrow I am to be married."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That," St. George explained, "is as you like. For if your father
+    is on the island we shall have found him by day after to-morrow, at
+    noon, if we have to shake all Yaque inside out, like a paper sack.
+    And if he isn't here, we simply needn't stop."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia shook her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't know the prince," she said. "I have heard enough to
+    convince me that it is quite as he says. He holds events in the
+    hollow of his hand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Amory proposed," said St. George, "that we sit up here and throw
+    pebbles at him for a time. And Amory is very practical."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia laughed&mdash;her laugh was delicious and alluring, and St. George
+    came dangerously near losing his head every time that he heard it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," she cried, "if only it weren't for the prince and if we had
+    news of father, what a heavenly, heavenly place this would be, would
+    it not?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It would, it would indeed," assented St. George, and in his heart
+    he said, "and so it is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's like being somewhere else," she said, looking into the abyss
+    of far waters, "and when you look down there&mdash;and when you look up,
+    you nearly <i>know</i>. I don't know what, but you nearly know. Perhaps
+    you know that 'here' is the same as 'there,' as all these people
+    say. But whatever it is, I think we might have come almost as near
+    knowing it in New York, if we had only known how to try."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps it isn't so much knowing," he said, "as it is being where
+    you can't help facing mystery and taking the time to be amazed.
+    Although," added St. George to himself, "there are things that one
+    finds out in New York. In a drawing-room, at the Boris, for
+    instance, over muffins and tea."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will be delightful to take all this back to New York," Olivia
+    vaguely added, as if she meant the fairy palace and the fairy sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will," agreed St. George fervently, and he couldn't possibly
+    have told whether he meant the mystery of the island or the mystery
+    of that hour there with her. There was so little difference.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Suppose," said Olivia whimsically, "that we open our eyes in a
+    minute, and find that we are in the prince's room in McDougle
+    Street, and that he has passed his hand before our faces and made us
+    dream all this. And father is safe after all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But it isn't all a dream," St. George said softly, "it can't
+    possibly all be a dream, you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She met his eyes for a moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not your coming away here," she said, "if the rest is true I
+    wouldn't want that to be a dream. You don't know what courage this
+    will give us all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She said "us all," but that had to mean merely "us," as well. St.
+    George turned and looked over the terrace. What an Arabian night it
+    was, he was saying to himself, and then stood in a sudden amazement,
+    with the uncertain idea that one of the Schererazade magicians had
+    answered that fancy of his by appearing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A little shrine hung thick with vines, its ancient stone chipped and
+    defaced, stood on the terrace with its empty, sightless niche turned
+    toward the sea. Leaning upon its base was an old man watching them.
+    His eyes under their lowered brows were peculiarly intent, but his
+    look was perfectly serene and friendly. His stuff robe hung in
+    straight folds about his singularly erect figure, and his beard and
+    hair were not all grey. But he was very old, with incredibly brown
+    and wrinkled flesh, and his face was vacant, as if the mind were
+    asleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As he looked, St. George knew him. Here on the top of this mountain
+    was that amazing old man whom he had last seen in the banquet hall
+    at the Palace of the Litany&mdash;that old Malakh for whom Olivia had so
+    unexplainably interceded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is that man doing here?" St. George asked in surprise.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0004"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image4.jpg" width="314" height="450"
+alt="uncaptioned, old Malakh">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<p>
+    "He is a mad old man, they said," Olivia told him, "down there they
+    call him Malakh&mdash;that means 'salt'&mdash;because they said he always
+    weeps. We had stopped to look at a metallurgist yesterday&mdash;he had
+    some zinc and some metals cut out like flowers, and he was making
+    them show phosphorescent colours in his little dark alcove. The old
+    man was watching him and trying to tell him something, but the
+    metallurgist was rude to him and some boys came by and jostled him
+    and pushed him about and taunted him&mdash;and the metallurgist actually
+    explained to us that every one did that way to old Malakh. So I
+    thought he was better off up here," concluded Olivia tranquilly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. He knew that Olivia was like this, but
+    everything that proved anew her loveliness of soul caught at his
+    heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me," he said impulsively, "what made you let him stay last
+    night, there in the banquet hall?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She flushed, and shook her head with a deprecatory gesture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I haven't an idea," she said gravely, "I think I must have done it
+    so the fairies wouldn't prick their feet on any new sorrow. One has
+    to be careful of the fairies' feet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded. It was a charming reason for the left hand to
+    give the right, and he was not deceived.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look at him," said St. George, almost reverently, "he looks like a
+    shade of a god that has come back from the other world and found his
+    shrine dishonoured."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Some echo of St. George's words reached the old man and he caught
+    at it, smiling. It was as if he had just been thinking what he
+    spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There are not enough shrines," he said gently, "but there are far
+    too many gods. You will find it so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Something in his words stirred St. George strangely. There was about
+    the old creature an air of such gentleness, such supreme repose and
+    detachment that, even in that place of quiet, his presence made a
+    kind of hush. He was old and pallid and fragile, but there lingered
+    within him, while his spirit lingered, the perfume of all fine and
+    gentle things, all things of quietude. When he had spoken the old
+    man turned and moved slowly down the ways of strange light, between
+    the fallen temples builded to forgotten gods, and he seemed like the
+    very spirit of the ancient mountain, ignorant of itself and knowing
+    all truth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How strange," said St. George, looking after him, "how unutterably
+    strange and sad."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is good of you," said Olivia. "Aunt Dora and Antoinette
+    thought I'd gone quite off my head, and Mr. Frothingham wanted to
+    know why I didn't bring back some one who could have been called as
+    a witness."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Witness," St. George echoed; "but the whole place is made of
+    witnesses. Which reminds me: what is the sentence?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The sentence?" she wondered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The potatoes of Yaque," he reminded her, "and my head?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well," said Olivia gravely, "inasmuch as the moon came up in the
+    east to-night instead of the west, I shall be generous and give you
+    one day's reprieve."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you know, I <i>thought</i> the moon came up in the east to-night,"
+    cried St. George joyfully.
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+<p>
+    It was half an hour afterward that Amory's languid voice from
+    somewhere in the sky broke in upon their talk. As he came toward
+    them across the terrace St. George saw that he was miraculously not
+    alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Afterward Amory told him what had happened and what had made him
+    abide in patience and such wondrous self-effacement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When St. George had left him contemplating the far beauties of the
+    little blur of light that was Med, Mr. Toby Amory set a match to one
+    of his jealously expended store of Habanas and added one more aroma
+    to the spiced air. To be standing on the doorstep of a king's
+    palace, confidently expecting within the next few hours to assist in
+    locating the king himself was a situation warranting, Amory thought,
+    such fragrant celebration, and he waited in comparative content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The moon had climbed high enough to cast a great octagonal shadow on
+    the smooth court, and the Habana was two-thirds memory when,
+    immediately back of Amory, a long window opened outward, releasing
+    an apparition which converted the remainder of the Habana into a
+    fiery trail ending out on the terrace. It was a girl of rather more
+    than twenty, exquisitely petite and pretty, and wearing a ruffley
+    blue evening gown whose skirt was caught over her arm. She stopped
+    short when she saw Amory, but without a trace of fear. To tell the
+    truth, Antoinette Frothingham had got so desperately bored
+    withindoors that if Amory had worn a black mask or a cloak of flame
+    she would have welcomed either.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For the last two hours Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham had sat in a white marble room of the king's palace,
+    playing chess on Mr. Frothingham's pocket chess-board. Mr.
+    Frothingham, who loathed chess, played it when he was tired so that
+    he might rest and when he was rested he played it so that he might
+    exercise his mind&mdash;on the principle of a cool drink on a hot day and
+    a hot drink on a cool day. Mrs. Hastings, who knew nothing at all
+    about the game, had entered upon the hour with all the suave
+    complacency with which she would have attacked the making of a pie.
+    Mrs. Hastings had a secret belief that she possessed great aptitude.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette Frothingham, the lawyer's daughter, had leaned on the
+    high casement and looked over the sea. The window was narrow, and
+    deep in an embrasure of stone. To be twenty and to be leaning in
+    this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly
+    suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had
+    been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle
+    tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no
+    possibility of any knight within an altitude of many hundred feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The dear little ponies' heads!" Mrs. Hastings had kept saying.
+    "What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don't you think?
+    That's what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings&mdash;at least,
+    that's what he always said to me: 'Most games are so <i>needless</i>, but
+    chess is really up and down poetic'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in
+    silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Um," he had responded liberally.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, "neither he nor
+    I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano
+    in the middle of the ocean. It's this awful feeling," Mrs. Hastings
+    had cried querulously, "of being neither on earth nor under the
+    water nor in Heaven that I object to. And nobody can get to us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's just it, Mrs. Hastings," Antoinette had observed earnestly
+    at this juncture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Um," said Mr. Frothingham, then, "not at all, not at all. We have
+    all the advantages of the grave and none of its discomforts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereupon Antoinette, rising suddenly, had slipped out of the white
+    marble room altogether and had found the knight smoking in
+    loneliness on the very veranda.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory put his cap under his arm and bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I hope," he said, "that I haven't frightened you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was an American! Antoinette's little heart leaped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am having to wait here for a bit," explained Amory, not without
+    vagueness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Frothingham advanced to the veranda rail and contrived a shy
+    scrutiny of the intruder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she said, "you didn't frighten me in the least, of course.
+    But&mdash;do you usually do your waiting at this altitude?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, no," answered Amory with engaging candour, "I don't. But
+    I&mdash;happened up this way." Amory paused a little desperately. In that
+    soft light he could not tell positively whether this was Miss
+    Holland or that other figure of silver and rose which he had seen in
+    the throne room. The blue gown was not interpretative. If she was
+    Miss Holland it would be very shabby of him to herald the surprise.
+    Naturally, St. George would appreciate doing that himself. "I'm
+    looking about a bit," he neatly temporized.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette suddenly looked away over the terrace as her eyes met
+    his, smiling behind their pince-nez. Amory was good to look at, and
+    he had never been more so than as he towered above her on the steps
+    of the king's palace. Who was he&mdash;but who was he? Antoinette
+    wondered rapidly. Had a warship arrived? Was Yaque taken? Or
+    had&mdash;she turned eyes, round with sudden fear, upon Amory.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did Prince Tabnit send you?" she demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, indeed," he said. Amory had once lived in the South, and he
+    accented the "no" very takingly. "I came myself," he volunteered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought," explained Antoinette, "that maybe he opened a door in
+    the dark, and you walked out. It <i>is</i> rather funny that you should
+    be here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are here, you know," suggested Amory doubtfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I may be a cannibal princess," Antoinette demurely pointed out.
+    It was not that her astonishment was decreasing; but why&mdash;modernity
+    and the democracy spoke within her&mdash;waste the possibilities of a
+    situation merely because it chances to be astonishing? Moments of
+    mystery are rare enough, in all conscience; and when they do arrive
+    all the world misses them by trying to understand them. Which is
+    manifestly ungrateful and stupid. They do these things better in
+    Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You maybe," agreed Amory evenly, "though I don't know that I ever
+    met a desert island princess in a dinner frock. But then, I am a
+    beginner in desert islands."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you an American?" inquired Antoinette earnestly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked up at the frowning façade of the king's palace, and he
+    could have found it in his heart to believe his own answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm the ghost," he confessed, "of a poor beggar of a Ph&oelig;nician who
+    used to make water-jars in Sidon. I have been condemned to plow the
+    high seas and explore the tall mountains until I find the Pitiful
+    Princess. She must be up at the very peak, in distress, and I&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory stopped and looked desperately about him. Would St. George
+    never come? How was he, Amory, to be accountable for what he told if
+    he were left here alone in these extraordinary circumstances?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Antoinette lightly clapped her hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A ghost!" she exclaimed with pleasure. "Miss Holland hoped the
+    place was haunted. A Ph&oelig;nician ghost with an Alabama accent."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She had said "Miss Holland hoped."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aren't you&mdash;aren't you Miss Holland?" demanded Amory promptly, a
+    joyful note of uncertainty in his voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette shook her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she said, "though I don't know why I should tell you that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    From Amory's soul rolled a burden that left him treading air on
+    Mount Khalak. She was not Miss Holland. What did he care how long
+    St. George stayed away?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am Tobias Amory," he said, "of New York. Most people don't know
+    about the Sidonian ghost part. But I've told you because I thought,
+    perhaps, you might be the Pitiful Princess."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette's heart was beating pleasantly. Of New York! How&mdash;oh, how
+    did he get here? Was there, then, a wishing-stone in that window
+    embrasure where she had been sitting, and had the knight come
+    because she had willed it? How much did he know? How much ought she
+    to tell? Nothing whatever, prudently decided the lawyer's daughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've had, I'm almost certain, the pleasure of seeing you before,"
+    imparted Amory pleasantly, adjusting his pince-nez and looking down
+    at her. She was so enchantingly tiny and he was such a giant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In New York?" demanded Antoinette.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," said Amory, "no. Do desert island princesses get to New York
+    occasionally, then? No, I think I saw you in Yaque. Yesterday. In a
+    silver automobile. Did I?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette dimpled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We frightened them all to death," she recalled. "Did we frighten
+    you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So much," admitted Amory, "that I took refuge up here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where were you?" Antoinette asked curiously. Really, he was very
+    amusing&mdash;this big courtly creature. How agreeable of Olivia to stay
+    away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, tell me how you got here," she impetuously begged. "Desert
+    island people don't see people from New York every day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well then, O Pitiful Princess," said the Shade from Sidon, "it was
+    like this&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was easy enough to fleet the time carelessly, and assuredly that
+    high moon-lit world was meant to be no less merry than the golden.
+    Whoever has chanced to meet a delightful companion on some silver
+    veranda up in the welkin knows this perfectly well; and whoever has
+    not is a dull creature. But there are delightful folk who are wont
+    to suspect the dullest of harbouring some sweet secret, some sense
+    of "those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life
+    worth enduring," and this was akin to such a sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After a time, at Antoinette's conscientious suggestion, they
+    strolled the way that St. George had taken. And to Olivia and the
+    missing adventurer over by the parapet came Amory's soft query:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St George, may I express a friendly concern?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, come here, Toby," commanded St. George happily, "her Highness
+    and I have been discussing matters of state."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Antoinette!" cried Olivia in amazement. From time immemorial
+    royalty has perpetually been surprised by the behaviour of its
+    ladies-in-waiting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've been remembering a verse," said Amory when he had been
+    presented to Olivia, "may I say it? It goes:
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "'I'll speak a story to you,<br>
+           &nbsp; &nbsp; Now listen while I try:<br>
+            I met a Queen, and she kept house<br>
+           &nbsp; &nbsp; A-sitting in the sky.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come in and say it to my aunt," Olivia applauded. "Aunt Dora is
+    dying of ennui up here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They crossed the terrace in the hush of the tropic night. Through
+    the fairy black and silver the four figures moved, and it was as if
+    the king's palace&mdash;that sky thing, with ramparts of air&mdash;had at
+    length found expression and knew a way to answer the ancient
+    glamourie of the moon.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0015"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XV
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    A VIGIL
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Upon Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, drowsing over the
+    pocket chess-board, the sound of footsteps and men's voices in the
+    corridor acted with electrical effect. Then the door was opened and
+    behind Olivia and Antoinette appeared the two visitors who seemed to
+    have fallen from the neighbouring heavens. The two chess-pretenders
+    looked up aghast. If there were a place in the world where
+    chaperonage might be relaxed the uninformed observer would say that
+    it would be the top of Mount Khalak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mercy around us!" cried Mrs. Medora Hastings, "if it isn't that
+    newspaper man! He's probably come over here to cable it all over the
+    front page of every paper in New York. Well," she added
+    complacently, as if she had brought it all about, "it seems good to
+    see some of your own race. How <i>did</i> you get here? Some trick, I
+    suppose?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear fellows," burst out Mr. Augustus Frothingham fervently,
+    "thank God! I'm not, ordinarily, unequal to my situations, but I
+    confess to you, as I would not to a client, that I don't object to
+    sharing this one. How did you come?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a house-party!" said Antoinette ecstatically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked at her in her blue gown in the light of the white room,
+    and his spirits soared heavenward. Why should St. George have an
+    idea that he controlled the hour?
+</p>
+<p>
+    From a tumult of questioning, none of which was fully answered
+    before Mrs. Hastings put another query, the lawyer at length
+    elicited the substance of what had occurred.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You came up the side of the mountain, carried by four of those
+    frightful natives?" shrilled Mrs. Hastings. "Olivia, think. It's a
+    wonder they didn't murder you first and throw you over afterward,
+    isn't it, Olivia? Oh, and my poor dear brother. To think of his
+    lying somewhere all mangled and bl&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Emotion overcame Mrs. Hastings. Her tortoise-shell glasses fell to
+    her lap and both her side-combs tinkled melodiously to the tiled
+    floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This reminds me," said Mr. Frothingham, settling back and finding a
+    pencil with which to emphasize his story, "this reminds me very much
+    of a case that I had on the June calendar&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In half an hour St. George and Amory saw that all serious
+    consideration of their situation must be accomplished alone with
+    Olivia; for in that time Mr. Frothingham had been reminded of two
+    more cases and Mrs. Hastings had twice been reduced to tears by the
+    picture of the possible fate of her brother. Moreover, there
+    presently appeared supper&mdash;a tray of the most savoury delicacies, to
+    produce which Olivia had slipped away and, St. George had no doubt,
+    said over some spell in the kitchens. Supper in the white marble
+    room of the king's palace was almost as wonderful as muffins and tea
+    at the Boris.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There were Olivia in her gown of roses on one side of the table and
+    Antoinette on the other and between them the hungry and happy
+    adventurers. Across the room under a tall silver vase that might
+    have been the one proposed by Achilles at the funeral games for
+    Patroclus ("that was the work of the 'skilful Sidonians'" St. George
+    recalled with a thrill), Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham were
+    conscientiously finishing their chess, since the lawyer believed in
+    completing whatever he undertook, if for nothing more than a warning
+    never to undertake it again. Manifestly the little ivory kings and
+    queens and castles were in league with all the other magic of the
+    night, for the game prolonged itself unconscionably, and the supper
+    party found it far from difficult to do the same. St. George looked
+    at Olivia in her gown of roses, and his eyes swept the high white
+    walls of the room with its frescoes and inscriptions, its broken
+    statues and defaced chests of stone and ancient armour, and so back
+    to Olivia in her gown of roses, with her little ringless hands
+    touching and lifting among the alien dishes as she ministered to
+    him. What a dear little gown of roses and what beautiful hands, St.
+    George thought; and as for the broken statues and the inscriptions
+    and the contents of the stone chests, nobody had paid any attention
+    to them for so long that they could hardly have missed his regard.
+    Nor Amory's. For Amory was in the midst of a reminiscent reference
+    to the Chiswicks, in the Adirondacks, and to Antionette Frothingham
+    in a launch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At last they all were aware that the chess-board was being closed
+    and Mrs. Hastings had risen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose," she was saying, "that they have an idea here, the poor
+    deluded creatures, that it is very late. But I tell Olivia that we
+    are so much farther east it <i>can't</i> be very late in New York at this
+    minute, and I intend to go to bed by my watch as I always do, and
+    that is New York time. If I were in New York I wouldn't be sleepy
+    now, and I'm no different here, am I? I don't think people are half
+    independent enough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings stepped round a stone god, almost faceless, that stood
+    in a little circular depression in the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia, where," she inquired, patting the bobbing, ticking jet on
+    her gown, "where do you think that frightful, mad, old man is?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I heard him cross the corridor a little while ago," Olivia
+    answered. "I think he went to his room."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must say, Olivia," said Mrs. Hastings with a damp sigh, "that you
+    are very selfish where I am concerned&mdash;in <i>this</i> matter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," said Olivia, "please, Aunt Dora. He is far too feeble to harm
+    any one. And he's away there on the second floor."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure he's a murderer," protested Mrs. Hastings. "He has the
+    murderer's eye. Mr. Hastings would have said he has. We all sleep on
+    the ground floor here," she continued plaintively, "because we are
+    so high up anyway that I think the air must be just as pure as it
+    would be up stairs. I always leave my window up the width of my
+    handkerchief-box."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As they went out to the great corridor Olivia spoke softly to St.
+    George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look up," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked, and saw that the vast circular chamber was of
+    incalculable height, extending up to the very dome of the palace,
+    and shaping itself to the lines of the topmost of the three huge
+    cones. It was a great well of light, playing over strange frescoes
+    of gods and daemons, of constellations and of beasts, and exquisite
+    with all the secret colours of some other way of vision. As high as
+    the eye could see, the precious metals upon the skeleton of the open
+    roof shone in the bright light that was set there&mdash;the light on the
+    summit of the king's palace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George turned from the glory of it and looked into her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'A new Heaven and a new earth,'" he said; but he did not mean the
+    dome of light nor yet the splendour of the palace.
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+<p>
+    Manifestly, there is no use in being asleep when one can dream
+    rather better awake. St. George wandered aimlessly between his room
+    and Amory's and took the time to reflect that when a man looks the
+    way Amory did he might as well have Cupids painted on his coat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St. George," Amory said soberly, "is this the way you've been
+    feeling all the way here? Is this what you came for? Then, on my
+    soul, I forgive you everything. I would have climbed ten mountains
+    to meet Antoinette Frothingham."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've been watching you, you son of Dixie," said St. George darkly;
+    "don't you lose your head just when you need it most."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have a notion yours is gone," defended Amory critically, "and
+    mine is only going."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's twice as dangerous," St. George wisely opined;
+    "besides&mdash;mine is different."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So is mine," said Amory, "so is everybody's."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace. Amory
+    didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and
+    St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the
+    south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood;
+    and there, because the night would have it no other way, he
+    stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe,
+    and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business
+    of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a
+    field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal
+    experiences where words themselves are born. Better and more
+    intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith
+    been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and
+    thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies,
+    breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of
+    what will be. He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman
+    mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to
+    the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told
+    himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His
+    mother and the bishop at Tübingen and on the Baltic! Curiously
+    enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the
+    bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
+    All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast
+    kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was
+    Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman
+    emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken
+    with him, when something&mdash;he was not sure whether it was a voice or
+    a touch&mdash;startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked
+    drowsily out at the glorified blackness&mdash;as if black were no longer
+    absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been
+    pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more
+    inclusive than white. The very dark seemed delicately vocal and to
+    "fill the waste with sound" no less than the wash of the waves. St.
+    George awoke deliciously confused by a returning sense of the sweet
+    and the joy of the night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'This was the loneliest beach between two seas,'" there flitted
+    through his mind, "'and strange things had been done there in the
+    ancient ages.'" He turned among the vines, half listening. "And in
+    there is the king's daughter," he told himself, "and this is
+    certainly 'the strangest thing that ever befell between two seas.'
+    And I have a great mind to look up the old woman of that tale who
+    must certainly be hereabout, dancing 'widdershins.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then, like a bright blade unsheathed in a quiet chamber, a cry of
+    great and unmistakable fear rang out from the palace&mdash;a woman's
+    cry, uttered but once, and giving place to a silence that was even
+    more terrifying. In an instant St. George was on his feet, running
+    with all his might.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Coming!" he called, "where are you&mdash;where are you?" And his heart
+    pounded against his side with the certainty that the voice had been
+    Olivia's.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was unmistakably Olivia's voice that replied to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here!" she cried clearly, and St. George followed the sound and
+    dashed through the long open window of the room next that in which
+    he had first seen her that night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here," she repeated, "but be careful. Some one is in this room."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't be afraid," he cried cheerily into the dark. "It's all
+    right," which is exactly what he would have said if there had been
+    about dragons and real shades from Sidon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The room was now in darkness, and in the dim light cast by the high
+    moon he could at first discern nothing. He heard a silken rustling
+    and the tap of slippered feet. The next instant the apartment was
+    quick with light, and in the curtained entrance to an inner room,
+    Olivia, in a brown dressing-gown, her hair vaguely bright about her
+    flushed face, stood confronting him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Between them, his thin hand thrown up, palm outward, to protect his
+    eyes from the sudden light, was the old man whom St. George had last
+    seen by the shrine on the terrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was prepared for a mere procession of palace ghosts, but
+    at this strange visitor he stared for an uncomprehending moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are you doing here?" he said wonderingly to him; "what in the
+    world are you doing here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man looked uncertainly about him, one hand spread against
+    the pillar behind him, the other fumbling at his throat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think," he answered almost indistinguishably, "I think that I
+    meant to sit here&mdash;to sit in the room beyond, where the mock stars
+    shine."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia uttered an exclamation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How could he possibly know that?" she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But what does he mean?" asked St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She crossed swiftly to a portiere hanging by slender rings from the
+    full height of the lofty room, and at her bidding St. George
+    followed her. She pushed aside the curtain, revealing a huge cave of
+    the dark, a room whose walls were sunk in shadow. But overhead the
+    ceiling was constellated in stars, so that it seemed to St. George
+    as if he were looking into a nearer heaven, homing the far lights
+    that he knew. The Pleiades, Orion, and the Southern Cross, blazing
+    down with inconceivable brilliance, were caught and held captive in
+    the cup of this nearer sky.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is like this at night," Olivia said, "but we see nothing in the
+    daytime, save the vague outlines of here and there a star. But how
+    could he have known? There is no other door save this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man had followed them and stood, his eyes fixed on the
+    shining points.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is done well," he said softly, "it makes one feel the
+    firmament."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, thrilling with the strangeness of what he saw, and the
+    strangeness of being there with Olivia and this weird old man of the
+    mountain, turned toward him almost fearfully. How did he know,
+    indeed?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well," he said, striving to reassure her, "I've no doubt he has
+    wandered in here some evening, while you were at dinner. No doubt&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the old man's hand. For as he
+    lifted it St. George had thought that something glittered. Without
+    hesitation he caught the old man's arm about the wrist, and turned
+    his hand in his own palm. In the thin fingers he found a small
+    sealed tube, filled with something that looked like particles of
+    nickel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mind telling me what that is?" asked St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Old Malakh's eyes, liquid and brown and very peaceful, met his own
+    without rebuke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mean the gem?" he asked gently. "It is a very beautiful
+    ruby."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then St. George saw upon the hand that held the sealed tube a ring
+    of matchless workmanship, set with a great ruby that smouldered in
+    the shadow where they stood. Olivia looked at St. George with
+    startled eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He was not wearing this when we first saw him," she said. "I
+    haven't seen him wearing it at all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George confronted the old man then and spoke with some
+    determination.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you please tell us," he said, "what there is in this tube, and
+    how you came by this ring?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Old Malakh looked down reflectively at his hand, and back to St.
+    George's face. It was wonderful, the air of courtliness and urbanity
+    and delicate breeding which persisted through age and infirmity and
+    the fallow mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wish that I might tell you," he said humbly, "but I have only
+    little lights in my head, instead of words. And when I say them,
+    they do not mean&mdash;what they <i>shine</i>. Do you not see? That is why
+    every one laughs. But I know what the lights say."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at Olivia helplessly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you tell me where his room is?" he said, "and I'll go back
+    with him. I don't know what to make of this, quite, but don't be
+    frightened. It's all right. Didn't you say he is on the second
+    floor?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, but don't go alone with him," begged Olivia suddenly, "let me
+    call some of the servants. We don't know what he may do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George shook his head, smiling a little in sheer boyish delight
+    at that "we." "We" is a very wonderful word, when it is not put to
+    unimportant uses by kings, editors and the like.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd rather not, thank you," he said. "I'll have a talk with him, I
+    think."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "His room is at the top of the stair, on the left," said Olivia
+    reluctantly, "but I wish&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We shall get on all right," St. George assured her, "and don't let
+    this worry you, will you? I was smoking on the terrace. I'll be
+    there for a while yet. Good night," he said from the doorway.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good night," said Olivia. "Good night&mdash;and, oh, I thank you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's expectation of having a talk with the old man was,
+    however, unfounded. Old Malakh led the way to his room&mdash;a great
+    place of carven seats and a frowning bed-canopy and high windows,
+    and doors set deep in stone; and he begged St. George to sit down
+    and permitted him to examine the sealed tube filled with little
+    particles that looked like nickel, and spoke with gentle irrelevance
+    the while. At the last St. George left him, feeling as if he were
+    committing not so much an indignity as a social solecism when he
+    locked the door upon the lonely creature, using for the purpose a
+    key-like implement chained to the lock without and having a ring
+    about the size of the iron crown of the Lombards.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good night," old Malakh told him courteously, "good night. But yet
+    all nights are good&mdash;save the night of the heart."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George went back to the terrace. For hours he paced the paths of
+    that little upper garden or lay upon the wall among the pungent
+    vines. But now he forgot the iridescent dark and the companion-sea
+    and the high moon and the king's palace, for it was not these that
+    made the necromancy of the night. It was permitted him to watch
+    before the threshold while Olivia slept, as lovers had watched in
+    the youth of the world. Whatever the morrow held, to-night had been
+    added to yesternight. Not until the dawn of that morrow whitened the
+    sky and drew from the vapourous plain the first far towers of Med,
+    the King's City, did St. George say good night to her glimmering
+    windows.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0016"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    GLAMOURIE
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    There is a certain poster, all stars and poppies and deep grass; and
+    over these hangs a new moon which must surely have been cut by fairy
+    scissors, for it looks as much like a cake or a cowslip as it looks
+    like a moon. But withal it sheds a light so eery and strangely
+    silver that the poster seems, in spite of the poppies, to have been
+    painted in Spring-wind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never," said some chance visitors vehemently, "have I seen such a
+    moon as that!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But ah, sir, and ah, madame," was the answer&mdash;it is not recorded
+    whether the poster spoke or whether some one spoke for it&mdash;"wouldn't
+    you like to?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now, therefore, concerning the sweet of those hours in the king's
+    palace the Vehement may be tempted to exclaim that in life things
+    never happen like that. Ah&mdash;do they not so? You have only to go back
+    to the days when young love and young life were yours to recall
+    distinctly that the most impossible things were every-day
+    occurrences. What about the time that you went down one street
+    instead of up another and <i>that</i> changed the entire course of your
+    days and brought you two together? What about the song, the June,
+    the letter that touched the world to gold before your eyes and
+    caught you up in a place of clouds? Remembering that magic, it is
+    quite impossible to assert that any charming thing whatever would
+    not have happened. Is there not some wonderland in every life? And
+    is not the ancient citadel of Love-upon-the-Heights that common
+    wonderland? One must believe in all the happiness that one can.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if the Most Vehement&mdash;who are as thick as butterflies&mdash;still
+    remain unconvinced and persist that they never heard of things
+    fallen out thus, there is left this triumph:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, sir, or ah, madame, wouldn't you like to?"
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+<p>
+    A fugitive wind rollicking in from sea next morning swept through
+    the palace and went on around the world; and thereafter it had an
+    hundred odourous ways of attracting attention, which were merely its
+    own tale of what pleasant things it had seen and heard on high.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For example, that breakfast. A cloth had been laid at one end of the
+    long stone table whereat, since the days of Abibaal, brother to
+    Hiram, friend to David, kings had breakfasted and banqueted, and
+    this cloth had now been set with the ancient plate of the
+    palace&mdash;dishes that looked like helmets and urns and discs. Here
+    Olivia and Antoinette, in charming print frocks, made a kind of tea
+    in a kind of biblical samovar and served it in vessels that
+    resembled individual trophies of the course. And here St. George and
+    Amory praised the admirable English muffins which some one had
+    taught the dubious cook to make; and Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+    tip-fingered his way about his plate among alien fruits and
+    queer-shaped cakes. "Are they cookies or are they manna?" Amory
+    wondered, "for they remind me of coriander seeds." And here Mrs.
+    Hastings, who always awoke a thought impatient and became
+    ultra-complacent with no interval of real sanity, wistfully asked
+    for a soft-boiled egg and added plaintively:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Though I dare say the very hens in Yaque lay something besides
+    eggs&mdash;pineapples, very likely."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose," speculated Amory, "that when we get perfectly
+    intuitionized we won't have to eat either one because we'll know
+    beforehand exactly how they both taste."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>, my young friend," said the lawyer
+    sternly; "the real purpose of eating will remain for ever
+    unchanged."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on the
+    terrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss the
+    weather report so," complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young people
+    with Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace. For
+    St. George had risen from his two hours' sleep with some
+    clearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every niche
+    and corner of the great pile where one&mdash;say a king&mdash;might be hidden
+    with twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.
+</p>
+<p>
+    What a morning it was! When the rollicking wind got to that part of
+    the story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumes
+    that even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, "thinking
+    delicate thoughts." There never was a fairer temple of romance, a
+    very temple of Young Love's Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St.
+    George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries were
+    become homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yet
+    be well.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, all
+    octagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity and
+    amazement might increase with every step. How they had ever raised
+    those massive blocks of stone to that great height no one can
+    guess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palace
+    had originally been built upon level ground and had had its
+    surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain. At all events
+    there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked
+    stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the
+    planetary deities&mdash;Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white
+    bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in
+    the form of a rising flame&mdash;types taken from the heavens and from
+    the abyss. There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven
+    cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and little
+    circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of
+    Baal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth,
+    with the lion's skin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step
+    of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing
+    size, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the painted
+    ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic
+    paws. Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled
+    with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most
+    luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort. The palace
+    was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two
+    thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance
+    of this moment's civilization of the world. The heart of that
+    elder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where they
+    came upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and tools
+    and empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallic
+    plate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in one
+    light, slightly fluorescent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adôn," said Jarvo. "She was
+    the daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touched
+    in this room was left unmoved. But it was very many years ago&mdash;I
+    have forgotten. Every one has forgotten."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went down among the very roots of the palace, three full
+    storeys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lighting
+    the way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding passages,
+    and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones had
+    been hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber of
+    the tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, now
+    hollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hall
+    were lined with <i>loculi</i> or niches, each as deep as the length of a
+    man. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the long
+    flags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven on
+    the stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was a
+    lofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was the
+    resting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal of
+    Tyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when the
+    Ph&oelig;nicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first passed the Straits of
+    Gibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastings
+    when they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and the
+    Washingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they were
+    nothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wall
+    was a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, where
+    slept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king of
+    Persia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket of
+    love-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probably
+    at one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in the
+    very palace. And if this is true the story of his omission to
+    conquer the island may one day divert the world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored with
+    winged circles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnapped
+    Egyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Ph&oelig;nician
+    merchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Here
+    lie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holy
+    office."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nothing was unbelievable&mdash;nothing had been unbelievable for so long
+    that these four had almost learned that everything is possible.
+    Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly you
+    learn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world of
+    possibilities. It is one of our two magics.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And this," Jarvo said softly, pausing before a vacant niche
+    opposite the tomb of King Abibaal, "this will be the receptacle for
+    the present king of Yaque, his Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of
+    God."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia suddenly looked up at St. George, her face pale in the
+    ghostly light. There it had been, waiting for them all the while,
+    the sense of the vivid personal against the vague eternal. But her
+    involuntary appeal to him, slight as it was, thrilled St. George
+    with tenderness as vivid as this tragic element itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went back to the sun and the sweet messengering air above, and
+    crossed a little vacant grassy court on the north side of the
+    mountain. Here they saw that the palace climbed down the northern
+    slope from the summit, and literally overhung the precipice where
+    the supports were made fast by gigantic girders run in the living
+    rock. A little observatory was built below the edge of the mountain,
+    and this box of a place had a glass floor, and one felt like a fly
+    on the sky as one stood there. It was said that a certain king of
+    Yaque, sometime in the course of the Punic Wars, had thrown himself
+    from this observatory in a rage because his court electrician had
+    died, but how true this may be it is impossible to say because so
+    little is known about electricity. Below the building lay quite the
+    most wonderful part of the king's palace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here in the long north rooms, hermetically quiet, was the heart of
+    the treasure of the ancient island. Here, saved inexplicably from
+    the wreck of the past, were a thousand testimonies to that lost and
+    but half-guessed art of the elder world. Beautiful things, made in
+    the days when King Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, lined the
+    walls, and filled the stone shelves, together with curios of that
+    later day when Ph&oelig;nicia stood first in knowledge of the plastic and
+    glyptic arts. Workers in gold and ivory, in gems and talismans, in
+    brass and fine linen and purple had done the marvels which those
+    courtier adventurers brought with them over the sea, and to these,
+    from year to year, had been added the treasure of private
+    chests&mdash;necklaces and coronals and hair-loops, bottles and vases of
+    glass coloured with metallic oxides, and patterned aggry-beads, now
+    sometimes found in ancient tombs on the Ashantee coasts. Beneath an
+    altar set with censers and basins of gold was a chest brought from
+    Amathus, its ogive lid carved with <i>bigæ</i> or two-horsed chariots,
+    and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the Hereditary
+    Treasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered with
+    bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the
+    Ph&oelig;nician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were
+    set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the
+    Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days
+    remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected
+    in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied
+    from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered&mdash;annals,
+    State documents, the Ph&oelig;nician originals of histories preserved
+    elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the
+    secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose
+    names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and
+    Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy
+    and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were
+    chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of
+    no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the
+    Past, watching lonely on the mountain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to the
+    cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted to
+    go somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure and
+    you thought Clusium was the name of it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know," said Amory shamelessly, "and there are no end of names for
+    it. But it's always the same thing. <i>Excepting this</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Excepting this," St. George repeated fervently as they turned to
+    go; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sang
+    that, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faint
+    voices from every shelf in the room,&mdash;voices that of old had
+    thrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Woke now to the eternal echo&mdash;an echo that touched delicately
+    through the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on all
+    that happened. Otherwise, if they four were not all a little
+    echo-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face of
+    danger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found time
+    for the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, because
+    they hold revelation. There were, too, some events; but an event is
+    a clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.
+    The delicious moments are when the intangibilities prevail and
+    pervade and possess. In the king's palace there must have been
+    shrines to intangibilities&mdash;as there should be everywhere&mdash;for they
+    seemed to come there, and belong.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The mere happenings included, for example, a talk that St. George
+    had with Mr. Augustus Frothingham on the terrace after luncheon,
+    in which St. George laid before the lawyer a plan which he had
+    virtually matured and of which he himself thought very well.
+    Thought so well, because of its possibilities, that his face was
+    betrayingly eager as he told about it. It was, briefly, that
+    inasmuch as four of the six men who could scale the mountain were
+    now on its summit, and inasmuch as all the airships were there
+    also, now, therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque,
+    were in a perfectly impregnable position&mdash;counting out Fifth
+    Dimension contingencies, which of course might include appearings
+    as well as disappearings&mdash;and why shouldn't they stay there, and
+    let the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked? And
+    when the lawyer said, "But, my dear fellow," as he was bound to
+    say, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, by
+    noon of the following day, two determined persons who, if Jarvo
+    would get word to them, would with perfect certainty find Mr. Otho
+    Holland, the king, if he were on the island. And when "Well, but
+    my dear fellow" occurred again, St. George replied with deference
+    that he knew it, but although he never had managed an airship he
+    fancied that perhaps he might help with one; and down there in the
+    harbour was a yacht waiting to sail for New York, and therefore no
+    one need even set foot on the island who didn't wish. And Mr.
+    Frothingham laid one long hand on each coat-lapel and threw back
+    his head until his hair rested on his collar, and he looked at the
+    palace&mdash;that Titan thing of the sky with ramparts of air&mdash;and
+    said, "Nothing in all my experience&mdash;" and St. George left him,
+    deep in thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the way back he chanced upon Mrs. Hastings, seated on a bench of
+    lapidescent wood in the portico&mdash;and a Titanic portico it looked by
+    day&mdash;and, having sent for the palace chef, she was attempting to
+    write down the recipe for the salad of that day's luncheon, although
+    it was composed chiefly of fowls now extinct everywhere excepting in
+    Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But my poultry man will get them for me," she urged with
+    determination; "I have only to tell him the name of what I want, and
+    he can always produce it in tins, nicely labeled."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Later, St. George came upon old Malakh, leaning on the terrace wall,
+    looking out to sea, and stood close beside him, marveling at the
+    pallor and the thousand wrinkles of the man's strange face. The face
+    was stranger by day than it had been by night&mdash;this St. George had
+    felt when he went that morning to release him, and the old man
+    leaned from the frowning bed-hangings to bid him a gentle good
+    morning. Could he be, St. George now wondered vaguely, a citizen of
+    the fifteenth or twentieth dimension, and, there, did they live to
+    his incredible age? Then he noticed that the old man was not wearing
+    the ruby ring.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakh
+    answered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and at
+    other things.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To everything that he asked him the old man returned only his
+    urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism.
+    When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would
+    consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George
+    himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I
+    would far rather talk with one madman with this madman's manners
+    than to sup with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murder
+    us, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Olivia
+    had no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could one
+    possibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing as
+    only that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that went
+    before. St. George was saying to himself that at last the <i>Here</i> and
+    the <i>Now</i> were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for the
+    morrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noon
+    they all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leaves
+    above carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. They
+    leaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the glory
+    of the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings of
+    gulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did not
+    know they gave&mdash;ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind told
+    about that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their young
+    courage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility of
+    their understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. For
+    the wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, and
+    one has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth.
+    Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spite
+    of the little wing-like moments that hold not history but
+    revelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendent
+    sword of "To-morrow, at noon."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0017"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    BENEATH THE SURFACE
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Up came the dusk to the doors of the king's palace&mdash;a hurry of grey
+    banners flowing into the empty ways where the sun had been. Upon
+    this high dominion Night could not advance unheralded, and here the
+    Twilight messengered her coming long after the dark lay thick on the
+    lowland and on the toiling water.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, leaning from Amory's window, looked down on the shadows
+    rising in exquisite hesitation, as if they came curling from the
+    lighted censer of Med. There is no doubt at all, Olivia had said
+    gravely, that the dusk is patterned, if only one could see
+    it&mdash;figured in unearthly flowers, in wandering stars, in upper-air
+    sprites, grey-winged, grey-bodied, so that sometimes glimpsing them
+    one fancies them to be little living goblins. He smiled, remembering
+    her words, and glanced over his shoulder down the long room where
+    the other light was now beginning to creep about, first expressing,
+    then embracing the chamber dusk. It seemed precisely the moment
+    when something delicate should be caught passing from gloom to
+    radiance, to be thankfully remembered. But only many-winged colours
+    were visible, though he could hear a sound like little murmurous
+    speech in the dusky roof where the air had a recurrent fashion of
+    whispering knowingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Indeed, the air everywhere in the palace had a fashion of whispering
+    knowingly, for it was a place of ghostly draughts and blasts
+    creeping through chambers cleft by yawning courts and open corridors
+    and topped by that skeleton dome. And as St. George turned from the
+    window he saw that the door leading into the hall, urged by some
+    nimble gust, imaginative or prying, had swung ajar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George mechanically crossed the room to close the door, noting
+    how the pale light warmed the stones of that cave-like corridor.
+    With his hand upon the latch his eyes fell on something crossing the
+    corridor, like a shadow dissolving from gloom to gloom. Well beyond
+    the open door, stealing from pillar to pillar in the dimness and
+    moving with that swiftness and slyness which proclaim a covert
+    purpose as effectually as would a bell, he saw old Malakh.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now St. George was in felt-soled slippers and he was coatless,
+    because in the adjoining room Jarvo, with a heated, helmet-like
+    apparatus, was attempting to press his blue serge coat. In that
+    room too was Amory, catching glimpses of himself in a mirror of
+    polished steel, but within reach, on the divan where Jarvo had just
+    laid it, was Amory's coat; and St. George caught that up, slipped it
+    on, and was off down the corridor after the old man, moving as
+    swiftly and slyly as he. St. George had no great faith in him or in
+    what he might know, but the old man puzzled him, and mystification
+    is the smell of a pleasant powder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The palace was very still. Presumably, Mrs. Hastings and Mr.
+    Frothingham were already at chess in the drawing-room awaiting
+    dinner. St. George heard a snatch of distant laughter, in quick
+    little lilts like a song, and it occurred to him that its echo there
+    was as if one were to pin a ruffle of lace to the grim stones. Some
+    one answered the laugh, and he heard the murmurous touching of soft
+    skirts entering the corridor as he dived down the ancient dark of
+    one of the musty passages. There the silence was resumed. In the
+    palace it was as though the stillness were some living sleeper,
+    waking with protests, thankful for the death of any echo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No one was in the gallery. St. George, stepping softly, followed as
+    near as he dared to that hurrying figure, flitting down the dark. A
+    still narrower hallway connected the main portion of the palace with
+    a shoulder of the south wing, and into this the old man turned and
+    skirted familiarly the narrow sunken pool that ran the length of
+    the floor, drawing the light to its glassy surface and revealing the
+    shadows sent clustering to the indistinguishable roof.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Midway the gallery sprang a narrow stairway, let in the wall and
+    once leading to the ancient armoury, but now disused and piled with
+    rubbish. Old Malakh went up two steps of this old stairway, turned
+    aside, and slipped away so swiftly that his amazed pursuer caught no
+    more than an after-flutter of his dun-coloured garments. St. George,
+    his softly-clad feet making no noise upon the stones, bounded
+    forward and saw, through a triangular aperture in the stones, and
+    set so low that a man must crouch upon the step to enter, a yawning
+    place of darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He might very well have been taking his life in his hands, for he
+    could have no idea whether the aperture led to the imperial dungeons
+    or to the imperial rain-water cistern; but St. George instantly bent
+    and slipped down into that darkness, thick with the dust of the
+    flight of the old man. With the distinctly pleasurable sensation of
+    being still alive he found himself standing upright upon an uneven
+    floor of masonry. He thrust out his arms and touched sides of mossy
+    rock. Then just before him a pale flame flickered. The old man had
+    kindled a little taper that hardly did more than make shallow
+    hollows in the darkness through which he moved.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was easy to follow now, and St. George went breathlessly on
+    past the rudely-hewn walls and giant pillars of that hidden way.
+    He might have been lost with ease in any of the lower processes of
+    the palace which they had that morning visited; but he could not
+    be deceived about the chambers which he had once seen, and this
+    subterranean course was new to him. Was it, he wondered, new to
+    Olivia, and to Jarvo? Else why had it been omitted in that
+    morning's search? And was this strange guide going on at random,
+    or did he know&mdash;something? A suspicion leaped to St. George's mind
+    that made his heart beat. The king&mdash;might he be down here
+    after all, and might this weird old man know where? His own
+    consciousness became chiefly conjecture, and every nerve was alert
+    in the pursuit; not the less because he realized that if he were
+    to lose this strange conductor who went on before, either in
+    secure knowledge or in utter madness, he himself might wander for
+    the rest of his life in that nether world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Past grim latchless doors sealing, with appropriate gestures, their
+    forgotten secrets, past outlying passages winding into the heart of
+    the mountain, past niches filled with shapeless crumbling rubbish
+    they hurried&mdash;the mad old man and his bewildered pursuer. Twice the
+    way turned, gradually narrowing until two could hardly have passed
+    there, and at last apparently terminated in a short flight of
+    steps. Old Malakh mounted with difficulty and St. George, waiting,
+    saw him standing before a blank stone wall. Immediately and without
+    effort the old man's scanty strength served to displace one of the
+    wall's huge stones which hung upon a secret pivot and rolled
+    noiselessly within. He stepped through the aperture, and St. George
+    sprang behind him, watched his moment to cross the threshold,
+    crouched in the leaping shadow of the displaced stone and
+    looked&mdash;looked with the undistinguishing amazement that a man feels
+    in the panorama of his dreams.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The room was small and low and set with a circular bench, running
+    about a central pillar. On the table was a confusion of things
+    brilliantly phosphorescent, emitting soft light, and mingled with
+    bulbs, coils and crucibles lying in a litter of egg-shells,
+    feathers, ivory and paper. But it was not these that held St. George
+    incredulous; it was the fire that glowed in their midst&mdash;a fire that
+    leaped and trembled and blazed inextinguishable colour, smouldering,
+    sparkling, tossing up a spray of strange light, lambent with those
+    wizard hues of the pennons and streamers floating joyously from the
+    dome of the Palace of the Litany&mdash;the fire from the subject hearts
+    of a thousand jewels. There could be no doubting what he saw. There,
+    flung on the table from the mouth of a carven casket and harbouring
+    the captive light of ages gone, glittered what St. George knew
+    would be the gems of the Hereditary Treasure of the kings of Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But for old Malakh to know where the jewels were&mdash;that was as
+    amazing as was their discovery. St. George, breathing hard in his
+    corner, watched the long, fine hands of the old man trembling among
+    the delicate tubes and spindles, lingering lovingly among the
+    stones, touching among the necklaces and coronals of the dead queens
+    whose dust lay not far away. It was as if he were summoning and
+    discarding something shining and imponderable, like words. The
+    contents of the casket which all Yaque had mourned lay scattered in
+    this secret place of which only this strange, mad creature, a chance
+    pensioner at the palace, had knowledge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly the memory of Balator's words smote St. George with new
+    perception. "He walks the streets of Med," Balator had told him at
+    the banquet, "saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say 'king,' and so
+    he is seeking the king. But he is mad, and he weeps; and therefore
+    they pretend to believe that he says, 'Malakh,' which is to say
+    'salt,' and they call him that, for his tears."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Could old Malakh possibly know something of the king? The hope
+    returned to St. George insistently, and he watched, spending his
+    thought in new and extravagant conjecture, his mental vision
+    blurring the details of that heaped-up, glistening confusion; and on
+    the opposite side of the table the old man lifted and laid down
+    that rainbow stuff of dreams, delighting in it, speaking softly
+    above it. Had he been the king's friend, St. George was asking&mdash;but
+    why did no one know anything of him? Or had he been an enemy who had
+    done the king violence&mdash;but how was that possible, in his age and
+    feebleness? Mystifying as the matter was, St. George exulted as much
+    as he marveled; for it would be his, at all events, to place the
+    jewels in Olivia's hands and clear her father's name; he longed to
+    step out of the dark and confront the old man and seize the casket
+    out of hand, and he would probably have done so and taken his
+    chances at getting back to the upper world, had he not been chained
+    to his corner by the irresistible hope that the old man knew
+    something more&mdash;something about the king. And while he wondered,
+    reflecting that at any cost he must prevent the replacing of the
+    pivotal stone, he saw old Malakh take up his taper, turn away from
+    the table, and open a door which the room's central pillar had cut
+    from his view.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was around the table in an instant. The open door revealed three
+    stone steps which the old man was ascending, one at a time.
+    Following him cautiously St. George heard a door grate outward at
+    the head of the stair, saw the taper move forward in darkness, and
+    the next moment found himself standing in the room of the tombs of
+    the kings of Yaque. And he saw that the panel which had swung
+    inward to admit them was set low in the monolithic tomb of King
+    Abibaal himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Old Malakh had crossed swiftly to the wall opposite the tomb, and
+    stood before the vacant niche which was to be occupied, as Jarvo had
+    announced, by "His Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of God." There,
+    setting aside his taper, the old man stretched his arms upward to
+    the empty shelf and with a gesture of inconceivable weariness bowed
+    his head upon them and stood silent, the leaping candle-light
+    silvering his hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Upon my soul," thought St George with finality, "he's murdered him.
+    Old Malakh has murdered the king, and it's driven him crazy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    With that he did step out of the dark, and he laid his hand suddenly
+    upon the old man's shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Malakh," he said, "what have you done with the king?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man lifted his head and turned toward St. George a face of
+    singular calm. It was as if so many phantoms vexed his brain that a
+    strange reality was of little consequence. But as his eyes met those
+    of St. George a sudden dimness came over them, the lids fluttered
+    and dropped, and his lips barely formed his words:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The king," he said. "I did not leave the king. It was the king who
+    somehow went away and left me here&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He threw out his hands blindly, tottered and swayed from the wall;
+    and St. George received him as he fell, measuring his length upon
+    the stones before King Otho's future tomb.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George caught down the light and knelt beside him. Death seemed
+    to have come "pressing within his face," and breathing hardly
+    disquieted his breast. St. George fumbled at the old man's robe, and
+    beneath his fingers the heart fluttered never so faintly. He
+    loosened the cloth at the withered throat, passed his hand over the
+    still forehead, and looked desperately about him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The other inmates of the palace were, he reflected, about two good
+    city blocks from him; and he doubted if he could ever find his
+    unaided way back to them. Mechanically, though he knew that he
+    carried no flask, he felt conscientiously through his pockets&mdash;a
+    habit of the boy in perplexity which never deserts the man
+    in crises. In the inside pocket of the coat that he was
+    wearing&mdash;Amory's coat&mdash;his fingers suddenly closed about
+    something made of glass. He seized it and drew it forth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was a little vase of rock-crystal, ornamented with gold
+    medallions, covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+    beauty and variety of design&mdash;gryphons, serpents, winged discs, men
+    contending with lions. St. George stared at it uncomprehendingly. In
+    the press of events of the last eight-and-forty hours Amory had
+    quite forgotten to mention to him the prince's intended gift of
+    wine, almost three thousand years old, sealed in Ph&oelig;nicia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George drew the stopper. In an instant an odour, spicy,
+    penetrating, delicious, saluted him and gave life to the dead air of
+    the room. For a moment he hesitated. He knew that the flask had not
+    been among Amory's belongings and that he himself had never seen it
+    before. But the odour was, he thought, unmistakable, and so powerful
+    that already he felt as if the liquor were racing through his own
+    veins. He touched it to his lips; it was like a full draught of some
+    marvelous elixir. Sudden confidence sat upon St. George, and
+    thanking his guiding stars for the fortunate chance, he
+    unhesitatingly set the flask to the old man's lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a long-drawn, shuddering breath, a fluttering of the
+    eyelids, a movement of the limbs, and after that old Malakh lay
+    quite still upon the stones. Once more St. George thrust his hand
+    within the bosom of the loose robe, and the heart was beating
+    rapidly and regularly and with amazing force. In a moment deep
+    breaths succeeded one another, filling the breast of the unconscious
+    man; but the eyelids did not unclose, and St. George took up the
+    taper and bent to scan the quiet face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked, and sank to his knees and looked again, holding
+    the light now here, now there, and peering in growing bewilderment.
+    What he saw he was wholly unable to define. It was as if a mask were
+    slowly to dissolve and yet to lie upon the features which it had
+    covered, revealing while it still made mock of concealing. Colour
+    was in the lips, colour was stealing into the changed face. The
+    <i>changed</i> face&mdash;changed, St. George could not tell how; and the
+    longer he looked, and though he rubbed his eyes and turned them
+    toward the dark and then looked again, moving the taper, he could
+    neither explain nor define what had happened.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He set the candle on the floor and sprang away from the quiet
+    figure, searching the dark. The great silent place, with its
+    shoulders of sarcophagi jutting from the gloom was black save for
+    the little ring of pallid light about that prostrate form. St.
+    George sent his hand to his forehead, and shook himself a bit, and
+    straightened his shoulders with a smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It must be the stuff you've tasted," he addressed himself solemnly.
+    "Heaven knows what it was. It's the stuff you've tasted."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Though he had barely touched his lips to the rock-crystal vase St.
+    George's blood was pounding through his veins, and a curious
+    exhilaration filled him. He looked about at the rims and corners of
+    the tombs caught by the light, and he laughed a little&mdash;though this
+    was not in the least what he intended&mdash;because it passed through
+    his mind that if King Abibaal and Queen Mitygen, for example, might
+    be treated with the contents of the mysterious vase they would no
+    doubt come forth, Abibaal with memories of the Queen of Sheba in his
+    eyes, and Queen Mitygen with her casket of Alexander's letters. Then
+    St. George went down on his knees again, and raised the old man's
+    head until it rested upon his own breast, and he passed the candle
+    before his face, his hand trembling so that the light flickered and
+    leaped up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This time there was no mistaking. The tissues of old Malakh's ashen
+    face and throat and pallid hands were undergoing some subtle
+    transfiguration. It was as if new blood had come encroaching in
+    their veins. It was as if the muscles were become firm and full, as
+    if the wrinkled skin had been made smooth, the lips grown fresh, as
+    if&mdash;the word came to St. George as he stared, spell-stricken&mdash;as if
+    <i>youth</i> had returned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George slipped down upon the stones and sat motionless. There
+    was a little blue, forked vein on the man's forehead, and upon this
+    he fastened his eyes, mechanically following it downward and back.
+    Lines had crossed it, and there had been a deep cleft between the
+    eyes, but these had disappeared, leaving the brow almost smooth. The
+    cheeks were now tinged with colour, and the throat, where he had
+    pulled aside the robe, showed firm and white. Mechanically St.
+    George passed his hand along the inert arm, and it was no more
+    withered than his own&mdash;the arm of no greybeard, but of a man in the
+    prime of life. What did it mean&mdash;what did it mean? St. George
+    waited, the blood throbbing in his temples, a mist before his eyes.
+    What did it mean?
+</p>
+<p>
+    The minutes dragged by and still the unconscious man did not stir or
+    unclose his eyes. From time to time St. George pressed his hand to
+    the heart, and found it beating on rhythmically, powerfully. When he
+    found himself sitting with averted head, as if he were afraid to
+    look back at that changing face, a fear seized him that he had lost
+    his reason and that what he imagined himself to see was a phase of
+    madness. So he left the old man's side and sturdily tramped away
+    into the huge dark of the room, resolutely explaining to himself
+    that this was all very natural; the old man had been ill, improperly
+    nourished, and the powerful stimulant of the wine had partly
+    restored him. But even while he went over it St. George knew in his
+    heart that what had happened was nothing that could be so explained,
+    nothing that could be explained at all by anything within his ken.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath
+    of the place smote his face as he moved. He stumbled on a displaced
+    tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and
+    reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness. The taper rays
+    struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet
+    of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock. St. George remembered
+    a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries,
+    coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air. It
+    seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far
+    slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this
+    ghost place. Back there, where the light glimmered beside the tomb
+    of King Abibaal, nobody could tell what awaited him. If the man
+    could change like this, might he not take on some shape too hideous
+    to bear in the silence? St. George stood still, suddenly
+    clenching his hands, trying to reach out through the dark and to
+    grasp&mdash;himself, the self that seemed slipping away from him. But was
+    he mad already, he wondered angrily, and hurried back to the far
+    flickering light, stumbling, panting, not daring to look at the
+    figure on the floor, not daring not to look.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He resolutely caught up the candle and peered once more at the face.
+    As steadily and swiftly as change in the aspect of the sky the face
+    had gone on changing. St. George had followed to the chamber an old
+    tottering man; the figure before him was a man of not more than
+    fifty years.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George let fall the candle, which flickered down, upright in its
+    socket; and he turned away, his hand across his eyes. Since this was
+    manifestly impossible he must be mad, something in the stuff that
+    he had tasted had driven him mad. He felt strong as a lion, strong
+    enough to lift that prostrate figure and to carry it through the
+    winding passages into the midst of those above stairs, and to beg
+    them in mercy to tell him how the man looked. What would <i>she</i> say?
+    He wondered what Olivia would say. Dinner would be over and they
+    would be in the drawing-room&mdash;Olivia and Amory and Antoinette
+    Frothingham; already the white room and the lights and Antoinette's
+    laughter seemed to him of another world, a world from which he had
+    irrevocably passed. Yet there they were above, the same roof
+    covering them, and they did not know that down here in this place of
+    the dead he, St. George, was beyond all question going mad.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With a cry he pulled off Amory's coat, flung it over the unconscious
+    man, and rushed out into the blackness of the corridor. He would not
+    take the light&mdash;the man must not die alone there in the dark&mdash;and
+    besides he had heard that the mad could see as well in the dark as
+    in the light. Or was it the blind who could see in the dark? No
+    doubt it was the blind. However, he could find his way, he thought
+    triumphantly, and ran on, dragging his hand along the slippery
+    stones of the wall&mdash;he could find his way. Only he must call out, to
+    tell them who it was that was lost. So he called himself by name,
+    aloud and sternly, and after that he kept on quietly enough, serene
+    in the conviction that he had regained his self-control, fighting to
+    keep his mind from returning to the face that changed before his
+    eyes, like the appearances in the puppet shows. But suddenly he
+    became conscious that it was his own name that he went shouting
+    through the passages; and that was openly absurd, he reasoned, since
+    if he wanted to be found he must call some one else's name. But he
+    must hurry&mdash;hurry&mdash;hurry; no one could tell what might be happening
+    back there to that face that changed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" he shouted, "Amory! Jarvo&mdash;oh, Jarvo! Rollo, you
+    scoundrel&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereat the memory that Rollo was somewhere on a yacht assailed him,
+    and he pressed on, blindly and in silence, until glimmering before
+    him he saw a light shining from an open door. Then he rushed forward
+    and with a groan of relief threw himself into the room. Opposite the
+    door loomed the grim sarcophagus of King Abibaal, and beside it on
+    the floor lay the figure with the face that changed. He had gone a
+    circle in those tortuous passages, and this was the room of the
+    tombs of the kings.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He dragged himself across the chamber toward the still form. He must
+    look again; no one could tell what might have happened. He pulled
+    down the coat and looked. And there was surely nothing in the
+    delicate, handsome, English-looking face upturned to his to give
+    him new horror. It was only that he had come down here in the wake
+    of a tottering old creature, and that here in his place lay a man
+    who was not he. Which was manifestly impossible.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mechanically St. George's hand went to the man's heart. It was
+    beating regularly and powerfully, and deep breaths were coming from
+    the full, healthily-coloured lips. For a moment St. George knelt
+    there, his blood tingling and pricking in his veins and pulsing in
+    his temples. Then he swayed and fell upon the stones.
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+<p>
+    When St. George opened his eyes it was ten o'clock of the following
+    morning, though he felt no interest in that. There was before him a
+    great rectangle of light. He lifted his head and saw that the light
+    appeared to flow from the interior of the tomb of King Abibaal. The
+    next moment Amory's cheery voice, pitched high in consternation and
+    relief, made havoc among the echoes with a background of Jarvo's
+    smooth thanksgiving for the return of adôn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, coatless, stiff from the hours on the mouldy stones,
+    dragged himself up and turned his eyes in fear upon the figure
+    beside him. It flashed hopefully through his mind that perhaps it
+    had not changed, that perhaps he had dreamed it all, that perhaps
+    ...
+</p>
+<p>
+    By his first glance that hope was dispelled. From beneath Amory's
+    coat on the floor an arm came forth, pushing the coat aside, and a
+    man slenderly built, with a youthful, sensitive face and somewhat
+    critically-drooping lids, sat up leisurely and looked about him in
+    slow surprise, kindling to distinct amusement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Upon my soul," he said softly, "what an admission&mdash;what an
+    admission! I can not have made such a night of it in years."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon which Jarvo dropped unhesitatingly to his knees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Melek! Melek!" he cried, prostrating himself again and again. "The
+    King! The King! The gods have permitted the possible."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0018"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVIII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    A MORNING VISIT
+</h3
+<br>
+
+<p>
+    In an upper room in the Palace of the Litany, fair with all the
+    burnished devices of the early light, Prince Tabnit paced on that
+    morning of mornings of his marriage day. Because of his great
+    happiness the whole world seemed to him like some exquisite intaglio
+    of which this day was the design.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The room, "walled with soft splendours of Damascus tiles," was laid
+    with skins of forgotten animals and was hung with historic
+    tapestries dyed by ancient fingers in the spiral veins of the Murex.
+    There were frescoes uniting the dream with its actuality, columns
+    carved with both lines and names of beauty, pilasters decorated with
+    chain and checker-work and golden nets. A stairway led to a high
+    shrine where hung the crucified Tyrian sphinx. The room was like a
+    singing voice summoning one to delights which it described. But
+    whatever way one looked all the lines neither pointed nor seemed to
+    have had beginning, but being divorced from source and direction
+    expressed merely beauty, like an altar "where none cometh to pray."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit, in his trailing robe of white embroidered by a
+    thousand needles, looked so akin to the room that one suspected it
+    of having produced him, Athena-wise, from, say, the great black
+    shrine. When he paused before the shrine he seemed like a child come
+    to beseech some last word concerning the Riddle, rather than a man
+    who believed himself to have mastered all wisdom and to have nailed
+    the world-sphinx to her cross.
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+     "Surely there is a vein for the silver<br>
+      And a place for the gold where they fine it.<br>
+      Iron is taken out of the earth<br>
+      And brass is moulton out of the stone.<br>
+      Man setteth an end to darkness<br>
+      And searcheth out all perfection: <br>
+      The stones of darkness and of the shadow of death,"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+    he was repeating softly. "So it is," he added, "'and searcheth to
+    the farthest bound.' Have I not done so? And do I not triumph?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then the youth who had once admitted St. George and his friends to
+    that far-away house in McDougle Street&mdash;with the hokey-pokey man
+    outside the door&mdash;entered with the poetry of deference; and if, as
+    he bent low, there was a lift and droop of his eyelids which tokened
+    utter bewilderment, not to say agitation, he was careful that the
+    prince should not see that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Her Highness, the Princess of Yaque, Mrs. Hastings, Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham and Miss Frothingham ask audience, your Highness," he
+    announced clearly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit turned swiftly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whom do you say, Matten?" he questioned and when the boy had
+    repeated the names, meditated briefly. He was at a loss to fathom
+    what this strange visit might portend; beyond doubt, he reflected
+    (in a world which was an intaglio of his own designing) it portended
+    nothing at all. He hastened forward to wait upon them and paused
+    midway the room, for the highest tribute that a Prince of the Litany
+    could pay to another was to receive him in this chamber of the
+    Crucified Sphinx.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Conduct them here, Matten," he commanded, and took up his station
+    beside an hundred-branched candlestick made in Curium. There he
+    stood when, having been led down corridors of ivory and through
+    shining anterooms, Mrs. Hastings and Olivia and Antoinette appeared
+    on the threshold of the chamber, followed by Mr. Frothingham. As the
+    prince hastened forward to meet them with sweepings of his gown
+    embroidered by a thousand needles and bent above their hands
+    uttering gracious words, assuredly in all the history of Med and of
+    the Litany the room of the Crucified Sphinx had never presented a
+    more peculiar picture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Into that tranquil atmosphere, dream-pervaded, Mrs. Medora Hastings
+    swept with all the certainty of an opinion bludgeoning the frail
+    security of a fact. She had refused to have her belongings sent to
+    the apartments in the House of the Litany placed that day at her
+    disposal, preferring to dress for the coronation before she
+    descended from Mount Khalak. She was therefore in a robe of black
+    samite, trimmed with the fur of a whole chapter of extinct animals,
+    and bangles and pendants of jewels bobbed and ticked all about her.
+    But on her head she wore the bonnet trimmed with a parrot, set, as
+    usual, frightfully awry. Beside her, with all the timidity of
+    charming reality in the presence of fantasy, came Olivia and
+    Antoinette&mdash;Olivia in a walking frock of white broadcloth, with an
+    auto coat of hunting pink, and a cap held down by yards of cloudy
+    veiling; Antoinette in a blue cloth gown, and about them both&mdash;stout
+    little boots and suede gloves and smart shirt-waists&mdash;such an air of
+    actuality as this chamber, prince and Sphinx and tradition and all,
+    could not approach. Mr. Augustus Frothingham had struck his usual
+    incontestable middle-ground by appearing in the blue velvet of a
+    robe of State, over which he had slipped his light covert top-coat,
+    and he carried his immaculate top-hat and a silver-headed stick.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit," said Mrs. Medora Hastings without ceremony, "what
+    have they done with that poor young man? Ask him, Olivia," she
+    besought, sinking down upon a chair of verd antique and extending a
+    limp, plump hand to the niece who always did everything executive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia was very pale. She had hardly slept, night-long. Alarm at the
+    inexplicable disappearance of St. George at dinner-time the day
+    before and at the discovery that old Malakh was nowhere about had,
+    by morning, deepened to unreasoning fear among them all. And then
+    Olivia, knowing nothing of what had taken place in the room of the
+    tombs, had resolved upon a desperate expedient, had bundled into an
+    airship her almost prostrate aunt, Mr. Frothingham and his excited
+    little daughter, and had borne down upon the Palace of the Litany
+    two hours before noon. Amory, frantic with apprehension, had stayed
+    behind with Jarvo, certain that St. George could not have left the
+    mountain. But now that Olivia stood before the prince it required
+    but a moment to convince her that Prince Tabnit really knew nothing
+    of St. George's whereabouts. Indeed, since his gift of Ph&oelig;nician
+    wine, sealed three thousand years ago, and the immediate evanishment
+    of the two Americans, his Highness had no longer vexed his thought
+    with them, and he was genuinely amazed to know that (in a world
+    which was an intaglio of his own designing) these two had actually
+    spent yesterday at the king's palace on Mount Khalak. He perceived
+    that he must give them more definite attention than his half-idle
+    device of the wine&mdash;intended as that had been as a mere hyperspatial
+    practical joke, not in the least irreconcilable with his office of
+    host.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. St. George came to Yaque to help me find my father," Olivia was
+    concluding earnestly, "and if anything has happened to him, Prince
+    Tabnit, I alone am responsible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince reflected for a moment, his eyes fixed upon the
+    hundred-branched candlestick. Then:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. St. George's disappearance," he said, "has prevented a still
+    more unpleasant catastrophe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Catastrophe!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, quite without tucking in her
+    voice at the corners, "I have thought of no other word since I got
+    to be royalty."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A world experience, a world experience, dear Madame," contributed
+    Mr. Frothingham, his hands laid trimly along his blue velvet lap.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But that doesn't make it any easier to bear, no matter what anybody
+    says," retorted the lady.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Inasmuch," pursued Prince Tabnit with infinite regret, "as these
+    Americans have, as you say, assisted in the search for your father,
+    the king, they have most unfortunately violated that ancient law
+    which provides that no State or satrapy shall receive aid, whether
+    of blood or of bond, from an alien. The Royal House alone is
+    exempt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the penalty," demanded Olivia fearfully. "Is there a penalty?
+    What is that, Prince Tabnit?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The voice of the prince was never more mellow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do not be alarmed, I beg," he hastened his reassurance. "Upon the
+    return of Mr. St. George, he and his friend will simply be set
+    adrift in a rudderless airship, an offering to the great idea of
+    space."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings swayed toward the prince in her chair of verd antique,
+    and her voice seemed to become brittle in the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, is that what you call being ahead of the time," she demanded
+    shrilly, "getting behind science to behave like Nero? And for my
+    part I don't see anything whatever about the island that is ahead of
+    the times. You haven't even got silk shoe-laces. I actually had to
+    use a cloth-of-gold sandal strap to lace my oxfords, and when I lost
+    a cuff-link I was obliged to make shift with two sides of one of
+    Queen Agothonike's ear-rings that I found in the museum at the
+    palace. And that isn't all," went on the lady, wrong kindling wrong,
+    "what do you do for paper and envelopes? There is not a quire to be
+    found in Med. They offered me <i>wireless blanks</i>&mdash;an ultra form that
+    Mr. Hastings would never have considered in good taste. And how
+    about visiting cards? I tried to have a plate made, and they showed
+    me a wireless apparatus for flashing from the doorstep the name of
+    the visitor&mdash;an electrical entrance which Mr. Hastings would have
+    considered most inelegant. Ahead of the times, with your rudderless
+    airships! I have always said that the electric chair is a way to be
+    barbarous and good form at the same time, and that is what I think
+    about Yaque!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham's hands worked forward convulsively on his blue
+    velvet knees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear Madame," he interposed earnestly, "the history of criminal
+    jurisprudence, not to mention the remarkable essay of the Marquis
+    Beccaria&mdash;proves beyond doubt that the extirpation of the offender
+    is the only possible safety for the State&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia rose and stood before the prince, her eyes meeting his.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You will permit this sentence?" she asked steadily. "As head of the
+    House of the Litany, you will execute it, Prince Tabnit?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Alas!" said the prince humbly, "it is customary on the day of the
+    coronation to set adrift all offenders. I am the servant of the
+    State."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then, Prince Tabnit, I can not marry you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this Mrs. Hastings looked blindly about for support, and Mr.
+    Frothingham and Antoinette flew to her side. In that moment the lady
+    had seen herself, prophetically, in black samite and her parrot
+    bonnet, set adrift in the penitential airship with her rebellious
+    niece.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For a moment Prince Tabnit hesitated: he looked at Olivia, who was
+    never more beautiful than as she defied him; then he walked slowly
+    toward her, with sweep and fall of his garments embroidered by a
+    thousand needles. Antoinette and her father, ministering to Mrs.
+    Hastings, heard only the new note that had crept into his voice, a
+    thrill, a tremour&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her eyes met his in amazement but no fear.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In a land more alien to me than the sun," said the prince, "I saw
+    you, and in that moment I loved you. I love you more than the life
+    beyond life upon which I have laid hold. I brought you to this
+    island to make you my wife. Do you understand what it is that I
+    offer you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia was silent. She was trembling a little at the sheer enormity
+    of the moment. Suddenly, Prince Tabnit seemed to her like a name
+    that she did not know.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you not understand what I mean?" he besought with passionate
+    earnestness. "Can I make my words mean nothing to you? Do you not
+    see that it is indeed as I say&mdash;that I have grasped the secret of
+    life within life, beyond life, transcending life, as his
+    understanding transcends the man? The wonder of the island is but
+    the alphabet of wisdom. The secrets of life and death and being
+    itself are in my grasp. The hidden things that come near to you in
+    beauty, in dream, in inspiration are mine and my people's. All
+    these I can make yours&mdash;I offer you life of a fullness such as the
+    people of the world do not dream. I will love you as the gods love,
+    and as the gods we will live and love&mdash;it may be for ever. Nothing
+    of high wisdom shall be unrevealed to us. We shall be what the world
+    will be when it nears the close of time. Come to me&mdash;trust me&mdash;be
+    beside me in all the wonder that I know. But above all, love me, for
+    I love you more than life, and wisdom, and mystery!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia understood, and she believed. The mystery of life had always
+    been more real to her than its commonplaces, and all her years she
+    had gone half-expecting to meet some one, unheralded, to whom all
+    things would be clear, and who should make her know by some secret
+    sign that this was so, and should share with her. She had no doubt
+    whatever that Prince Tabnit spoke the truth&mdash;just as the daughter of
+    the river-god Inachus knew perfectly that she was being wooed by a
+    voice from the air. Indeed, the world over, lovers promise each
+    other infinite things, and are infinitely believed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do understand you, Prince Tabnit," Olivia said simply, "I do
+    understand something of what you offer me. I think that these things
+    were not meant to be hidden from men always, so I can even believe
+    that you have all that you say. But&mdash;there is something more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia paused&mdash;and swiftly, as if some little listening spirit had
+    released the picture from the air, came the memory of that night
+    when she had stood with St. George on that airy rampart beside the
+    wall of blossoming vines.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is something more," she repeated, "when two love each other
+    very much I think that they have everything that you have said, and
+    more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked at her in silence. The stained light from some high window
+    caught her veil in meshes of rose and violet&mdash;fairy colours,
+    witnessing the elusive, fairy, invincible truth of what she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean that you do not love me?" said the prince gently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do not love you, your Highness," said Olivia, "and as for the
+    wisdom of which you speak, that is worse than useless to you if you
+    can do as you say with two quite innocent men." She hesitated,
+    searching his face. "Is there no way," she said, "that I, the
+    daughter of your king, can save them? I will appeal to the people!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince met her eyes steadily, adoringly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It would avail nothing," he said, "they are at one with the law.
+    Yet there is a way that I can help you. If Mr. St. George returns,
+    as he must, he and his friends shall be set adrift with due
+    ceremony&mdash;but in an imperial airship, with a man secretly in
+    control. By night they can escape to their yacht. This I will
+    do&mdash;upon one condition."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh&mdash;what is that?" she asked, and for all the reticence of her
+    eagerness, her voice was a betrayal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit turned to the window. Below, in the palace grounds,
+    and without, in the Eurychôrus, a thousand people awaited the
+    opening of the palace doors. They filled the majestic avenue, poured
+    up the shadowed alleys that taught the necessity of mystery, were
+    grouped beneath the honey-sweet trees; and above their heads, from
+    every dome and column in the fair city, flowed and streamed the
+    joyous, wizard, nameless colours of the pennons blown heavenward
+    against the blue. They were come, this strange, wise, elusive
+    people, to her marriage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince was smiling as he met her eyes; for the world was always
+    the exquisite intaglio, and to-day was its design.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They know," he said simply, "what was to have been at noon to-day.
+    Do you not understand my condition?"
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0019"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIX
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    IN THE HALL OF KINGS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Somewhat before noon the great doors of the Palace of the Litany and
+    of the Hall of Kings were thrown open, and the people streamed in
+    from the palace grounds and the Eurychôrus. Abroad among
+    them&mdash;elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs
+    to dawn, not dusk&mdash;was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of
+    expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself. Especially the youths
+    and maidens&mdash;who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells&mdash;waited
+    with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind
+    of god even to the immortals. But there were also those who weighed
+    the departures incident to the coming of the strange people from
+    over-seas; and there were not lacking conservatives of the old
+    régime to shake wise heads and declare that a barbarian is a
+    barbarian, the world over.
+</p>
+<p>
+    All that rainbow multitude, clad for festival, rose with the first
+    light music that stole, winged and silken, from hidden cedar
+    alcoves, and some minutes past the sounding of the hour of noon the
+    chamfered doors set high in the south wall of the Hall of Kings were
+    swung open, and at the head of the stair appeared Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She was alone, for the custom of Yaque required that the island
+    princesses should on the day of their recognition first appear alone
+    before their people in token of their mutual faith. From the
+    wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of
+    Queen Mitygen herself. It was of fine lace woven in a single piece,
+    and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of
+    shadow. On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in
+    the Ph&oelig;nician fashion, once taken from a king's casket and sent
+    secretly, upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy, to be bartered in
+    the marts of Coele-Syria. Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay
+    about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead
+    queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder
+    dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust. Girdling her
+    waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered
+    light. With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies&mdash;vivid,
+    graphic, delineated not by light but by line.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white,
+    and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate
+    few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the
+    stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia's women, led by
+    Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were
+    entering by an opposite door. In the raised seats near the High
+    Council, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham leaned to wave a
+    sustaining greeting. Until that high moment Mrs. Medora Hastings had
+    been by no means certain that Olivia would appear at all, though she
+    openly nourished the hope that "everything would go off smoothly."
+    ("I don't care much for foreigners and never have," she confided to
+    Mr. Frothingham, "still, I was thinking while I was at breakfast,
+    after all, to the prince <i>we are</i> the foreigners. There is something
+    in that, don't you think? And then the dear prince&mdash;he is so very
+    metaphysical!")
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon the beetling throne Olivia took her place, and her women sank
+    about her like tiers of sunset clouds. She was so little and so
+    beautiful and so unconsciously appealing that when Prince Tabnit and
+    Cassyrus and the rest of the court entered, it is doubtful if an eye
+    left Olivia, to homage them. But Prince Tabnit was the last to note
+    that, for he saw only Olivia; and the world&mdash;the world was an
+    intaglio of his own designing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With due magnificence the preliminary ceremonies of the coronation
+    proceeded&mdash;musty necessities, like oaths and historical truths,
+    being mingled with the most delicate observances, such as the
+    naming of the former princesses of the island, from Adija, daughter
+    of King Abibaal, to Olivia, daughter of King Otho; and such as
+    counting the clouds for the misfortunes of the régime. This last
+    duty fell to the office of the lord chief-chancellor, and from an
+    upper porch he returned quickening with the intelligence that there
+    was not a cloud in the sky, a state of the heavens known to no
+    coronation since Babylon was ruled by Assyrian viceroys. The lord
+    chief-chancellor and Cassyrus themselves brought forth the crown&mdash;a
+    beautiful crown, shining like dust-in-the-sun&mdash;and Cassyrus, in a
+    voice that trumpeted, rehearsed its history: how it had been made of
+    jewels brought from the coffers of Amasis and Apries, when King
+    Nebuchadnezzar wrested Ph&oelig;nicia from Egypt, and, too, of all manner
+    of precious stones sent by Queen Atossa, wife of Darius, when the
+    Crotoniat Democedes, with two triremes and a trading vessel, visited
+    Yaque before they went to survey Hellenic shores, with what
+    disastrous result. And Olivia, standing in the queen's gown,
+    listened without hearing one word, and turned to have her veil
+    lifted by Antoinette and the daughter of a peer of Yaque; and she
+    knelt before the people while the lord chief-chancellor set the
+    crown on her bright hair. It was a picture that thrilled the lord
+    chief-chancellor himself&mdash;who was a worshiper of beauty, and a man
+    given to angling in the lagoon and making metric translations of the
+    inscriptions.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then it was in the room as if a faint flame had been breathed upon
+    and had upleaped in a thousand ways of expectancy, and as if a
+    secret sign had been set in the lift and dip of the music&mdash;the music
+    that was so like the great chamber with its lift and dip of carven
+    line. The thrill with which one knows the glad news of an unopened
+    letter was upon them all, and they heard that swift breath of an
+    event that stirs before its coming. When Olivia's women fell back
+    from the dais with wonder and murmur, the murmur was caught up in
+    the great hall, and ran from tier to tier as amazement, as
+    incredulity, and as thanksgiving.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For there, beside the beetling throne, was standing a man, slenderly
+    built, with a youthful, sensitive face and critically-drooping lids,
+    and upon them all his eyes were turned in faint amusement warmed by
+    an idle approbation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perfect&mdash;perfect. Quite perfect," he was saying below his breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia turned. The next moment she stood with outstretched arms
+    before her father; and King Otho, in his long, straight robe,
+    encrusted with purple amethysts, bent with exquisite courtesy above
+    his daughter's hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear child," he murmured, "the picture that you make entirely
+    justifies my existence, but hardly my absence. Shall we ask his
+    Highness to do that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It mattered little who was to do that so long as it was done. For to
+    that people, steeped in dream, risen from the crudity of mere events
+    to breathe in the rarer atmosphere of their significance, here was a
+    happening worthy their attention, for it had the dignity of mystery.
+    Even Mrs. Medora Hastings, billowing toward the throne with cries,
+    was less poignantly a challenge to be heard. Upon her the king laid
+    a tranquillizing hand and, with a droop of eyelids in recognition of
+    Mr. Frothingham, he murmured: "Ah, Medora&mdash;Medora! Delight in the
+    moment&mdash;but do not embrace it," while beside him, star-eyed, Olivia
+    stood waiting for Prince Tabnit to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To Olivia, trembling a little as she leaned upon his arm, King Otho
+    bent with some word, at which she raised to his her startled face,
+    and turned from him uncertainly, and burned a heavenly colour from
+    brow to chin. Then, her father's words being insistent in her ear,
+    and her own heart being tumultuous with what he had told her, she
+    turned as he bade her, and, following his glance, slipped beneath a
+    shining curtain that cut from the audience chamber the still
+    seclusion of the King's Alcove, a chamber long sacred to the
+    sovereigns of Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Confused with her wonder and questioning, hardly daring to
+    understand the import of her father's words, Olivia went down a
+    passage set between two high white walls of the palace, open
+    to-day to the upper blue and to the floating pennons of the dome.
+    Here, prickly-leaved plants had shot to the cornices with
+    uncouth contorting of angled boughs, and in their inner green
+    ruffle-feathered birds looked down on her with the uncanny
+    interest of myriapods. She caught about her the lace of her skirts
+    and of her floating veil, and the way echoed musically to the
+    touch of her little sandals and was bright with the shining of her
+    diadem. And at the end of the passage she lifted a swaying curtain
+    of soft dyes and entered the King's Alcove.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The King's Alcove laid upon one the delicate demands of calm open
+    water&mdash;for its floor of white transparent tiles was cunningly traced
+    with the reflected course of the carven roof, and one seemed to look
+    into mirrored depths of disappearing line between spaces shaped like
+    petals and like chevrons. In the King's Alcove one stood in a world
+    of white and one's sight was exquisitely won, now by a niche open to
+    a blue well of sea and space, now by silver plants lucent in high
+    casements. And there one was spellbound with this mirroring of the
+    Near which thus became the Remote, until one questioned gravely
+    which was "there" and which was "here," for the real was extended
+    into vision, and vision was quickened to the real, and nothing lay
+    between. But to Olivia, entering, none of these things was clearly
+    evident, for as the curtain of many dyes fell behind her she was
+    aware of two figures&mdash;but the one, with a murmured word which she
+    managed somehow to answer without an idea what she said or what it
+    had said either, vanished down the way that she had come. And she
+    stood there face to face with St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had risen from a low divan before a small table set with figs and
+    bread and a decanter of what would have been bordeaux if it had not
+    been distilled from the vineyards of Yaque. He was very pale and
+    haggard, and his eyes were darkly circled and still fever-bright.
+    But he came toward her as if he had quite forgotten that this is a
+    world of danger and that she was a princess and that, little more
+    than a week ago, her name was to him the unknown music. He came
+    toward her with a face of unutterable gladness, and he caught and
+    crushed her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he could
+    look to the distant soul of her. He led her to a great chair hewn
+    from quarries of things silver and unremembered, and he sat at her
+    feet upon a bench that might have been a stone of the altar of some
+    forgotten deity of dreams, at last worshiped as it should long have
+    been worshiped by all the host that had passed it by. He looked up
+    in her face, and the room was like a place of open water where
+    heaven is mirrored in earth, and earth reflects and answers heaven.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed a little for sheer, inextinguishable happiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Once," he said, "once I breakfasted with you, on tea and&mdash;if I
+    remember correctly&mdash;gold and silver muffins. Won't you breakfast
+    with me now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia looked down at him, her heart still clamourous with its
+    anxiety of the night and of the morning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me where you can have been," she said only; "didn't you know
+    how distressed we would be? We imagined everything&mdash;in this dreadful
+    place. And we feared everything, and we&mdash;" but yet the "we" did not
+    deceive St. George; how could it with her eyes, for all their
+    avoidings, so divinely upon him?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you," he said, "ah&mdash;did you wonder? I wish I knew!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And my father&mdash;where did you find him?" she besought. "It was you?
+    You found him, did you not?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked down at a fold of her gown that was fallen across
+    his knee. How on earth was he ever to move, he wondered vaguely, if
+    the slightest motion meant the withdrawing of that fold. He looked
+    at her hand, resting so near, so near, upon the arm of the chair;
+    and last he looked again into her face; and it seemed wonderful and
+    before all things wonderful, not that she should be here, jeweled
+    and crowned, but that he should so unbelievably be here with her.
+    And yet it might be but a moment, as time is measured, until this
+    moment would be swept away. His eyes met hers and held them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Would you mind," he said, "now&mdash;just for a little, while we wait
+    here&mdash;not asking me that? Not asking me anything? There will be time
+    enough in there&mdash;when <i>they</i> ask me. Just for now I only want to
+    think how wonderful this is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She said: "Yes, it is wonderful&mdash;unbelievable," but he thought that
+    she might have meant the white room or her queen's robe or any one
+    of all the things which he did not mean.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Is</i> it wonderful to you?" he asked, and he said again: "I wish&mdash;I
+    wish I knew!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked at her, sitting in the moon of her laces and the stars of
+    her gems, and the sense of the immeasurableness of the hour came
+    upon him as it comes to few; the knowledge that the evanescent
+    moment is very potent, the world where the siren light of the Remote
+    may at any moment lie quenched in some ashen present. To him, held
+    momentarily in this place that was like shoreless, open water, the
+    present was inestimably precious and it lay upon St. George like the
+    delicate claim of his love itself. What the next hour held for them
+    neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him
+    crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand
+    lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her
+    fingers to his lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia&mdash;dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do&mdash;what
+    will happen&mdash;oh, may I tell you <i>now</i>?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not
+    withdrawn from his. And so he did tell her, told her all his heart
+    as he had known his heart to be that last night on <i>The Aloha</i>, and
+    in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those
+    hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the
+    vigil that followed, and always&mdash;always, ever since he could
+    remember, only that he hadn't known that he was waiting for her, and
+    now he knew&mdash;now he knew.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Must you not have known, up there in the palace," he besought her,
+    "the night that I got there? And yesterday, all day yesterday, you
+    must have known&mdash;didn't you know? I love you, Olivia. I couldn't
+    have told you, I couldn't have let you know, only now, when we can't
+    know what may come or what they may do&mdash;oh, say you forgive me.
+    Because I love you&mdash;I love you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold
+    of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the
+    strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at
+    him in almost unearthly beauty. He stood before her, waiting for the
+    moment when she should lift her eyes. And the eyes were lifted, and
+    he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the
+    coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque.
+    He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine
+    moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that
+    world that was like the shoreless open sea where earth reflects
+    heaven, and heaven comes down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St. George half knelt
+    beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and
+    there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear.
+    And because this fragment of the past since they had met was
+    incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before
+    them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that
+    future, clinging to each other's hands. The little chamber of
+    translucent white, where one looked down to a mirrored dome and up
+    to a kind of sky, became to them a place bounded by the touch and
+    the look and the voice of each other, as every place in the world is
+    bounded for every heart that beats.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sweetheart," said St. George presently, "do you remember that you
+    are a princess, and I'm merely a kind of man?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Was it not curious, he thought, that his lips did not speak a new
+    language of their own accord?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know," corrected Olivia adorably, "that I'm a kind of princess.
+    But what use is that when it only makes trouble for us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Us"&mdash;"makes trouble for us." St. George wondered how he could ever
+    have thought that he even guessed what happiness might be when
+    "trouble for us" was like this. He tried to say so, and then:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But do you know what you are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you
+    see&mdash;dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world
+    that you can never, never get back?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It
+    seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his
+    forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it
+    back. To prove that <i>that</i> was not incredible, St. George turned
+    until his lips brushed her wrist.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very
+    possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the
+    rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming
+    they will sometime know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of
+    that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll never be sorry&mdash;never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely
+    denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he
+    whimsically remembered something else:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is
+    another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a
+    queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And
+    in New York&mdash;in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I <i>insist</i> upon a
+    flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the
+    altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour
+    dissolving to mirrored point and light&mdash;the mystic union of sight
+    with dream&mdash;and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine
+    resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different&mdash;a flat," she said
+    shyly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Wouldn't it&mdash;wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But it will be different, just different enough to like better,"
+    she admitted then. "You know that I think so," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If only you knew how much I think so," he told her, "how I have
+    thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris.
+    Olivia, dear heart&mdash;when did you think so first&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She shook her head and laid her hands upon his and drew them to her
+    face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, now&mdash;now!" she cried, "and there never was any time but now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But there will be&mdash;there will be," he said, his lips upon her hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After a time&mdash;for Time, that seems to have no boundaries in the
+    abstract, is a very fiend for bounding the divine concrete&mdash;after a
+    time Amory spoke hesitatingly on the other side of the curtain of
+    many dyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St. George," he said, "I'm afraid they want you. Mr. Holland&mdash;the
+    king, he's got through playing them. He wants you to get up and give
+    'em the truth, I think."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come in&mdash;come in, Amory," St. George said and lifted the curtain,
+    and "I beg your pardon," he added, as his eyes fell upon Antoinette
+    in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated. She had followed
+    Olivia from the hall, and had met Amory midway the avenue of prickly
+    trees, and they had helpfully been keeping guard. Now they went on
+    before to the Hall of Kings, and St. George, remembering what must
+    happen there, turned to Olivia for one crowning moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know," she said fearfully, "before father came the prince
+    intended the most terrible things&mdash;to set you and Mr. Amory adrift
+    in a rudderless airship&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed in amusement. The poor prince with his impossible
+    devices, thinking to harm him, St. George&mdash;<i>now</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He meant to marry you, he thought," he said, "but, thank Heaven, he
+    has your father to answer to&mdash;and me!" he ended jubilantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And yet, after all, Heaven knew what possibilities hemmed them
+    round. And Heaven knew what she was going to think of him when she
+    heard his story. He turned and caught her to him, for the crowning
+    moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You love me&mdash;you love me," he said, "no matter what happens or what
+    they say&mdash;no matter what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She met his eyes and, of her own will, she drew his face down to
+    hers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No matter what," she answered. So they went together toward the
+    chamber which they had both forgotten.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they reached the Hall of Kings they heard King Otho's
+    voice&mdash;suave, mellow, of perfect enunciation:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;some one," the king was concluding, "who can tell this
+    considerably better than I. And it seems to me singularly fitting
+    that the recognition of the part eternally played by the 'possible'
+    be temporarily deferred while we listen to&mdash;I dislike to use the
+    word, but shall I say&mdash;the facts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It seemed to St. George when he stood beside the dais, facing that
+    strange, eager multitude with his strange unbelievable story upon
+    his lips&mdash;the story of the finding of the king&mdash;as if his own voice
+    were suddenly a part of all the gigantic incredibility. Yet the
+    divinely real and the fantastic had been of late so fused in his
+    consciousness that he had come to look upon both as the
+    normal&mdash;which is perhaps the only sane view. But how could he tell
+    to others the monstrous story of last night, and hope to be
+    believed?
+</p>
+<p>
+    None the less, as simply as if he had been narrating to
+    Chillingworth the high moment of a political convention, St. George
+    told the people of Yaque what had happened in that night in the room
+    of the tombs with that mad old Malakh whom they all remembered. It
+    came to him as he spoke that it was quite like telling to a field of
+    flowers the real truth about the wind of which they might be
+    supposed to know far more than he; and yet, if any one were to tell
+    the truth about the wind who would know how to listen? He was not
+    amazed that, when he had done, the people of Yaque sat in a profound
+    silence which might have been the silence of innocent amazement or
+    of utter incredulity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But there was no mistaking the face of Prince Tabnit. Its cool
+    tolerant amusement suddenly sent the blood pricking to St. George's
+    heart and filled him with a kind of madness. What he did was the
+    last thing that he had intended. He turned upon the prince, and his
+    voice went cutting to the farthest corner of the hall:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Men and women of Yaque," he cried, "I accuse your prince of the
+    knowledge that can take from and add to the years of man at will. I
+    accuse him of the deliberate and criminal use of that knowledge to
+    take King Otho from his throne!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly knew what effect his words had. He saw only
+    Olivia, her hands locked, her lips parted, looking in his face in
+    anguish; and he saw Prince Tabnit smile. Prince Tabnit sat upon the
+    king's left hand, and he leaned and whispered a smiling word in the
+    ear of his sovereign and turned a smiling face to Olivia upon her
+    father's right.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know something of your American newspapers, your Majesty," the
+    prince said aloud, "and these men are doing their part excellently,
+    excellently."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean, your Highness?" demanded St. George curtly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But is it not simple?" asked the prince, still smiling. "You have
+    contrived a sensation for the great American newspaper. No one can
+    doubt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho leaned back in the beetling throne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes," he said, "it is true. Something has been contrived.
+    But&mdash;is the sensation of <i>his</i> contriving, Prince?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia stood silent. It was not possible, it was not possible, she
+    said over mechanically. For St. George to have come with this story
+    of a potion&mdash;a drug that had restored youth to her father, had
+    transformed him from that mad old Malakh&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father!" she cried appealingly, "don't you remember&mdash;don't you
+    know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho, watching the prince, shook his head, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "At dawn," he said, "there are few of us to be found remaining still
+    at table with Socrates. I seem not to have been of that number."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" cried St. George suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She met his eyes for a moment, the eyes that had read her own, that
+    had given message for message, that had seen with her the glory of a
+    mystic morning willingly relinquished for a diviner dawn. Was she
+    not princess here in Yaque? She laid her hand upon her father's
+    hand; the crown that they had given her glittered as she turned
+    toward the multitude.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My people," she said ringingly, "I believe that that man speaks the
+    truth. Shall the prince not answer to this charge before the High
+    Council now&mdash;here&mdash;before you all?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this King Otho did something nearly perceptible with his
+    eyebrows. "Perfect. Perfect. Quite perfect," he said below his
+    breath. The next instant the eyelids of the sovereign drooped
+    considerably less than one would have supposed possible. For from
+    every part of the great chamber, as if a storm long-pent had forced
+    the walls of the wind, there came in a thousand murmurs&mdash;soft,
+    tremulous, definitive&mdash;the answering voice to Olivia's question:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Yes. Yes..."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0020"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XX
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    In Prince Tabnit's face there was a curious change, as if one were
+    suddenly to see hieroglyphics upon a star where before there had
+    been only shining. But his calm and his magnificent way of authority
+    did not desert him, as so grotesque a star would still stand lonely
+    and high in the heavens. He spoke, and upon the multitude fell
+    instant silence, not the less absolute that it harboured foreboding.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whatever the people would say to me," said the prince simply, "I
+    will hear. My right hand rests in the hand of the people. In return
+    I decree allegiance to the law. Your princess stands before you,
+    crowned. This most fortunate return of his Majesty, the King, can
+    not set at naught the sacred oath which has just left her lips.
+    Henceforth, in council and in audience, her place shall be at his
+    Majesty's right hand, as was the place of that Princess Athalme,
+    daughter of King Kab, in the dynasty of the fall of Rome. Is it not,
+    therefore, but the more incumbent upon your princess to own her
+    allegiance to the law of the island by keeping her troth with
+    me&mdash;that troth witnessed and sanctioned by you yourselves? This
+    ceremony concluded I will answer the demands of the loyal subjects
+    whose interests alone I serve. For we obey that which is higher than
+    authority&mdash;the law, born in the Beginning&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit's voice might almost have taken his place in his
+    absence, it was so soft, so fine of texture, no more consciously
+    modulated than is the going of water or the way of a wing. It was
+    difficult to say whether his words or, so to say, their fine fabric
+    of voice, begot the silence that followed. But all eyes were turned
+    upon Olivia. And, Prince Tabnit noting this, before she might speak
+    he suddenly swept his flowing robes embroidered by a thousand
+    needles to a posture of humility before his sovereign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your Majesty," he besought, "I pray your consent to the bestowal
+    upon my most unworthy self of the hand of your daughter, the
+    Princess Olivia."
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho leaned upon the arm of his carven throne. Against its
+    strange metal his hand was cameo-clear.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For the king," he was remembering softly, "'the Pyrenees, or so he
+    fancied, ceased to exist.' For another 'the mountains of Daphne are
+    everywhere.' Each of us has his impossible dream to prove that he
+    is an impossible creature. Why not I? To be normal is the cry of all
+    the hobgoblins ... And what does the princess say?" he asked aloud.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Her Highness has already given me the great happiness to plight me
+    her troth," said Prince Tabnit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho's eyebrows flickered from their parallel of repose.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In Yaque or in America," he murmured, "the Americans do as the
+    Americans do. None of us is mentioned in Deuteronomy, but what is
+    the will of the princess?" the American Sovereign asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings, seated near the dais, heard; and as she turned, a
+    rhinestone side-comb slipped from her hair, tinkled over the jewels
+    of her corsage and shot into the lap of a member of the High
+    Council. He, never having seen a side-comb, fancied that it might be
+    an infernal machine which he had never seen either, and,
+    palpitating, flashed it to the guardian hand of Mr. Frothingham. At
+    the same moment:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, why, Otho," said Mrs. Hastings audibly, "we had two ancestors
+    at Bannockburn!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bannockburn!" argued Mr. Augustus Frothingham, below the voice,
+    "Bannockburn. But what, my dear Mrs. Hastings, is Bannockburn beside
+    the Midianites and the Moabites and the Hittites and the Ammonites
+    and the Levites?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In this genealogical moment the prince leaned toward Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Choose," he said significantly, but so softly that none might hear,
+    "oh, my beloved, choose!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The faces of the great assembly blurred and wavered before Olivia,
+    and the low hum of the talk in the room was relative, like the
+    voices of passers-by. She looked up at the prince and away from him
+    in mute appeal to something that ought to help her and would not.
+    For Olivia was of those who, never having seen the face of Destiny
+    very near, are accustomed to look upon nothing as wholly
+    irrevocable; and&mdash;for one of her graces&mdash;she had the feminine
+    expectation that, if only events can be sufficiently postponed,
+    something will intervene; which is perhaps a heritage of the
+    gentlest women descended from Homeric days. If the island was so
+    historic, little Olivia may have said, where was the interfering
+    goddess? She looked unseeingly toward St. George and toward her
+    father, and the sense of the bitter actuality of the choice suddenly
+    wounded her, as the Actual for ever wounds the woman and the dream.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then suddenly, above the stir of expectation of the people, and the
+    associate bustling of the High Council there came a vague confusion
+    and trampling from outside, and the far outer doors of the hall were
+    thrown open with a jar and a breath, vibrant as a murmur. There was
+    a cry, the determined resistance of some of the Golden Guard, and
+    shouts of expostulation and warning as they were flung aside by a
+    powerful arm. In the disorder that followed, a miraculously-familiar
+    figure&mdash;that familiarity and strangeness are both miracles ought to
+    explain certain mysteries&mdash;was beside St. George and a thankful
+    voice said in his ear:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. St. George, sir, for the mercy of Heaven, sir&mdash;come back to the
+    yacht. No person can tell what may happen ten minutes ahead, sir!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The oracle of this universal truth was Rollo, palpitating, his
+    immaculate coat stained with earth, earth-stains on his cheeks, and
+    his breast labouring in an excitement which only anxiety for his
+    master could effect. But St. George hardly saw him. His eyes were
+    fixed on some one who stood towering before the dais, like the old
+    prints of the avenging goddesses. Clad in the hideous stripes which
+    boards of directors consider <i>de rigueur</i> for the soul that is to be
+    won back to the normal, stood the woman Elissa, who, by all counts
+    of Prince Tabnit, should have been singing a hymn with Mrs. Manners
+    and Miss Bella Bliss Utter in the Bitley Reformatory, in Westchester
+    County, New York.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop!" she cried in that perfect English which is not only a rare
+    experience but a pleasant adventure, "what new horror is this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    To Prince Tabnit's face, as he looked at her, came once more that
+    indefinable change&mdash;only this time nearer and more intimately
+    explainable, as if something ethereal, trained to delicate lines,
+    like smoke, should suddenly shape itself to a menace. St. George saw
+    the woman step close to the dais, he saw Olivia's eyes questioning
+    him, and in the hurried rising of the peers and of the High Council
+    he heard Rollo's voice in his ear:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a gr'it go, sir," observed Rollo respectfully, "the woman has
+    things to tell, sir, as people generally don't know. She's flew the
+    coop at the place she was in&mdash;it seems she's been shut up some'eres
+    in America, sir; an' she got 'old of the capting of a tramp boat o'
+    some kind&mdash;one o' them boats as smells intoxicating round the
+    'atches&mdash;an' she give 'im an' the mate a 'andful o' jewelry that
+    she'd on 'er when she was took in an' 'ad someways contrived to 'ang
+    on to, an' I'm blessed hif she wasn't able fer to steer fer the
+    island, sir&mdash;we took 'er aboard the yacht only this mornin' with 'er
+    'air down her back, an' we've brought 'er on here. An' she says&mdash;men
+    can be gr'it beasts, sir, an' no manner o' mistake," concluded Rollo
+    fervently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And a little hoarse voice said in St. George's ear:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. St. George, sir&mdash;we ain't late, are we? We been flirtin' de
+    ger-avel up dat ka-liff since de car-rack o' day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And there was Bennietod, with an edge of an old horse pistol
+    showing beneath his cuff; and, round-eyed and alert as a bird newly
+    alighted on a stranger sill, Little Cawthorne stood; and the sight
+    put strength into St. George, and so did Little Cawthorne's words:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't know whether they'd let us in or not," he said, "unless we
+    had on a plaited décolletté, with biases down the back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Clearly and confidently in the silent room rang the voice of the
+    woman confronting Prince Tabnit, and her eyes did not leave his
+    face. St. George was struck with the change in her since that day in
+    the Reformatory chapel. Then she had been like a wild, alien thing
+    in dumb distress; now she was unchained and native. Her first words
+    explained why, in the extreme dilemma in which St. George had last
+    seen her, she had yet remained mute.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I release myself," she cried, "from my oath of silence, though
+    until to-day I have spoken only to those who helped me to come back
+    to you&mdash;my master. Have you nothing to say to me? Has the time
+    seemed long? Is it a weary while since I left you to do your will
+    and murder the woman whom you were now about to make your wife?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A cry of horror rose from the people, and then stillness came again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Take the woman away," said Prince Tabnit only, "she is speaking
+    madness."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am speaking the truth," said the woman clearly. "I was of
+    Melita&mdash;there are those here who will know my face. And it is not I
+    alone who have served the State. I challenge you, Tabnit&mdash;here,
+    before them all! Where are Gerya and Ibera, Cabulla and Taura? Have
+    not their people, weeping, besought news of them in vain? And what
+    answer have you given them?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Murmurs and sobs rose from the assembly, stilled by the tranquil
+    voice of the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where are they?" he repeated gently, his voice vibrant in its rise
+    and fall, its giving of delicate values. "But the people know where
+    they are. They have attained to the perfect life and died the
+    perfect death. For I have raised them to the supreme estate."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit, with uplifted face, sat motionless, looking out over
+    the throng from beneath lowered lids; then his eyes, confident and a
+    little mocking, returned to the woman. But they had for her no
+    terror. She turned from him, confronting the pale, eager faces of
+    the people; and in her beauty and distinction she was like Olivia's
+    women, crowded beside the dais.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Men and women of Yaque," cried Elissa, "I will tell you to what
+    'supreme estate' these friends whom you seek have long been raised.
+    For here in Med and in Melita you will find many of those whom you
+    have mourned as dead&mdash;you will find them as you yourselves have met
+    and passed them, it may have been countless times, on your streets
+    of Yaque&mdash;not young and beautiful as when they left you, but men and
+    women of incredible age. Withered, shaken by palsy, infirm, they
+    creep upon their lonely ways or go at will to drag themselves
+    unrecognized along your highways, as helpless as the dead
+    themselves. They number scores, and they are those who have
+    displeased your prince by some little word, some little wrong, or,
+    more than these, by some thwarting of the way of his ambition: Oblo,
+    who disappeared from his place as keeper at the door; Ithobal,
+    satrap of Melita; young Prince Kaal&mdash;ay, and how many more? You do
+    not understand my words? I say that your prince has knowledge of
+    some secret, accursed drug that can call back youth or make actual
+    age&mdash;<i>age</i>, do you understand&mdash;just as we of Yaque bring both
+    flowers and fruit to swift maturity!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia uttered a little cry, not at the grotesque horror of what the
+    woman had said but at the miracle of its unconscious support of the
+    story and theory of St. George. And St. George heard; and suddenly,
+    because another had voiced his own fantastic message, its
+    incredibility and unreality became appalling, and yet he felt
+    infinitely reconciled to both because he interpreted aright that
+    little muffled exclamation from Olivia. What did it matter&mdash;oh, what
+    did it matter whether or not the reality were grotesque? What seems
+    to be happening is always the reality, if only one understands it
+    sufficiently. And at all events there had been that hour in the
+    King's Alcove. At last, as he weighed that hour against the fantasy
+    of all the rest, St. George understood and lived the divine madness
+    of all great moments, the madness that realizes one star and is
+    content that all the heavens shall march unintelligibly past so long
+    as that single shining is not dimmed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But King Otho was riding no such griffin with sun-gold wings. King
+    Otho was genuinely and personally interested in the woman's words.
+    He turned to Prince Tabnit with animation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Really, Prince," he said, "is it so? Pray do not deny it unless
+    there is no other way, for I am before all things interested. It is
+    far more important to me that you tell me as much as you can tell,
+    than that you deny or even disprove it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit smiled in the eagerly interested face of his
+    sovereign, and rose and came to the edge of the dais, his garments
+    embroidered by a thousand needles touching and floating about him;
+    and it was as if he reached those before him by a kind of spiritual
+    magnetism, not without sublimity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My people," he said&mdash;and his voice had all the tenderness that they
+    knew so well&mdash;"this is some conspiracy of those to whom we have
+    shown the utmost hospitality. I would have shielded your king, for
+    he was also my sovereign and I owed him allegiance. But now that is
+    no longer possible, and the time is come. Know then, oh my people of
+    Yaque, that which my loyalty has led me wrongfully to conceal: that
+    in the strange disappearance and return of your sovereign, King
+    Otho, he who will may trace the loss of that which the island has
+    mourned without ceasing. I accuse your king&mdash;he is no longer
+    mine&mdash;of being now in possession of the Hereditary Treasure of
+    Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then St. George came back with a thrill to actuality. In the press
+    of the events of this morning, after his awakening in the room of
+    the tombs, he had completely forgotten the soft fire of gems that
+    had burned beneath the hands of old Malakh in that dark chamber
+    under King Abibaal's tomb. He and Amory and Jarvo had, with the
+    king, left the chamber by the upper passages, and Amory and Jarvo
+    knew nothing of the jewels. Yet St. George was certain that he could
+    not have been mistaken, and he listened breathlessly for what the
+    king would say.
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho, with a smile, nodded in perfect imperturbability.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is true," he said, "I had forgotten all about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They waited for him to speak, the people in amazed silence, Mrs.
+    Medora Hastings saying unintelligible things in whispers, for which
+    she had a genius.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is true," said King Otho, "that I am responsible for the
+    disappearance of the Hereditary Treasure. You will find it at this
+    moment in a basement dungeon of the palace on Mount Khalak. On the
+    very day, three months ago, that I dined with your prince I had made
+    a discovery of considerable importance to me, namely, that the
+    little island of Yaque is richer in most of the radio-active
+    substances than all the rest of the world. The discovery gave me
+    keener pleasure than I had known in years&mdash;I had suspected it for
+    some time after I found the noctilucous stars on the ceiling of my
+    sitting-room at the palace. And in the work-shop of the Princess
+    Simyra I came upon a quantity of metallic uranium, and a great many
+    other things which I question the taste of taking the time to
+    describe. But my experiments there with the very perfect gems of
+    your admirable collection had evidently been antedated by some of
+    your own people, for the apparatus was intact. I shall be glad to
+    show some charming effects to any one who cares to see them. I have
+    succeeded in causing the diamonds of Darius to phosphoresce most
+    wonderfully."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The phosphorescence of the diamonds of Darius was to the people far
+    less important than the joyous fact which they were not slow to
+    grasp, that the Hereditary Treasure was, if they might believe the
+    king's words, restored to them, and the burden of the tax averted.
+    They did not understand, nor did they seek to understand; because
+    they knew the inefficiency of details and they also knew the value
+    of mere import.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the king, child of a social order that wreaks itself on
+    particularizations, returned to his quest for a certain recounting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit," he said, "the High Council and the people of Yaque
+    are impatient for your answer to this woman's words."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I rejoice with them and with your Majesty," replied Prince Tabnit
+    softly, "that the treasure is safe. My own explanation is far less
+    simple. If what this woman says is true, yet it is true in such wise
+    as, strive as I may, I can not speak; nor, strive as you may, can
+    you fathom. Therefore I say that the claim which she has made is
+    idle, and not within my power to answer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this St. George bounded to his feet. Amory looked up at him in
+    terror, and Little Cawthorne and Bennietod went a step or two after
+    him as he sprang forward, and Rollo's lean shadowed face, obvious as
+    his way of speech, was wrinkled in terrified appeal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An idle claim!" St. George thundered as he strode before the dais.
+    "Is this woman's story and mine an idle claim, and one not within
+    your power to answer? Then I will tell you how to answer, Prince
+    Tabnit. I challenge you now, in the presence of your people&mdash;taste
+    this!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon the carven arm of Prince Tabnit's throne St. George set
+    something that he had taken from his pocket. It was the vase of
+    rock-crystal from which, the night before in the room of the tombs,
+    the king had drunk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    What followed was the last thing that St. George had expected. It
+    was as if his defiance had unlocked flood-gates. In an instant the
+    vast assembly was in motion. With a sound of garments that was like
+    far wind they were upon their feet and pressing toward the throne.
+    With all the passion of their "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in response to
+    Olivia's appeal they came, resistlessly demanding the answer to some
+    dreadful question long shrouded in their hearts. Their armour was
+    their silence; they made no sound save that ominous sweep of their
+    robes and the conspiracy of their sandaled feet upon the tiles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George did not turn. Indeed, it did not once cross his mind that
+    their hostility could possibly be toward him. Besides, his look was
+    fixed upon the prince's face, and what he read there was enough. The
+    peers, the High Council and those nearest the throne wavered and
+    swerved from the man, leaving him to face what was to come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whatever was to come he would have met nobly. He was of those
+    infrequent folk of some upper air who exhibit a certain purity even
+    in error, or in worse. He stood with his exquisite pale face
+    uplifted, his white hair in a glory about it, his white gown
+    embroidered by a thousand needles falling in virginal lines against
+    the warm, pure colour of that room with its wraiths of hue and
+    light. And he opened the heart of the green jewel that burned upon
+    his breast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not for me the wine of youth," he said slowly, "but the poison of
+    age. The poison which, without me to unlock the secret, all mankind
+    must drink alone. May you drink it late, my friends!" he cried. "I,
+    who hold in my soul the secret of the passing of time and youth,
+    drink now to those among you and among all men who have won and kept
+    the one thing dearer than these."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He touched the green gem to his lips, and let it fall upon the
+    embroidered laces on his breast. Then quietly and in another voice
+    he began to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With the first words there came to St. George the thrill of
+    something that had possessed him&mdash;when? In that ecstatic moment on
+    <i>The Aloha</i> when he had seen the light in the king's palace; in the
+    instant when the Isle of Yaque had first lain subject before him, "a
+    land which no one can define or remember&mdash;only desire;" in the
+    divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the
+    palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour
+    of his joy in the King's Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes
+    and touched his lips. Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies
+    barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own&mdash;a shell, a duty, a
+    vista&mdash;he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying. He
+    listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched
+    hands with the elemental and saw the ancient kindliness of all those
+    people naked in their faces and knew himself for what he was.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He listened, and yet there was no making captive the words of the
+    prince in understanding. Prince Tabnit was speaking the English, and
+    every word was clearly audible and, moreover, was probably daily
+    upon St. George's lips. But if it had been to ransom the rest of the
+    world from its night he could not have understood what the prince
+    was saying. Every word was a word that belonged as much to St.
+    George as to the prince; but in some unfathomable fashion the inner
+    sense of what he said for ever eluded, dissolving in the air of
+    which it was a part. And yet, past all doubting, St. George knew
+    that he was hearing the essence of that strange knowledge which the
+    Isle of Yaque had won while all the rest of mankind struggled for
+    it&mdash;he knew with the certainty with which we recognize strange
+    forces in a dozen of the every-day things of life, in electricity,
+    in telepathy, in dreams. With the same certainty he realized that
+    what the prince was saying would, if he could understand, lift a
+    certain veil. Here, put in words at last, was manifestly the secret,
+    that catch of understanding without which men are groping in the
+    dark, perhaps that mere pointing of relations which would make
+    clear, without blasphemy, time and the future, rebirth and old
+    existence, it might be; and certainly the accident of personality.
+    Here, crystallized, were the things that men almost know, the dream
+    that has just escaped every one, the whisper in sleep that would
+    have explained if one could remember when one woke, the word that
+    has been thrillingly flashed to one in moments of absorption and has
+    fled before one might catch the sound, the far hope of science, the
+    glimpse that comes to dying eyes and is voiced in fragments by dying
+    lips. Here without penetrating the great reserve or tracing any
+    principle to its beginning, was the truth about both. And St. George
+    was powerless to receive it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He turned fearfully to Olivia. Ah&mdash;what if she did not guess
+    anything of the meaning of what she was hearing? For one instant he
+    knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star. But
+    when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and
+    her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she
+    might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near,
+    how near they Stood; and to be with her on this side was
+    dearer&mdash;nay, was nearer the Secret&mdash;than without her to pass the
+    veil that they touched. Then he looked at Amory; wouldn't old Amory
+    know, he wondered. Wouldn't his mere understanding of news teach him
+    what was happening? But old Amory, the light flashing on his
+    pince-nez, was keeping one eye on the prince and wondering if the
+    chair that he had just placed for Antoinette was not in the draught
+    of the dome; and little Antoinette was looking about her like a
+    rosebud, new to the butterflies of June; and King Otho was
+    listening, languid, heavy-lidded, sensitive to little values,
+    sophisticating the moment; and Little Cawthorne stood with eyes
+    raised in simple, tolerant wonder; and the others, Bennietod, Mrs.
+    Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, showed faces like the pools
+    in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples&mdash;one must
+    suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly such
+    faces. St. George saw how it was. Here, spoken casually by the
+    prince, just as the Banal would speak of the visible and invisible
+    worlds, here was the Sesame of understanding toward which the
+    centuries had striven, the secret of the link between two worlds;
+    and here, of all mankind, were only they two to hear&mdash;they two and
+    that motionless company who knew what the prince knew and who kept
+    it sealed within their eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at the multitude in swift understanding. They
+    were like a Greek chorus, signifying what is. They knew what the
+    prince was saying, they had the secret and yet&mdash;they were <i>no
+    nearer, no nearer</i> than he. With their ancient kindliness naked in
+    their faces, St. George knew that through his love he was as near to
+    the Source as were they. And it was suddenly as it had been that
+    first night when he had stridden buoyantly through the island; for
+    he could not tell which was the secret of the prince and of these
+    people and which was the blessedness of his love.
+</p>
+<p>
+    None the less he clung desperately to the last words of Prince
+    Tabnit in a vain effort to hold, to make clear, to sophisticate one
+    single phrase, as one waking in the night says over, in a vain
+    effort to fix it, some phantom sentence cried to him in dreams by a
+    shadowy band destined to be dissolved when, in bright day, he would
+    reclaim it. He even managed frantically to write down a jumble of
+    words of which he could make nothing, save here and there a phrase
+    like a touch of hands from the silence: "...the infinite moment that
+    is pending" ... "all is become a window where had been a wall" ...
+    "the wintry vision" ... they were all words that beckon without
+    replying. And all the time it was curiously as if the Something
+    Silent within St. George himself, that so long had striven to speak,
+    were crying out at last in the prince's words&mdash;and he could not
+    understand. Yet in spite of it all, in spite of this imminent
+    satisfying of the strange, dreadful curiosity which possesses all
+    mankind, St. George, even now, was far less keen to comprehend than
+    he was to burst through the throng with Olivia in his arms, gain the
+    waiting <i>Aloha</i> and sail into the New York harbour with the prize
+    that he had won. "I drink now to those among you and among all men
+    who have won and kept that which is greater than these," the prince
+    had said, and St. George perfectly understood. He had but to look at
+    Olivia to be triumphantly willing that the gods should keep their
+    secrets about time and the link between the two worlds so long as
+    they had given him love. What should he care about time? He had this
+    hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the prince ceased speaking the hall was hushed; but because of
+    the tempest in the hearts of them all the silence was as if a strong
+    wind, sweeping powerfully through a forest, were to sway no boughs
+    and lift no leaves, only to strive noiselessly round one who walked
+    there.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit wrapped his white mantle about him and sat upon his
+    throne. Spell-stricken, they watched him, that great multitude, and
+    might not turn away their eyes. Slowly, imperceptibly, as Time
+    touches the familiar, the face of the prince took on its change&mdash;and
+    one could not have told wherein the change lay, but subtly as the
+    encroachment of the dark, or the alchemy of the leaves, or the
+    betrayal of certain modes of death, the finger was upon him. While
+    they watched he became an effigy, the hideous face of a fantasy of
+    smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among
+    the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death&mdash;the horror was
+    that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying and withering
+    at the bones.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0005"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image5.jpg" width="317" height="450"
+alt="uncaptioned, people around withering Prince">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+
+<p>
+    A long, whining cry came from Cassyrus, who covered his face with
+    his mantle and fled. The spell being broken, by common consent the
+    great hall was once more in motion&mdash;St. George would never forget
+    that tide toward all the great portals and the shuddering backward
+    glances at the white heap upon the beetling throne. They fled away
+    into the reassuring sunlight, leaving the echoless hall deserted,
+    save for that breathing one upon the throne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was one other. From somewhere beside the dais the woman Elissa
+    crept and knelt, clasping the knees of the man.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0021"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XXI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    OPEN SECRETS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    "Will you have tea?" asked Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George brought a deck cushion and tucked it in the willow
+    steamer chair and said adoringly that he would have tea. Tea. In a
+    world where the essentials and the inessentials are so deliciously
+    confused, to think that tea, with some one else, can be a kind of
+    Heaven.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Two lumps?" pursued Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Three, please," St. George directed, for the pure joy of watching
+    her hands. There were no tongs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aren't the rest going to have some?" Olivia absently shared her
+    attention, tinkling delicately about among the tea things. "Doesn't
+    every one want a cup of tea?" she inquired loud enough for nobody to
+    hear. St. George, shifting his shoulder from the rail, looked
+    vaguely over the deck of <i>The Aloha</i>, sighed contentedly, and smiled
+    back at her. No one else, it appeared, would have tea; and there was
+    none to regret it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's cursory inspection had revealed the others variously
+    absorbed, though they were now all agreed in breathing easily since
+    Barnay, interlarding rational speech with Irishisms of thanksgiving,
+    had announced five minutes before that the fires were up and that in
+    half an hour <i>The Aloha</i> might weigh anchor. The only thing now left
+    to desire was to slip clear of the shadow of the black reaches of
+    Yaque, shouldering the blue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Meanwhile, Antoinette and Amory sat in the comparative seclusion of
+    the bow with their backs to the forward deck, and it was definitely
+    manifest to every one how it would be with them, but every one was
+    simply glad and dismissed the matter with that. Mr. Frothingham, in
+    his steamer chair, looked like a soft collapsible tube of something;
+    Bennietod, at ease upon the uncovered boards of the deck, was
+    circumspectly having cheese sandwiches and wastefully shooting the
+    ship's rockets into the red sunset, in general celebration; and
+    Rollo, having taken occasion respectfully to submit to whomsoever it
+    concerned that fact is ever stranger than fiction, had gone below.
+    Mr. Otho Holland and Little Cawthorne&mdash;but their smiles were like
+    different names for the same thing&mdash;were toasting each other in
+    something light and dry and having a bouquet which Mr. Holland, who
+    ought to know, compared favourably with certain vintages of 1000
+    B.C. In a hammock near them reclined Mrs. Medora Hastings, holding
+    two kinds of smelling salts which invariably revived her simply by
+    inducing the mental effort of deciding which was the better. Her
+    hair, which was exceedingly pretty, now rippled becomingly about her
+    flushed face and was guiltless of side-combs&mdash;she had lost them both
+    down a chasm in that headlong flight from the cliff's summit, and
+    they irrecoverably reposed in the bed of some brook of the Miocene
+    period. And Mrs. Hastings, her hand in that of her brother, lay in
+    utter silence, smiling up at him in serene content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For King Otho of Yaque was turning his back upon his island domain
+    for ever. In that hurried flight across the Eurychôrus among his
+    distracted subjects, his resolution had been taken. Jarvo and Akko,
+    the adieux to whom had been every one's sole regret in leaving the
+    island, had miraculously found their way to the king and his party
+    in their flight, and were despatched to Mount Khalak for such of
+    their belongings as they could collect, and the island sovereign was
+    well content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now," he had just observed, languidly surveying the
+    tropical horizon through a cool glass of winking amber bubbles, "one
+    must learn that to touch is far more delicate than to lift. It is
+    more wonderful to have been the king of one moment than the ruler of
+    many. It is better to have stood for an instant upon a rainbow than
+    to have taken a morning walk through a field of clouds. The
+    principle has long been understood, but few have had&mdash;shall I
+    say the courage?&mdash;to practise it. Yet 'courage' is a term
+    from-the-shoulder, and what I require is a word of finger-tips,
+    over-tones, ultra-rays&mdash;a word for the few who understand that to
+    leave a thing is more exquisite than to outwear it. It is by its
+    very fineness circumscribed&mdash;a feminine virtue. Women understand it
+    and keep it secret. I flatter myself that I have possessed the high
+    moment, vanished against the noon. Ah, my dear fellow&mdash;" he added,
+    lifting his glass to St. George's smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But little Cawthorne&mdash;all reality in his heliotrope outing and duck
+    and grey curls&mdash;raised a characteristic plaint.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, but I've done it," he mournfully reviewed. "When'll I ever be
+    in another island, in front of another vacated throne? Why didn't I
+    move into the palace, and set up a natty, up-to-date little
+    republic? I could have worn a crown as a matter of taste&mdash;what's the
+    use of a democracy if you aren't free to wear a crown? And what kind
+    of American am I, anyway, with this undeveloped taste for acquiring
+    islands? If they ever find this out at the polls my vote'll be
+    challenged. What?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aw whee!" said Bennietod, intent upon a Roman candle, "wha' do you
+    care, Mr. Cawt'orne? You don't hev to go back fer to be a
+    child-slave to Chillingwort'. Me, I've gotta good call to jump
+    overboard now an' be de sonny of a sea-horse, dead to rights!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at them all affectionately, unconscious that
+    already the experience of the last three days was slipping back into
+    the sheathing past, like a blade used. But he was dawningly aware,
+    as he sat there at Olivia's feet in glorious content, that he was
+    looking at them all with new eyes. It was as if he had found new
+    names for them all; and until long afterward one does not know that
+    these moments of bestowing new names mark the near breathing of the
+    god.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The silence of Mrs. Hastings and her quiet devotion to her brother
+    somehow gave St. George a new respect for her. Over by the
+    wheel-house something made a strange noise of crying, and St. George
+    saw that Mr. Frothingham sat holding a weird little animal, like a
+    squirrel but for its stumpy tail and great human eyes, which he had
+    unwittingly stepped on among the rocks. The little thing was licking
+    his hand, and the old lawyer's face was softened and glowing as he
+    nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. As he looked, St. George warmed
+    to them all in new fellowship and, too, in swift self-reproach; for
+    in what had seemed to him but "broad lines and comic masks" he
+    suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts. The better
+    and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his
+    grasp were more important than Yaque itself. He remembered, with a
+    thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must
+    walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of
+    the heart, before he can put much in or take much from the
+    market-place. And lo! this fairy-land of his finding had
+    proved&mdash;must it not always prove?&mdash;the essence of all Reality.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His eyes went to Olivia's face in a flash of understanding and
+    belief.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you see?" he said, quite as if they two had been talking what
+    he had thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She waited, smiling a little, thrilled by his certainty of her
+    sympathy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "None of this happened really," triumphantly explained St. George,
+    "I met you at the Boris, did I not? Therefore, I think that since
+    then you have graciously let me see you for the proper length of
+    time, and at last we've fallen in love just as every one else does.
+    And true lovers always do have trouble, do they not? So then, Yaque
+    has been the usual trouble and happiness, and here we are&mdash;engaged."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm not engaged," Olivia protested serenely, "but I see what you
+    mean. No, none of it happened," she gravely agreed. "It couldn't,
+    you know. Anybody will tell you that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In her eyes was the sparkle of understanding which made St. George
+    love her more every time that it appeared. He noted, the white cloth
+    frock, and the coat of hunting pink thrown across her chair, and he
+    remembered that in the infinitesimal time that he had waited for her
+    outside the Palace of the Litany, she must have exchanged for these
+    the coronation robe and jewels of Queen Mitygen. St. George liked
+    that swift practicality in the race of faery, though he was
+    completely indifferent to Mrs. Hastings' and Antoinette's claims to
+    it; and he wondered if he were to love Olivia more for everything
+    that she did, how he could possibly live long enough to tell her.
+    When one has been to Yaque the simplest gifts and graces resolve
+    themselves into this question.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>The Aloha</i> gently freed herself from the shallow green pocket where
+    she had lain through three eventful days, and slipped out toward the
+    waste of water bound by the flaunting autumn of the west. An island
+    wind, fragrant of bark and secret berries, blew in puffs from the
+    steep. A gull swooped to her nest in a cranny of the basalt. From
+    below a servant came on deck, his broad American face smiling over a
+    tray of glasses and decanters and tinkling ice. It was all very
+    tranquil and public and almost commonplace&mdash;just the high tropic
+    seas at the moment of their unrestrained sundown, and the odour of
+    tea-cakes about the pleasantly-littered deck. And for the moment,
+    held by a common thought, every one kept silent. Now that <i>The
+    Aloha</i> was really moving toward home, the affair seemed suddenly
+    such a gigantic impossibility that every one resented every one
+    else's knowing what a trick had been played. It was as if the
+    curtain had just fallen and the lights of the auditorium had flashed
+    up after the third act, and they had all caught one another
+    breathless or in tears, pretending that the tragedy had really
+    happened.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Promise me something," begged St. George softly, in sudden alarm,
+    born of this inevitable aspect; "promise me that when we get to New
+    York you are not going to forget all about Yaque&mdash;and me&mdash;and
+    believe that none of us ever happened."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia looked toward the serene mystery of the distance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "New York," she said only, "think of seeing you in New York&mdash;now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Was I of more account in Yaque?" demanded St. George anxiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sometimes," said Olivia adorably, "I shall tell you that you were.
+    But that will be only because I shall have an idea that in Yaque you
+    loved me more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, very well then. And sometimes," said St. George contentedly,
+    "when we are at dinner I shall look down the table at you sitting
+    beside some one who is expounding some baneful literary theory, and
+    I shall think: What do I care? He doesn't know that she is really
+    the Princess of Far-Away. But I do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And he won't know anything about our motor ride, alone, the night
+    that I was kidnapped, either&mdash;the literary-theory person," Olivia
+    tranquilly took away his breath by observing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked up at her quickly and, secretly, Olivia thought
+    that if he had been attractive when he was courageous he was doubly
+    so with the present adorably abashed look in his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When&mdash;alone?" St. George asked unconvincingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She laughed a little, looking down at him in a reproof that was all
+    approbation, and to be reproved like that is the divinest praise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How did you know?" protested St. George in fine indignation.
+    "Besides," he explained, "I haven't an idea what you mean."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I guessed about that ride," she went on, "the night before last,
+    when you were walking up and down outside my window. I don't know
+    what made me&mdash;and I think it was very forward of me. Do you want to
+    know something?" she demanded, looking away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "More than anything," declared St. George. "What?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think&mdash;" Olivia said slowly, "that it began&mdash;then&mdash;just when I
+    first thought how wonderful that ride would have been. Except&mdash;that
+    it had begun a great while before," she ended suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And at these enigmatic words St. George sent a quick look over the
+    forward deck. It was of no use. Mr. Frothingham was well within
+    range.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Heavens, good heavens, how happy I am," said St. George instead.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And then," Olivia went on presently, "sometimes when there are a
+    lot of people about&mdash;literary-theory persons and all&mdash;I shall look
+    across at you, differently, and that will mean that you are to
+    remember the exact minute when you looked in the window up at the
+    palace, on the mountain, and I saw you. Won't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will," said St. George fervently. "Don't try to persuade me that
+    there wasn't any such mountain," he challenged her. "I suppose," he
+    added in wonder, "that lovers have been having these secret signs
+    time out of mind&mdash;and we never knew."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia drew a little breath of content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bless everybody," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    So they made invasion of that pure, dim world before them; and the
+    serene mystery of the distance came like a thought, drawn from a
+    state remote and immortal, to clasp the hand of There in the hand of
+    Here.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And then sometimes," St. George went on, his exultation proving
+    greater than his discretion, "we'll take the yacht and pretend
+    we're going back&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped abruptly with a quick indrawn breath and the hope that
+    she had not noticed. He was, by several seconds, too late.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whose yacht is it?" Olivia asked promptly. "I wondered."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George had dreaded the question. Someway, now that it was all
+    over and the prize was his, he was ashamed that he had not won it
+    more fairly and humiliated that he was not what she believed him, a
+    pillar of the <i>Evening Sentinel</i>. But Amory had miraculously heard
+    and turned himself about.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's his," he said briefly, "I may as well confess to you, Miss
+    Holland," he enlarged somewhat, "he's a great cheat. <i>The Aloha</i> is
+    his, and so am I, busy body and idle soul, for using up his yacht
+    and his time on a newspaper story. You were the 'story,' you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But," said Olivia in bewilderment, "I don't understand. Surely&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothing whatever is sure, Miss Holland," Amory sadly assured her,
+    but his eyes were smiling behind his pince-nez. "You would think one
+    might be sure of him. But it isn't so. Me, you may depend upon me,"
+    he impressed it lightly. "I'm what I say I am&mdash;a poor beggar of a
+    newspaper man, about to be held to account by one Chillingworth for
+    this whole millenial occurrence, and sent off to a political
+    convention to steady me, unless I'm fired. But St. George, he's a
+    gay dilettante."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Amory resumed a better topic of his own; and Olivia, when she
+    understood, looked down at her lover as miserably as one is able
+    when one is perfectly happy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh," she said, "and up there&mdash;in the palace to-day&mdash;I did think for
+    a minute that perhaps you wanted me to marry the prince so
+    that&mdash;they could&mdash;."
+</p>
+<p>
+    One could smile now at the enormity of that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So that I could put it in the paper?" he said. "But, you see, I
+    never could put it in any paper, even if I didn't love you. Who
+    would believe me? A thousand years from now&mdash;maybe less&mdash;the
+    <i>Evening Sentinel</i>, if it is still in existence, can publish the
+    story, perhaps. Until then I'm afraid they'll have to confine
+    themselves to the doings of the precincts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia waived the whole matter for one of vaster importance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then why did you come to Yaque?" she demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham had left his place by the wheel-house and wandered
+    forward. The steamer chair had a back that was both broad and high,
+    and one sitting in its shadow was hermetically veiled from the rest
+    of the deck. So St. George bent forward, and told her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After that they sat in silence, and together they looked back
+    toward the island with its black rocks smitten to momentary gold by
+    a last javelin of light. There it lay&mdash;the land locking away as
+    realities all the fairy-land of speculation, the land of the
+    miracles of natural law. They had walked there, and had glimpsed the
+    shadowy threshold of the Morning. Suppose, St. George thought, that
+    instead of King Otho, with his delicate sense of the merely visible,
+    a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque? And instead
+    of Mr. Frothingham, slave to the contestable, and Little Cawthorne
+    in bondage to humour, and Amory and himself swept off their feet by
+    a heavenly romance, suppose a party of savants and economists had
+    arrived in Yaque, with a poet or two to bring away the fire&mdash;what
+    then? St. George lost the doubt in the noon of his own certainty.
+    There could be no greater good, he chanted to the god who had
+    breathed upon him, than this that he and Amory shared now with the
+    wise and simple world, the world of the resonant new names. He even
+    doubted that, save in degree, there could be a purer talisman than
+    the spirit that inextinguishably shone in the face of the childlike
+    old lawyer as the strange little animal nestled in his coat and
+    licked his hand. And these were open secrets. Open secrets of the
+    ultimate attainment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They watched the land dissolving in the darkness like a pearl in
+    wine of night. But at last, when momentarily they had turned happy
+    eyes to each other's faces, they looked again and found that the
+    dusk, taking ancient citadels with soundless tread, had received the
+    island. And where on the brow of the mountain had sprung the white
+    pillars of the king's palace glittered only the early stars.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Crown jewels," said Olivia softly, "for everybody's head."
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+
+
+<div style="height: 6em;"><br><br><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13731 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13731 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13731)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romance Island, by Zona Gale
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Romance Island
+
+Author: Zona Gale
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2004 [EBook #13731]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMANCE ISLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: frontispiece]
+
+
+ROMANCE ISLAND
+
+
+By
+
+ZONA GALE
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+HERMANN C. WALL
+
+
+
+INDIANAPOLIS
+THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
+1906
+
+
+
+
+
+  "Who that remembers the first kind glance of her
+   whom he loves can fail to believe in magic?"
+                                     --NOVALIS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+      I DINNER TIME
+     II A SCRAP OF PAPER
+    III ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
+     IV THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
+      V OLIVIA PROPOSES
+     VI TWO LITTLE MEN
+    VII DUSK, AND SO ON
+   VIII THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
+     IX THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
+      X TYRIAN PURPLE
+     XI THE END OF THE EVENING
+    XII BETWEEN-WORLDS
+   XIII THE LINES LEAD UP
+    XIV THE ISLE OF HEARTS
+     XV A VIGIL
+    XVI GLAMOURIE
+   XVII BENEATH THE SURFACE
+  XVIII A MORNING VISIT
+    XIX IN THE HALL OF KINGS
+     XX OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
+    XXI OPEN SECRETS
+
+
+
+
+ROMANCE ISLAND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DINNER TIME
+
+
+As _The Aloha_ rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the
+harbour, St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous
+parody upon capital letters:
+
+"Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
+observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her--do you see? She
+belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
+of rope."
+
+Instead--mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
+own glorie"--he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and
+was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might
+three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch
+counter. For in America, dreams of gold--not, alas, golden
+dreams--do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly
+happenings in this pleasant land of larvæ, few are so spectacular as
+the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a
+toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his _bien_. However, to
+none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to
+himself.
+
+Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
+humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do
+if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
+marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
+among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen
+his mother--an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
+mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune--set
+off for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop
+Arthur Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look
+upon whose portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain
+of his charities seen St. George through college; and it made the
+million worth while to his nephew merely to send him to Tübingen to
+set his soul at rest concerning the date of one of the canonical
+gospels. Next to the rich delight of planning that voyage, St.
+George placed the buying of his yacht.
+
+In the dusty, inky office of the _New York Evening Sentinel_ he had
+been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting
+words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his
+typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone
+bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought
+and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes
+remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked
+toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass
+slipping to the river's mouth; whereupon he had been seized by such
+a passion to work hard and earn a white-and-brass craft of his own
+that the story which he was hurrying for the first edition was quite
+ruined.
+
+"Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had
+gnarled, "we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up
+this wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph
+reads like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less
+than fifteen minutes to do it in."
+
+St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
+ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
+had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like
+that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had
+received for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
+him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
+common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
+craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
+He had found himself estimating the value--in money--of the
+bric-à-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
+alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
+yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
+bric-à-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
+interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
+night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
+photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
+comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
+disagreeable task.
+
+Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
+transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
+the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
+things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
+unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had
+been _The Aloha_, which only that day had slipped to the river's
+mouth in the view from his old window at the _Sentinel_ office. St.
+George had the grace to be ashamed to remember how smoothly the
+social ills had adjusted themselves.
+
+Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected
+triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St.
+George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys
+which his fortune had brought to him. For although he had accurately
+painted, for example, the delight of a cruise in a sea-going yacht
+of his own, yet to step into his dory in the sunset, to watch _The
+Aloha's_ sides shine in the late light as he was rowed ashore past
+the lesser crafts in the harbour; to see the man touch his cap and
+put back to make the yacht trim for the night, and then to turn his
+own face to his apartment where virtually the entire day-staff of
+the _Evening Sentinel_ was that night to dine--these were among the
+pastimes of the lesser angels which his fancy had never compassed.
+
+A glow of firelight greeted St. George as he entered his apartment,
+and the rooms wore a pleasant air of festivity. A table, with covers
+for twelve, was spread in the living-room, a fire of cones was
+tossing on the hearth, the curtains were drawn, and the sideboard
+was a thing of intimation. Rollo, his man--St. George had easily
+fallen in all the habits which he had longed to assume--was just
+closing the little ice-box sunk behind a panel of the wall, and he
+came forward with dignified deference.
+
+"Everything is ready, Rollo?" St. George asked. "No one has
+telephoned to beg off?"
+
+"Yes, sir," answered Rollo, "and no, sir."
+
+St. George had sometimes told himself that the man looked like an
+oval grey stone with a face cut upon it.
+
+"Is the claret warmed?" St. George demanded, handing his hat. "Did
+the big glasses come for the liqueur--and the little ones will set
+inside without tipping? Then take the cigars to the den--you'll have
+to get some cigarettes for Mr. Provin. Keep up the fire. Light the
+candles in ten minutes. I say, how jolly the table looks."
+
+"Yes, sir," returned Rollo, "an' the candles 'll make a great
+difference, sir. Candles do give out an air, sir."
+
+One month of service had accustomed St. George to his valet's gift
+of the Articulate Simplicity. Rollo's thoughts were doubtless
+contrived in the cuticle and knew no deeper operance; but he always
+uttered his impressions with, under his mask, an air of keen and
+seasoned personal observation. In his first interview with St.
+George, Rollo had said: "I always enjoy being kep' busy, sir. _To
+me_, the busy man is a grand sight," and St. George had at once
+appreciated his possibilities. Rollo was like the fine print in an
+almanac.
+
+When the candles were burning and the lights had been turned on in
+the little ochre den where the billiard-table stood, St. George
+emerged--a well-made figure, his buoyant, clear-cut face accurately
+bespeaking both health and cleverness. Of a family represented by
+the gentle old bishop and his own exquisite mother, himself
+university-bred and fresh from two years' hard, hand-to-hand
+fighting to earn an honourable livelihood, St. George, of sound body
+and fine intelligence, had that temper of stability within vast
+range which goes pleasantly into the mind that meets it. A symbol of
+this was his prodigious popularity with those who had been his
+fellow-workers--a test beside which old-world traditions of the
+urban touchstones are of secondary advantage. It was deeply
+significant that in spite of the gulf which Chance had digged the
+day-staff of the _Sentinel_, all save two or three of which were not
+of his estate, had with flattering alacrity obeyed his summons to
+dine. But, as he heard in the hall the voice of Chillingworth, the
+difficulty of his task for the first time swept over him. It was
+Chillingworth who had advocated to him the need of wooden type to
+suit his literary style and who had long ordered and bullied him
+about; and how was he to play the host to Chillingworth, not to
+speak of the others, with the news between them of that million?
+
+When the bell rang, St. George somewhat gruffly superseded Rollo.
+
+"I'll go," he said briefly, "and keep out of sight for a few
+minutes. Get in the bath-room or somewhere, will you?" he added
+nervously, and opened the door.
+
+At one stroke Chillingworth settled his own position by dominating
+the situation as he dominated the city room. He chose the best chair
+and told a good story and found fault with the way the fire burned,
+all with immediate ease and abandon. Chillingworth's men loved to
+remember that he had once carried copy. They also understood all the
+legitimate devices by which he persuaded from them their best
+effort, yet these devices never failed, and the city room agreed
+that Chillingworth's fashion of giving an assignment to a new man
+would force him to write a readable account of his own entertainment
+in the dark meadows. Largely by personal magnetism he had fought his
+way upward, and this quality was not less a social gift.
+
+Mr. Toby Amory, who had been on the Eleven with St. George at
+Harvard, looked along his pipe at his host and smiled, with
+flattering content, his slow smile. Amory's father had lately had a
+conspicuous quarter of an hour in Wall Street, as a result of which
+Amory, instead of taking St. George to the cemetery at Clusium as he
+had talked, himself drifted to Park Row; and although he now knew
+considerably less than he had hoped about certain inscriptions, he
+was supporting himself and two sisters by really brilliant work, so
+that the balance of his power was creditably maintained. Surely the
+inscriptions did not suffer, and what then was Amory that he should
+object? Presently Holt, the middle-aged marine man, and Harding
+who, since he had lost a lightweight sparring championship, was
+sporting editor, solemnly entered together and sat down with the
+social caution of their class. So did Provin, the "elder giant," who
+gathered news as he breathed and could not intelligibly put six
+words together. Horace, who would listen to four lines over the
+telephone and therefrom make a half-column of American newspaper
+humour or American newspaper tears, came in roaring pacifically and
+marshaling little Bud, that day in the seventh heaven of his first
+"beat." Then followed Crass, the feature man, whose interviews were
+known to the new men as literature, although he was not above
+publicly admitting that he was not a reporter, but a special writer.
+Mr. Crass read nothing in the paper that he had not written, and St.
+George had once prophesied that in old age he would use his
+scrap-book for a manual of devotions, as Klopstock used his
+_Messiah_. With him arrived Carbury, the telegraph editor, and later
+Benfy, who had a carpet in his office and wrote editorials and who
+came in evening clothes, thus moving Harding and Holt to instant
+private conversation. The last to appear was Little Cawthorne who
+wrote the fiction page and made enchanting limericks about every one
+on the staff and went about singing one song and behaving, the
+dramatic man flattered him, like a motif. Little Cawthorne entered
+backward, wrestling with some wiry matter which, when he had
+executed a manoeuvre and banged the door, was thrust through the
+passage in the form of Bennie Todd, the head office boy,
+affectionately known as Bennietod. Bennietod was in every one's
+secret, clipped every one's space and knew every one's salary, and
+he had lately covered a baseball game when the man whose copy he was
+to carry had, outside the fence, become implicated in allurements.
+He was greeted with noise, and St. George told him heartily that he
+was glad he had come.
+
+"He made me," defensively claimed Bennietod; frowning deferentially
+at Little Cawthorne.
+
+"Hello, St. George," said the latter, "come on back to the office.
+Crass sits in your place and he wears cravats the colour of goblin's
+blood. Come back."
+
+"Not he," said Chillingworth, smoking; "the Dead-and-Done-with
+editor is too keen for that; I won't give him a job. He's ruined.
+Egg sandwiches will never stimulate him now."
+
+St. George joined in the relieved laugh that followed. They were
+remembering his young Sing Sing convict who had completed his
+sentence in time to step in a cab and follow his mother to the
+grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And
+St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words
+of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed
+for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat
+of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things
+in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the
+composing room had shaken mailed fists.
+
+"Hi, you!" said Little Cawthorne, who was born in the South, "this
+is a mellow minute. I could wish they came often. This shall be a
+weekly occurrence--not so, St. George?"
+
+"Cawthorne," Chillingworth warned, "mind your manners, or they'll
+make you city editor."
+
+A momentary shadow was cast by the appearance of Rollo, who was
+manifestly a symbol of the world Philistine about which these guests
+knew more and in which they played a smaller part than any other
+class of men. But the tray which Rollo bore was his passport.
+Thereafter, they all trooped to the table, and Chillingworth sat at
+the head, and from the foot St. George watched the city editor break
+bread with the familiar nervous gesture with which he was wont to
+strip off yards of copy-paper and eat it. There was a tacit
+assumption that he be the conversational sun of the hour, and in
+fostering this understanding the host took grateful refuge.
+
+"This is shameful," Chillingworth began contentedly. "Every one of
+you ought to be out on the Boris story."
+
+"What is the Boris story?" asked St. George with interest. But in
+all talk St. George had a restful, host-like way of playing the rôle
+of opposite to every one who preferred being heard.
+
+"I'll wager the boy hasn't been reading the papers these three
+months," Amory opined in his pleasant drawl.
+
+"No," St. George confessed; "no, I haven't. They make me homesick."
+
+"Don't maunder," said Chillingworth in polite criticism. "This is
+Amory's story, and only about a quarter of the facts yet," he added
+in a resentful growl. "It's up at the Boris, in West Fifty-ninth
+Street--you know the apartment house? A Miss Holland, an heiress,
+living there with her aunt, was attacked and nearly murdered by a
+mulatto woman. The woman followed her to the elevator and came
+uncomfortably near stabbing her from the back. The elevator boy was
+too quick for her. And at the station they couldn't get the woman to
+say a word; she pretends not to understand or to speak anything
+they've tried. She's got Amory hypnotized too--he thinks she can't.
+And when they searched her," went on Chillingworth with enjoyment,
+"they found her dressed in silk and cloth of gold, and loaded down
+with all sorts of barbarous ornaments, with almost priceless jewels.
+Miss Holland claims that she never saw or heard of the woman before.
+Now, what do you make of it?" he demanded, unconcernedly draining
+his glass.
+
+"Splendid," cried St. George in unfeigned interest. "I say,
+splendid. Did you see the woman?" he asked Amory.
+
+Amory nodded.
+
+"Yes," he said, "Andy fixed that for me. But she never said a word.
+I _parlez-voused_ her, and _verstehen-Sied_ her, and she sighed and
+turned her head."
+
+"Did you see the heiress?" St. George asked.
+
+"Not I," mourned Amory, "not to talk with, that is. I happened to be
+hanging up in the hall there the afternoon it occurred;" he modestly
+explained.
+
+"What luck," St. George commented with genuine envy. "It's a
+stunning story. Who is Miss Holland?"
+
+"She's lived there for a year or more with her aunt," said
+Chillingworth. "She is a New Yorker and an heiress and a great
+beauty--oh, all the properties are there, but they're all we've got.
+What do you make of it?" he repeated.
+
+St. George did not answer, and every one else did.
+
+"Mistaken identity," said Little Cawthorne. "Do you remember
+Provin's story of the woman whose maid shot a masseuse whom she took
+to be her mistress; and the woman forgave the shooting and seemed to
+have her arrested chiefly because she had mistaken her for a
+masseuse?"
+
+"Too easy, Cawthorne," said Chillingworth.
+
+"The woman is probably an Italian," said the telegraph editor,
+"doing one of her Mafia stunts. It's time they left the politicians
+alone and threw bombs at the bonds that back them."
+
+"Hey, Carbury. Stop writing heads," said Chillingworth.
+
+"Has Miss Holland lived abroad?" asked Crass, the feature man.
+"Maybe this woman was her nurse or ayah or something who got fond of
+her charge, and when they took it away years ago, she devoted her
+life to trying to find it in America. And when she got here she
+wasn't able to make herself known to her, and rather than let any
+one else--"
+
+"No more space-grabbing, Crass," warned Chillingworth.
+
+"Maybe," ventured Horace, "the young lady did settlement work and
+read to the woman's kid, and the kid died, and the woman thought
+she'd said a charm over it."
+
+Chillingworth grinned affectionately.
+
+"Hold up," he commanded, "or you'll recall the very words of the
+charm."
+
+Bennietod gasped and stared.
+
+"Now, Bennietod?" Amory encouraged him.
+
+"I t'ink," said the lad, "if she's a heiress, dis yere
+dagger-plunger is her mudder dat's been shut up in a mad-house to a
+fare-you-well."
+
+Chillingworth nodded approvingly.
+
+"Your imagination is toning down wonderfully," he flattered him. "A
+month ago you would have guessed that the mulatto lady was an
+Egyptian princess' messenger sent over here to get the heart from an
+American heiress as an ingredient for a complexion lotion. You're
+coming on famously, Todd."
+
+"The German poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has,
+in his epic of the _Oberon_ made admirable use of much the same
+idea, Mr. Chillingworth--"
+
+Yells interrupted him. Mr. Benfy was too "well-read" to be wholly
+popular with the staff.
+
+"Oh, well, the woman was crazy. That's about all," suggested
+Harding, and blushed to the line of his hair.
+
+"Yes, I guess so," assented Holt, who lifted and lowered one
+shoulder as he talked, "or doped."
+
+Chillingworth sighed and looked at them both with pursed lips.
+
+"You two," he commented, "would get out a paper that everybody would
+know to be full of reliable facts, and that nobody would buy. To be
+born with a riotous imagination and then hardly ever to let it riot
+is to be a born newspaper man. Provin?"
+
+The elder giant leaned back, his eyes partly closed.
+
+"Is she engaged to be married?" he asked. "Is Miss Holland engaged?"
+
+Chillingworth shook his head.
+
+"No," he said, "not engaged. We knew that by tea-time the same day,
+Provin. Well, St. George?"
+
+St. George drew a long breath.
+
+"By Jove, I don't know," he said, "it's a stunning story. It's the
+best story I ever remember, excepting those two or three that have
+hung fire for so long. Next to knowing just why old Ennis
+disinherited his son at his marriage, I would like to ferret out
+this."
+
+"Now, tut, St. George," Amory put in tolerantly, "next to doing
+exactly what you will be doing all this week you'd rather ferret out
+this."
+
+"On my honour, no," St. George protested eagerly, "I mean quite what
+I say. I might go on fearfully about it. Lord knows I'm going to see
+the day when I'll do it, too, and cut my troubles for the luck of
+chasing down a bully thing like this."
+
+If there was anything to forgive, every one forgave him.
+
+"But give up ten minutes on _The Aloha_," Amory skeptically put it,
+adjusting his pince-nez, "for anything less than ten minutes on _The
+Aloha_?"
+
+"I'll do it now--now!" cried St. George. "If Mr. Chillingworth will
+put me on this story in your place and will give you a week off on
+_The Aloha_, you may have her and welcome."
+
+Little Cawthorne pounded on the table.
+
+"Where do I come in?" he wailed. "But no, all I get is another wad
+o' woe."
+
+"What do you say, Mr. Chillingworth?" St. George asked eagerly.
+
+"I don't know," said Chillingworth, meditatively turning his glass.
+"St. George is rested and fresh, and he feels the story. And
+Amory--here, touch glasses with me."
+
+Amory obeyed. His chief's hand was steady, but the two glasses
+jingled together until, with a smile, Amory dropped his arm.
+
+"I _am_ about all in, I fancy," he admitted apologetically.
+
+"A week's rest on the water," said Chillingworth, "would set you on
+your feet for the convention. All right, St. George," he nodded.
+
+St. George leaped to his feet.
+
+"Hooray!" he shouted like a boy. "Jove, won't it be good to get
+back?"
+
+He smiled as he set down his glass, remembering the day at his desk
+when he had seen the white-and-brass craft slip to the river's
+mouth.
+
+Rollo, discreet and without wonder, footed softly about the table,
+keeping the glasses filled and betraying no other sign of life. For
+more than four hours he was in attendance, until, last of the
+guests, Little Cawthorne and Bennietod departed together, trying to
+remember the dates of the English kings. Finally Chillingworth and
+Amory, having turned outdoors the dramatic critic who had arrived
+at midnight and was disposed to stay, stood for a moment by the fire
+and talked it over.
+
+"Remember, St. George," Chillingworth said, "I'll have no
+monkey-work. You'll report to me at the old hour, you won't be late;
+and you'll take orders--"
+
+"As usual, sir," St. George rejoined quietly.
+
+"I beg your pardon," Chillingworth said quickly, "but you see this
+is such a deuced unnatural arrangement."
+
+"I understand," St. George assented, "and I'll do my best not to get
+thrown down. Amory has told me all he knows about it--by the way,
+where is the mulatto woman now?"
+
+"Why," said Chillingworth, "some physician got interested in the
+case, and he's managed to hurry her up to the Bitley Reformatory in
+Westchester for the present. She's there; and that means, we need
+not disguise, that nobody can see her. Those Bitley people are like
+a rabble of wild eagles."
+
+"Right," said St. George. "I'll report at eight o'clock. Amory can
+board _The Aloha_ when he gets ready and take down whom he likes."
+
+"On my life, old chap, it's a private view of Kedar's tents to me,"
+said Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. "I'll probably
+win wide disrespect by my inability to tell a mainsail from a
+cockpit, but I'm a grateful dog, in spite of that."
+
+When they were gone St. George sat by the fire. He read Amory's
+story of the Boris affair in the paper, which somewhere in the
+apartment Rollo had unearthed, and the man took off his master's
+shoes and brought his slippers and made ready his bath. St. George
+glanced over his shoulder at the attractively-dismantled table, with
+its dying candles and slanted shades.
+
+"Gad!" he said in sheer enjoyment as he clipped the story and saw
+Rollo pass with the towels.
+
+It was so absurdly like a city room's dream of Arcady.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A SCRAP OF PAPER
+
+
+To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing
+breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were
+novel preparations for work in the _Sentinel_ office. The
+impossibility of it all delighted St. George rather more than the
+reality, for there is no pastime, as all the world knows, quite like
+that of practising the impossible. The days when, "like a man
+unfree," he had fared forth from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely
+to partake of an evil omelette, seemed enchantingly far away. It
+was, St. George reflected, the experience of having been released
+from prison, minus the disgrace.
+
+Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the
+printers' ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the
+elation of the return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets.
+When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its
+fascination, but now he understood. "A newspaper office," so a
+revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once
+imparted to St. George, "is a place where a man with the
+temperament of a savant and a recluse may bring his American vice of
+commercialism and worship of the uncommon, and let them have it out.
+Newspapers have no other use--except the one I began on." When St.
+George entered the city room, Crass, of the goblin's blood cravats,
+had vacated his old place, and Provin was just uncovering his
+typewriter and banging the tin cover upon everything within reach,
+and Bennietod was writhing over a rewrite, and Chillingworth was
+discharging an office boy in a fashion that warmed St. George's
+heart.
+
+But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of
+Chillingworth, the guest. He waved both arms at the foreman who
+ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he
+frowned a greeting at St. George.
+
+"Get right out on the Boris story," he said. "I depend on you. The
+chief is interested in this too--telephoned to know whom I had on
+it."
+
+St. George knew perfectly that "the chief" was playing golf at Lenox
+and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland
+story, for he was a close friend of the bishop's, and St. George
+knew his ways; but Chillingworth's methods always told, and St.
+George turned away with all the old glow of his first assignment.
+
+St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances
+and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman;
+but he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one
+apostate Chance who open great good luck of any sort. So, though the
+journey to Westchester County was almost certain to result in
+refusal, he meant to be confronted by that certainty before he
+assumed it. To the warden on the wire St. George put his inquiry.
+
+"What are your visitors' days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+
+"Thursdays," came the reply, and the warden's voice suggested
+handcuffs by way of hospitality.
+
+"This is St. George of the _Sentinel_. I want very much to see one
+of your people--a mulatto woman. Can you fix it for me?"
+
+"Certainly not," returned the warden promptly. "The _Sentinel_ knows
+perfectly that newspaper men can not be admitted here."
+
+"Ah, well now, of course," St. George conceded, "but if you have a
+mysterious boarder who talks Patagonian or something, and we think
+that perhaps we can talk with her, why then--"
+
+"It doesn't matter whether you can talk every language in South
+America," said the warden bruskly. "I'm very busy now, and--"
+
+"See here, Mr. Jeffrey," said St. George, "is no one allowed there
+but relatives of the guests?"
+
+"Nobody,"--crisply.
+
+"I beg your pardon, that is literal?"
+
+"Relatives, with a permit," divulged the warden, who, if he had had
+a sceptre would have used it at table, he was so fond of his little
+power, "and the Readers' Guild."
+
+"Ah--the Readers' Guild," said St. George. "What days, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+
+"To-day and Saturdays, ten o'clock. I'm sorry, Mr. St. George, but
+I'm a very busy man and now--"
+
+"Good-by," St. George cried triumphantly.
+
+In half an hour he was at the Grand Central station, boarding a
+train for the Reformatory town. It was a little after ten o'clock
+when he rang the bell at the house presided over by Chillingworth's
+"rabble of wild eagles."
+
+The Reformatory, a boastful, brick building set in grounds that
+seemed freshly starched and ironed, had a discoloured door that
+would have frowned and threatened of its own accord, even without
+the printed warnings pasted to its panels stating that no
+application for admission, with or without permits, would be
+honoured upon any day save Thursday. This was Tuesday.
+
+Presently, the chains having fallen within after a feudal rattling,
+an old man who looked born to the business of snapping up a
+drawbridge in lieu of a taste for any other exclusiveness peered at
+St. George through absurd smoked glasses, cracked quite across so
+that his eyes resembled buckles.
+
+"Good morning," said St. George; "has the Readers' Guild arrived
+yet?"
+
+The old man grated out an assent and swung open the door, which
+creaked in the pitch of his voice. The bare hall was cut by a wall
+of steel bars whose gate was padlocked, and outside this wall the
+door to the warden's office stood open. St. George saw that a
+meeting was in progress there, and the sight disturbed him. Then the
+click of a key caught his attention, and he turned to find the old
+man quietly and surprisingly swinging open the door of steel bars.
+
+"This way, sir," he said hoarsely, fixing St. George with his buckle
+eyes, and shambled through the door after him locking it behind
+them.
+
+If St. George had found awaiting him a gold throne encircled by
+kneeling elephants he could have been no more amazed. Not a word had
+been said about the purpose of his visit, and not a word to the
+warden; there was simply this miraculous opening of the barred door.
+St. George breathlessly footed across the rotunda and down the dim
+opposite hall. There was a mistake, that was evident; but for the
+moment St. George was going to propose no reform. Their steps echoed
+in the empty corridor that extended the entire length of the great
+building in an odour of unspeakable soap and superior disinfectants;
+and it was not until they reached a stair at the far end that the
+old man halted.
+
+"Top o' the steps," he hoarsely volunteered, blinking his little
+buckle eyes, "first door to the left. My back's bad. I won't go up."
+
+St. George, inhumanely blessing the circumstance, slipped something
+in the old man's hand and sprang up the stairs.
+
+The first door at the left stood ajar. St. George looked in and saw
+a circle of bonnets and white curls clouded around the edge of the
+room, like witnesses. The Readers' Guild was about leaving; almost
+in the same instant, with that soft lift and touch which makes a
+woman's gown seem sewed with vowels and sibilants, they all arose
+and came tapping across the bare floor. At their head marched a
+woman with such a bright bonnet, and such a tinkle of ornaments on
+her gown that at first sight she quite looked like a lamp. It was
+she whom St. George approached.
+
+"I beg your pardon, madame," he said, "is this the Readers' Guild?"
+
+There was nothing in St. George's grave face and deferential
+stooping of shoulders to betray how his heart was beating or what a
+bound it gave at her amazing reply.
+
+"Ah," she said, "how do you do?"--and her manner had that violent
+absent-mindedness which almost always proves that its possessor has
+trained a large family of children--"I am so glad that you can be
+with us to-day. I am Mrs. Manners--forgive me," she besought with
+perfectly self-possessed distractedness, "I'm afraid that I've
+forgotten your name."
+
+"My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual
+speechlessness.
+
+The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs.
+Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to
+compensate her total lack of attention.
+
+"Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
+
+Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and
+caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and
+muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter,
+a little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
+
+"Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a
+wonderful meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately
+for us you are just in time for our third floor council."
+
+It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and
+was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns
+on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have
+amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions
+when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the
+temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost
+St. George an effort, which he was afterward glad to remember having
+made, to turn to Mrs. Manners, who had that air of appointing
+committees and announcing the programme by which we always recognize
+a leader, and try to explain.
+
+"I am afraid," St. George said as they reached the stairs, "that you
+have mistaken me, Mrs. Manners. I am not--"
+
+"Pray, pray do not mention it," cried Mrs. Manners, shaking her
+little lamp-shade of a hat at him, "we make every allowance, and I
+am sure that none will be necessary."
+
+"But I am with the _Evening Sentinel_," St. George persisted, "I am
+afraid that--"
+
+"As if one's profession made any difference!" cried Mrs. Manners
+warmly. "No, indeed, I perfectly understand. We all understand," she
+assured him, going over some papers in one hand and preparing to
+mount the stairs. "Indeed, we appreciate it," she murmured, "do we
+not, Miss Utter?"
+
+The little brown nut seemed to crack in a capacious smile.
+
+"Indeed, indeed!" she said fervently, accenting her emphasis by
+briefly-closed eyes.
+
+"Hymn books. Now, have we hymn books enough?" plaintively broke in
+Mrs. Manners. "I declare, those new hymn books don't seem to have
+the spirit of the old ones, no matter what _any one_ says," she
+informed St. George earnestly as they reached an open door. In the
+next moment he stood aside and the Readers' Guild filed past him. He
+followed them. This was pleasantly like magic.
+
+They entered a large chamber carpeted and walled in the garish
+flowers which many boards of directors suppose will joy the
+cheerless breast. There were present a dozen women inmates,--sullen,
+weary-looking beings who seemed to have made abject resignation
+their latest vice. They turned their lustreless eyes upon the
+visitors, and a portly woman in a red waist with a little American
+flag in a buttonhole issued to them a nasal command to rise. They
+got to their feet with a starched noise, like dead leaves blowing,
+and St. George eagerly scanned their faces. There were women of
+several nationalities, though they all looked raceless in the ugly
+uniforms which those same boards of directors consider _de rigueur_
+for the soul that is to be won back to the normal. A little negress,
+with a spirit that soared free of boards of directors, had tried to
+tie her closely-clipped wool with bits of coloured string; an
+Italian woman had a geranium over her ear; and at the end of the
+last row of chairs, towering above the others, was a creature of a
+kind of challenging, unforgetable beauty whom, with a thrill of
+certainty, St. George realized to be her whom he had come to see.
+So strong was his conviction that, as he afterward recalled, he even
+asked no question concerning her. She looked as manifestly not one
+of the canaille of incorrigibles as, in her place, Lucrezia Borgia
+would have looked.
+
+The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder
+and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned. She was young,
+hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar
+litheness which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was
+of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of
+the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more
+penetrable. Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she
+divined that in some way his coming affected her.
+
+"We will have our hymn first." Mrs. Manners' words were buzzing and
+pecking in the air. "What can I have done with that list of numbers?
+We have to select our pieces most carefully," she confided to St.
+George, "so to be sure that _Soul's Prison_ or _Hands Red as
+Crimson_, or, _Do You See the Hebrew Captive Kneeling?_ or anything
+personal like that doesn't occur. Now what can I have done with that
+list?"
+
+Her words reached St. George but vaguely. He was in a fever of
+anticipation and enthusiasm. He turned quickly to Mrs. Manners.
+
+"During the hymn," he said simply, "I would like to speak with one
+of the women. Have I your permission?"
+
+Mrs. Manners looked momentarily perplexed; but her eyes at that
+instant chancing upon her lost list of hymns, she let fall an
+abstracted assent and hurried to the waiting organist. Immediately
+St. George stepped quietly down among the women already fluttering
+the leaves of their hymn books, and sat beside the mulatto woman.
+
+Her eyes met his in eager questioning, but she had that temper of
+unsurprise of many of the eastern peoples and of some animals. Yet
+she was under some strong excitement, for her hands, large but
+faultlessly modeled, were pressed tensely together. And St. George
+saw that she was by no means a mulatto, or of any race that he was
+able to name. Her features were classic and of exceeding fineness,
+and her face was sensitive and highly-bred and filled with repose,
+like the surprising repose of breathing arrested in marble. There
+was that about her, however, which would have made one, constituted
+to perceive only the arbitrary balance of things, feel almost
+afraid; while one of high organization would inevitably have been
+smitten by some sense of the incalculably higher organization of her
+nature, a nature which breathed forth an influence, laid a
+spell--did something indefinable. Sometimes one stands too closely
+to a statue and is frightened by the nearness, as by the nearness
+of one of an alien region. St. George felt this directly he spoke to
+her. He shook off the impression and set himself practically to the
+matter in hand. He had never had greater need of his faculty for
+directness. His low tone was quite matter-of-fact, his manner
+deferentially reassuring.
+
+"I think," he said softly and without preface, "that I can help you.
+Will you let me help you? Will you tell me quickly your name?"
+
+The woman's beautiful eyes were filled with distress, but she shook
+her head.
+
+"Your name--name--name?" St. George repeated earnestly, but she had
+only the same answer. "Can you not tell me where you live?" St.
+George persisted, and she made no other sign.
+
+"New York?" went on St. George patiently. "New York? Do you live in
+New York?"
+
+There was a sudden gleam in the woman's eyes. She extended her hands
+quickly in unmistakable appeal. Then swiftly she caught up a hymn
+book, tore at its fly-leaf, and made the movement of writing. In an
+instant St. George had thrust a pencil in her hand and she was
+tracing something.
+
+He waited feverishly. The organ had droned through the hymn and the
+women broke into song, with loose lips and without restraint, as
+street boys sing. He saw them casting curious, sullen glances, and
+the Readers' Guild whispering among themselves. Miss Bella Bliss
+Utter, looking as distressed as a nut can look, nodded, and Mrs.
+Manners shook her head and they meant the same thing. Then St.
+George saw the attendant in the red waist descend from the platform
+and make her way toward him, the little American flag rising and
+falling on her breast. He unhesitatingly stepped in the aisle to
+meet her, determined to prevent, if possible, her suspicion of the
+message. "Is it the barbarism of a gentleman," Amory had once
+propounded, "or is it the gentleman-like manners of a barbarian
+which makes both enjoy over-stepping a prohibition?"
+
+"I compliment you," St. George said gravely, with his deferential
+stooping of the shoulders. "The women are perfectly trained. This,
+of course, is due to you."
+
+The hard face of the woman softened, but St. George thought that one
+might call her very facial expression nasal; she smiled with evident
+pleasure, though her purpose remained unshaken.
+
+"They do pretty good," she admitted, "but visitors ain't best for
+'em. I'll have to request you"--St. George vaguely wished that she
+would say "ask"--"not to talk to any of 'em."
+
+St. George bowed.
+
+"It is a great privilege," he said warmly if a bit incoherently,
+and held her in talk about an institution of the sort in Canada
+where the women inmates wore white, the managers claiming that the
+effect upon their conduct was perceptible, that they were far more
+self-respecting, and so on in a labyrinth of defensive detail. "What
+do you think of the idea?" he concluded anxiously, manfully holding
+his ground in the aisle.
+
+"I think it's mostly nonsense," returned the woman tartly, "a big
+expense and a sight of work for nothing. And now permit me to say--"
+
+St. George vaguely wished that she would say "let."
+
+"I agree with you," he said earnestly, "nothing could be simpler and
+neater than these calico gowns."
+
+The attendant looked curiously at him.
+
+"They are gingham," she rejoined, "and you'll excuse me, I hope, but
+visitors ain't supposed to converse with the inmates."
+
+St. George was vanquished by "converse."
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, "pray forgive me. I will say good-by
+to my friend."
+
+He turned swiftly and extended his hand to the strange woman behind
+him. With the cunning upon which he had counted she gave her own
+hand, slipping in his the folded paper. Her eyes, with their
+haunting watchfulness, held his for a moment as she mutely bent
+forward when he left her.
+
+The hymn was done and the women were seating themselves, as St.
+George with beating heart took his way up the aisle. What the paper
+contained he could not even conjecture; but there _was_ a paper and
+it _did_ contain something which he had a pleasant premonition would
+be invaluable to him. Yet he was still utterly at loss to account
+for his own presence there, and this he coolly meant to do.
+
+He was spared the necessity. On the platform Mrs. Manners had risen
+to make an announcement; and St. George fancied that she must
+preside at her tea-urn and try on her bonnets with just that same
+formal little "announcement" air.
+
+"My friends," she said, "I have now an unexpected pleasure for you
+and for us all. We have with us to-day Mr. St. George, of New York.
+Mr. St. George is going to sing for us."
+
+St. George stood still for a moment, looking into the expectant
+faces of Mrs. Manners and the other women of the Readers' Guild, a
+spark of understanding kindling the mirth in his eyes. This then
+accounted both for his admittance to the home and for his welcome by
+the women upon their errand of mercy. He had simply been very
+naturally mistaken for a stranger from New York who had not arrived.
+But since he had accomplished something, though he did not know
+what, inasmuch as the slip of paper lay crushed in his hand unread,
+he must, he decided, pay for it. Without ado he stepped to the
+platform.
+
+"I have explained to Mrs. Manners and to these ladies," he said
+gravely, "that I am not the gentleman who was to sing for you.
+However, since he is detained, I will do what I can."
+
+This, mistaken for a merely perfunctory speech of self-depreciation,
+was received in polite, contradicting silence by the Guild. St.
+George, who had a rich, true barytone, quickly ran over his little
+list of possible songs, none of which he had ever sung to an
+audience that a canoe would not hold, or to other accompaniment than
+that of a mandolin. Partly in memory of those old canoe-evenings St.
+George broke into a low, crooning plantation melody. The song, like
+much of the Southern music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the
+college men had loved, something--or so one might have said who took
+the canoe-music seriously--of the wildness and fierceness of old
+tribal loves and plaints and unremembered wooings with a desert
+background: a gallop of hoof-beats, a quiver of noon light above
+saffron sand--these had been, more or less, in the music when St.
+George had been wont to lie in a boat and pick at the strings while
+Amory paddled; and these he must have reëchoed before the crowd of
+curious and sullen and commonplace, lighted by that one wild,
+strange face. When he had finished the dark woman sat with bowed
+head, and St. George himself was more moved by his own effort than
+was strictly professional.
+
+"Dear Mr. St. George," said Mrs. Manners, going distractedly through
+her hand-bag for something unknown, "our secretary will thank you
+formally. It was she who sent you our request, was it not? She
+_will_ so regret being absent to-day."
+
+"She did not send me a request, Mrs. Manners," persisted St. George
+pleasantly, "but I've been uncommonly glad to do what I could. I am
+here simply on a mission for the _Evening Sentinel_."
+
+Mrs. Manners drew something indefinite from her bag and put it back
+again, and looked vaguely at St. George.
+
+"Your voice reminds me so much of my brother, younger," she
+observed, her eyes already straying to the literature for
+distribution.
+
+With soft exclamatory twitters the Readers' Guild thanked St.
+George, and Miss Bella Bliss Utter, who was of womankind who clasp
+their hands when they praise, stood thus beside him until he took
+his leave. The woman in the red waist summoned an attendant to show
+him back down the long corridor.
+
+At the grated door within the entrance St. George found the warden
+in stormy conference with a pale blond youth in spectacles.
+
+"Impossible," the warden was saying bluntly, "I know you. I know
+your voice. You called me up this morning from the _New York
+Sentinel_ office, and I told you then--"
+
+"But, my dear sir," expostulated the pale blond youth, waving a
+music roll, "I do assure you--"
+
+"What he says is quite true, Warden," St. George interposed
+courteously, "I will vouch for him. I have just been singing for the
+Readers' Guild myself."
+
+The warden dropped back with a grudging apology and brows of tardy
+suspicion, and the old man blinked his buckle eyes.
+
+"Gentlemen," said St. George, "good morning."
+
+Outside the door, with its panels decorated in positive
+prohibitions, he eagerly unfolded the precious paper. It bore a
+single name and address: Tabnit, 19 McDougle Street, New York.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
+
+
+St. George lunched leisurely at his hotel. Upon his return from
+Westchester he had gone directly to McDougle Street to be assured
+that there was a house numbered 19. Without difficulty he had found
+the place; it was in the row of old iron-balconied apartment houses
+a few blocks south of Washington Square, and No. 19 differed in no
+way from its neighbours even to the noisy children, without toys,
+tumbling about the sunken steps and dark basement door. St. George
+contented himself with walking past the house, for the mere
+assurance that the place existed dictated his next step.
+
+This was to write a note to Mrs. Medora Hastings, Miss Holland's
+aunt. The note set forth that for reasons which he would, if he
+might, explain later, he was interested in the woman who had
+recently made an attempt upon her niece's life; that he had seen the
+woman and had obtained an address which he was confident would lead
+to further information about her. This address, he added, he
+preferred not to disclose to the police, but to Mrs. Hastings or
+Miss Holland herself, and he begged leave to call upon them if
+possible that day. He despatched the note by Rollo, whom he
+instructed to deliver it, not at the desk, but at the door of Mrs.
+Hastings' apartment, and to wait for an answer. He watched with
+pleasure Rollo's soft departure, recalling the days when he had sent
+a messenger boy to some inaccessible threshold, himself stamping up
+and down in the cold a block or so away to await the boy's return.
+
+Rollo was back almost immediately. Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland
+were not at home. St. George eyed his servant severely.
+
+"Rollo," he said, "did you go to the door of their apartment?"
+
+"No, sir," said Rollo stiffly, "the elevator boy told me they was
+out, sir."
+
+"Showing," thought St. George, "that a valet and a gentleman is a
+very poor newspaper man."
+
+"Now go back," he said pleasantly, "go up in the elevator to their
+door. If they are not in, wait in the lower hallway until they
+return. Do you get that? Until they return."
+
+"You'll want me back by tea-time, sir?" ventured Rollo.
+
+"Wait," St. George repeated, "until they return. At three. Or six.
+Or nine o'clock. Or midnight."
+
+"Very good, sir," said Rollo impassively, "it ain't always wise,
+sir, for a man to trust to his own judgment, sir, asking your
+pardon. His judgment," he added, "may be a bit of the ape left in
+him, sir."
+
+St. George smiled at this evolutionary pearl and settled himself
+comfortably by the open fire to await Rollo's return. It was after
+three o'clock when he reappeared. He brought a note and St. George
+feverishly tore it open.
+
+"Whom did you see? Were they civil to you?" he demanded.
+
+"I saw a old lady, sir," said Rollo irreverently. "She didn't say a
+word to me, sir, but what she didn't say was civiler than many
+people's language. There's a great deal in manner, sir," declaimed
+Rollo, brushing his hat with his sleeve, and his sleeve with his
+handkerchief, and shaking the handkerchief meditatively over the
+coals.
+
+St. George read the note at a glance and with unspeakable relief.
+They would see him. A refusal would have delayed and annoyed him
+just then, in the flood-tide of his hope.
+
+     "My Dear Mr. St. George," the note ran. "My niece is not at
+     home, and I can not tell how your suggestion will be received
+     by her, though it is most kind. I may, however, answer for
+     myself that I shall be glad to see you at four o'clock this
+     afternoon.
+                   "Very truly yours,
+                               "MEDORA HASTINGS."
+
+Grateful for her evident intention to waste no time, St. George
+dressed and drove to the Boris, punctually sending up his card at
+four o'clock. At once he was ushered to Mrs. Hastings' apartment.
+
+St. George entered her drawing-room incuriously. Three years of
+entering drawing-rooms which he never thereafter was to see had
+robbed him of that sensation of indefinable charm which for many a
+strange room never ceases to yield. He had found far too many tables
+upholding nothing which one could remember, far too many pictures
+that returned his look, and rugs that seemed to have been selected
+arbitrarily and because there was none in stock that the owner
+really liked. He was therefore pleasantly surprised and puzzled by
+the room which welcomed him. The floor was tiled in curious blocks,
+strangely hieroglyphed, as if they had been taken from old tombs.
+Over the fireplace was set a panel of the same stone, which, by the
+thickness of the tiles, formed a low shelf. On this shelf and on
+tables and in a high window was the strangest array of objects that
+St. George had ever seen. There were small busts of soft rose stone,
+like blocks of coral. There was a statue or two of some indefinable
+white material, glistening like marble and yet so soft that it had
+been indented in several places by accidental pressure. There were
+fans of strangely-woven silk, with sticks of carven rock-crystal,
+and hand mirrors of polished copper set in frames of gems that he
+did not recognize. Upon the wall were mended bits of purple
+tapestry, embroidered or painted or woven in singular patterns of
+flora and birds that St. George could not name. There were rolls of
+parchment, and vases of rock-crystal, and a little apparatus, most
+delicately poised, for weighing unknown, delicate things; and jars
+and cups without handles, all baked of a soft pottery having a nap
+like the down of a peach. Over the windows hung curtains of lace,
+woven by hands which St. George could not guess, in patterns of such
+freedom and beauty as western looms never may know. On the floor and
+on the divans were spread strange skins, some marked like peacocks,
+some patterned like feathers and like seaweed, all in a soft fur
+that was like silk.
+
+Mingled with these curios were the ordinary articles of a cultivated
+household. There were many books, good pictures, furniture with
+simple lines, a tea-table that almost ministered of itself, a
+work-basket filled with "violet-weaving" needle-work, and a gossipy
+clock with well-bred chimes. St. George was enormously attracted by
+the room which could harbour so many pagan delights without itself
+falling their victim. The air was fresh and cool and smelled of the
+window primroses.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In a few moments Mrs. Hastings entered, and if St. George had been
+bewildered by the room he was still more amazed by the appearance
+of his hostess. She was utterly unlike the atmosphere of her
+drawing-room. She was a bustling, commonplace little creature, with
+an expressionless face, indented rather than molded in features. Her
+plump hands were covered with jewels, but for all the richness of
+her gown she gave the impression of being very badly dressed; things
+of jet and metal bobbed and ticked upon her, and her side-combs were
+continually falling about. She sat on the sofa and looked at the
+seat which St. George was to have and began to talk--all without
+taking the slightest heed of him or permitting him to mention the
+_Evening Sentinel_ or his errand. If St. George had been painted
+purple he felt sure that she would have acted quite the same.
+Personality meant nothing to her.
+
+"Now this distressing matter, Mr. St. George," began Mrs. Hastings,
+"of this frightful mulatto woman. I didn't see her myself--no, I had
+stopped in on the first floor to visit my lawyer's wife who was ill
+with neuralgia, and I didn't see the creature. If I had been with my
+niece I dare say it wouldn't have occurred. That's what I always say
+to my niece. I always say, 'Olivia, nothing _need_ occur to vex one.
+It always happens because of pure heedlessness.' Not that I accuse
+my own niece of heedlessness in this particular. It was the elevator
+boy who was heedless. That is the trouble with life in a great
+city. Every breath you draw is always dependent on somebody else's
+doing his duty, and when you consider how many people habitually
+neglect their duty it is a wonder--I always say that to Olivia--it
+is a wonder that anybody is alive to _do_ a duty when it presents
+itself. 'Olivia,' I always say, 'nobody needs to die.' And I really
+believe that they nearly all do die out of pure heedlessness. Well,
+and so this frightful mulatto creature: you know her, I understand?"
+
+Mrs. Hastings leaned back and consulted St. George through her
+tortoise-shell glasses, tilting her head high to keep them on her
+nose and perpetually putting their gold chain over her ear, which
+perpetually pulled out her side-combs.
+
+"I saw her this morning," St. George said. "I went up to the
+Reformatory in Westchester, and I spoke with her."
+
+"Mercy!" ejaculated Mrs. Hastings, "I wonder she didn't tear your
+eyes out. Did they have her in a cage or in a cell? What was the
+creature about?"
+
+"She was in a missionary meeting at the moment," St. George
+explained, smiling.
+
+"Mercy!" said Mrs. Hastings in exactly the same tone. "Some trick, I
+expect. That's what I warn Olivia: 'So few things nowadays are done
+through necessity or design.' Nearly everything is a trick. Every
+invention is a trick--a cultured trick, one might say. Murder is a
+trick, I suppose, to a murderer. That's why civilization is bad for
+morals, don't you think? Well, and so she talked with you?"
+
+"No, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "she did not say one word. But
+she wrote something, and that is what I have come to bring you."
+
+"What was it--some charm?" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Oh, nobody knows
+what that kind of people may do. I'll meet any one face to face, but
+these juggling, incantation individuals appal me. I have a brother
+who travels in the Orient, and he tells me about hideous things they
+do--raising wheat and things," she vaguely concluded.
+
+"Ah!" said St. George quickly, "you have a brother--in the Orient?"
+
+"Oh, yes. My brother Otho has traveled abroad I don't know how many
+years. We have a great many stamps. I can't begin to pronounce all
+the names," the lady assured him.
+
+"And this brother--is he your niece, Miss Holland's father?" St.
+George asked eagerly.
+
+"Certainly," said Mrs. Hastings severely; "I have only one brother,
+and it has been three years since I have seen him."
+
+"Pardon me, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "this may be most
+important. Will you tell me when you last heard from him and where
+he was?"
+
+"I should have to look up the place," she answered, "I couldn't
+begin to pronounce the name, I dare say. It was somewhere in the
+South Atlantic, ten months or more ago."
+
+"Ah," St. George quietly commented.
+
+"Well, and now this frightful creature," resumed Mrs. Hastings, "do,
+pray, tell me what it was she wrote."
+
+St. George produced the paper.
+
+"That is it," he said. "I fancy you will not know the street. It is
+19 McDougle Street, and the name is simply Tabnit."
+
+"Yes. And is it a letter?" his hostess demanded, "and whatever does
+it say?"
+
+"It is not a letter," St. George explained patiently, "and this is
+all that it says. The name is, I suppose, the name of a person. I
+have made sure that there is such a number in the street. I have
+seen the house. But I have waited to consult you before going
+there."
+
+"Why, what is it you think?" Mrs. Hastings besought him. "Do you
+think this person, whoever it is, can do something? And whatever can
+he do? Oh dear," she ended, "I do want to act the way poor dear Mr.
+Hastings would have acted. Only I know that he would have gone
+straight to Bitley, or wherever she is, and held a revolver at that
+mulatto creature's head, and _commanded_ her to talk English. Mr.
+Hastings was a very determined character. If you could have seen the
+poor dear man's chin! But of course I can't do that, can I? And
+that's what I say to Olivia. 'Olivia, one doesn't _need_ a man's
+judgment if one will only use judgment oneself.' What is it you
+think, Mr. St. George?"
+
+Before St. George could reply there entered the room, behind a low
+announcement of his name, a man of sixty-odd years, nervous,
+slightly stooped, his smooth pale face unlighted by little deep-set
+eyes.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Frothingham!" said Mrs. Hastings in evident relief, "you
+are just in time. Mr. St. John was just telling me horrible things
+about this frightful mulatto creature. This is Mr. St. John. Mr.
+Frothingham is my lawyer and my brother Otho's lawyer. And so I
+telephoned him to come in and hear all about this. And now do go on,
+Mr. St. John, about this hideous woman. What is it you think?"
+
+"How do you do, Mr. St. John?" said the lawyer portentously. His
+greeting was almost a warning, and reminded St. George of the way in
+which certain brakemen call out stations. St. George responded as
+blithely to this name as to his own and did not correct it. "And
+what," went on the lawyer, sitting down with long unclosed hands
+laid trimly along his knees, "have you to contribute to this most
+remarkable occurrence, Mr. St. John?"
+
+St. George briefly narrated the events of the morning and placed the
+slip of paper in the lawyer's hands.
+
+"Ah! We have here a communication in the nature of a confession,"
+the lawyer observed, adjusting his gold pince-nez, head thrown back,
+eyebrows lifted.
+
+"Only the address, sir," said St. George, "and I was just saying to
+Mrs. Hastings that some one ought to go to this address at once and
+find out whatever is to be got there. Whoever goes I will very
+gladly accompany."
+
+Mr. Frothingham had a fashion of making ready to speak and
+soliciting attention by the act, and then collapsing suddenly with
+no explosion, like a bad Roman candle. He did this now, and whatever
+he meant to say was lost to the race; but he looked very wise the
+while. It was rather as if he discarded you as a fit listener, than
+that he discarded his own comment.
+
+"I don't know but I ought to go myself," rambled Mrs. Hastings,
+"perhaps Mr. Hastings would think I ought. Suppose, Mr. Frothingham,
+that we both go. Dear, dear! Olivia always sees to my shopping and
+flowers and everything executive, but I can't let her go into these
+frightful places, can I?"
+
+There was a rustling at the far end of the room, and some one
+entered. St. George did not turn, but as her soft skirts touched and
+lifted along the floor he was tinglingly aware of her presence. Even
+before Mrs. Hastings heard her light footfall, even before the clear
+voice spoke, St. George knew that he was at last in the presence of
+the arbiter of his enterprise, and of how much else he did not know.
+He was silent, breathlessly waiting for her to speak.
+
+"May I come in, Aunt Dora?" she said. "I want to know to what place
+it is impossible for me to go?"
+
+She came from the long room's boundary shadow. There was about her a
+sense of white and gray with a knot of pale colour in her hat and an
+orchid on her white coat. Mrs. Hastings, taking no more account of
+her presence than she had of St. George's, tilted back her head and
+looked at the primroses in the window as closely as at anything, and
+absently presented him.
+
+"Olivia," she said, "this is Mr. St. John, who knows about that
+frightful mulatto creature. Mr. St. George," she went on, correcting
+the name entirely unintentionally, "my niece, Miss Holland. And I'm
+sure I wish I knew what the necessary thing to be done _is_. That is
+what I always tell you, you know, Olivia. 'Find out the necessary
+thing and do it, and let the rest go.'"
+
+"It reminds me very much," said the lawyer, clearing his throat, "of
+a case that I had on the April calendar--"
+
+Miss Holland had turned swiftly to St. George:
+
+"You know the mulatto woman?" she asked, and the lawyer passed by
+the April calendar and listened.
+
+"I went to the Bitley Reformatory this morning to see her," St.
+George replied. "She gave me this name and address. We have been
+saying that some one ought to go there to learn what is to be
+learned."
+
+Mr. Frothingham in a silence of pursed lips offered the paper. Miss
+Holland glanced at it and returned it.
+
+"Will you tell us what your interest is in this woman?" she asked
+evenly. "Why you went to see her?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Holland," St. George replied, "you know of course that
+the police have done their best to run this matter down. You know it
+because you have courteously given them every assistance in your
+power. But the police have also been very ably assisted by every
+newspaper in town. I am fortunate to be acting in the interests of
+one of these--the _Sentinel_. This clue was put in my hands. I came
+to you confident of your coöperation."
+
+Mrs. Hastings threw up her hands with a gesture that caught away the
+chain of her eye-glass and sent it dangling in her lap, and her
+side-combs tinkling to the tiled floor.
+
+"Mercy!" she said, "a reporter!"
+
+St. George bowed.
+
+"But I never receive reporters!" she cried, "Olivia--don't you
+know? A newspaper reporter like that fearful man at Palm Beach, who
+put me in the Courtney's ball list in a blue silk when I never wear
+colours."
+
+"Now really, really, this intrusion--" began Mr. Frothingham, his
+long, unclosed hands working forward on his knees in undulations, as
+a worm travels.
+
+Miss Holland turned to St. George, the colour dyeing her face and
+throat, her manner a bewildering mingling of graciousness and
+hauteur.
+
+"My aunt is right," she said tranquilly, "we never have received any
+newspaper representative. Therefore, we are unfortunate never to
+have met one. You were saying that we should send some one to
+McDougle Street?"
+
+St. George was aware of his heart-beats. It was all so unexpected
+and so dangerous, and she was so perfectly equal to the
+circumstance.
+
+"I was asking to be allowed to go myself, Miss Holland," he said
+simply, "with whoever makes the investigation."
+
+Mrs. Hastings was looking mutely from one to another, her forehead
+in horizons of wrinkles.
+
+"I'm sure, Olivia, I think you ought to be careful what you say,"
+she plaintively began. "Mr. Hastings never allowed his name to go in
+any printed lists even, he was so particular. Our telephone had a
+private number, and all the papers had instructions never to mention
+him, even if he was murdered, unless he took down the notice
+himself. Then if anything important did happen, he often did take it
+down, nicely typewritten, and sometimes even then they didn't use
+it, because they knew how very particular he was. And of course we
+don't know how--"
+
+St. George's eyes blazed, but he did not lift them. The affront was
+unstudied and, indeed, unconscious. But Miss Holland understood how
+grave it was, for there are women whose intuition would tell them
+the etiquette due upon meeting the First Syndic of Andorra or a
+noble from Gambodia.
+
+"We want the truth about this as much as Mr. St. George does," she
+said quickly, smiling for the first time. St. George liked her
+smile. It was as if she were amused, not absent-minded nor yet a
+prey to the feminine immorality of ingratiation. "Besides," she
+continued, "I wish to know a great many things. How did the mulatto
+woman impress you, Mr. St. George?"
+
+Miss Holland loosened her coat, revealing a little flowery waist,
+and leaned forward with parted lips. She was very beautiful, with
+the beauty of perfect, blooming, colourful youth, without line or
+shadow. She was in the very noon of youth, but her eyes did not
+wander after the habit of youth; they were direct and steady and a
+bit critical, and she spoke slowly and with graceful sanity in a
+voice that was without nationality. She might have been the
+cultivated English-speaking daughter of almost any land of high
+civilization, or she might have been its princess. Her face showed
+her imaginative; her serene manner reassured one that she had not,
+in consequence, to pay the usury of lack of judgment; she seemed
+reflective, tender, and of a fine independence, tempered, however,
+by tradition and unerring taste. Above all, she seemed alive,
+receptive, like a woman with ten senses. And--above all again--she
+had charm. Finally, St. George could talk with her; he did not
+analyze why; he only knew that this woman understood what he said in
+precisely the way that he said it, which is, perhaps, the fifth
+essence in nature.
+
+"May I tell you?" asked St. George eagerly. "She seemed to me a very
+wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world. She
+is not mulatto--her features are quite classic; and she is not a
+fanatic or a mad-woman. She is, of her race, a strangely superior
+creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that
+at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some
+tremendous secret. I think we must find out what that is, first, for
+your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth
+while."
+
+"Ah," cried Miss Holland, "delightful. I begin to be glad that it
+happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I
+thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did
+make me wonder, but I hardly believed that."
+
+"The newspapers," Mr. Frothingham said acidly, "became very much
+involved in their statements concerning this matter."
+
+"This 'Tabnit,'" said Miss Holland, and flashed a smile of pretty
+deference at the lawyer to console him for her total neglect of his
+comment, "in McDougle Street. Who can he be?--he _is_ a man, I
+suppose. And where is McDougle Street?"
+
+St. George explained the location, and Mrs. Hastings fretfully
+commented.
+
+"I'm sure, Olivia," she said, "I think it is frightfully unwomanly
+in you--"
+
+"To take so much interest in my own murder?" Miss Holland asked in
+amusement. "Aunt Dora, I'm going to do more: I suggest that you and
+Mr. Frothingham and I go with Mr. St. George to this address in
+McDougle Street--"
+
+"My dear Olivia!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, "it's in the very heart of
+the Bowery--isn't it, Mr. St. John? And only think--"
+
+It was as if Mrs. Hastings' frustrate words emerged in the fantastic
+guise of her facial changes.
+
+"No, it isn't quite the Bowery, Mrs. Hastings," St. George
+explained, "though it won't look unlike."
+
+"I wish I knew what Mr. Hastings would have done," his widow
+mourned, "he always said to me: 'Medora, do only the necessary
+thing.' Do you think this _is_ the necessary thing--with all the
+frightful smells?"
+
+"It is perfectly safe," ventured St. George, "is it not, Mr.
+Frothingham?"
+
+Mr. Frothingham bowed and tried to make non-partisanship seem a
+tasteful resignation of his own will.
+
+"I am at Mrs. Hastings' command," he said, waving both hands, once,
+from the wrist.
+
+"You know the place is really only a few blocks from Washington
+Square," St. George submitted.
+
+Mrs. Hastings brightened.
+
+"Well, I have some friends in Washington Square," she said, "people
+whom I think a great deal of, and always have. If you really feel,
+Olivia--"
+
+"I do," said Miss Holland simply, "and let us go now, Aunt Dora. The
+brougham has been at the door since I came in. We may as well drive
+there as anywhere, if Mr. St. George is willing."
+
+"I shall be happy," said St. George sedately, longing to cry:
+"Willing! Willing! Oh, Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland--_willing_!"
+
+Miss Holland and St. George and the lawyer were alone for a few
+minutes while Mrs. Hastings rustled away for her bonnet. Miss
+Holland sat where the afternoon light, falling through the corner
+window, smote her hair to a glory of pale colour, and St. George's
+eyes wandered to the glass through which the sun fell. It was a thin
+pane of irregular pieces set in a design of quaint, meaningless
+characters, in the centre of which was the figure of a sphinx,
+crucified upon an upright cross and surrounded by a border of coiled
+asps with winged heads. The window glittered like a sheet of gems.
+
+"What wonderful glass," involuntarily said St. George.
+
+"Is it not?" Miss Holland said enthusiastically. "My father sent it.
+He sent nearly all these things from abroad."
+
+"I wonder where such glass is made," observed St. George; "it is
+like lace and precious stones--hardly more painted than carved."
+
+She bent upon him such a sudden, searching look that St. George felt
+his eyes held by her own.
+
+"Do you know anything of my father?" she demanded suddenly.
+
+"Only that Mrs. Hastings has just told me that he is abroad--in the
+South Atlantic," St. George wonderingly replied.
+
+"Why, I am very foolish," said Miss Holland quickly, "we have not
+heard from him in ten months now, and I am frightfully worried. Ah
+yes, the glass is beautiful. It was made in one of the South
+Atlantic islands, I believe--so were all these things," she added;
+"the same figure of the crucified sphinx is on many of them."
+
+"Do you know what it means?" he asked.
+
+"It is the symbol used by the people in one of the islands, my
+father said," she answered.
+
+"These symbols usually, I believe," volunteered Mr. Frothingham,
+frowning at the glass, "have little significance, standing merely
+for the loose barbaric ideas of a loose barbaric nation."
+
+St. George thought of the ladies of Doctor Johnson's Amicable
+Society who walked from the town hall to the Cathedral in Lichfield,
+"in linen gowns, and each has a stick with an acorn; but for the
+acorn they could give no reason."
+
+He looked long at the glass.
+
+"She," he said finally, "our false mulatto, ought to stand before
+just such glass."
+
+Miss Holland laughed. She nodded her head a little, once, every time
+she laughed, and St. George was learning to watch for that.
+
+"The glass would suit any style of beauty better than steel bars,"
+she said lightly as Mrs. Hastings came fluttering back. Mrs.
+Hastings fluttered ponderously, as humblebees fly. Indeed, when one
+considered, there was really a "blunt-faced bee" look about the
+woman.
+
+The brougham had on the box two men in smart livery; the footman,
+closing the door, received St. George's reply to Mrs. Hastings'
+appeal to "tell the man the number of this frightful place."
+
+"I dare say I haven't been careful," Mrs. Hastings kept anxiously
+observing, "I have been heedless, I dare say. And I always think
+that what one must avoid is heedlessness, don't you think? Didn't
+Napoleon say that if only Cæsar had been first in killing the men
+who wanted to kill him--something about Pompey's statue being kept
+clean. What was it--why should they blame Cæsar for the condition of
+the public statues?"
+
+"My dear Mrs. Hastings," Mr. Frothingham reminded her, his long
+gloved hands laid trimly along his knees as before, "you are in my
+care."
+
+The statue problem faded from the lady's eyes.
+
+"Poor, dear Mr. Hastings always said you were so admirable at
+cross-questioning," she recalled, partly reassured.
+
+"Ah," cried Miss Holland protestingly, "Aunt Dora, this is an
+adventure. We are going to see 'Tabnit.'"
+
+St. George was silent, ecstatically reviewing the events of the last
+six hours and thinking unenviously of Amory, rocking somewhere with
+_The Aloha_ on a mere stretch of green water:
+
+"If Chillingworth could see me now," he thought victoriously, as the
+carriage turned smartly into McDougle Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
+
+
+No. 19 McDougle Street had been chosen as a likely market by a
+"hokey-pokey" man, who had wheeled his cart to the curb before the
+entrance. There, despite Mrs. Hastings' coach-man's peremptory
+appeal, he continued to dispense stained ice-cream to the little
+denizens of No. 19 and the other houses in the row. The brougham,
+however, at once proved a counter-attraction and immediately an
+opposition group formed about the carriage step and exchanged
+penetrating comments upon the livery.
+
+"Mrs. Hastings, you and Miss Holland would better sit here,
+perhaps," suggested St. George, alighting hurriedly, "until I see if
+this man is to be found."
+
+"Please," said Miss Holland, "I've always been longing to go into
+one of these houses, and now I'm going. Aren't we, Aunt Dora?"
+
+"If you think--" ventured Mr. Frothingham in perplexity; but Mr.
+Frothingham's perplexity always impressed one as duty-born rather
+than judicious, and Miss Holland had already risen.
+
+"Olivia!" protested Mrs. Hastings faintly, accepting St. George's
+hand, "do look at those children's aprons. I'm afraid we'll all
+contract fever after fever, just coming this far."
+
+Unkempt women were occupying the doorstep of No. 19. St. George
+accosted them and asked the way to the rooms of a Mr. Tabnit. They
+smiled, displaying their wonderful teeth, consulted together, and
+finally with many labials and uncouth pointings of shapely hands
+they indicated the door of the "first floor front," whose wooden
+shutters were closely barred. St. George led the way and entered the
+bare, unclean passage where discordant voices and the odours of
+cooking wrought together to poison the air. He tapped smartly at the
+door.
+
+Immediately it was opened by a graceful boy, dressed in a long,
+belted coat of dun-colour. He had straight black hair, and eyes
+which one saw before one saw his face, and he gravely bowed to each
+of the party in turn before answering St. George's question.
+
+"Assuredly," said the youth in perfect English, "enter."
+
+They found themselves in an ample room extending the full depth of
+the house; and partly because the light was dim and partly in sheer
+amazement they involuntarily paused as the door clicked behind them.
+The room's contrast to the squalid neighbourhood was complete. The
+apartment was carpeted in soft rugs laid one upon another so that
+footfalls were silenced. The walls and ceiling were smoothly covered
+with a neutral-tinted silk, patterned in dim figures; and from a
+fluted pillar of exceeding lightness an enormous candelabrum shed
+clear radiance upon the objects in the room. The couches and divans
+were woven of some light reed, made with high fantastic backs, in
+perfect purity of line however, and laid with white mattresses. A
+little reed table showed slender pipes above its surface and these,
+at a touch from the boy, sent to a great height tiny columns of
+water that tinkled back to the square of metal upon which the table
+was set. A huge fan of blanched grasses automatically swayed from
+above. On a side-table were decanters and cups and platters of a
+material frail and transparent. Before the shuttered window stood an
+observable plant with coloured leaves. On a great table in the
+room's centre were scattered objects which confused the eye. A light
+curtain stirring in the fan's faint breeze hung at the far end of
+the room.
+
+In a career which had held many surprises, some of which St. George
+would never be at liberty to reveal to the paper in whose service he
+had come upon them, this was one of the most alluring. The mere
+existence of this strange and luxurious habitation in the heart of
+such a neighbourhood would, past expression, delight Mr. Crass, the
+feature man, and no doubt move even Chillingworth to approval.
+Chillingworth and Crass! Already they seemed strangers. St. George
+glanced at Miss Holland; she was looking from side to side, like a
+bird alighted among strange flowers; she met his eyes and dimpled
+in frank delight. Mrs. Hastings sat erectly beside her, her
+tortoise-rimmed glasses expressing bland approval. The improbability
+of her surroundings had quite escaped her in her satisfied discovery
+that the place was habitable. The lawyer, his thin lips parted, his
+head thrown back so that his hair rested upon his coat collar,
+remained standing, one long hand upon a coat lapel.
+
+"Ah," said Miss Holland softly, "it _is_ an adventure, Aunt Dora."
+
+St. George liked that. It irritated him, he had once admitted, to
+see a woman live as if living were a matter of life and death. He
+wished her to be alive to everything, but without suspiciously
+scrutinizing details, like a census-taker. To appreciate did not
+seem to him properly to mean to assess. Miss Holland, he would have
+said, seemed to live by the beats of her heart and not by the waves
+of her hair--but another proof, perhaps, of "if thou likest her
+opinions thou wilt praise her virtues."
+
+It was but a moment before the curtain was lifted, and there
+approached a youth, apparently in the twenties, slender and
+delicately formed as a woman, his dark face surmounted by a great
+deal of snow-white hair. He was wearing garments of grey, cut in
+unusual and graceful lines, and his throat was closely wound in
+folds of soft white, fastened by a rectangular green jewel of
+notable size and brilliance. His eyes, large and of exceeding beauty
+and gentleness, were fixed upon St. George.
+
+"Sir," said St. George, "we have been given this address as one
+where we may be assisted in some inquiries of the utmost importance.
+The name which we have is simply 'Tabnit.' Have I the honour--"
+
+Their host bowed.
+
+"I am Prince Tabnit," he said quietly.
+
+St. George, filled with fresh amazement, gravely named himself and,
+making presentation of the others, purposely omitted the name of
+Miss Holland. However, hardly had he finished before their host
+bowed before Miss Holland herself.
+
+"And you," he said, "you to whom I owe an expiation which I can
+never make,--do you know it is my servant who would have taken your
+life?"
+
+In the brief interval following this naïve assertion, his guests
+were not unnaturally speechless. Miss Holland, bending slightly
+forward, looked at the prince breathlessly.
+
+"I have suffered," he went on, "I have suffered indescribably since
+that terrible morning when I missed her and understood her mission.
+I followed quickly--I was without when you entered, but I came too
+late. Since then I have waited, unwilling to go to you, certain that
+the gods would permit the possible. And now--what shall I say?"
+
+He hesitated, his eyes meeting Miss Holland's. And in that moment
+Mrs. Hastings found her voice. She curved the chain of her
+eye-glasses over her ear, threw back her head until the
+tortoise-rims included her host, and spoke her mind.
+
+"Well, Prince Tabnit," she said sharply--quite as if, St. George
+thought, she had been nursery governess to princes all her life--"I
+must say that I think your regret comes somewhat late in the day.
+It's all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has
+tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a
+servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous
+and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?"
+
+Her voice, never modulated in her excitements, was so full that no
+one heard at that instant a quick, indrawn breath from St. George,
+having something of triumph and something of terror. Even as he
+listened he had been running swiftly over the objects in the room to
+fasten every one in his memory, and his eyes had rested upon the
+table at his side. A disc of bronze, supported upon a carven tripod,
+caught the light and challenged attention to its delicate traceries;
+and within its border of asps and goat's horns he saw cut in the
+dull metal a sphinx crucified upon an upright cross--an exact
+facsimile of the device upon that strange opalized glass from some
+far-away island which he had lately noted in the window in Mrs.
+Hastings' drawing-room. Instantly his mind was besieged by a volley
+of suppositions and imaginings, but even in his intense excitement
+as to what this simple discovery might bode, he heard the prince's
+soft reply to Mrs. Hastings:
+
+"Madame," said the prince, "she is a loyal creature. Whatever she
+does, she believes herself to be doing in my service. I trusted her.
+I believed that such error was impossible to her."
+
+"Error!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, looking about her for support and
+finding little in the aspect of Mr. Augustus Frothingham, who
+appeared to be regarding the whole proceeding as one from which he
+was to extract data to be thought out at some future infinitely
+removed.
+
+As for St. George, he had never had great traffic with a future
+infinitely removed; he had a youthful and somewhat imaginative
+fashion of striking before the iron was well in the fire.
+
+"Your servant believed, then, your Highness," he said clearly,
+"that in taking Miss Holland's life she was serving you?"
+
+"I must regretfully conclude so."
+
+St. George rose, holding the little brazen disc which he had taken
+from the table, and confronted his host, compelling his eyes.
+
+"Perhaps you will tell us, Prince Tabnit," he said coolly, "what it
+is that the people who use this device find against Miss Holland's
+father?"
+
+St. George heard Olivia's little broken cry.
+
+"It is the same!" she exclaimed. "Aunt Dora--Mr. Frothingham--it is
+the crucified sphinx that was on so many of the things that father
+sent. Oh," she cried to the prince, "can it be possible that you
+know him--that you know anything of my father?"
+
+To St. George's amazement the face of the prince softened and glowed
+as if with peculiar delight, and he looked at St. George with
+admiration.
+
+"Is it possible," he murmured, half to himself, "that your race has
+already developed intuition? Are you indeed so near to the Unknown?"
+
+He took quick steps away and back, and turned again to St. George, a
+strange joy dawning in his face.
+
+"If there be some who are ready to know!" he said. "Ah," he recalled
+himself penitently to Miss Holland, "your father--Otho Holland, I
+have seen him many times."
+
+"_Seen Otho_!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, as pink and trembling and
+expressionless as a disturbed mold of jelly. "Oh, poor, dear Otho!
+Did he live where there are people like your frightful servant?
+Olivia, think! Maybe he is lying at the bottom of a gorge, all
+wounded and bloody, with a dagger in his back! Oh, my poor, dear
+Otho, who used to wheel me about!"
+
+Mrs. Hastings collapsed softly on the divan, her glasses fallen in
+her lap, her side-combs slipping silently to the rug. Olivia had
+risen and was standing before Prince Tabnit.
+
+"Tell me," she said trembling, "when have you seen him? Is he well?"
+
+Prince Tabnit swept the faces of the others and his eyes returned to
+Miss Holland and dropped to the floor.
+
+"The last time that I saw him, Miss Holland," he answered, "was
+three months ago. He was then alive and well."
+
+Something in his tone chilled St. George and sent a sudden thrill of
+fear to his heart.
+
+"He was then alive and well?" St. George repeated slowly. "Will you
+tell us more, your Highness? Will you tell us why the death of his
+daughter should be considered a service to the prince of a country
+which he had visited?"
+
+"You are very wonderful," observed the prince, smiling meditatively
+at St. George, "and your penetration gives me good news--news that
+I had not hoped for, yet. I can not tell you all that you ask, but I
+can tell you much. Will you sit down?"
+
+He turned and glanced at the curtain at the far end of the room.
+Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were
+placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties
+not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and
+Finnish and all but Icelandic cafés in every block.
+
+"Pray do me the honour," the prince besought, taking the dishes from
+the hands of the boy. "It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell
+you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before
+him."
+
+Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the
+smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business
+toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He
+impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from
+the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer
+atmosphere. The lawyer's face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of
+affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.
+
+There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a
+tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that
+had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and
+with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white
+berries, such as the Japanese call "pinedews"; there was a tea
+distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury
+and fantastic. So potent was the spell of the prince's hospitality,
+and so gracious the insistence with which he set before them the
+strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia, eager almost to tears
+for news of her father, and Mrs. Hastings, as critical and
+suspicious as some beetle with long antennæ, might not refuse them.
+As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might be Cagliostro's
+spagiric food, or "extract of Saturn," for aught that his previous
+experience equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and was
+constrained to nibble again.
+
+When they had been served, Prince Tabnit abruptly began speaking,
+the while turning the fine stem of his glass in his delicate
+fingers.
+
+"You do not know," he said simply, "where the island of Yaque lies?"
+
+Mrs. Hastings sat erect.
+
+"Yaque!" she exclaimed. "That was the name of the place where your
+father was, Olivia. I know I remembered it because it wasn't like
+the man What's-his-name in _As You Like It_, and because it didn't
+begin with a J."
+
+"The island is my home," Prince Tabnit continued, "and now, for the
+first time, I find myself absent from it. I have come a long
+journey. It is many miles to that little land in the eastern seas,
+that exquisite bit of the world, as yet unknown to any save the
+island-men. We have guarded its existence, but I have no fear to
+tell you, for no mariner, unaided by an islander, could steer a
+course to its coasts. And I can tell you little about the island for
+reasons which, if you will forgive me, you would hardly understand.
+I must tell you something of it, however, that you may know the
+remarkable conditions which led to the introduction of Mr. Holland
+to Yaque.
+
+"The island of Yaque," continued the prince, "or Arqua, as the name
+was written by the ancient Phoenicians, has been ruled by hereditary
+monarchs since 1050 B.C., when it was settled."
+
+"What date did I understand you to say, sir?" demanded Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham.
+
+The prince smiled faintly.
+
+"I am well aware," he said, "that to the western mind--indeed, to
+any modern mind save our own--I shall seem to be speaking in
+mockery. None the less, what I am saying is exact. It is believed
+that the enterprises of the Phoenicians in the early ages took them
+but a short distance, if at all, beyond the confines of the
+Mediterranean. It is merely known that, in the period of which I
+speak, a more adventurous spirit began to be manifested, and the
+Straits of Gibraltar were passed and settlements were made in
+Iberia. But how far these adventurers actually penetrated has been
+recorded only in those documents that are in the hands of my
+people--descendants of the boldest of these mariners who pushed
+their galleys out into the Atlantic. At this time the king of Tyre
+was Abibaal, soon to be succeeded by his son Hiram, the friend, you
+will remember, of King David,--"
+
+Mr. Frothingham, who did not go to the theatre for fear of exciting
+his imagination, uttered the soft non-explosion which should have
+been speech.
+
+"King Abibaal," continued the prince, "who maintained his court in
+great pomp, had a younger and favourite son who bore his own name.
+He was a wild youth of great daring, and upon the accession of
+Hiram to the throne he left Tyre and took command of a galley of
+adventuresome spirits, who were among the first to pass the
+straits and gain the open sea. The story of their wild voyage I
+need not detail; it is enough to say that their trireme was
+wrecked upon the coast of Yaque; and Abibaal and those who joined
+him--among them many members of the court circle and even of the
+royal family--settled and developed the island. And there the race
+has remained without taint of admixture, down to the present day.
+Of what was wrought on the island I can tell you little, though
+the time will come when the eyes of the whole world will be
+turned upon Yaque as the forerunner of mighty things. Ruled over
+by the descendants of Abibaal, the islanders have dwelt in peace
+and plenty for nearly three thousand years--until, in fact, less
+than a year ago. Then the line thus traceable to King Hiram
+himself abruptly terminated with the death of King Chelbes,
+without issue."
+
+Again Mr. Frothingham attempted to speak, and again he collapsed
+softly, without expression, according to his custom. As for St.
+George, he was remembering how, when he first went to the paper, he
+had invariably been sent to the anteroom to listen to the daily
+tales of invention, oppression and projects for which a continual
+procession of the more or less mentally deficient wished the
+_Sentinel_ to stand sponsor. St. George remembered in particular one
+young student who soberly claimed to have invented wireless
+telegraphy and who molested the staff for months. Was this olive
+prince, he wondered, going to prove himself worth only a half-column
+on a back page, after all?
+
+"I understand you to say," said St. George, with the weary
+self-restraint of one who deals with lunatics, "that the line of
+King Hiram, the friend of King David of Israel, became extinct less
+than a year ago?"
+
+The prince smiled.
+
+"Do not conceal your incredulity," he said liberally, "for I
+forgive it. You see, then," he went on serenely, "how in Yaque the
+question of the succession became engrossing. The matter was not
+merely one of ascendancy, for the Yaquians are singularly free from
+ambition. But their pride in their island is boundless. They see in
+her the advance guard of civilization, the peculiar people to whom
+have come to be intrusted many of the secrets of being. For I should
+tell you that my people live a life that is utterly beyond the ken
+of all, save a few rare minds in each generation. My people live
+what others dream about, what scientists struggle to fathom, what
+the keenest philosophers and economists among you can not formulate.
+We are," said Prince Tabnit serenely, "what the world will be a
+thousand years from now."
+
+"Well, I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings broke in plaintively, "that I hope
+your servant, for instance, is not a sample of what the world is
+coming to!"
+
+The prince smiled indulgently, as if a child had laid a little,
+detaining hand upon his sleeve.
+
+"Be that as it may," he said evenly, "the throne of Yaque was still
+empty. Many stood near to the crown, but there seemed no reason for
+choosing one more than another. One party wished to name the head of
+the House of the Litany, in Med, the King's city, who was the chief
+administrator of justice. Another, more democratic than these,
+wished to elevate to the throne a man from whose family we had won
+knowledge of both perpetual motion and the Fourth Dimension--"
+
+St. George smiled angelically, as one who resignedly sees the last
+fragments of a shining hope float away. This quite settled it. The
+olive prince was crazy. Did not St. George remember the old man in
+the frayed neckerchief and bagging pockets who had brought to the
+office of the _Sentinel_ chart after chart about perpetual motion,
+until St. George and Amory had one day told him gravely that they
+had a machine inside the office then that could make more things go
+for ever than he had ever dreamed of, though they had _not_ said
+that the machine was named Chillingworth.
+
+"You have knowledge of both these things?" asked St. George
+indulgently.
+
+"Yaque understood both those laws," said the prince quietly, "when
+William the Conqueror came to England."
+
+He hesitated for a moment and then, regardless of another soft
+explosion from Mr. Frothingham's lips, he added:
+
+"Do you not see? Will you not understand? It is our knowledge of the
+Fourth Dimension which has enabled us to keep our island a secret."
+
+St. George suddenly thrilled from head to foot. What if he were
+speaking the truth? What if this man were speaking the truth?
+
+"Moreover," resumed the prince, "there were those among us who had
+long believed that new strength would come to my people by the
+introduction of an inhabitant of one of the continents. His coming
+would, however, necessitate his sovereignty among us, in fulfilment
+of an ancient Phoenician law, providing that the state, and every
+satrapy therein, shall receive no service, either of blood or of
+bond, nor enter into the marriage contract with an alien; from which
+law only the royal house is exempt. Thus were the two needs of our
+land to be served by the means to which we had recourse. For there
+being no way to settle the difficulty, we vowed to leave the matter
+to Chance, that great patient arbiter of destinies of which your
+civilization takes no account, save to reduce it to slavery.
+Accordingly each inhabitant of the island took a solemn oath to
+await, with an open mind free from choice or prejudice, the
+settlement of the event, certain that the gods would permit the
+possible. Five days after this decision our watchers upon the hills
+sighted a South African transport bound for the Azores to coal. A
+hundred miles from our coast she was wrecked, and it was thought
+that all on board had been lost. A submarine was ordered to the
+spot--"
+
+"Do you mean," interrupted St. George, "that you were able to see
+the wreck at that distance?"
+
+"Certainly," said the prince. "Pray forgive me," he added winningly,
+"if I seem to boast. It is difficult for me to believe that your
+appliances are so immature. We were using steamship navigation and
+limiting our vision at the time of Pericles, but the futility of
+these was among our first discoveries."
+
+Involuntarily St. George turned to Miss Holland. What would she
+think, he found himself wondering. Her eyes were luminous and her
+breath was coming quickly; he was relieved to find that she had not
+the infectious vulgarity to doubt the possibility of what seemed
+impossible. This was one of the qualities of Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham, who had assumed an air of polite interest and an
+accurately cynical smile, and the manner of generously lending his
+professional attention to any of the vagaries of the client. Mrs.
+Hastings stirred uneasily.
+
+"I'm sure," she said fretfully, "that I must be very stupid, but I
+simply can _not_ follow you. Why, you talk about things that don't
+exist! My husband, who was a very practical and advanced man, would
+have shown you at once that what you say is impossible."
+
+Here was the attitude of the Commonplace the world over, thought St.
+George: to believe in wireless telegraphy simply because it has
+been found out, and to disbelieve in the Fourth Dimension because it
+has not been.
+
+"I can not explain these things," admitted the prince gravely, "and
+I dare say that you could prove that they do not exist, just as a
+man from another planet could show us to his own satisfaction that
+there are no such things as music or colour."
+
+"Go on, please," said Olivia eagerly.
+
+"Olivia, I'm sure," protested Mrs. Hastings, "I think it's very
+unwomanly of you to show such an interest in these things."
+
+"Will you bear with me for one moment, Mrs. Hastings?" begged the
+prince, "and perhaps I shall be able to interest you. The submarine
+returned, bringing the sole survivor of the wreck of the African
+transport."
+
+"Ah, now," Mrs. Hastings assured him blandly, "you are dealing with
+things that can happen. My brother Otho, my niece's father, was just
+this last year the sole survivor of the wreck of a very important
+vessel."
+
+"I have the honour, Mrs. Hastings, to be narrating to you the
+circumstances attending the discovery of your brother and Miss
+Holland's father, after the wreck of that vessel."
+
+"My father?" cried Olivia.
+
+The prince bowed.
+
+"After this manner, Chance had rewarded us. We crowned your father
+King of Yaque."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+OLIVIA PROPOSES
+
+
+Prince Tabnit's announcement was received by his guests in the
+silence of amazement. If they had been told that Miss Holland's
+father was secretly acting as King of England they could have been
+no more profoundly startled than to hear stated soberly that he had
+been for nearly a year the king of a cannibal island. For the
+cannibal phase of his experience seemed a foregone conclusion. To
+St. George, profoundly startled and most incredulous, the possible
+humour of the situation made first appeal. The picture of an
+American gentleman seated upon a gold throne in a leopard-skin coat,
+ordering "oysters and foes" for breakfast, was irresistible.
+
+          "But he shaved with a shell when he chose,
+          'Twas the manner of Primitive Man"
+
+floated through his mind, and he brought himself up sharply.
+Clearly, somebody was out of his head, but it must not be he.
+
+"What?" cried Mrs. Hastings in two inelegant syllables, on the
+second of which her uncontrollable voice rose. "My brother Otho, a
+vestry-man at St. Mark's--"
+
+"Aunt Dora!" pleaded Olivia. "Tell us," she besought the prince.
+
+"King Otho I of Yaque," the prince was begining, but the title was
+not to be calmly received by Mrs. Hastings.
+
+"_King_ Otho!" she articulated. "Then--am I royalty?"
+
+"All who may possibly succeed to the throne Blackstone holds to be
+royalty," said the lawyer in an edictal voice, and St. George looked
+away from Olivia.
+
+_The Princess Olivia_!
+
+"King Otho," continued the prince, "ruled wisely and well for seven
+months, and it was at the beginning of that time that the imperial
+submarine was sent to the Azores with letters and a packet to you.
+The enterprise, however, was attended by so great danger of
+discovery that it was never repeated. This is why, for so long, you
+have had no word from the king. And now I come," said the prince
+with hesitation, "to the difficult part of my narrative."
+
+He paused and Mr. Frothingham rushed to his assistance.
+
+"As the family solicitor," said the lawyer, pursing his lips, and
+waving his hands, once, from the wrists, "would you not better
+divulge to my ear alone, the--a--"
+
+"No--no!" flashed Olivia. "No, Mr. Frothingham--please."
+
+The prince inclined his head.
+
+"Will it surprise you, Miss Holland," he said, "to learn that I made
+my voyage to this country expressly to seek you out?"
+
+"To seek me?" exclaimed Olivia. "But--has anything happened to my
+father?"
+
+"We hope not," replied the prince, "but what I have to tell will
+none the less occasion you anxiety. Briefly, Miss Holland, it is
+more than three months since your father suddenly and mysteriously
+disappeared from Yaque, leaving absolutely no clue to his
+whereabouts."
+
+A little cry broke from Olivia's lips that went to St. George's
+heart. Mrs. Hastings, with a gesture that was quite wild and sent
+her bonnet hopelessly to one side, burst into a volley of
+exclamations and demands.
+
+"Who did it?" she wailed. "Who did it? Otho is a gentleman. He
+would never have the bad taste to disappear, like all those
+dreadful people's wives, if somebody hadn't--"
+
+"My dear Madame," interposed Mr. Frothingham, "calm--calm
+yourself. There are families of undisputed position which
+record disappearances in several generations."
+
+"Please," pleaded Olivia. "Ah, tell us," she begged the prince
+again.
+
+"There is, unfortunately, but little to tell, Miss Holland," said
+the prince with sympathetic regret. "I had the honour, three months
+ago, to entertain the king, your father, at dinner. We parted at
+midnight. His Majesty seemed--"
+
+"His Majesty!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, smiling up at the opposite
+wall as if her thought saw glories.
+
+"--in the best of health and spirits," continued the prince. "A
+meeting of the High Council was to be held at noon on the following
+day. The king did not appear. From that moment no eye in Yaque has
+fallen upon him."
+
+"One moment, your Highness," said St. George quickly; "in the
+absence of the king, who presides over the High Council?"
+
+"As the head of the House of the Litany, the chief administrator of
+justice, it is I," said the prince with humility.
+
+"Ah, yes," St. George said evenly.
+
+"But what have you done?" cried Olivia. "Have you had search made?
+Have you--"
+
+"Everything," the prince assured her. "The island is not large. Not
+a corner of it remains unvisited. The people, who were devoted to
+the king, your father, have sought night and day. There is, it is
+hardly right to conceal from you," the prince hesitated, "a
+circumstance which makes the disappearance the more alarming."
+
+"Tell us. Keep nothing from us, I beg, Prince Tabnit," besought
+Olivia.
+
+"For centuries," said the prince slowly, "there has been in the
+keeping of the High Council of the island a casket, containing what
+is known as the Hereditary Treasure. This casket, with some of the
+finest of its jewels, was left by King Abibaal himself. Since his
+time every king of the island has upon his death bequeathed to the
+casket the finest jewel in his possession; and its contents are now
+therefore of inestimable value. The circumstance to which I refer is
+that two days after the disappearance of the king, your father,
+which spread grief and alarm through all Yaque, it was discovered
+that the Hereditary Treasure was gone."
+
+"Gone!" burst from the lips of the prince's auditors.
+
+"As utterly as if the Fifth Dimension had received it," the prince
+gravely assured them. "The loss, as you may imagine, is a grievous
+one. The High Council immediately issued a proclamation that if the
+treasure be not restored by a certain date--now barely two weeks
+away--a heavy tax will be levied upon the people to make good, in
+the coin of the realm, this incalculable loss. Against this the
+people, though they are a people of peace, are murmurous."
+
+"Indeed!" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Great loyalty it is that sets up the
+loss of their trumpery treasure over and above the loss of their
+king, my brother Otho! If," she shrilled indignantly, "we are not
+unwise to listen to this at all. What is it you think? What is it
+your people think?"
+
+She raised her head until she had framed the prince in
+tortoise-shell. Mrs. Hastings never held her head quite still. It
+continually waved about a little, so that usually, even in peace, it
+intimated indignation; and when actual indignation set in, the jet
+on her bonnet tinkled and ticked like so many angry sparrows.
+
+"Madame," said the prince, "there are those among his Majesty's
+subjects who would willingly lay down their lives for him. But he is
+a stranger to us--come of an alien race; and the double
+disappearance is a most tragic occurrence, which the burden of the
+tax has emphasized. To be frank, were his Majesty to reappear in
+Yaque without the treasure having been found--"
+
+"Oh!" breathed Mrs. Hastings, "they would kill him!"
+
+The prince shuddered and set his white teeth in his nether lip.
+
+"The gods forbid," he said. "Such primeval punishment is as unknown
+among us as is war itself. How little you know my people; how
+pitifully your instincts have become--forgive me--corrupted by
+living in this barbarous age of yours, fumbling as you do at
+civilization. With us death is a sacred rite, the highest tribute
+and the last sacrifice to the Absolute. Our dying are carried to the
+Temple of the Worshipers of Distance, and are there consecrated.
+The limit of our punishment would be aerial exposure--"
+
+"You mean?" cried St. George.
+
+"I mean that in extreme cases we have, with due rite and ceremonial,
+given a victim to an airship, without ballast or rudder, and
+abundantly provisioned. Then with solemn ritual we have set him
+adrift--an offering to the great spirits of space--so that he may
+come to know. This," the prince paused in emotion, "this is the
+worst that could befall your father."
+
+"How horrible!" cried Olivia. "Oh, how horrible."
+
+"Oh," Mrs. Hastings moaned, "he was born to it. He was born to it.
+When he was six he tied kites to his arms and jumped out the window
+of the cupola and broke his collar bone--oh, Otho,--oh Heaven,--and
+I made him eat oatmeal gruel three times a day when he was getting
+well."
+
+"Prince Tabnit," said St. George, "I beg you not to jest with us.
+Have consideration for the two to whom this man is dear."
+
+"I am speaking truth to you," said the prince earnestly. "I do not
+wish to alarm these ladies, but I am bound in honour to tell you
+what I know."
+
+"Ah then," said St. George, his narrowed eyes meeting those of the
+prince, "since the taking of life is unknown to you in Yaque, will
+you explain how it was that your servant adopted such unerring
+means to take the life of Miss Holland? And why?"
+
+"My servant," said the prince readily, "belongs to the lahnas or
+former serfs of the island. Upon her people, now the owners of rich
+lands, the tax will fall heavily. Crazed by what she considers her
+people's wrongs following upon the coming of the stranger sovereign,
+the poor creature must have developed the primitive instincts of
+your race. Before coming to this country my servant had never heard
+of murder save as a superseded custom of antiquity, like the
+crucifying of lions. Her discovery of your daily practice of murder,
+and of murder practised as a cure for crime--"
+
+"Sir," began the lawyer imposingly.
+
+"--wakened in her the primitive instincts of humanity, and her
+instinct took the deplorable and fanatic form of your own courts,"
+finished the prince. "Her bitterness toward his Majesty she sought
+to visit upon his daughter."
+
+Olivia sprang to her feet.
+
+"I must go to my father. I must go to Yaque," she cried ringingly.
+"Prince Tabnit, will you take me to him?"
+
+Into the prince's face leaped a fire of admiration for her beauty
+and her daring. He bowed before her, his lowered lashes making thick
+shadows on his dark cheeks.
+
+"I insist upon this," cried little Olivia firmly, "and if you do not
+permit it, Prince Tabnit, we must publish what you have told us
+from one end of the city to the other."
+
+"Yes, by Jove," thought St. George, "and one's country will have a
+Yaque exhibit in its own department at the next world's fair."
+
+"Olivia! My child! Miss Holland--," began the lawyer.
+
+The prince spoke tranquilly.
+
+"It is precisely this errand," he said, "that has brought me to
+America. Do you not see that, in the event of your father's failure
+to return to his people, you will eventually be Queen of Yaque?"
+
+St. George found himself looking fixedly at Mrs. Hastings' false
+front as the only reality in the room. If in a minute Rollo was
+going to waken him by bringing in his coffee, he was going to
+throttle Rollo--that was all. Olivia Holland, an American heiress,
+the hereditary princess of a cannibal island! St. George still
+insisted upon the cannibal; it somehow gave him a foothold among the
+actualities.
+
+"I!" cried Olivia.
+
+Mrs. Hastings, brows lifted, lips parted, winked with lightning
+rapidity in an effort to understand.
+
+St. George pulled himself together.
+
+"Your Highness," he said sternly, "there are several things upon
+which I must ask you to enlighten us. And the first, which I hope
+you will forgive, is whether you have any direct proof that what
+you tell us of Miss Holland's father is true."
+
+"That's it! That's it!" Mr. Frothingham joined him with all the
+importance of having made the suggestion. "We can hardly proceed in
+due order without proofs, sir."
+
+The prince turned toward the curtain at the room's end and the youth
+appeared once more, this time bearing a light oval casket of
+delicate workmanship. It was of a substance resembling both glass
+and metal of changing, rainbow tints, and it passed through St.
+George's mind as he observed it that there must be, to give such a
+dazzling and unreal effect, more than seven colours in the spectrum.
+
+"A spectrum of seven colours," said the prince at the same moment,
+"could not, of course, produce this surface. I confess that until I
+came to this country I did not know that you had so few colours. Our
+spectrum already consists of twelve colours visible to the naked
+eye, and at least five more are distinguishable through our powerful
+magnifying glasses."
+
+St. George was silent. It was as if he had suddenly been permitted
+to look past the door that bars and threatens all knowledge.
+
+The prince unlocked the casket. He drew out first a quantity of
+paper of extreme thinness and lightness on which, embossed and
+emblazoned, was the coat of arms of the Hollands--a sheaf of wheat
+and an unicorn's head--and this was surmounted by a crown.
+
+"This," said the prince, "is now the device upon the signet ring of
+the King of Yaque, the arms of your own family. And here chances to
+be a letter from your father containing some instructions to me. It
+is true that writing has with us been superseded by wireless
+communication, excepting where there is need of great secrecy. Then
+we employ the alphabet of any language we choose, these being almost
+disused, as are the Cuneiform and Coptic to you."
+
+"And how is it," St. George could not resist asking, "that you know
+and speak the English?"
+
+The prince smiled swiftly.
+
+"To you," he said, "who delve for knowledge and who do not know that
+it is absolute and to be possessed at will, this can not now be made
+clear. Perhaps some day..."
+
+Olivia had taken the paper from the prince and pressed it to her
+lips, her eyes filling with tears. There was no mistaking that
+evidence, for this was her father's familiar hand.
+
+"Otho always did write a fearful scrawl," Mrs. Hastings commented,
+"his l's and his t's and his vowels were all the same height. I used
+to tell him that I didn't know whatever people would think."
+
+"I may, moreover," continued the prince, "call to mind several
+articles which were included in the packet sent from the Azores by
+his Majesty. You have, for example, a tapestry representing an ibis
+hunt; you have an image in pink sutro, or soft marble, of an ancient
+Phoenician god--Melkarth. And you have a length of stained glass
+bearing the figure of the Tyrian sphinx, crucified, and surrounded
+by coiled asps."
+
+"Yes, it is true," said Olivia, "we have all these things."
+
+"Why, the trash must be quite expensive," observed Mrs. Hastings. "I
+don't care much for so many colours myself, perhaps because I always
+wear black; though I did wear light colours a good deal when I was a
+girl."
+
+"What else, Mr. St. George?" inquired the prince pleasantly.
+
+"Nothing else," cried Olivia passionately. "I am satisfied. My
+father is in danger, and I believe that he is in Yaque, for he would
+never of his own will desert a place of trust. I must go to him.
+And, Aunt Dora, you and Mr. Frothingham must go with me."
+
+"Oh, Olivia!" wailed Mrs. Hastings, a different key for every
+syllable, "think--consider! Is it the necessary thing to do? And
+what would your poor dear uncle have done? And is there a better way
+than his way? For I always say that it is not really necessary to do
+as my poor dear husband would have done, providing only that we can
+find a better way. Oh," she mourned, lifting her hands, "that this
+frightful thing should come to me at my age. Otho may be married to
+a cannibal princess, with his sons catching wild goats by the hair
+like Tennyson and the whistling parrots--"
+
+"Madame," said the prince coldly, "forgets what I have been saying
+of my country."
+
+"I do not forget," declared Mrs. Hastings sharply, "but being behind
+civilization and being ahead of civilization comes to the same thing
+more than once. In morals it does."
+
+St. George was silent. Olivia's splendid daring in her passionate
+decision to go to her father stirred him powerfully; moreover, her
+words outlined a possible course of his own whose magnitude startled
+him, and at the same time filled him with a sudden, dazzling hope.
+
+"But where is your island, Prince Tabnit?" he asked. "You've
+naturally no consul there and no cable, since you are not even on
+the map."
+
+"Yaque," said the prince readily, "lies almost due southwest from
+the Azores."
+
+Mr. Frothingham stirred skeptically.
+
+"But such an island," he said pompously, "so rich in material for
+the archaeologist, the anthropologist, the explorer in all fields of
+antiquity--ah, it is out of the question, out of the question!"
+
+"It is difficult," said the prince patiently, "most difficult for me
+to make myself intelligible to you--as difficult, if you will
+forgive me, as if you were to try to explain calculus to one of the
+street boys outside. But directly your phase of civilization has
+opened to you the secrets of the Fourth Dimension, much will be
+discovered to you which you do not now discern or dream, and among
+these, Yaque. I do not jest," he added wearily, "neither do I expect
+you to believe me. But I have told you the truth. And it would be
+impossible for you to reach Yaque save in the company of one of the
+islanders to whom the secret is known. I can not explain to you, any
+more than I can explain harmony or colour."
+
+"Well, I'm sure," cried Mrs. Hastings fretfully, "I don't know why
+you all keep wandering from the subject so. Now, my brother Otho--"
+
+"Prince Tabnit,"--Olivia's voice never seemed to interrupt, but
+rather to "divide evidence finely" at the proper moment--"how long
+will it take us to reach Yaque?"
+
+St. George thrilled at that "us."
+
+"My submarine," replied the prince, "is plying about outside the
+harbour. I arrived in four days."
+
+"By the way," St. George submitted, "since your wireless system is
+perfected, why can not we have news of your island from here?"
+
+"The curve of the earth," explained the prince readily, "prevents.
+We have conquered only those problems with which we have had to
+deal. The curve of the earth has of course never entered our
+calculation. We have approached the problem from another
+standpoint."
+
+"We have much to do, Prince Tabnit," said Olivia; "when may we
+leave?"
+
+"Command me," said Prince Tabnit, bowing.
+
+"To-morrow!" cried Olivia, "to-morrow, at noon."
+
+"Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings' voice broke over the name like ice upon a
+warm promontory. Mrs. Hastings' voice was suited to say "Keziah" or
+"Katinka," not Olivia.
+
+"Can you go, Mr. Frothingham?" demanded Olivia.
+
+Mr. Frothingham's long hands hung down and he looked as if she had
+proposed a jaunt to Mars.
+
+"My physician has ordered a sea-change," he mumbled doubtfully, "my
+daughter Antoinette--I--really--there is nothing in all my
+experience--"
+
+"Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings in tears was superintending the search for
+both side-combs.
+
+"Aunt Dora," said Olivia, "you're not going to fail me now. Prince
+Tabnit--at noon to-morrow. Where shall we meet?"
+
+St. George listened, glowing.
+
+"May I have the honour," suggested the prince, "of waiting upon you
+at noon to conduct you? And I need hardly say that we undertake the
+journey under oath of secrecy?"
+
+"Anything--anything!" cried Olivia.
+
+"Oh, my dear Olivia," breathed Mrs. Hastings weakly, "taking me, at
+my age, into this awful place of Four Dimentias--or whatever it was
+you said."
+
+"We will be ready to go with you at noon," said Olivia steadily.
+
+St. George held his peace as they made their adieux. A great many
+things remained to be thought out, but one was clear enough.
+
+The boy servant ran before them to the door. They made their way to
+the street in the early dusk. A hurdy-gurdy on the curb was bubbling
+over with merry discords, and was flanked by garrulous Italians with
+push-carts, lighted by flaring torches. Men were returning from
+work, children were quarreling, women were in doorways, and a
+policeman was gossiping with the footman in a knot of watching
+idlers. With a sigh that was like a groan, Mrs. Hastings sank back
+on the cushions of the brougham.
+
+"I feel," she said, eyes closed, "as if I had been in a pagan temple
+where they worship oracles and what's-his-names. What time is it? I
+haven't an idea. Dear, dear, I want to get home and feel as if my
+feet were on land and water again. I want some strong sleep and a
+good sound cup of coffee, and then I shall know what's actually
+what."
+
+To St. George the slow drive up town was no less unreal than their
+visit. His head was whirling, a hundred plans and speculations
+filled his mind, and through these Mrs Hastings' chatter of
+forebodings and the lawyer's patterned utterance hardly found their
+way. At his own street he was set down, with Mrs. Hastings'
+permission to call next day.
+
+Miss Holland gave him her hand.
+
+"I can not thank you," she said, "I can not thank you. But try to
+know, won't you, what this has been to me. Until to-morrow."
+
+Until to-morrow. St. George stood in the brightness of the street
+looking after the vanishing carriage, his hand tingling from her
+touch. Then he went up to his apartment and met Rollo--sleek,
+deferential, the acme of the polite barbarism in which the prince
+had made St. George feel that he and his world were living. Ah, he
+thought, as Rollo took his hat, this was no way to live, with the
+whole world singing to be discovered anew.
+
+He sat down before the trim little white table with its pretty china
+and silver and its one rose-shaded candle, but the doubtful content
+of comfort was suddenly not enough. The spirit of the road and of
+the chase was in his veins, and he was aglow with "the taste for
+pilgriming." He looked about on the simple luxury with which he had
+surrounded himself, and he welcomed his farewell to it. And when
+Rollo had gone up stairs to complain in person of the shad-roe, St.
+George spoke aloud:
+
+"If Miss Holland sails for Yaque to-morrow on the prince's
+submarine," he said, "_The Aloha_ and I will follow her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TWO LITTLE MEN
+
+
+Next morning St. George was early astir. He had slept little and his
+dreams had been grotesques. He threw up his blind and looked across
+buildings to the grey park. The sky was marked with rose, the still
+reservoir gave back colour upon its breast, and the tower upon its
+margin might have been some guttural-christened castle on the Rhine.
+St. George drew a deep breath of good, new air and smiled for the
+sake of the things that the day was to bring him. He was in the
+golden age when the youthful expectation of enjoyment is just
+beginning to be savoured by the inevitable longing for more light,
+and he seemed to himself to be alluringly near the verge of both.
+
+His first care the evening before had been to hunt out
+Chillingworth. He had found him in a theatre and had got him out to
+the foyer and kept him through the third act, pouring in his ears as
+much as he felt that it was well for him to know. Chillingworth had
+drawn his square, brown hands through his hair and, in lieu of
+copy-paper, had nibbled away his programme and paced the corner by
+the cloak-room.
+
+"It looks like a great big thing," said the city editor; "don't you
+think it looks like a great big thing?"
+
+"Extraordinarily so," assented St. George, watching him.
+
+"Can you handle it alone, do you think?" Chillingworth demanded.
+
+"Ah, well now, that depends," replied St. George. "I'll see it
+through, if it takes me to Yaque. But I'd like you to promise, Mr.
+Chillingworth, that you won't turn Crass loose at it while I'm gone,
+with his feverish head-lines. Mrs. Hastings and her niece must be
+spared that, at all events."
+
+"Don't you be a sentimental idiot," snapped Chillingworth, "and
+spoil the biggest city story the paper ever had. Why, this may draw
+the whole United States into a row, and mean war and a new
+possession and maybe consulates and governorships and one thing or
+another for the whole staff. St. George, don't spoil the sport.
+Remember, I'm dropsical and nobody can tell what may happen. By the
+way, where did you say this prince man is?"
+
+"Ah, I didn't say," St. George had answered quietly. "If you'll
+forgive me, I don't think I shall say."
+
+"Oh, you don't," ejaculated Chillingworth. "Well, you please be
+around at eight o'clock in the morning."
+
+St. George watched him walking sidewise down the aisle as he always
+walked when he was excited. Chillingworth was a good sort at heart,
+too; but given, as the bishop had once said of some one else, to
+spending right royally a deal of sagacity under the obvious
+impression that this is the only wisdom.
+
+At his desk next morning Chillingworth gave to St. George a note
+from Amory, who had been at Long Branch with _The Aloha_ when the
+letter was posted and was coming up that noon to put ashore
+Bennietod.
+
+"May Cawthorne have his day off to-morrow and go with me?" the
+letter ended. "I'll call up at noon to find out."
+
+"Yah!" growled Chillingworth, "it's breaking up the whole staff,
+that's what it's doin'. You'll all want cut-glass typewriters next."
+
+"If I should sail to-day," observed St. George, quite as if he were
+boarding a Sound steamer, "I'd like to take on at least two men. And
+I'd like Amory and Cawthorne. You could hardly go yourself, could
+you, Mr. Chillingworth?"
+
+"No, I couldn't," growled Chillingworth, "I've got to keep my tastes
+down. And I've got to save up to buy kid gloves for the staff. Look
+here--" he added, and hesitated.
+
+"Yes?" St. George complied in some surprise.
+
+"Bennietod's half sick anyway," said Chillingworth, "he's thin as
+water, and if you would care--"
+
+"By all means then," St. George assented heartily, "I would care
+immensely. Bennietod sick is like somebody else healthy. Will you
+mind getting Amory on the wire when he calls up, and tell him to
+show up without fail at my place at noon to-day? And to wait there
+for me."
+
+Little Cawthorne, with a pair of shears quite a yard long, was
+sitting at his desk clipping jokes for the fiction page. He was
+humming a weary little tune to the effect that "Billy Enny took a
+penny but now he hadn't many--Lookie They!" with which he whiled
+away the hours of his gravest toil, coming out strongly on the
+"Lookie They!" until Benfy on the floor above pounded for quiet
+which he never got.
+
+"Cawthorne," said St. George, "it may be that I'm leaving to-night
+on the yacht for an island out in the southeast. And the chief says
+that you and Amory are to go along. Can you go?"
+
+Little Cawthorne's blue eyes met St. George's steadily for a moment,
+and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.
+
+"I can get the page done in an hour," he promised, "and I can pack
+my thirty cents in ten minutes. Will that do?"
+
+St. George laughed.
+
+"Ah, well now, this goes," he said. "Ask Chillingworth. Don't tell
+any one else."
+
+"'Billy Enny took a penny,'" hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect
+tranquillity.
+
+St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand
+doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to
+face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away.
+Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world
+which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present
+knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced
+his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk
+more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.
+
+The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early
+morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand
+Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only
+avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out
+incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For
+only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to
+be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid
+wonderment at crêpe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed
+woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in
+McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive
+comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour
+gone astray.
+
+St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted
+him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons
+brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the
+latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of
+furniture remained.
+
+He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find
+the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and
+he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could
+have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls,
+to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so
+emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured
+a title. But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted
+and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable
+characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the
+prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and
+questioned a group of boys in the passage.
+
+"Yup," shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation
+distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement
+as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, "he means de
+bloke wid de black block. Aw, he lef' early dis mornin' wid 's junk
+follerin.' Dey's two of 'em. Wot's he t'ink? Dis ain't no Nigger's
+Rest. Dis yere's all Eyetalian."
+
+St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street. It was not yet ten
+o'clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and
+for his life he could not have waited longer. Perhaps it was not
+true at all; perhaps none of it had happened. The McDougle Street
+part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth? But as he
+sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better.
+The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time,
+and she had said "Until to-morrow."
+
+On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to
+her apartment. He found the drawing-room in confusion--the furniture
+covered with linen, the bric-à-brac gone, and three steamer trunks
+strapped and standing outside the door. All of which mattered to him
+less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.
+
+She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and
+very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had
+been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober
+little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he
+could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.
+She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To
+complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before
+the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.
+
+"This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and
+a muffin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."
+
+For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.
+
+"You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the
+little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.
+
+"Really leaving," she assented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham
+sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great
+comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added
+naïvely, "but he must take her."
+
+St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he
+reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the
+daughter of its sovereign.
+
+"Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.
+
+He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place
+below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince,
+it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to assure them
+that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no
+impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt
+withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St.
+George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a
+world of uncertainty.
+
+"I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided
+between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear
+lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.
+
+Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.
+
+"Have a muffin--do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in
+America for a time--let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St.
+George, I want--oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate--"
+
+"Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you
+see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now
+to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."
+
+"No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was
+a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through
+the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds
+without packing a bag and feeding the peacocks and leaving, pinned
+to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.
+
+"Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought.
+"Forgive me--what are you going to do all alone there in that
+strange land, and such a land?"
+
+He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he
+was lost in anticipative admiration; when she was neither he admired
+more than ever.
+
+"I don't know," said Olivia gravely, "I only know that I must go.
+You see that, do you not--that I must go?"
+
+"Ah, yes," St. George assured her, "I do indeed, believe me. Don't
+you think," he said, "that I might give you a lamp to rub if you
+need help? And then I'll appear."
+
+"In Yaque?"
+
+He nodded gravely.
+
+"Yes, in Yaque. I shall rise out of a jar like the Evil Genie; and
+though I shall be quite helpless you will still have the lamp. And I
+shall be no end glad to have appeared."
+
+"But suppose," said Olivia merrily, "that when I have eaten a
+pomegranate or a potato or something in Yaque I forget all about
+America? And when you step out of the jar I say 'Off with his head,'
+by mistake. How shall I know it is you when the jar is opened?"
+
+"I shall ask you what the population of Yaque is," he assured her,
+"and how the island compares with Manhattan, and if this is your
+first visit, and how you are enjoying your stay; and then you will
+recognize the talk of civilization and spare me."
+
+"No," she protested, "I've longed to say 'Off with his head' to too
+many people who have said all that to me. And you mustn't say that a
+holiday always seems like Sunday, either."
+
+Whereat they both laughed, and it seemed an uncommonly pleasant
+world, and even the sad errand that was taking Olivia to Yaque
+looked like a hope.
+
+Then the talk ran on pleasantly, and things went very briskly
+forward, and there was no dearth of fleet little smiles at this and
+that. What was she to bring him from Yaque--a pet ibis? No, he had
+no taste for ibises--unless indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension
+ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a
+magic field-glass, with which one might see what is happening at an
+infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he
+wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her
+errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the
+puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor
+children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of
+science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with
+mere tricks of jars of genii instead of applied electricity and its
+daring. What an Arabian Nights' Entertainment we might have had if
+only Scheherazade had ever heard of the Present! As for the
+thousand-and-one-nights, they would not have contained all her
+invention. No wonder that the time went trippingly for the two who
+were concerned in such bewildering speculation as the prince had
+made possible and who were furthering acquaintanceship besides.
+
+"Ah, well now, at all events," begged St. George at length, "will
+you remember something while you are away?"
+
+"Your kindness, always," she returned.
+
+"But will you remember," said St. George with his boy's eagerness,
+"that there is some one who hopes no less than you for your success,
+and who will be infinitely proud of any command at all from you? And
+will you remember that, though I may not be successful, I shall at
+least be doing something to try to help you?"
+
+"You are very good," she said gently, "I shall remember. For already
+you have not only helped me--you have made the whole matter
+possible."
+
+"And what of that," propounded St. George gloomily, "if I can't help
+you just when the danger begins? I insist, Miss Holland, that it
+takes far more good nature to see some one else set off at adventure
+than it takes to go one's self. Won't you let me come back here at
+twelve o'clock and go down with you to the boat?"
+
+"By all means," Olivia assented, "my aunt and I shall both be glad,
+Mr. St. George. Then you can wish us well. What is a submarine
+like," she wanted to know; "were you ever on one?"
+
+"Never, excepting a number of times," replied St. George, supremely
+unconscious of any vagueness. He was rapidly losing count of all
+events up to the present. He was concerned only with these things:
+that she was here with him, that the time might be measured by
+minutes until she would be caught away to undergo neither knew what
+perils, and that at any minute Mrs. Hastings might escape from the
+chemist's.
+
+Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was
+quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did
+make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her
+drawing-room had been untenanted. And in the meantime no one knows
+what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so
+perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon
+the shore for a word of farewell. But, indeed, if it were not for
+the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would
+become very tame affairs. When the first man and maid said even the
+most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the
+right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion. Very likely
+the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination.
+Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the
+preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it. And, enchantment
+being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been
+that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat
+staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and
+Olivia was taking her tea. Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very
+literal interfering goddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so
+that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent
+and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness. But it
+must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore
+were "_les antipodes des grâces_." She was followed by a footman,
+his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan
+and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hastings
+had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and
+whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug. She sat
+down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another
+sort of energy and became fragments of talk. Mrs. Hastings was like
+the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the goddess of silence, but
+could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. St. George," she said. "I'm sure I've quite
+forgotten everything. Olivia dear, I've had all the prescriptions
+made up that I've ever taken to Rutledge's, because no one can tell
+what the climate will be like, it's so low on the map. I've looked
+up the Azores--that's where we get some of our choicest cheese. And
+camphor--I've got a pound of camphor. And I must say positively that
+I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the
+camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now
+it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound. And then the flaxseed,
+Olivia dear. I've got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell--"
+
+St. George doubted if she knew when he said good morning, although
+she named him Mr. St. John, gave him permission to go to the boat,
+hoped in one breath that he would come again to see them, and in the
+next that he would send them a copy of whatever the _Sentinel_ might
+publish about them, in serene oblivion of the state of the
+post-office department in Yaque. Mrs. Hastings, in short, was one of
+the women who are thrown into violent mental convulsions by the
+prospect of a journey; this was not at all because she was setting
+sail specifically for Yaque, for the moment that she saw a porter or
+a pier, though she was bound only for the Bronx or Staten Island,
+she was affected in the same way.
+
+As Olivia gave St. George her hand he came perilously near telling
+her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he
+were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the
+submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator
+bell for so long that the boy deliberately stopped on the floor
+below and waited, with the diabolical independence of the American
+lords of the lift, "for to teach 'im a lessing," this one explained
+to a passing chamber-maid.
+
+St. George hurried to his apartment to leave a note for Amory who
+was directed upon his arrival to bide there and await his host's
+return. Then he paced the floor until it was time to go back to the
+Boris, deaf to Rollo's solemn information that the dust comes up out
+of the varnish of furniture during the night, like cream out of
+milk. By the time he had boarded a down-town car, St. George had
+tortured himself to distraction, and his own responsibility in this
+submarine voyage loomed large and threatening. Therefore, it
+suddenly assumed the proportion of mountains yet unseen when, though
+it wanted ten minutes to twelve when he reached the Boris, his card
+was returned by a faint polite clerk with the information that Mrs.
+Hastings and Miss Holland had been gone from the hotel for half an
+hour. There was a note for him in their box the clerk believed, and
+presently produced it--a brief, regretful word from Olivia telling
+him that the prince had found that they must leave fully an hour
+earlier than he had planned.
+
+Sick with apprehension, cursing himself for the ease and dexterity
+with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St.
+George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of
+chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had
+bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod
+would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of
+anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer
+hallway and saw that which caused that confidence to balloon
+smilingly back to support him.
+
+In the vestibule of the Boris, deaf to the hovering attention of a
+door-boy more curious than dutiful, stood two men of the stature and
+complexion of Prince Tabnit of Yaque. They were dressed like the
+youth who had answered the door of the prince's apartment, and they
+were speaking softly with many gestures and evidently in some
+perplexity. The drooping spirits of St. George soared to Heaven as
+he hastened to them.
+
+"You are asking for Miss Holland, the daughter of King Otho of
+Yaque," he said, with no time to smile at the pranks of the
+democracy with hereditary titles.
+
+The men stared and spoke almost together.
+
+"We are," they said promptly.
+
+"She is not here," explained St. George, "but I have attended to
+some affairs for her. Will you come with me to my apartment where we
+may be alone?"
+
+The men, who somehow made St. George think of tan-coloured
+greyhounds with very gentle eyes, consulted each other, not with the
+suspicion of the vulgar but with the caution of the thorough-bred.
+
+"Pardon," said one, "if we may be quite assured that this is Miss
+Holland's friend to whom we speak--"
+
+St. George hesitated. The hall-boy listened with an air of polite
+concern, and there were curious over-shoulder glances from the
+passers-by. Suddenly St. George's face lighted and he went swiftly
+through his pockets and produced a scrap of paper--the fragment that
+had lain that morning on the floor of the prince's deserted
+apartment, and that bore the arms of the King of Yaque. It was the
+strangers' turn to regard him with amazement. Immediately, to St.
+George's utmost embarrassment, they both bowed very low and
+pronounced together:
+
+"Pardon, adôn!"
+
+"My name is St. George," he assured them, "and let's get into a
+cab."
+
+They followed him without demur.
+
+St. George leaned back on the cushions and looked at them--lean
+lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great
+repose. They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had
+felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley
+Reformatory--as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way
+rhymed with a word which he did not know.
+
+"What is it," St. George asked as they rolled away, "what is it that
+you have come to tell Miss Holland?"
+
+Only one of the men spoke, the other appearing content to show two
+rows of exceptionally white teeth.
+
+"May we not know, adôn," asked the man respectfully, "whether the
+prince has given her his news? And if the prince is still in your
+land?"
+
+"The prince's servant, Elissa, has tried to stab Miss Holland and
+has got herself locked up," St. George imparted without hesitation.
+
+An exclamation of horror broke from both men.
+
+"To stab--to _kill_!" they cried.
+
+"Quite so," said St. George, "and the prince, upon being discovered,
+disclosed some very important news to Miss Holland, and she and her
+friends started an hour ago for Yaque."
+
+"That is well, that is well!" cried the little man, nodding, and
+momentarily hesitated; "but yet his news--what news, adôn, has he
+told her?"
+
+For a moment St. George regarded them both in silence.
+
+"Ah, well now, what news had he?" he asked briefly.
+
+The men answered readily.
+
+"Prince Tabnit was commissioned by the Yaquians to acquaint the
+princess with the news of the strange disappearance of her father,
+the king, and to supplicate her in his place to accept the
+hereditary throne of Yaque."
+
+"Jupiter!" said St. George under breath.
+
+In a flash the whole matter was clear to him. Prince Tabnit had
+delivered no such message from the people of Yaque, but had
+contented himself with the mere intimation that in some vanishing
+future she would be expected to ascend the throne. And he had done
+this only when Olivia herself had sought him out after an attempt
+had been made upon her life by his servant. It seemed to St. George
+far from improbable that the woman had been acting under the
+prince's instructions and, that failing, he himself had appeared and
+obligingly placed the daughter of King Otho precisely within the
+prince's power. Now she was gone with him, in the hope of aiding her
+father, to meet Heaven knew what peril in this pagan island; and he,
+St. George, was wholly to blame from first to last.
+
+"Good Heavens," he groaned, "are you sure--but are you sure?"
+
+"It is simple, adôn," said the man, "we came with this message from
+the people of Yaque. A day before we were to land, Akko and I--I am
+Jarvo--overheard the prince plan with the others to tell her
+nothing--nothing that the people desire. When they knew that we had
+heard they locked us up and we have only this morning escaped from
+the submarine. If the prince has told her this message everything is
+well. But as for us, I do not know. The prince has gone."
+
+"He told her nothing--nothing," said St. George, "but that her
+father and the Hereditary Treasure have disappeared. And he has
+taken her with him. She has gone with him."
+
+Deaf alike to their exclamations and their questions St. George sat
+staring unseeingly through the window, his mind an abyss of fear.
+Then the cab drew up at the door of his hotel and he turned upon the
+two men precipitantly.
+
+"See," he cried, "in a boat on the open sea, would you two be at all
+able to direct a course to Yaque?"
+
+Both men smiled suddenly and brilliantly.
+
+"But we have stolen a chart," announced Jarvo with great simplicity,
+"not knowing what thing might befall."
+
+St. George wrenched at the handle of the cab door. He had a glimpse
+of Amory within, just ringing the elevator bell, and he bundled the
+two little men into the lobby and dashed up to him.
+
+"Come on, old Amory," he told him exultingly. "Heaven on earth, put
+out that pipe and pack. We leave for Yaque to-night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+DUSK, AND SO ON
+
+
+Dusk on the tropic seas is a ceremony performed with reverence, as
+if the rising moon were a priestess come among her silver vessels.
+Shadows like phantom sails dip through the dark and lie idle where
+unseen crafts with unexplained cargoes weigh anchor in mid-air. One
+almost hears the water cunningly lap upon their invisible sides.
+
+To Little Cawthorne, lying luxuriously in a hammock on the deck of
+_The Aloha_, fancies like these crowded pleasantly, and slipped away
+or were merged in snatches of remembered songs. His hands were
+clasped behind his head, one foot was tapping the deck to keep the
+hammock in motion while strange compounds of tune and time broke
+aimlessly from his lips.
+
+          "Meet me by moonlight alone,
+           And then I will tell you a tale.
+           Must be told in the moonlight alone
+           In the grove at the end of the vale"
+
+he caroled contentedly.
+
+Amory, the light of his pipe cheerfully glowing, lay at full length
+in a steamer chair. _The Aloha_ was bounding briskly forward, a
+solitary speck on the bosom of darkening purple, and the men sitting
+in the companionship of silence, which all the world praises and
+seldom attains, had been engaging in that most entertaining of
+pastimes, the comparison of present comfort with past toil. Little
+Cawthorne's satisfaction flowered in speech.
+
+"Two weeks ago to-night," he said, running his hands through his
+grey curls, "I took the night desk when Ellis was knocked out. And
+two weeks ago to-morrow morning we were the only paper to be beaten
+on the Fownes will story. Hi--you."
+
+"Happy, Cawthorne?" Amory removed his pipe to inquire with idle
+indulgence.
+
+"Am I happy?" affirmed Little Cawthorne ecstatically in four tones,
+and went on with his song:
+
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,
+           But there's something about the moon's ray
+           That is sweeter to you and to me."
+
+"Did you make that up?" inquired Amory with polite interest.
+
+"I did if I want to," responded Little Cawthorne. "Everything's true
+out here--go on, tell everything you like. I'll believe you."
+
+St. George came out of the dark and leaned on the rail without
+speaking. Sometimes he wondered if he were he at all, and he liked
+the doubt. He felt pleasantly as if he had been cut loose from all
+old conditions and were sailing between skies to some unknown
+planet. This was not only because of the strange waters rushing
+underfoot but because of the flowering and singing of something
+within him that made the world into which he was sailing an alien
+place, heavenly desirable. A week ago that day _The Aloha_ had
+weighed anchor, and these seven days, in fairly fortunate weather,
+her white nose had been cleaving seas to traverse which had so long
+been her owner's dream; and yet her owner, in pleasant apostasy, had
+turned his back upon the whole matter of what he had been used to
+dream, and now ungratefully spent his time in trying to count the
+hours to his journey's end.
+
+Somewhere out yonder, he reflected, as he leaned on the rail, this
+southern moonlight was flooding whatever scene _she_ looked on; the
+lapping of the same sea was in her ears; and his future and hers
+might be dependent upon those two perplexed tan-coloured greyhounds
+below. By which one would have said that matters had been going
+briskly forward with St. George since the morning that he had
+breakfasted with Olivia Holland.
+
+Exactly when the end of the journey would be was not evident either
+to him or to the two strange creatures who proposed to be his
+guides. Or rather to Jarvo, who was still the spokesman; lean
+little Akko, although his intelligence was unrivaled, being content
+with monosyllables for stepping-stones while the stream of Jarvo's
+soft speech flowed about him. Barnay, the captain, frankly
+distrusted them both, and confided to St. George that "them two
+little jool-eyed scuts was limbs av the old gint himself, and they
+reminded him, Barnay, of a pair of haythen naygurs," than which he
+could say no more. But then, Barnay's wholesale skepticism was his
+only recreation, save talking about his pretty daughter "of school
+age," and he liked to stand tucking his beard inside his collar and
+indulging in both. In truth, Barnay, who knew the waters of the
+Atlantic fairly well, was sorely tried to take orders from the two
+little brown strangers who, he averred, consulted a "haythen
+apparaytus" which they would cheerfully let him see but of which he
+could "make no more than av the spach av a fish," and then directed
+him to take courses which lay far outside the beaten tracks of the
+high seas.
+
+St. George, who had had several talks with them, was puzzled and
+doubtful, and more than once confided to himself that the lives of
+the passenger list of _The Aloha_ might be worth no more than coral
+headstones at the bottom of the South Atlantic. But he always
+consoled himself with the cheering reflection that he had had to
+come--there was no other way half so good. So _The Aloha_ continued
+to plow her way as serenely as if she were heading toward the white
+cliffs of Dover and trim villas and a custom-house. And the sea lay
+a blue, uninhabited glory save as land that Barnay knew about marked
+low blades of smoke on the horizon and slipped back into blue
+sheaths.
+
+This was the evening of the seventh day, and that noon Jarvo had
+looked despondent, and Barnay had sworn strange oaths, and St.
+George had been disquieted. He stood up now, going vaguely down into
+his coat pockets for his pipe, his erect figure thrown in relief
+against the hurrying purple. St. George was good to look at, and
+Amory, with the moonlight catching the glass of his pince-nez,
+smoked and watched him, shrewdly pondering upon exactly how much
+anxiety for the success of the enterprise was occupying the breast
+of his friend and how much of an emotion a good bit stronger. Amory
+himself was not in love, but there existed between him and all who
+were a special kinship, like that between a lover of music and a
+musician.
+
+Little Cawthorne rose and shuffled his feet lazily across deck.
+
+"Where is that island, anyway?" he wanted to know, gazing
+meditatively out to sea.
+
+St. George turned as if the interruption was grateful.
+
+"The island. I don't see any island," complained Little Cawthorne.
+"I tell you," he confided, "I guess it's just Chillingworth's little
+way of fixing up a nice long vacation for us."
+
+They smiled at memory of Chillingworth's grudging and snarling
+assents to even an hour off duty.
+
+From below came Bennietod, walking slowly. The seaman's life was not
+for Bennietod, and he yearned to reach land as fervently as did St.
+George, though with other anxiety. He sat down on the moon-lit deck
+and his face was like that of a little old man with uncanny
+shrewdness. His week among them had wrought changes in the head
+office boy. For Bennietod was ambitious to be a gentleman. His
+covert imitations had always amused St. George and Amory. Now in the
+comparative freedom of _The Aloha_ his fancy had rein and he had
+adopted all the habits and the phrases which he had long reserved
+and liked best, mixing them with scraps of allusions to things which
+Benfy had encouraged him to read, and presenting the whole in his
+native lower East-side dialect. Bennietod was Bowery-born and
+office-bred, and this sad metropolitanism almost made of him a good
+philosopher.
+
+"I'd like immensely to say something," observed St. George abruptly,
+when his pipe was lighted.
+
+"Oh, yes. All right," shrilled Little Cawthorne with resignation, "I
+suppose you all feel I'm the Jonah and you thirst to scatter me to
+the whales."
+
+"I want to know," St. George went on slowly, "what you think. On my
+life, I doubt if I thought at all when we set out. This all promised
+good sport, and I took it at that. Lately, I've been wondering, now
+and then, whether any of you wish yourselves well out of it."
+
+For a moment no one spoke. To shrink from expression is a
+characteristic in which the extremes of cultivation and mediocrity
+meet; the reserve of delicacy in St. George and Amory would have
+been a reserve of false shame in Bennietod, and of an exaggerated
+sense of humour in Little Cawthorne. It was not remarkable that from
+the moment the enterprise had been entered upon, its perils and its
+doubtful outcome had not once been discussed. St. George vaguely
+reckoned with this as he waited, while Amory smoked on and blew
+meditative clouds and regarded the bowl of his pipe, and Little
+Cawthorne ceased the motion of his hammock, and Bennietod hugged his
+knees and looked shrewdly at the moon, as if he knew more about the
+moon than he would care to tell. St. George felt his heart sink a
+little. Then Little Cawthorne rose and squared valiantly up to him.
+
+"What," inquired the little man indignantly, "are you trying to do?
+Pick a fight?"
+
+St. George looked at him in surprise.
+
+"Because if you are," continued little Cawthorne without preamble,
+"we're three to one. And three of us are going to Yaque. We'll put
+you ashore if you say so."
+
+St. George smiled at him gratefully.
+
+"No--Bennietod?" inquired Little Cawthorne.
+
+Bennietod, pale and manifestly weak, grinned cheerfully and fumbled
+in sudden abashment at an amazing checked Ascot which he had derived
+from unknown sources.
+
+"Bes' t'ing t'ever I met up wid," he assented, "ef de deck'd lay
+down levil. I'm de sonny of a sea-horse if it ain't."
+
+"Amory?" demanded the little man.
+
+Amory looked along his pipe and took it briefly from his lips and
+shook his head.
+
+"Don't say these things," he pleaded in his pleasant drawl, "or I'll
+swear something horrid."
+
+St. George merely held his pipe by the bowl and nodded a little, but
+the hearts of all of them glowed.
+
+After dinner they sat long on deck. Rollo, at his master's
+invitation, joined them with a mandolin, which he had been
+discovered to play considerably better than any one else on board.
+Rollo sat bolt upright in a reclining chair to prove that he did not
+forget his station and strummed softly, and acknowledged approval
+with:
+
+"Yes, sir. A little music adds an air to any occasion, _I_ always
+think, sir."
+
+The moon was not yet full, but its light in that warm world was
+brilliant. The air was drowsy and scented with something that might
+have been its own honey or that might have come from the strange
+blooms, water-sealed below. Now and then St. George went aside for a
+space and walked up and down the deck or sent below for Jarvo. Once,
+as Jarvo left St. George's side, Little Cawthorne awoke and sat
+upright and inquiring, in his hammock.
+
+"What _is_ the matter with his feet?" he inquired peevishly. "I
+shall certainly ask him directly."
+
+"It's the seventh day out," Amory observed, "and still nobody
+knows."
+
+For Jarvo and Akko had another distinction besides their diminutive
+stature and greyhound build. Their feet, clad in soft soleless
+shoes, made of skins, were long and pointed and of almost uncanny
+flexibility. It had become impossible for any one to look at either
+of the little men without letting his eyes wander to their curiously
+expressive feet, which, like "courtier speech," were expressive
+without revealing anything.
+
+"I t'ink," Bennietod gave out, "dat dey're lost Eyetalian
+organ-grinder monkeys, wid huming intelligence, like Bertran's
+Bimi."
+
+"What a suspicious child it is," yawned Little Cawthorne, and went
+to sleep again. Toward midnight he awoke, refreshed and happy, and
+broke into instant song:
+
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,
+           But there's something about the moon's ray--"
+
+he was chanting in perfect tonelessness, when St. George cried out.
+The others sprang to their feet.
+
+"Lights!" said St. George, and gave the glass to Amory, his hand
+trembling, and very nearly snatched it back again.
+
+Far to the southeast, faint as the lost Pleiad, a single golden
+point pricked the haze, danced, glimmered, was lost, and reappeared
+to their eager eyes. The impossibility of it all, the impossibility
+of believing that they could have sighted the lights of an island
+hanging there in the waste and hitherto known to nobody simply
+because nobody knew the truth about the Fourth Dimension did not
+assail them. So absorbed had St. George become in the undertaking,
+so convincing had been the events that led up to it, and so ready
+for anything in any dimension were his companions, that their
+excitement was simply the ancient excitement of lights to the
+mariner and nothing more; save indeed that to St. George they spoke
+a certain language sweeter than the language of any island lying in
+the heart of mere science or mere magic either.
+
+When it became evident that the lights were no will-o'-the-wisps,
+born of the moon and the void, but the veritable lights that shine
+upon harbours, Bennietod tumbled below for Jarvo, who came on deck
+and gazed and doubted and well-nigh wept for joy and poured forth
+strange words and called aloud for Akko. Akko came and nodded and
+showed white teeth.
+
+"To-morrow," he said only.
+
+Barnay came.
+
+"Fwhat matther?" He put it cynically, scowling critically at Jarvo
+and Akko. "All in the way av fair fight, that'll be about Mor-rocco,
+if I've the full av my wits about me, an' music to my eyes, by the
+same token."
+
+Jarvo fixed him with his impenetrable look.
+
+"It is the light of the king's palace on the summit of Mount
+Khalak," he announced simply.
+
+The light of the king's palace. St. George heard and thrilled with
+thanksgiving. It would be then the light at her very threshold,
+provided the impossible is possible, as scientists and devotees have
+every reason to think. But was she there--was she there? If there
+was an oracle for the answer, it was not St. George. The little
+white stars danced and signaled faintly on the far horizon. Whatever
+they had to reveal was for nearer eyes than his.
+
+The glass passed from hand to hand, and in turn they all swept the
+low sky where the faint points burned; but when some one had cried
+that the lights were no longer visible, and the others had verified
+the cry by looking blankly into a sudden waste of milky black--black
+water, pale light--and turned baffled eyes to Jarvo, the little man
+spoke smoothly, not even reaching a lean, brown hand for the glass.
+
+"But have no fear, adôn," he reassured them, "the chart is not
+exact--it is that which has delayed us. It will adjust itself. The
+light may long disappear, but it will come again. The gods will
+permit the possible."
+
+They looked at one another doubtfully when the two little brown men
+had gone below, where Barnay had immediately retired, tucking his
+beard in his collar and muttering sedition. If the two strange
+creatures were twin Robin Goodfellows perpetrating a monstrous
+twentieth century prank, if they were gigantic evolutions of Puck
+whose imagination never went far beyond threshing corn with shadowy
+flails, at least this very modern caper demanded respect for so
+perfectly catching the spirit of the times. At all events it was
+immensely clever of them to have put their finger upon the public
+pulse and to have realized that the public imagination is ready to
+believe anything because it has seen so much proved. Still, "science
+was faith once"; and besides, to St. George, charts and compasses of
+all known and unknown systems of seamanship were suddenly become
+but the dead letter of the law. The spirit of the whole matter was
+that Olivia might be there, under the lights that his own eyes would
+presently see again. "Who, remembering the first kind glance of her
+whom he loves, can fail to believe in magic?" It is very likely that
+having met Olivia at all seemed at that moment so wonderful to St.
+George that any of the "frolic things" of science were to be
+accepted with equanimity.
+
+For an hour or more the moon, flooding the edge of the deck of _The
+Aloha_, cast four shadows sharply upon the smooth boards. Lined up
+at the rail stood the four adventurers, and the glass passed from
+one to another like the eye of the three Grey Sisters. The far
+beacon appeared and disappeared, but its actuality might not be
+doubted. If Jarvo and Akko were to be trusted, there in the velvet
+distance lay Yaque, and Med, the King's City, and the light upon the
+very palace of its American sovereign.
+
+St. George's pulses leaped and trembled. Amory lifted lazy lids and
+watched him with growing understanding and finally, upon a pretext
+of sleep, led the others below. And St. George, with a sense of
+joyful companionship in the little light, paced the deck until dawn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
+
+
+By afternoon the island of Yaque was an accomplished fact of
+distinguishable parts. There it lay, a thing of rock and green, like
+the islands of its sister latitudes before which the passing ships
+of all the world are wont to cast anchor. But having once cast
+anchor before Yaque the ships of all the world would have had great
+difficulty in landing anybody.
+
+Sheer and almost smoothly hewn from the utmost coast of the island
+rose to a height of several hundred feet one scarcely deviating wall
+of rock; and this apparently impregnable wall extended in either
+direction as far as the sight could reach. Above the natural rampart
+the land sloped upward still in steep declivities, but cut by
+tortuous gorges, and afar inland rose the mountain upon whose summit
+the light had been descried. There the glass revealed white towers
+and columns rising from a mass of brilliant tropical green, and now
+smitten by the late sun; but save these towers and columns not a
+sign of life or habitation was discernible. No smoke arose, no
+wharf or dock broke the serene outline of the black wall lapped by
+the warm sea; and there was no sound save that of strong torrents
+afar off. Lonely, inscrutable, the great mass stood, slightly
+shelved here and there to harbour rank and blossomy growths of green
+and presenting a rugged beauty of outline, but apparently as
+uninhabitable as the land of the North Silences.
+
+Consternation and amazement sat upon the faces of the owner of _The
+Aloha_ and his guests as they realized the character of the
+remarkable island. St. George and Amory had counted upon an
+adventure calling for all diplomacy, but neither had expected the
+delight of hazard that this strange, fairy-like place seemed about
+to present. Each felt his blood stirring and singing in his veins at
+the joy of the possibilities that lay folded before them.
+
+"We shall be obliged to land upon the east coast then, Jarvo?"
+observed St. George; "but how long will it take us to sail round the
+island?"
+
+"Very long," Jarvo responded, "but no, adôn, we land on this coast."
+
+"How is that possible?" St. George asked.
+
+"Well, hi--you," said Little Cawthorne, "I'm a goat, but I'm no
+mountain goat. See the little Swiss kid skipping from peak to peak
+and from crag to crag--"
+
+"Do we scale the wall?" inquired St. George, "or is there a passage
+in the rock?"
+
+Bennietod hugged himself in uncontrollable ecstasy.
+
+"Hully Gee, a submarine passage, in under de sea, like Jules Werne,"
+he said in a delight that was almost awe.
+
+"There is a way over the rock," said Jarvo, "partly hewn, partly
+natural, and this is known to the islanders alone. That way we must
+take. It is marked by a White Blade blazoned on the rock over the
+entrance of the submarines. The way is cunningly concealed--hardly
+will the glass reveal it, adôn."
+
+Barnay shook his head.
+
+"You've a bad time comin' with the home-sickness," he prophesied,
+tucking his beard far down in his collar until he looked, for
+Barnay, smooth-shaven. "I've sailed the sou' Atlantic up an' down
+fer a matther av four hundhred years, more or less, an' I niver as
+much as seed hide _nor_ hair av the place before this prisint. There
+ain't map or chart that iver dhrawed breath that shows ut, new or
+old. Ut's been lifted out o' ground to be afther swallowin' us in--a
+sweet dose will be the lot av us, mesilf with as foine a gir-rl av
+school age as iver you'll see in anny counthry."
+
+"Ah yes, Barnay," said St. George soothingly--but he would have
+tried now to soothe a man in the embrace of a sea-serpent in just
+the same absent-minded way, Amory thought indulgently.
+
+The sun was lowering and birds of evening were beginning to brood
+over the painted water when _The Aloha_ cast anchor. In the late
+light the rugged sides of the island had an air of almost sinister
+expectancy. There was a great silence in their windless shelter
+broken only by the boom and charge of the breakers and the gulls and
+choughs circling overhead, winging and dipping along the water and
+returning with discordant cries to their crannies in the black rock.
+Before the yacht, blazoned on a dark, water-polished stratum of the
+volcanic stone, was the White Blade which Jarvo told them marked the
+subterranean entrance to the mysterious island.
+
+St. George and his companions and Barnay, Jarvo and Akko were on
+deck. Rollo, whose soul did not disdain to be valet to a steam
+yacht, was tranquilly mending a canvas cushion.
+
+"The adôn will wait until sunrise to go ashore?" asked Jarvo.
+
+"_Sunrise_!" cried St. George. "Heaven on earth, no. We'll go now."
+
+There was no need to ask the others. Whatever might be toward, they
+were eager to be about, though Rollo ventured to St. George a
+deprecatory: "You know, sir, one can't be too careful, sir."
+
+"Will you prefer to stay aboard?" St. George put it quietly.
+
+"Oh, no, sir," said Rollo with a grieved face, "one should meet
+danger with a light heart, sir," and went below to pack the
+oil-skins.
+
+"Hear me now," said Barnay in extreme disfavour. "It's I that am to
+lay hereabouts and wait for you, sorr? Lord be good to me, an' fwhat
+if she lays here tin year', and you somewheres fillin' the eyes av
+the aygles with your brains blowed out, neat?" he demanded
+misanthropically. "Fwhat if she lays here on that gin'ral theory
+till she's rotted up, sorr?"
+
+"Ah well now, Barnay," said St. George grimly, "you couldn't have an
+easier career."
+
+Little Cawthorne, from leaning on the rail staring out at the
+island, suddenly pulled himself up and addressed St. George.
+
+"Here we are," he complained, "here has been me coming through the
+watery deep all the way from Broadway, with an octopus clinging to
+each arm and a dolphin on my back, and you don't even ask how I
+stood the trip. And do you realize that it's sheer madness for the
+five of us to land on that island together?"
+
+"What do you mean?" asked St. George.
+
+The little man shook his grey curls.
+
+"What if it's as Barnay says?" he put it. "What if they should bag
+us all--who'll take back the glad news to the harbour? Lord, you
+can't tell what you're about walking into. You don't even know the
+specific gravity of the island," he suggested earnestly. "How do
+you know but your own weight will flatten you out the minute you
+step ashore?"
+
+St. George laughed. "He thinks he is reading the fiction page," he
+observed indulgently. "Still, I fancy there is good sense on the
+page, for once. We don't know anything about anything. I suppose we
+really ought not to put all five eggs in one basket. But, by Jove--"
+
+He looked over at Amory with troubled eyes.
+
+"As host of this picnic," he said, "I dare say I ought to stay
+aboard and let you fellows--but I'm hanged if I will."
+
+Little Cawthorne reflected, frowning; and you could as well have
+expected a bird to frown as Little Cawthorne. It was rather the name
+of his expression than a description of it.
+
+"Suppose," he said, "that Bennietod and I sit rocking here in this
+bay--if it is a bay--while you two rest your chins on the top of
+that ledge of rock up there, and look over. And about to-morrow or
+day after we two will venture up behind you, or you could send one
+of the men back--"
+
+"My thunder," said Bennietod wistfully, "ain't I goin' to get to
+climb in de pantry window at de palace--nor fire out of a
+loophole--"
+
+"Bennietod an' I couldn't talk to a prince anyway," said Little
+Cawthorne; "we'd get our language twisted something dizzy, and
+probably tell him 'yes, ma'am.'"
+
+St. George's eyes softened as he looked at the little man. He knew
+well enough what it cost him to make the suggestion, which the good
+sense of them all must approve. Not only did Little Cawthorne always
+sacrifice himself, which is merely good breeding, but he made
+opportunities to do so, which is both well-bred and virtuous. When
+Rollo came up with the oil-skins they told him what had been
+decided, and Rollo, the faithful, the expressionless, dropped his
+eyelids, but he could not banish from his voice the wistfulness that
+he might have been one to stay behind.
+
+"Sometimes it _is_ best for a person to change his mind, sir," was
+his sole comment.
+
+Presently the little green dory drew away from _The Aloha_, and they
+left her lying as much at her ease as if the phantom island before
+her were in every school-boy's geography, with a scale of miles and
+a list of the principal exports attached.
+
+"If we had diving dresses, adôn," Jarvo suggested, "we might have
+gone down through the sluice and entered by the lagoon where the
+submarines pass."
+
+"Jove," said Amory, trying to row and adjust his pince-nez at the
+same time, "Chillingworth will never forgive us for missing that."
+
+"You couldn't have done it," shouted Little Cawthorne derisively,
+from the deck of the yacht, "you didn't wear your rubbers. If
+anybody sticks a knife in you send up a r-r-r-ocket!"
+
+The landing, effected with the utmost caution, was upon a flat
+stone already a few inches submerged by the rising tide. Looking up
+at the jagged, beetling world above them their task appeared
+hopeless enough. But Jarvo found footing in an instant, and St.
+George and Amory pressed closely behind him, Rollo and little Akko
+silently bringing up the rear and carrying the oil-skins. Slowly and
+cautiously as they made their way it was but a few minutes until the
+three standing on the deck, and Barnay open-mouthed in the dory, saw
+the sinuous line of the five bodies twist up the tortuous course
+considerably above the blazoned emblem of the White Blade.
+
+In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever
+before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble
+and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent,
+perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from
+below it had appeared. But it seemed interminable. Even when the sea
+lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of
+_The Aloha_ were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued
+to stretch upward, melting into the sky's late blue.
+
+The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk
+came swiftly out of the east. At snail's pace, now with heads bent
+to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up by the arms or to
+leap a wicked-looking crevice, the four took their way up the black
+side of the rock. Birds of the cliffs, disturbed from long rest,
+wheeled and screamed about them, almost brushing their faces with
+long, fearless wings. There was an occasional shelf where, with
+backs against the wall spotted with crystals of feldspar, they
+waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge. Great
+slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of
+calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava
+covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp
+shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray. Gradually rock-slides
+and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches,
+but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral crevasses
+made the vague trail slippery and the occasional earth sodden and
+treacherous. For a quarter of a mile their way lay over a kind of
+porous gravel into which their feet sank, and beyond at the summit
+of a ridge Jarvo halted and threw back to them a summary warning to
+prepare for "a long leap." A sharp angle of rock, jutting out, had
+been split down the middle by some ancient force--very likely a
+Paleozoic butterfly had brushed it with its wing--and the edges had
+been worn away in a treacherous slope to the very lip of the
+crumbling promontory. From this edge to the edge of the opposite
+abutment there was a gap of wicked width, and between was a sheer
+drop into space wherefrom rose the sound of tumbling waters. When
+Jarvo had taken the leap, easily and gracefully, alighting on the
+other side like the greyhound that he resembled, and the others,
+following, had cleared the edge by as safe a margin as if the abyss
+were a minor field-day event, St. George and Amory looked back with
+sudden wonder over the path by which they had come.
+
+"I feel as if I weighed about ninety pounds," said St. George; "am I
+fading away or anything?"
+
+Amory stood still.
+
+"I was thinking the same thing," he said. "By Jove--do you
+suppose--what if Little Cawthorne hit the other end of the
+nail, as usual? Suppose the specific gravity--suppose there is
+something--suppose it doesn't hold good in this dimension that
+a body--by Jove," said Amory, "wouldn't that be the deuce?"
+
+St. George looked at Jarvo, bounding up the stony way as easily as
+if he were bounding down.
+
+"Ah well now," he said, "you know on the moon an ordinary man would
+weigh only twenty-six or seven pounds. Why not here? We aren't held
+down by any map!"
+
+They laughed at the pleasant enormity of the idea and were hurrying
+on when Akko, behind them, broke his settled silence.
+
+"In America," he said, "a man feels like a mountain. Here he feels
+like a man."
+
+"What do you mean by that?" demanded St. George uneasily. But Akko
+said no more, and St. George and Amory, with a disquieting idea that
+each was laughing at the other, let the matter drop.
+
+From there on the way was easier, leveling occasionally, frequently
+swelling to gentle ridges, and at last winding up a steep trail that
+was not difficult to keep in spite of the fast falling night. And at
+length Jarvo, rounding a huge hummock where converging ridges met,
+scrambled over the last of these and threw himself on the ground.
+
+"Now," he said simply.
+
+The two men stood beside him and looked down. It seemed to St.
+George that they looked not at all upon a prospect but upon the
+sudden memory of a place about which he might have dreamed often and
+often and, waking, had not been able to remember, though its
+familiarity had continued insistently to beat at his heart; or that
+in what was spread before him lay the satisfaction of Burne-Jones'
+wistful definition of a picture: "... a beautiful, romantic dream of
+something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any
+light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only
+desire..." yet it was to St. George as if he had reached no strange
+land, no alien conditions; but rather that he had come home. It was
+like a home-coming in which nothing is changed, none of the little
+improvements has been made which we resent because no one has
+thought to tell us of them; but where everything is even more as one
+remembers than one knew that one remembered.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+At his feet lay a pleasant valley filled with the purple of deep
+twilight. Far below a lagoon caught the late light and spread it in
+a pattern among hidden green. In the midst of the valley towered the
+mountain whose summit, royally crowned by shining towers, had been
+visible from the open sea. At its feet, glittering in the abundant
+light shed upon its white wall and dome and pinnacle, stood Med, the
+King's City--but its light was not the light of the day, for that
+was gone; nor of the moon, not risen; and no false lights vexed the
+dark. Yet he was looking into a cup of light, as clear as the light
+in a gazing-crystal and of a quality as wholly at variance with
+reality. The rocky coast of Yaque was literally a massive, natural
+wall; and girt by it lay the heart of the island, fertile and
+populous and clothed in mystery. This new face which Nature turned
+to him was a glorified face, and some way _it meant what he meant_.
+
+St. George was off for a few steps, trampling impatiently over the
+coarse grass of the bank. Somewhere in that dim valley--was she
+there, was she there? Was she in trouble, did she need him, did she
+think of him? St. George went through the ancient, delicious list
+as conscientiously as if he were the first lover, and she were the
+first princess, and this were the first ascent of Yaque that the
+world had ever known. For by some way of miracle, the mystery of the
+island was suddenly to him the very mystery of his love, and the two
+so filled his heart that he could not have told of which he was
+thinking. That which had lain, shadowy and delicious, in his soul
+these many days--not so very many, either, if one counts the
+suns--was become not only a thing of his soul but a thing of the
+outside world, almost of the visible world, something that had
+existed for ever and which he had just found out; and here, wrapped
+in nameless light, lay its perfect expression. When a shaft of
+silver smote the long grass at his feet, and the edge of the moon
+rose above the mountain, St. George turned with a poignant
+exultation--did a mere victory over half a continent ever make a man
+feel like that?--and strode back to the others.
+
+"Come on," he called ringingly in a voice that did everything but
+confess in words that something heavenly sweet was in the man's
+mind, "let's be off!"
+
+Amory was carefully lighting his pipe.
+
+"I feel sort of tense," he explained, "as if the whole place would
+explode if I threw down my match. What do you think of it?"
+
+St. George did not answer.
+
+"It's a place where all the lines lead up," he was saying to
+himself, "as they do in a cathedral."
+
+The four went the fragrant way that led to the heart of the island.
+First the path followed the high bank the branches of whose tropical
+undergrowth brushed their faces with brief gift of perfume. On the
+other side was a wood of slim trunks, all depths of shadow and
+delicacies of borrowed light in little pools. Everywhere, everywhere
+was a chorus of slight voices, from bark and air and secret moss,
+singing no forced notes of monotone, but piping a true song of the
+gladness of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It
+came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would
+always sound if, somehow, one were able to hear the sweetness that
+poured itself out. Even that familiar sense in the night-woods that
+something is about to happen was deliciously present with him; and
+though Amory went on quietly enough, St. George swam down that green
+way, much as one dreams of floating along a street, above-heads.
+
+The path curved, and went hesitatingly down many terraces. Here,
+from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged
+into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering
+upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to
+meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than
+any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a
+veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the
+censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and
+curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see
+about them. Yet it did not occur to either to distrust the
+phenomenon, or to regard it as unnatural or the fruit of any
+unnatural law. It was somehow quite as convincing to them as is his
+first sight of electric light to the boy of the countryside, and no
+more to be regarded as witchcraft.
+
+St. George was silent. It was as if he were on the threshold of
+Far-Away, within the Porch of the Morning of some day divine. The
+place was so poignantly like the garden of a picture that one has
+seen as a child, and remembered as a place past all speech
+beautiful, and yet failed ever to realize in after years, or to make
+any one remember, or, save fleetingly in dreams to see once more,
+since the picture-book is never, never chanced upon again. Sometimes
+he had dreamed of a great sunny plain, with armies marching;
+sometimes he had awakened at hearing the chimes, and fancied
+sleepily that it was infinite music; sometimes, in the country in
+the early morning, he had had an unreasonable, unaccountable moment
+of perfect happiness: and now the fugitive element of them all
+seemed to have been crystallized and made his own in that floating
+walk down the wooded terraces of this unknown world. And yet he
+could not have told whether the element was contained in that
+beauty, or in his thought of Olivia.
+
+At last they emerged upon a narrow, grassy terrace where white steps
+mounted to a wide parapet. Jarvo ran up the steps and turned:
+
+"Behold Med, adôn," he said modestly, as if he had at that moment
+stirred it up in a sauce-pan and baked it before their astonished
+eyes.
+
+They were standing at the top of an immense flight of steps
+extending as far to right and left as they could see, and leading
+down by easy stages and wide landings to the white-paved city
+itself. The clear light flooded the scene--lucid, vivid,
+many-peopled. Far as the eye could see, broad streets extended,
+lined with structures rivaling in splendour and beauty those
+unforgotten "topless towers." Temples, palaces, and public buildings
+rose, storey upon storey, built of hewn stones of great size; and
+noble arches faced an open square before a temple of colossal
+masonry crowning an eminence in the centre of the city. Directly in
+line with this eminence rose the mountain upon whose summit stood
+the far-seen pillars where burned the solitary light.
+
+If an enchanted city had risen from the waves because some one had
+chanced to speak the right word, it could have been no more
+bewildering; and yet the look of this city was so substantial, so
+adapted to all commonplace needs, so essentially the scene of
+every-day activity and purpose, that dozens of towns of petty
+European principalities seem far less actual and practicable homes
+of men. Busy citizens hurrying, the bark of a dog, the mere tone of
+a temple bell spoke the ordinary occupations of all the world; and
+upon the chief street the moon looked down as tranquilly as if the
+causeway were a continuation of Fifth Avenue.
+
+But it was as if the spirit of adventure in St. George had suddenly
+turned and questioned him, saying:
+
+"What of Olivia?"
+
+For Olivia gone to a far-away island to find her father was subject
+of sufficient anxiety; but Olivia in the power of a pretender who
+might have at command such undreamed resources was more than cool
+reason could comprehend. That was the principal impression that Med,
+the King's City, made upon St. George.
+
+"To the right, adôn," Jarvo was saying, "where the walls are
+highest--that is the palace of the prince, the Palace of the
+Litany."
+
+"And the king's palace?" St. George asked eagerly.
+
+Jarvo lifted his face to the solitary summit light upon the
+mountain.
+
+"But how does one ascend?" cried St. George.
+
+"By permission of Prince Tabnit," replied Jarvo, "one is borne up
+by six imperial carriers, trained in the service from birth. One
+attempting the ascent alone would be dashed in pieces."
+
+"No municipal line of airships?" ventured Amory in slow
+astonishment.
+
+Jarvo did not quite get this.
+
+"The airships, adôn," he said, "belong to the imperial household and
+are kept at the summit of Mount Khalak."
+
+"A trust," comprehended Amory; "an absolute monarchy is a bit of a
+trust, anyhow. Of course, it's sometimes an outraged trust..." he
+murmured on.
+
+"The adôn," said Jarvo humbly, "will understand that we, I and Akko,
+have borne great risk. It is necessary that we make our peace with
+all speed, if that may be. The very walls are the ears of Prince
+Tabnit, and it is better to be behind those walls. May the gods
+permit the possible."
+
+"Do you mean to say," asked St. George, "that we too would better
+look out the prince at once?"
+
+"The adôn is wise," said Jarvo simply, "but nothing is hid from
+Prince Tabnit."
+
+St. George considered. In this mysterious place, whose ways were as
+unknown to him and to his companions as was the etiquette of the
+court of the moon, clearly diplomacy was the better part of valour.
+It was wiser to seek out Prince Tabnit, if he had really arrived on
+the island, than to be upon the defensive.
+
+"Ah, very well," he said briefly, "we will visit the prince."
+
+"Farewell, adôn," said Jarvo, bowing low, "may the gods permit the
+possible."
+
+"Of course you will communicate with us to-morrow," suggested St.
+George, "so that if we wish to send Rollo down to the yacht--"
+
+"The gods will permit the possible, adôn," Jarvo repeated gently.
+
+There was a flash of Akko's white teeth and the two little men were
+gone.
+
+St. George and Amory turned to the descending of the wide white
+steps. Such immense, impossible white steps and such a curious place
+for these two to find themselves, alone, with a valet. Struck by the
+same thought they looked at each other and nodded, laughing a
+little.
+
+"Alone in the distance," said Amory, emptying his pipe, "and not a
+cab to be seen."
+
+Rollo thrust forward his lean, shadowed face.
+
+"Shall I look about for a 'ansom, sir?" he inquired with perfect
+gravity.
+
+St. George hardly heard.
+
+"It's like cutting into a great, smooth sheet of white paper," he
+said whimsically, "and making any figure you want to make."
+
+Before they reached the bottom of the steps they divined, issuing
+from an isolated, temple-seeming building below, a train of
+sober-liveried attendants, all at first glance resembling Jarvo and
+Akko. These defiled leisurely toward the strangers and lined up
+irregularly at the foot of the steps.
+
+"Enter Trouble," said Amory happily.
+
+They found themselves confronting, in the midst of the attendants,
+an olive man with no angles, whose face, in spite of its health and
+even wealth of contour, was ridiculously grave, as if the
+_papier-mâché_ man in the down-town window should have had a sudden
+serious thought just before his _papier-mâché_ incarnation.
+
+"Permit me," said the man in perfect English and without bowing, "to
+bring to you the greeting of his Highness, Prince Tabnit, and his
+welcome to Yaque. I am Cassyrus, an officer of the government. At
+the command of his Highness I am come to conduct you to the palace."
+
+"The prince is most kind," said St. George, and added eagerly: "He
+is returned, then?"
+
+"Assuredly. Three days ago," was the reply.
+
+"And the king--is he returned?" asked St. George.
+
+The man shook his head, and his very anxiety seemed important.
+
+"His Majesty, the King," he affirmed, "is still most lamentably
+absent from his throne and his people."
+
+"And his daughter?" demanded St. George then, who could not
+possibly have waited an instant longer to put that question.
+
+"The daughter of his Majesty, the King," said Cassyrus, looking
+still more as if he were having his portrait painted, "will in three
+days be recognized publicly as Princess of Yaque."
+
+St. George's heart gave a great bound. Thank Heaven, she was here,
+and safe. His hope and confidence soared heavenward. And by some
+miracle she was to take her place as the people of Yaque had
+petitioned. But what was the meaning of that news of the prince's
+treachery which Jarvo and Akko had come bearing? The prince had
+faithfully fulfilled his mission and had conducted the daughter of
+the King of Yaque safely to her father's country. What did it all
+mean?
+
+St. George hardly noted the majestic square through which they
+were passing. Impressions of great buildings, dim white and misty
+grey and bathed in light, bewilderingly succeeded one another;
+but, as in the days which followed the news of his inheritance, he
+found himself now in a temper of unsurprise, in that mental
+atmosphere--properly the normal--which regards all miracle as
+natural law. He even omitted to note what was of passing
+strangeness: that neither the retinue of the minister nor the
+others upon the streets cast more than casual glances at their
+unusual visitors. But when the great gates of the palace were
+readied his attention was challenged and held, for though mere
+marvels may become the air one breathes, beauty will never cease
+to amaze, and the vista revealed was of almost disconcerting
+beauty.
+
+Avenues of brightness, arches of green, glimpses of airy columns, of
+boundless lawns set with high, pyramidal shrines, great places of
+quiet and straight line, alleys whose shadow taught the necessity of
+mystery, the sound of water--the pure, positive element of it
+all--and everywhere, above, below and far, that delicate, labyrinth
+light, diffused from no visible source. It was as if some strange
+compound had changed the character of the dark itself, transmuting
+it to a subtle essence more exquisite than light, inhabiting it with
+wonders. And high above their heads where this translucence seemed
+to mix with the upper air and to fuse with moonbeams, sprang almost
+joyously the pale domes and cornices of the palace, sending out
+floating streamers and pennons of colours nameless and unknown.
+
+"Jupiter," said the human Amory in awe, "what a picture for the
+first page of the supplement."
+
+St. George hardly heard him. The picture held so perfectly the
+elusive charm of the Question--the Question which profoundly
+underlies all things. It was like a triumphant burst of music which
+yet ends on a high note, with imperfect close, hinting passionately
+at some triumph still loftier.
+
+From either side of the wall of the palace yard came glittering a
+detachment of the Royal Golden Guard, clad in uniforms of unrelieved
+cloth-of-gold. These halted, saluted, wheeled, and between their
+shining ranks St. George and Amory footed quietly on, followed by
+Rollo carrying the yellow oil-skins. To St. George there was relief
+in the motion, relief in the vastness, and almost a boy's delight in
+the pastime of living the hour.
+
+Yet Royal Golden Guard, majestic avenues, and towered palace with
+its strange banners floating in strange light, held for him but one
+reality. And when they had mounted the steps of the mighty entrance,
+and the sound of unrecognized music reached him--a very myth of
+music, elusive, vagrant, fugued--and the palace doors swung open to
+receive them, he could have shouted aloud on the brilliant
+threshold:
+
+"He says she is here in Yaque."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
+
+
+So there were St. George and Amory presently domiciled in a prince's
+palace such as Asia and Europe have forgotten, as by and by they
+will forget the Taj Mahal and the Bon Marché. And at nine o'clock
+the next morning in a certain Tyrian purple room in the west wing of
+the Palace of the Litany the two sat breakfasting.
+
+"One always breakfasts," observed St. George. "The first day that
+the first men spend on Mars I wonder whether the first thing they do
+will be to breakfast."
+
+"Poor old Mars has got to step down now," said Amory. "We are one
+farther on. I don't know how it will be, but if I felt on Mars the
+way I do now, I should assent to breakfast. Shouldn't you?"
+
+"On my life, Toby," said St. George, "as an idealist you are
+disgusting. Yes, I should."
+
+The table had been spread before an open window, and the window
+looked down upon the palace garden, steeped in the gold of the sunny
+morning, and formal with aisles of mighty, flowering trees. Within,
+the apartment was lofty, its walls fashioned to lift the eye to
+light arches, light capitals, airy traceries, and spaces of the hue
+of old ivory, held in heavenly quiet. The sense of colour, colour
+both captive and atmospheric, was a new and persistent delight, for
+it was colour purified, specialized, and infinitely extended in
+either direction from the crudity of the seven-winged spectrum. The
+room was like an alcove of outdoors, not divorced from the open air
+and set in contra-distinction, but made a continuation of its space
+and order and ancient repose--a kind of exquisite porch of light.
+
+Across this porch of light Rollo stepped, bearing a covered dish.
+The little breakfast-table and the laden side-table were set with
+vessels of rock-crystal and drinking-cups of silver gilt, and
+breakfast consisted of delicately-prepared sea-food, a pulpy fruit,
+thin wine and a paste of delicious powdered gums. These things Rollo
+served quite as if he were managing oatmeal and eggs and china. One
+would have said that he had been brought up between the covers of an
+ancient history, nothing in consequence being so old or so new as to
+amaze him. Upon their late arrival the evening before he had
+instantly moved about his duties in all the quiet decorum with which
+he officiated in three rooms and a bath, emptying the oil-skins,
+disposing of their contents in great cedar chests, and, from
+certain rich and alien garments laid out for the guests, pretending
+as unconcernedly to fleck lint as if they had been broadcloth from
+Fifth Avenue. He stood bending above the breakfast-table, his lean,
+shadowed hands perfectly at home, his lean, shadowed face all
+automatic attention.
+
+"Rollo," said St. George, "go and look out the window and see if
+Sodom is smoking."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo, and moved to the nearest casement and bent
+his look submissively below.
+
+"Everything quiet, sir," he reported literally; "a very warm day,
+sir. But it's easy to sleep, sir, no matter how warm the days are if
+only the nights are cool. Begging your pardon, sir."
+
+St. George nodded.
+
+"You don't see Jezebel down there in the trees," he pressed him, "or
+Elissa setting off to found Carthage? Chaldea and Egypt all calm?"
+he anxiously put it.
+
+Rollo stirred uneasily.
+
+"There's a couple o' blue-tailed birds scrappin' in a palm tree,
+sir," he submitted hopefully.
+
+"Ah," said St. George, "yes. There would be. Now, if you like," he
+gave his servant permission, "you may go to the festivals or the
+funeral games or wherever you choose to-day. Or perhaps," he
+remembered with solicitude, "you would prefer to be present at the
+wedding-of-the-land-water-with-the-sea-water, providing, as I
+suspect, Tyre is handy?"
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Rollo doubtfully.
+
+"Mind you put your money on the crack disc-thrower, though," warned
+St. George, "and you might put up a couple of darics for me."
+
+"No," languidly begged Amory, "pray no. You are getting your periods
+mixed something horrid."
+
+"A person's recreation is as good for him as his food, sir,"
+proclaimed Rollo, sententious, anxious to agree.
+
+"Food," said Amory languidly, "this isn't food--it's molten history,
+that's what it is. Think--this is what they had to eat at the cafés
+boulevardes of Gomorrah. And to think we've been at Tony's, before
+now. Do you remember," he asked raptly, "those brief and savoury
+banquets around one o'clock, at Tony's? From where Little Cawthorne
+once went away wearing two omelettes instead of his overshoes? Don't
+tell me that Tonycana and all this belong to the same system in
+space. Don't tell me--"
+
+He stopped abruptly and his eyes sought those of St. George. It was
+all so incredible, and yet it was all so real and so essentially,
+distractingly natural.
+
+"I feel as if we had stepped through something, to somewhere else.
+And yet, somehow, there is so little difference. Do you suppose when
+people die _they_ don't notice any difference, either?"
+
+"What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's
+going to look in print. Think of Crass--digging for head-lines."
+
+St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl;
+but there were times--
+
+"Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the
+absolute."
+
+Amory nodded.
+
+"Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an
+Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out
+with the camera, while the light is good."
+
+The lateness of the hour of their arrival at the palace the evening
+before had prevented the prince from receiving them, but he had sent
+a most courteous message announcing that he himself would wait upon
+them at a time which he appointed. While they were abiding his
+coming, Rollo setting aside the dishes, Amory smoking, strolling up
+and down, and examining the faint symbolic devices upon the walls'
+tiling, St. George stood before one of the casements, and looked
+over the aisles of flowering tree-tops to the grim, grey sides of
+Mount Khalak, inscrutable, inaccessible, now not even hinting at the
+walls and towers upon its secret summit. He was thinking how
+heavenly curious it was that the most wonderful thing in his
+commonplace world of New York--that is, his meeting with
+Olivia--should, out here in this world of things wonderful beyond
+all dream, still hold supreme its place as the sovereign wonder, the
+sovereign delight.
+
+"I dare say that means something," he said vaguely to himself, "and
+I dare say all the people who are--in love--know what it does mean,"
+and at this his spirit of adventure must have nodded at him, as if
+it understood, too.
+
+When, in a little time, Prince Tabnit appeared at the open door of
+the "porch of light," it was as if he had parted from St. George in
+McDougle Street but the night before. He greeted him with exquisite
+cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He
+was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem
+burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly
+tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One
+might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested
+certain of his smile.
+
+"I wonder," he asked with engaging hesitation when he was seated,
+"whether I may have a--cigarette? That is the name? Yes, a
+cigarette. Tobacco is unknown in Yaque. We have invented no colonies
+useful for the luxury. How can it be--forgive me--that your people,
+who seem remote from poetry, should be the devisers and popularizers
+of this so poetic pastime? To breathe in the green of earth and the
+light of the dead sun! The poetry of your American smoke delights
+me."
+
+St. George smiled as he offered the prince his case.
+
+"In America," he said, "we devised it as a vice, your Highness. We
+are obliged to do the same with poetry, if we popularize it."
+
+And St. George was thinking:
+
+"Miss Holland. He has seen Miss Holland--perhaps yesterday. Perhaps
+he will see her to-day. And how in this world am I ever to mention
+her name?"
+
+But the prince was in the idlest and most genial of humours. He
+spoke at once of the matters uppermost in the minds of his guests,
+gave them news of the party from New York, told how they were in
+comfort in the palace on the summit of Mount Khalak, struck a
+momentary tragic note in mention of the mystery still mantling the
+absence of the king and repeated the announcement already made by
+Cassyrus, the premier, that in two days' time, failing the return of
+the sovereign, the king's daughter would be publicly recognized,
+with solemn ceremonial, as Princess of Yaque. Then he turned to St.
+George, his eyes searching him through the haze of smoke.
+
+"Your own coming to Yaque," he said abruptly, "was the result of a
+sudden decision?"
+
+"Quite so, your Highness," replied St. George. "It was wholly
+unexpected."
+
+"Then we must try to make it also an unexpected pleasure," suggested
+the prince lightly. "I am come to ask you to spend the day with me
+in looking about Med, the King's City."
+
+He dropped the monogrammed stub of his cigarette in a little jar of
+smaragdos, brought, he mentioned in passing, from a despoiled temple
+of one of the Chthonian deities of Tyre, and turned toward his
+guests with a winning smile.
+
+"Come," he said, "I can no longer postpone my own pleasure in
+showing you that our nation is the Lady of Kingdoms as once were
+Babylon and Chaldea."
+
+It was as if the strange panorama of the night before had once more
+opened its frame, and they were to step within. As the prince left
+them St. George turned to Rollo for the novelty of addressing a
+reality.
+
+"How do you wish to spend the day, Rollo?" he asked him.
+
+Rollo looked pensive.
+
+"Could I stroll about a bit, sir?" he asked.
+
+"Stroll!" commanded St. George cheerfully.
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Rollo. "I always think a man can best learn
+by observation, sir."
+
+"Observe!" supplemented his master pleasantly, as a detachment of
+the guard appeared to conduct Amory and him below.
+
+"Don't black up the sandals," Amory warned Rollo as he left him,
+"and be back early. We may want you to get us ready for a mastodon
+hunt."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo with simplicity, "I'll be back quite some
+time before tea-time, sir."
+
+St. George was smiling as they went down the corridor. He had been
+vain of his love that, in Yaque as in America, remained the thing it
+was, supreme and vital. But had not the simplicity of Rollo taken
+the leap in experience, and likewise without changing? For a moment,
+as he went down the silent corridors, lofty as the woods, vocal with
+faint inscriptions on the uncovered stone, the old human doubt
+assailed him. The very age of the walls was a protest against the
+assumption that there is a touchstone that is ageless. Even if there
+is, even if love is unchanging, the very temper of unconcern of his
+valet might be quite as persistent as love itself. But the gallery
+emptying itself into a great court open to the blue among graven
+rafters, St. George promptly threw his doubt to the fresh,
+heaven-kissing wind that smote their faces, and against mystery and
+argument and age alike he matched only the happy clamour of his
+blood. Olivia Holland was on the island, and all the age was gold.
+In Yaque or on the continents there can be no manner of doubt that
+this is love, as Love itself loves to be.
+
+They emerged in the appeasing air of that perfect morning, and the
+sweetness of the flowering trees was everywhere, and wide roads
+pointed invitingly to undiscovered bournes, and overhead in the
+curving wind floated the flags and streamers of those joyous, wizard
+colours.
+
+They went out into the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating
+at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds
+captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals
+itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey
+that he has taken long ago--Long Ago and Far Away are the great
+touchstones--and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget
+the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and forget
+the fabric, then he will understand the spirit that informed that
+first morning in Yaque. It was a morning all compact of wonder and
+delight--wonder at that which half-revealed itself, delight in the
+ever-present possibility that here, there, at any moment, Olivia
+Holland might be met. As for the wonder, that had taken some three
+thousand years to accumulate, as nearly as one could compute; and as
+for the delight, that had taken less than ten days to make possible;
+and yet there is no manner of doubt which held high place in the
+mind of St. George as the smooth miles fled away from hurrying
+wheels.
+
+Such wheels! Motors? St. George asked himself the question as he
+took his place beside the prince in the exquisitely light vehicle,
+Amory following with Cassyrus, and the suites coming after, like the
+path from a lanthorn. For the vehicles were a kind of electric
+motor, but constructed exquisitely in a fashion which, far from
+affronting taste, delighted the eye by leading it to lines of
+unguessed beauty. They were motors as the ancients would have built
+them if they had understood the trick of science, motors in which
+the lines of utility were veiled and taught to be subordinate. The
+speed attained was by no means great, and the motion was gentle and
+sacrificed to silence. And when St. George ventured to ask how they
+had imported the first motors, the prince answered that as Columbus
+was sailing on the waters of the Atlantic at adventure, the people
+of Yaque were touring the island in electric motors of much the same
+description, though hardly the clumsiness, of those which he had
+noticed in New York.
+
+This was the first astonishment, and other astonishments were to
+follow. For as they went about the island it was revealed that the
+remainder of the world is asleep with science for a pillow and the
+night-lamp of philosophy casting shadows. Yet as the prince
+exhibited wonders, one after another, St. George, dimly conscious
+that these are the things that men die to discover, would have given
+them all for one moment's meeting with Olivia on that high-road of
+Med. If you come to think of it, this may be why science always has
+moved so slowly, creeping on from point to point.
+
+Thus it came about that when Prince Tabnit indicated a low,
+pillared, temple-like building as the home of perpetual motion,
+which gave the power operating the manufactures and water supply of
+the entire island, St. George looked and understood and resolved to
+go over the temple before he left Yaque, and then fell a-wondering
+whether, when he did so, Olivia would be with him. When the prince
+explained that it is ridiculous to suppose that combustion is the
+chief means of obtaining light and heat, or that Heaven provided
+divinely-beautiful forests for the express purpose of their being
+burned up; and when he told him that artificial light and heat were
+effected in a certain reservoir (built with a classic regard for the
+dignity of its use as a link with unspoken forces) St. George
+listened, and said over with attention the name of the substance
+acted upon by emanations--and wondered if Olivia were not afraid of
+it. So it was all through the exhibition of more wonders scientific
+and economic than any one has dreamed since every one became a
+victim of the world's habit of being afraid to dream. Although it is
+true that when St. George chanced to observe that there were about
+Med few farms of tilled ground, the prince's reply did startle him
+into absorbed attention:
+
+"You are referring to agriculture?" Prince Tabnit said after a
+moment's thought. "I know the word from old parchments brought from
+Phoenicia by our ancestors. But I did not know that the art is in
+practice anywhere in the world. Do you mean to assure me," cried the
+prince suddenly, "that the vegetables which I ate in America were
+raised by what is known as 'tilling the soil'?"
+
+"How else, your Highness?" doubted St. George, wondering if he were
+responsible for the fading mentality of the prince.
+
+Prince Tabnit looked away toward the splendour of some new thought.
+
+"How beautiful," he said, "to subsist on the sun and the dust.
+Beautiful and lost, like the dreams of Mitylene. But I feel as if I
+were reading in Genesis," he declared. "Is it possible that in this
+'age of science' of yours it has not occurred to your people that if
+plants grow by slowly extracting their own elements from the soil,
+those elements artificially extracted and applied to the seed will
+render growth and fruitage almost instantaneous?"
+
+"At all events we've speculated about it," St. George hastened to
+impart with pride, "just as we do about telephones that will let
+people see one another when they talk. But nearly every one smiles
+at both."
+
+"Don't smile," the prince warned him. "Yaque has perfected both
+those inventions only since she ceased to smile at their
+probability. Nothing can be simpler than instantaneous vegetation.
+Any Egyptian juggler can produce it by using certain acids. We have
+improved the process until our fruits and vegetables are produced as
+they are needed, from hour to hour. This was one of the so-called
+secrets of the ancient Phoenicians--has it never occurred to you as
+important that the Phoenician name for Dionysos, the god of
+wine-growers, was lost?"
+
+Mentally St. George added another barrel to the cargo of _The
+Aloha_, and wondered if the _Sentinel_ would start botanical gardens
+and a lighting plant and turn them to the account of advertisers.
+
+All the time, mile upon mile, was unrolling before them the
+unforgetable beauty of the island. So perfectly were its features
+marshaled and so exact were its proportions that, as in many great
+experiences and as in all great poems, one might not, without
+familiarity, recall its detail, but must instead remain wrapped in
+the glory of the whole. The avenues, wide as a river, swept between
+white banks of majestic buildings combining with the magic of great
+mass the pure beauty of virginal line. Line, the joy of line, the
+glory of line, almost, St. George thought, the divinity of line, was
+everywhere manifest; and everywhere too the divinity of colour, no
+longer a quality extraneous, laid on as insecure fancy dictates,
+but, by some law long unrevealed, now actually identified with the
+object which it not so much decorated as purified. The most
+interesting of the thoroughfares led from the Eurychôrus, or public
+square, along the lagoon. This fair water, extending from Med to
+Melita, was greenly shored and dotted with strange little pleasure
+crafts with exquisite sweeping prows and silken canopies. Before a
+white temple, knee-deep in whose flowered ponds the ibises dozed
+and contemplated, was anchored the imperial trireme, with
+delicately-embroidered sails and prow and poop of forgotten metals.
+From within, temple music sounded softly and was never permitted to
+be silenced, as the flame of the Vestals might never be
+extinguished. Here on the shores had begun the morning traffic of
+itinerant merchants of Med and Melita, compelled by law to carry on
+their exchange in the morning only, when the light is least lovely.
+Upon canopied wagons drawn by strange animals, with shining horns,
+were displayed for sale all the pleasantest excuses for
+commerce--ostrich feathers, gums, gems, quicksilver, papyrus, bales
+of fair cloth, pottery, wine and oranges. The sellers of salt and
+fish and wool and skins were forced down under the wharfs of the
+lagoon, and there endeavoured to attract attention by displaying
+fanciful and lovely banners and by liberating faint perfumes of the
+native orris and algum. Street musicians, playing tunefully upon the
+zither and upon the crowd, wandered, wearing wreaths of fir, and
+clustered about stalls where were offered tenuous blades, and
+statues, and temple vessels filled with wine and flowers.
+
+At the head of the street leading to the temple of Baaltis (My
+Lady--Aphrodite) the prince's motor was checked while a procession
+of pilgrims, white-robed and carrying votive offerings, passed
+before them, the votive tablet to the Lady Tanith and the Face of
+Baal being borne at the head of the line by a dignitary in a smart
+electric victoria. This was one of the frequent Festival Embassies
+to Melita, to combine religious rites with mourning games and the
+dedication of the tablet, and there was considerable delay incident
+to the delivery of a wireless message to the dignitary with the
+tablet of the Semitic inscription. St. George wondered vaguely why,
+in a world of marvels, progress should not already have outstripped
+the need of any communication at all. This reminded him of something
+at which the prince had hinted away off in another æon, in another
+world, when St. George had first seen him, and there followed ten
+minutes of talk not to be forgotten.
+
+"Would it be possible for you to tell me, your Highness," St. George
+asked,--and thereafter even a lover must have forgiven the brief
+apostasy of his thought--"how it can be that you know the English?
+How you are able to speak it here in Yaque?"
+
+The motor moved forward as the procession passed, and struck into a
+magnificent country avenue bordered by trees, tall as elms and
+fragrant as acacias.
+
+"I can tell you, yes," said the prince, "but I warn you that you
+will not in the least understand me. I dare say, however, that I may
+illustrate by something of which you know. Do there chance to be,
+for example, any children in America who are regarded as prodigies
+of certain understanding?"
+
+"You mean," St. George asked, "children who can play on a musical
+instrument without knowing how they do it, and so on?"
+
+"Quite so," said the prince with interest.
+
+"Many, your Highness," affirmed St. George. "I myself know a child
+of seven who can play most difficult piano compositions without ever
+having been taught, or knowing in the least how he does it."
+
+"Do you think of any one else?" asked the prince.
+
+"Yes," said St. George, "I know a little lad of about five, I should
+say, who can add enormous numbers and instantly give the accurate
+result. And he has no idea how he does that, and no one has ever
+taught him to count above twelve. Oh--every one knows those cases, I
+fancy."
+
+"Has any one ever explained them, Mr. St. George?" asked the prince.
+
+"How should they?" asked St. George simply. "They are prodigies."
+
+"Quite so," said the prince again. "It is almost incredible that
+these instances seem to suggest to no one that there must be other
+ways to 'learn' music and mathematics--and, therefore, everything
+else--than those known to your civilization. Let me assure you that
+such cases as these, far from being miracles and prodigies, are
+perfectly normal when once the principle is understood, as we of
+Yaque understand it. It is the average intelligence among your
+people which is abnormal, inasmuch as it is unable to perform these
+functions which it was so clearly intended to exercise."
+
+"Do you mean," asked St. George, "that we need not learn--as we
+understand 'learn'?"
+
+"Precisely," said the prince simply. "You are accustomed, I was told
+in New York, to say that there is 'no royal road to learning.' On
+the contrary, I say to you that the possibilities of these children
+are in every one. But to my intense surprise I find that we of Yaque
+are the only ones in the world who understand how to use these
+possibilities. Our system of education consists simply in mastering
+this principle. After that, all knowledge--all languages, for
+instance--everything--belongs to us."
+
+St. George looked away to the rugged sides of Mount Khalak, lying in
+its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima
+Thule. It was all right--what he had just been hearing was a part of
+this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet _he_
+was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic,
+perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the
+prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that
+he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might
+have been his of his own accord if only he had understood how to
+call them in!
+
+"That would make a very jolly thing of college," he pensively
+conceded. "You could not show me how it is managed, your Highness?"
+he besought. "That will hardly come in bulk, too--"
+
+The prince shook his head, smiling.
+
+"I could not 'show you,' as you say," he answered, "any more than I
+could, at present, send a wireless communication without the
+apparatus--though it will be only a matter of time until that is
+accomplished, too."
+
+St. George pulled himself up sharply. He glanced over his shoulder
+and saw Amory polishing his pince-nez and looking quite as if he
+were leaning over hansom-doors in the park, and he turned quickly to
+the prince, half convinced that he had been mocked.
+
+"Suppose, your Highness," he said, "that I were to print what you
+have just told me on the front page of a New York morning paper,
+for people to glance over with their coffee? Do you think that even
+the most open-minded among them would believe that there is such a
+place as Yaque?"
+
+The prince smiled curiously, and his long-fringed lids drooped in
+momentary contemplation. The auto turned into that majestic avenue
+which terminates in the Eurychôrus before the Palace of the Litany.
+St. George's eye eagerly swept the long white way. At its far end
+stood Mount Khalak. _She_ must have passed over this very ground.
+
+"There is," the prince's smooth voice broke in upon his dream, "no
+such place as Yaque--as you understand 'place.'"
+
+"I beg your pardon, your Highness?" St. George doubted blankly. Good
+Heavens. Maybe there had arrived in Yaque no Olivia, as he
+understood Olivia.
+
+"You showed some surprise, I remember," continued the prince, "when
+I told you, in McDougle Street, that we of Yaque understand the
+Fourth Dimension."
+
+McDougle Street. The sound smote the ear of St. George much as would
+the clang of the fire patrol in the midst of light opera.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said, his attention now completely chained. Yet even
+then it was not that he cared so absorbingly about the Fourth
+Dimension. But what if this were all some trick and if, in this
+strange land, Olivia had simply been flashed before his eyes by the
+aid of mirrors?
+
+"I find," said the prince with deliberation, "that in America you
+are familiar with the argument that, if your people understood
+only length and breadth and did _not_ understand the Third
+Dimension--thickness--you could not then conceive of lifting, say,
+a square or a triangle and laying it down upon another square or
+triangle. In other words, you would not know anything of _up_ and
+_down_."
+
+St. George nodded. This was the familiar talk of college
+class-rooms.
+
+"As it is," pursued the prince, "your people do perfectly understand
+lifting a square and placing it upon a square, or a triangle upon a
+triangle. But you do not know anything about placing a cube upon a
+cube, or a pyramid upon a pyramid _so that both occupy the same
+space at the same time_. We of Yaque have mastered that principle
+also," the prince tranquilly concluded, "and all that of which this
+is the alphabet. That is why we are able to keep our island unknown
+to the world--not to say 'invisible.'"
+
+For a moment St. George looked at him speechlessly; then, in spite
+of himself, a slow smile overspread his face.
+
+"But," he said, "your Highness, there is not a mathematician in the
+civilized world who has not considered that problem and cast it
+aside, with the word that if fourth-dimensional space does exist it
+can not possibly be inhabited."
+
+"Quite so," said the prince, "and yet here we are."
+
+And, if you come to think of it--as St. George did--that is the only
+answer to a world of impossibilities already proved possible. But
+the vista which all this opened smote him with irresistible humour.
+
+"Ah well now, I suppose, your Highness," he said, "that our ocean
+liners sail clean through the island of Yaque, then, and never even
+have their smoke pushed sidewise?"
+
+The prince laughed pleasantly.
+
+"Have you ever," he asked, "had occasion to explain the principles
+of hydraulics, or chess, or philosophical idealism to a
+three-year-old child, or a charwoman? You must forgive me, but
+really I can think of no better comparison. I am quite as powerless
+now as you have been if you have ever attempted it. I can only
+assure you that such things _are_. Without Jarvo or Akko or some one
+who understood, you might have sailed the high seas all your life
+and never have come any nearer to Yaque."
+
+St. George reflected.
+
+"Is Yaque the only example of this kind of thing," he asked, "that
+the Fourth Dimension would reveal?"
+
+"By no means," said the prince in surprise, "the world is
+literally teeming with like revelations, once the key is in your
+hands. The Fourth Dimension is only the beginning. We utilize that
+to isolate our island. But the higher dimensions are gradually
+being conquered, too. Nearly all of us can pass into the Fifth at
+will, 'disappearing,' as you have the word, from the lower
+dimensions. It is well-known to you that in a land whose people
+knew length and breadth, but no _up_ and _down_, an object might
+be pushed, but never lifted _up_ or put _down_. If it were to be
+lifted, such a people would believe it to have 'disappeared.' So,
+from you who know only three dimensions, Yaque has 'disappeared,'
+until one of us guides you here. Also we pass at will into the
+Fifth Dimension and even higher, and seem to 'disappear'; the only
+difference is that, there, we should not be able yet to guide one
+who did not himself understand how to pass there. Just as one who
+understands how to die and to come to life, as you have the
+phrase, would not be able to take with him any one who did not
+understand how to take himself there..."
+
+St. George listened, grasping at straws of comprehension,
+remembering how he had heard all this theorized about and smiled at;
+but most of all he was beset by a practical consideration.
+
+"Then," he said suddenly, the question leaping to his lips almost
+against his will, "if you hold this key to all knowledge, how is it
+that the king--Mr. Holland--could get away from you, and the
+Hereditary Treasure be lost?"
+
+The prince sighed profoundly.
+
+"We have by no means," he said, "perfected our knowledge. We are at
+one with the absolute in knowledge--true. But the affairs of every
+day most frequently elude us. Not even the most advanced among us
+are perfect intuitionists. We have by no means reached that
+desirable and inevitable day when our minds shall flow together,
+without need of communication, without possibility of secret. We
+still suffer the disadvantage of a slight barrier of personality."
+
+"And it is into one of these lapses," thought St. George
+irreverently, "that the king has disappeared." Aloud he asked
+curiously concerning a matter which was every moment becoming more
+incomprehensible.
+
+"But how, your Highness," he said simply, "did your people ever
+consent to have an American for your king?"
+
+Before the prince could reply there occurred a phenomenon that sent
+all thought of such insubstantialities as the secrets of the Fourth
+Dimension far in the background.
+
+The prince's motor, closely followed by the others of the train, had
+reached a little eminence from which the island unrolled in fair
+patterns. Before them the smooth road unwound in varied light. At
+their left lay a still grove from whose depths was glimpsed a slim
+needle of a tower, rising, arrow-like, from the green. In the
+distance lay Med, with shining domes. The water of the lagoon gave
+brightness here and there among the hills. And as St. George and the
+prince looked over the prospect they saw, far down the avenue toward
+Med, a little, moving speck--a speck moving with a rapidity which
+neither the prince's motor nor any known motor of Yaque had ever
+before permitted itself.
+
+In an instant the six members of the Royal Golden Guard, who upon
+beautiful, spirited horses rode in advance of the train of the
+prince, wheeled and thundered back, lifting glittering hands of
+warning. "Aside! Aside!" shrieked the main Golden Guard, "a motor is
+without control!"
+
+Immediately there was confusion. At a touch the prince's car was
+drawn to the road's extreme edge, and the Golden Guards rode
+furiously back along the train, hailing the peaceful, slow-going
+machines into orderly retreat. They were all sufficiently amenable,
+for at sight of the alarming and unprecedented onrush of the growing
+speck that was bearing full down upon them, anxiety sat upon every
+face.
+
+St. George watched. And as the car drew nearer the thought which, at
+first sight of its speed, had vaguely flashed into being, took
+definite shape, and his blood leaped to its music. Whose hand would
+be upon that lever, whose daring would be directing its flight,
+whose but one in all Yaque--and that Olivia's?
+
+It was Olivia. That was plain even in the mere instant that it took
+the great, beautiful motor, at thirty miles an hour, to flash past
+them. St. George saw her--coat of hunting pink and fluttering veil
+and shining eyes; he was dimly conscious of another little figure
+beside her, and of the unmistakable and agonized Mrs. Hastings in
+the tonneau; but it was only Olivia's glance that he caught as it
+swept the prince. There was the faintest possible smile, and she was
+gone; and St. George, his heart pounding, sat staring stupidly after
+that shining cloud of dust, frantically wondering whether she could
+just possibly have seen him. For this was no trick of the
+imagination, his galloping heart told him that. And whether or not
+Yaque was a place, the world, the world was within his grasp,
+instinct with possibilities heavenly sweet. His eyes met Amory's in
+the minute when Cassyrus, prime minister of Yaque, had it borne in
+upon him that this was no runaway machine, but the ordinary and
+preferred pace of the daughter of their king; and while Cassyrus, at
+the enormity of the conception, breathed out expostulations in
+several languages--some of them known to us only by means of
+inscriptions on tombs--Amory spoke to St. George:
+
+"Who was the other girl?" he asked comprehensively.
+
+"What other girl?" St. George blankly murmured.
+
+And at this, Amory turned away with a look that could be made to
+mean whatever Amory meant.
+
+On went the imperial train faring back to Med over the road lately
+stirred to shining dust by the wheels of Olivia's auto. Olivia's
+auto. St. George was secretly saying over the words with a kind of
+ecstatic non-comprehension, when the prince spoke:
+
+"That," he said, "may explain why an American has been able to
+govern us. Chance crowned him, but he made himself king."
+
+Prince Tabnit hesitated and his eyes wandered--and those of St.
+George followed--to a far winding dot in that opal valley, a mere
+speck of silver with a prick of pink, fleeing in a cloud of sunny
+dust.
+
+"I do not know if you will know what I mean," said the prince, "but
+hers is the spirit, and the spirit of her father, the king, which
+Yaque had never known. It is the spirit which we of Phoenicia seem
+to have lost since the wealth of the world accumulated at her ports
+and she gave her trust to the hands of mariners and mercenaries, and
+later bowed to the conqueror. It is the spirit that not all the
+continental races, I fancy, have for endowment, but yours possesses
+in rich measure. For this we would exchange half that we have
+achieved."
+
+St. George nodded, glowing.
+
+"It is a great tribute, your Highness," he said simply, and in his
+heart he laid it at Olivia's feet.
+
+Thereafter, in the long ride to Melita, during luncheon upon a high
+white terrace overlooking the sailless sea, and in the hours on the
+unforgetable roads of the islands, St. George, while incommunicable
+marvels revealed themselves linked with incommunicable beauty, sat
+in the prince's motor, his eyes searching the horizon for that
+fleeing speck of silver and pink. It did not appear again. And when
+the train of the prince rolled into the yard of the Palace of the
+Litany it trembled upon St. George's lips to ask whether the
+formalities of the court would permit him that day to scale the
+skies and call upon the royal household.
+
+"For whatever he says, I've got to do," thought St. George, "but no
+matter what he says, I shall go. Doesn't Amory realize that we've
+been more than twelve hours on this island, and that nothing has
+been done?"
+
+And then as they crossed the grassy court in the delicate hush of
+the merging light--the nameless radiance already penetrating the
+dusk--the prince spoke smoothly, as if his words bore no import
+deeper than his smile:
+
+"You are come," he said courteously, "in time for one of the
+ceremonies of our régime most important--to me. You will, I hope, do
+honour to the occasion by your presence. This evening, in the Hall
+of Kings in the Palace of the Litany, will occur the ceremony of my
+betrothal."
+
+"Your betrothal, your Highness?" repeated St. George uncertainly.
+
+"You will be attended by an escort," the prince continued, "and
+Balator, the commander of the guard, will receive you in the hall.
+May the gods permit the possible."
+
+He swept through the portico before them, and they followed dumbly.
+
+The betrothal of the prince.
+
+St. George heard, and his eager hope went down in foreboding. He
+turned, hardly daring to read his own dread in the eyes of Amory.
+
+Amory, as St. George had said, was delicious, especially his drawl;
+but there were times--now, for example, when all that the eyes of
+Amory expressed was what his lips framed, _sotto-voce_:
+
+"An American heiress, betrothed to the prince of a cannibal island!
+Wouldn't Chillingworth turn in his grave at his desk?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+TYRIAN PURPLE
+
+
+The "porch of light" proved to be an especially fascinating place at
+evening. Evening, which makes most places resemble their souls
+instead of their bodies, had a grateful task in the beautiful room
+whose spirit was always uppermost, and Evening moved softly in its
+ivory depths, preluding for Sleep. Here, his lean, shadowed face all
+anxiety, Rollo stood, holding at arm's length a parti-coloured robe
+with floating scarfs.
+
+"It seems to me, sir," he said doubtfully, "that this one would 'ave
+done better. Beggin' your pardon, sir."
+
+St. George shook his head distastefully.
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said, and broke into a slow smile as he
+looked at Amory. The robes which the prince had provided for the
+evening were rather harder to become accustomed to than the notion
+of intuitive knowledge.
+
+"There's an air about this one though, sir," opined Rollo firmly,
+"there's a cut--a sort of _way_ with the seams, so to speak, sir,
+that the other can't touch. And cut is what counts, sir, cut counts
+every time."
+
+"Ah, yes, I dare say, Rollo," said St. George, "and as a judge of
+'cut' I don't say you can be equaled. But I do say that in the
+styles of Deuteronomy you aren't necessarily what you might call
+up."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo, dropping his eyes, "but a well-dressed man
+was a well-dressed man, sir, then _as_ now."
+
+As a matter of fact the well-knit, athletic young figures looked
+uncommonly well in the garments _à la mode_ in Yaque. One would have
+said that if the garments followed Deuteronomy fashions they had at
+all events been cut by the scissors of a court tailor to Louis XV.
+The result was beautiful and bizarre, but it did not suggest
+stageland because the colours were so good.
+
+"I dare say," said St. George, examining the exquisitely fine cloth
+whose shades were of curious depth and richness, "that this may be
+regular Tyrian purple."
+
+Amory waved his long sleeves.
+
+"Stop," he languidly begged, "you make me feel like a golden text."
+
+St. George went back to the row of open casements and resumed his
+walk up and down before the windows that looked away to the huge
+threatening bulk of Mount Khalak. Since the prince's announcement
+that afternoon St. George had done little besides continuing that
+walk. Now it wanted hardly half an hour to the momentous ceremony of
+the evening, big with at least one of the dozen portents of which he
+accused it.
+
+"Amory," he burst out as he walked, "if you didn't know anything
+about it, would you say that the prince could possibly have made her
+consent to marry him?"
+
+Amory, left in the middle of the great room, stood polishing his
+pince-nez exactly as if he had been waiting at the end of
+Chillingworth's desk of a bright, American morning.
+
+"If I didn't know anything about it," he said cheerfully, "I should
+say that he had. As it is, having this afternoon watched a certain
+motor wear its way past me, I should say that nothing in Yaque is
+more unlikely. And that's about as strong as you could put it."
+
+"We don't know what the man may have threatened," said St. George
+morosely, "he may have played upon her devotion to her father to
+some ridiculous extent. He may have refused to land the submarine at
+Yaque at all otherwise--"
+
+St. George broke off suddenly.
+
+"Toby!" he said.
+
+Amory looked over and nodded. He had seen that look before on St.
+George's face.
+
+"She's not going to marry the prince," said St. George, "and if her
+father is alive and in a hole, he's going to be pulled out. And
+she's _not_ going to marry the prince."
+
+"Why, no," assented Amory, "no."
+
+He had guessed a good deal of the truth since he had been watching
+St. George flee over seas upon a yacht, shod, so to speak, with
+fire, and he had arrived at the suspicion that _The Aloha_ was
+winged by little Loves and guided under water by plenty of blue and
+green dragons. But he had not, until now, been thoroughly certain
+that St. George's spirit of adventure had another name; and though
+theoretically his sympathies leaped to the look in his friend's
+eyes, yet he found himself wondering practically what effect romance
+would be having upon their enterprise. After all, from a newspaper
+point of view, to relinquish any part of the adventure was a kind of
+tragedy, and it cost Amory something to emphasize his assent.
+
+"Of course she won't," he said, "and now let's toddle down and see
+about it."
+
+When the tread of the feet of a detachment of the Royal Golden Guard
+was heard without, Rollo advanced to the door with a dignity which
+amounted to melancholy. The setting of a palace and the proximity of
+a prince had raised his office to the majesty of skilled labour. He
+always threw open the door now as who should say, "Enter. But mind
+you have a reason."
+
+At sight of the long liberty of the corridor where the light lay
+mysteriously touching tiles and tapestries to festal colours,
+Amory's spirits rose contagiously, and his eyes shone behind his
+pince-nez.
+
+"Me," he said, looking ahead with enjoyment at the glittering
+escort, "me--done in a fabric of about the eleventh shade of the
+Yaque spectrum--made loose and floppy, after a modish Canaanitish
+model. I'll wager that when the first-born of Canaan was in the
+flood-tide of glory, this very gown was worn by one of the most
+beautiful women in the pentapolis of Philistia. I'm going to
+photograph the model for the Sunday supplement, and name it _The
+Nebuchadnezzar_."
+
+Amory murmured on, and St. George hardly heard him. He could almost
+count by minutes now the time until he should see her. Would she see
+him, and might he just possibly speak with her, and what would the
+evening hold for her? As he went forth where she would be, the spell
+of the place was once more laid upon him, as it had been laid in the
+hour of his coming. Once more, as in the hour when he had first
+looked down upon the valley brimming with a light "better than any
+light that ever shone" he was at one with the imponderable things
+which, always before, had just eluded him. Now, as then, the thought
+of Olivia was the symbol for them all. So the two went on through
+the winding galleries--silent, haunted--to the great staircase, and
+below into the crowded court. And when they reached the threshold
+of the audience-chamber they involuntarily stood still.
+
+The hall was like a temple in its sense of space and height and
+clear air, but its proportions did not impress one, and indeed one
+could not remember its boundaries as one does not consider the
+boundaries of a grove. It was amphitheatre-shaped, and about it ran
+a splendid colonnade, in the niches of whose cornices were beautiful
+grotesques--but Yaque seemed to be a land whose very grotesques had
+all the dignity of the ultimate instead of crying for the indulgence
+due a phase. The roof was inlaid with prisms of clear stone, and on
+high were pilasters carved with the Tyrian sphinxes crucified upon
+upright crosses, surmounted by parhelions of burnished metal. All
+the seats faced a great dais at the chamber's far end where three
+thrones were set.
+
+But it was the men and women in the great chamber who filled St.
+George with wonder. The women--they were beautiful women,
+slow-moving, slow-eyed, of soft laughter and sudden melancholy, and
+clear, serene profiles and abundant hair. And they were all _alive_,
+fully and mysteriously alive, alive to their finger-tips. It was as
+if in comparison all other women acted and moved in a kind of
+half-consciousness. It was as if, St. George thought vaguely, one
+were to step through the frame of a pre-Raphaelite tapestry and
+suddenly find its strange women rejoicing in fulfillment instead of
+yearning, in noon instead of dusk. As he stood looking down the vast
+chamber, all springing columns and light lines lifting through the
+honey-coloured air, it smote St. George that these people, instead
+of being far away, were all near, surprisingly, unbelievably near to
+him,--in a way, nearer to his own elusive personality than he was
+himself. They were all obviously of his own class; he could
+perfectly imagine his mother, with her old lace and Roman mosaics,
+moving at home among them, and the bishop, with his wise, kindly
+smile. Yet he was irresistibly reminded of a certain haunting dream
+of his childhood in which he had seemed to himself to walk the world
+alone, with every one else allied against him because they all knew
+something that he did not know. That was it, he thought suddenly,
+and felt his pulse quickening at the intimation: _They all knew
+something that he did not know_, that he could not know. But, as
+they swept him with their clear-eyed, impersonal look, a look
+that seemed in some exquisite fashion to take no account of
+individuality, he was gratefully aware of a curious impression
+that they would like to have had him know, too.
+
+"They wish I knew--they'd rather I did know," St. George found
+himself thinking in a strange excitement, "if only I could know--if
+only I could know."
+
+He looked about him, smiling a little at his folly. He saw the
+light flash on Amory's glasses as they turned inquisitively on this
+and that, and somehow the sight steadied him.
+
+"Ah well," he assured himself, "I'll look them up in a thousand
+years or so, and we'll dine together, and then we'll say: 'Don't you
+remember how I didn't know?'"
+
+Immediately there presented himself to them a little man who proved
+to be Balator, lord-chief-commander of the Royal Golden Guard, and
+now especially directed by the prince, he pleasantly told them, to
+be responsible for their entertainment and comfort during the
+ceremony to follow. They were, in fact, his guests for the evening,
+but St. George and Amory were uncertain whether, considering his
+office, this was a high honour or a kind of exalted durance.
+However, as the man was charming the doubt was not important. He had
+an attenuated face, so conveniently brown by race as to suggest the
+most soldierly exposure, and he had great, peaceable, slow-lidded
+eyes. He was, they subsequently learned, an authority upon insect
+life in Yaque, for he had never had the smallest opportunity to go
+to war.
+
+As Balator led his guests to their seats near the throne every one
+looked on them, as they passed, with the serenest fellowship, and no
+regard persisted longer than a glance, friendly and fugitive.
+Balator himself not only refrained from stoning the barbarians with
+commonplaces, but he did not so much as mention America to them or
+treat them otherwise than as companions, as if his was not only the
+cosmopolitanism that knows no municipal or continental aliens of its
+own class, but a kind of inter-dimensional cosmopolitanism as well.
+
+"Which," said Amory afterward, "was enviable. The next man from
+Trebizond or Saturn or Fez whom I meet I'm going to greet and treat
+as if he lived the proverbial 'twenty minutes out.'"
+
+A great clock boomed and throbbed through the palace, striking an
+hour that was no more intelligible than the jargon of a ship's clock
+to a landsman. Somewhere an orchestra thrilled into haunting sound,
+poignant with disclosures barely missed. Overhead, through the
+mighty rafters of the conical roof, the moon looked down.
+
+"That'll be the same old moon," said Amory. "By Jove! Won't it?"
+
+"It will, please Heaven," said St. George restlessly; "I don't know.
+Will it?"
+
+Near the throne was seated a company of dignitaries who wore upon
+their breasts great stars and were soberly dressed in a kind of
+scholar's gown. Some whispered together and nodded and looked as
+solemn as tithing men; and others were feverishly restless and
+continually took papers from their graceful sleeves. By
+developments these were revealed to be the High Council of Yaque,
+conservative and radical, even in dimensional isolation. Farther
+back rose tier upon tier of seats sacred to the wives and daughters
+of the ministry, and St. George even looked hopelessly and
+mechanically among these for the face that he sought.
+
+To some seats slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his
+attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of
+purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to
+have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs.
+Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham, in indescribably gorgeous apparel elaborately bent to
+receive--and a member of the High Council bent to hand--two
+glittering articles which St. George was certain were side-combs.
+There the lady sat, tilting her head to keep her tortoise-shell
+glasses on her nose, perpetually curving their chain over her ear, a
+gesture by which the side-combs were perpetually displaced. If the
+island people had been painted purple, St. George felt sure that she
+would have acted quite the same. Personality meant nothing to
+her--not, as with them, because it had been merged in something
+greater, but because, with her, it was overborne by self. And there
+sat Mr. Frothingham (who did not attend the play during court
+because he believed that a man of affairs should not unduly
+stimulate the imagination), his head thrown back so that his long
+hair rested on his amazing collar, his hands laid trimly along his
+knees. In that crystal air, instinct with its delicate, dominant
+implication of things imponderable, the personality of each
+persisted undisturbed, in a kind of adamantine unconsciousness.
+Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St. George
+smiled a shade bitterly. Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?
+Is love's uttermost gift so little? But as the music swelled with
+premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very
+transitoriness disclosed: the persistence of love, love's mere
+immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is
+elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to
+which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.
+
+Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by
+the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about
+the walls and from the alcoves of the lofty roof. Then a veil
+hanging between two pillars was drawn aside, and the prince's train
+appeared. There were a detachment of the guard, splendid in their
+unrelieved gold, and the officers of the court, at their head
+Cassyrus, the premier, who had manifestly been compounded of Heaven
+to be a drum-major, and had so undeviating a look that he seemed
+always to have been caught, red-handed, at his post. Last came
+Prince Tabnit, dressed in pure white save for a collar of precious
+stones from which hung the strange green gem that St. George
+remembered. His clear face and the whiteness of his hair lent to him
+an air of almost unearthly distinction. His delicate hands wearing
+no jewels were at his sides, and his head was magnificently erect.
+He mounted the dais as the music sank to silence, and without
+preface began to speak.
+
+"My people," he said, and St. George felt himself thrilling with the
+strength and tenderness of that voice, "in the continuance of this
+our time of trial we come among you that we may win strength and
+courage from your presence. Since one mind dwells in us all, we have
+no need of words of cheer. That no message from his Majesty, the
+King, has come to us is known to you all, with mourning. But the
+gods--to whom 'here' is the same as 'there'--will permit the
+possible, and they have permitted to us the presence of the daughter
+of our sovereign, by the grace of the infinite, heir to the throne
+of Yaque. In two days, should his Majesty not then have returned to
+his sorrowing people, she will, in accordance with our custom, be
+crowned Hereditary Princess of Yaque and, after one year, Queen of
+Yaque and your rightful sovereign."
+
+As the prince paused, a little breath of assent was in the room,
+more potent than any crudity of applause.
+
+"Next," pursued the prince, "we would invite your attention to our
+own affairs, which are of importance solely as they are affected by
+the immemorial tradition of the House of the Litany. Therefore, in
+accordance with the custom of our predecessors for two thousand
+years," lightly pursued the prince, "we have named this day as the
+day of our betrothal. Moreover, this is determined upon in justice
+to the daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque, whose marriage the
+law forbids until the choice of the head of the House of the Litany
+has been made..."
+
+St. George listened, and his hope soared heavenward as the hope of
+young love will soar, in spite of itself, at the mere sight of open
+sky. The daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque! Of course they were
+to be considered. Why should he fear that, because Olivia was in
+Yaque, the mere mention of a betrothal referred to Olivia? He was
+bold enough to smile at his fears, to smile even when, as the prince
+ceased speaking, the music sounded again, as it were from the air,
+in a chorus of pure young voices with a ripple of unknown strings in
+accompaniment.
+
+Suddenly, at the opening of great doors, a flood of saffron light
+was poured upon a stair, and at the summit appeared the leisurely
+head of a procession which the two men were destined never to
+forget. Across the gallery and down the stair--it might have been
+the Golden Stair linking Near with Far--came a score of exquisite
+women in all the glory of their youth, of perfect physical beauty
+and splendid strength and fullness of life; and the wonder was not
+their beauty more than a kind of dryad delicacy of that beauty,
+which was yet not frailty but a look of angelic strength. But they
+were not remote--they were gloriously human, almost, one would say,
+divinely human, all gentle movement and warmth and tender breath.
+They were not remote, save as one's own soul would be remote by its
+very excess of intimacy with life, Little maids, so shy that their
+actuality was certain, came before them carrying flowers, and these
+were followed by youths scattering fragrant burning powder whose
+fallen flames were instantly pounced upon and extinguished by small
+furry lemurs trained to lay silver discs upon the flames. And as
+they all ranged themselves about the throne a little figure appeared
+at the top of the stairway alone, beneath the lifted curtain.
+
+She was veiled; but the elastic step, the girlish grace, the poise
+and youthful dignity were not to be mistaken. The room whirled round
+St. George, and then closed in about him and grew dark. For this was
+the woman advancing to her betrothal; from the manner of her
+entrance there could be no doubt of that. And it was none of the
+daughters of the twenty peers. It was Olivia.
+
+She wore a trailing gown of rainbow hues, more like the hues of
+water than of texture, and the warm light fell upon these as she
+descended and variously multiplied them to beauty. Her little feet
+were sandaled and a veil of indescribable thinness was wound about
+her abundant hair and fell across her face, but the gold of her hair
+escaped the veil and rippled along her gown. Carven chains and
+necklaces were upon her throat, and bracelets of beaten gold and
+jewels upon her arms. About her forehead glittered a jeweled band
+with pendent gems which, at her moving, were like noon sun upon
+water.
+
+As he realized that this was indeed she whom he had come to seek,
+only to find her hedged about with difficulties--and it might be by
+divinities--which he had not dreamed of coping, a kind of madness
+seized St. George. The lights danced before his eyes, and his
+impulse had to do with rushing up to the dais and crying everybody
+defiance but Olivia. On the moon-lit deck of _The Aloha_ he had
+dreamed out the island and the rescue of the island princess, and a
+possible home-going on his yacht to a home about which he had even
+dared to dream, too. But it had not once occurred to him to forecast
+such a contingency as this, or, later, so to explain to himself
+Prince Tabnit's change of purpose in permitting her recognition as
+Princess of Yaque--indeed, if what Jarvo and Akko had told him in
+New York were accurate, in bringing her to the island at all. And
+yet what, he thought crazily, if his guess at her part in this
+betrothal were far wrong? What if her father's safety were not the
+only consideration? What if, not unnaturally dazzled by the
+fairy-land which had opened to her ... even while he feared, St.
+George knew far better. But the number of terrors possible to a man
+in love is equal to those of battle-fields.
+
+Amory bent toward him, murmuring excitedly.
+
+"Jupiter," he said, "is she the American girl?"
+
+"She's Miss Holland," answered St. George miserably.
+
+"No--no, not the princess," said Amory, "the other."
+
+St. George looked. On the stair was a little figure in rose and
+silver--very tiny, very fair, and no doubt the lawyer's daughter.
+
+"I dare say it is," he told him, as one would say, "Now what the
+deuce of it?"
+
+Prince Tabnit had risen to receive Olivia, and St. George had to see
+him extend his hand and assist her beside him upon the dais. In the
+absence of her father she was obliged to stand alone. Then the
+little figure in rose and silver and one of the daughters of the
+peers advanced and lifted her veil, and St. George wanted to shout
+with sudden exultation. This then was she--so near, so near. Surely
+no great harm could come to them so long as the sea and the mystery
+of the island no longer lay between them. Did she know of his
+presence? Although he and Amory were seated so near the throne, they
+were at one side, and her clear, pure profile was turned toward
+them. And Olivia did not lift her eyes throughout the prime
+minister's long address, of which St. George and Amory, so lapped
+were they in wild projects and importunities, heard nothing until,
+uttered with indescribable pompousness, as if Cassyrus were a
+dowager and had made the match himself, the concluding words beat
+upon St. George's heart like stones. They were the formal
+announcement of the betrothal of Olivia, daughter of his Majesty,
+Otho I of Yaque, to Tabnit, Prince of Yaque and Head of the House of
+the Litany.
+
+St. George saw Prince Tabnit kneel before Olivia and place a ring
+upon her hand--no doubt the ring which had betrothed the island
+princesses for three thousand years. He saw the High Council
+standing with bowed heads, like the necessary archangels in an old
+painting; he caught the flash of the turquoise-blue ephod of the
+head of the religious order, as the benediction was pronounced by
+its wearer. And through it all he said to himself that all would be
+well if only she understood, if only she had the supreme
+self-consciousness to play the game. After all he knew her so
+little. He was certain of her exquisite, playful fancy, but had she
+imagination? Would she see the value of the moment and watch herself
+moving through it? Or would she live it with that feminine,
+unhumourous seriousness which is woman's weakness? She had an
+exquisite independence, he was certain that she had humour, and he
+remembered how alive she had seemed to him, receptive, like a woman
+with ten senses. But after all, would not her graceful sanity of
+view, that sense of tradition and unerring taste which he so
+reverenced, yet handicap her now and prevent her from daring
+whatever she must dare?
+
+Amory was beside himself. It was all very well to feel a great
+sympathy for St. George, but the sight was more than journalistic
+flesh and blood could look upon with sympathetic calm.
+
+"An American girl!" he breathed in spite of himself. "Why, St.
+George, if we can leave this island alive--"
+
+"Well, _you_ won't," St. George explained, with brutal directness,
+"unless you can cut that."
+
+Before silence had again fallen, the prime minister, all his fever
+of importance still upon him, once more faced the audience. This
+time his words came to St. George like a thunderbolt:
+
+"In three days' time, at noon, in this the Hall of Kings," he cried,
+letting each phrase fall as if he were its proud inventor,
+"immediately following the official recognition of Olivia, daughter
+of Otho I, as Hereditary Princess of Yaque, there will be
+solemnized, according to the immemorial tradition of the island last
+observed six hundred and eighty-four years ago by Queen Pentellaria,
+the marriage of Olivia of Yaque, to his Highness, Prince Tabnit,
+head of the House of the Litany, and chief administrator of justice.
+_For the law prescribes that no unmarried woman shall sit upon the
+throne of Yaque._ At noon of the third day will be observed the
+double ceremony of the recognition and the marriage. May the gods
+permit the possible."
+
+There was a soft insistence of music from above, a stir and breath
+about the room, the premier backed away to his seat, and St. George,
+even with the horrified tightening at his heart, was conscious of a
+vague commotion from the vicinity of Mrs. Medora Hastings. Then he
+saw the prince rise and turn to Olivia, and extend his hand to
+conduct her from the hall. The great banquet room beyond the
+colonnade was at once thrown open, and there the court circle and
+the ministry were to gather to do honour to the new princess, whom
+Prince Tabnit was to lead to the seat at his right hand at the
+table's head.
+
+To the amazement of his Highness, Olivia made no movement to accept
+the hand that he offered. Instead, she sat slightly at one side of
+the great glittering throne, looking up at him with something like
+the faintest conceivable smile which, while one saw, became once
+more her exquisite, girlish gravity. When the music sank a little
+her voice sounded above it with a sweet distinctness:
+
+"One moment, if you please, your Highness," she said clearly.
+
+It was the first time that St. George had heard her voice since its
+good-by to him in New York. And before her words his vague fears for
+her were triumphantly driven. The spirit that he had hoped for was
+in her face, and something else; St. George could have sworn that he
+saw, but no one else could have seen the look, a glimpse of that
+delicate roguery that had held him captive when he had breakfasted
+with her--several hundred years before, was it?--at the Boris. Ah,
+he need not have feared for her, he told himself exultantly. For
+this was Olivia--of America--standing in a company of the women who
+seemed like the women of whom men dream, and whose presence, save in
+glimpses at first meetings, they perhaps never wholly realize. These
+were the women of the land which "no one can define or remember."
+And yet, as he watched her now, St. George was gloriously conscious
+that Olivia not only held her own among them, but that in some charm
+of vividness and of _knowledge of laughter_, she transcended them
+all.
+
+A ripple of surprise had gone round the room. For all the air of the
+ultimate about the island-women, St. George doubted whether ever in
+the three thousand years of Yaque's history a woman had raised her
+voice from that throne upon a like occasion. And such a tender,
+beguiling, cajoling little voice it was. A voice that held little
+remarques upon whatever it had just said, and that made one
+breathless to know what would come next.
+
+"Bully!" breathed Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez.
+
+Prince Tabnit hesitated.
+
+"If the princess wishes to speak with us--" he began, and Olivia
+made a charming gesture of dissent, and all the jewels in her hair
+and upon her white throat caught the light and were set glittering.
+
+"No," she said gently, "no, your Highness. I wish to speak in the
+presence of my people."
+
+She gave the "my" no undue value, yet it fell from her lips with
+delicious audacity.
+
+"Indeed," she said, "I think, your Highness, that I will speak to my
+people myself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE END OF THE EVENING
+
+
+The Hall of Kings was very still as Olivia rose. She stood with one
+hand touching her veil's hem, the other resting on the low, carved
+arm of the throne, and at the coming and going of her breath her
+jewels made the light lambent with the indeterminate colours of
+those strange, joyous banners floating far above her head.
+
+Her voice was very sweet and a little tremulous--and it is the very
+grace of a woman's courage that her voice tremble never so slightly.
+It seemed to St. George that he loved her a thousand times the more
+for that mere persuasive wavering of her words. And, while he
+listened to what he felt to be the prelude of her message, it seemed
+to him that he loved her another thousand times the more--what
+heavenly ease there is in this arithmetic of love--for the tender
+meaning which, upon her lips, her father's name took on. When,
+speaking with simplicity and directness of the subject that lay
+uppermost in the minds of them all, she asked their utmost endeavour
+in their common grief, it was clear that what she said transcended
+whatever phenomena of mere experience lay between her and those who
+heard her, and they understood. The _rapport_ was like that among
+those who hear one music. But St. George listened, and though his
+mind applauded, it ran on ahead to the terrifying future. This was
+all very well, but how was it to help her in the face of what was to
+happen in three days' time?
+
+"Therefore," Olivia's words touched tranquilly among the flying ends
+of his own thought, "I am come before you to make that sacrifice
+which my love for my father, and my grief and my anxiety demand. I
+count upon your support, as he would count upon it for me. I ask
+that one heart be in us all in this common sorrow. And I am come
+with the unalterable determination both to renounce my throne
+there"--never was anything more enchanting than the way those two
+words fell from her lips--"and to postpone my marriage"--there never
+was anything more profoundly disquieting than _those_ two words in
+such a connection--"until such time as, by your effort and by my
+own, we may have news of my father, the king; and until, by your
+effort or by my own, the Hereditary Treasure shall be restored."
+
+So, serenely and with the most ingenuous confidence, did the
+daughter of the absent King Otho make disposition of the hour's
+events. Amory leaned forward and feverishly polished his pince-nez.
+
+"What do you think of that?" he put it, beneath his breath, "what
+_do_ you think of that?"
+
+St. George, watching that little figure--so adorably, almost
+pathetically little in its corner of the great throne--knew that he
+had not counted upon her in vain. Over there on the raised seats
+Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham were looking on
+matters as helplessly as they would look at a thunder-storm or a
+circus procession, and they were taking things quite as seriously.
+But Olivia, in spite of the tragedy that the hour held for her, was
+giving the moment its exact value, guiltless of the feminine
+immorality of panic. To give a moment its due without that panic,
+is, St. George knew, a kind of genius, like creating beauty, and
+divining another's meaning, and redeeming the spirit of a thing from
+its actuality. But by that time the arithmetic of his love was by
+way of being in too many figures to talk about. Which is the proper
+plight of love.
+
+Every one had turned toward Prince Tabnit, and as St. George looked
+it smote him whimsically that that impassive profile was like the
+profiles upon the ancient coins which, almost any day, might be cast
+up by a passing hoof on the island mold. Indeed, St. George thought,
+one might almost have spent the prince's profile at a fig-stall,
+and the vender would have jingled it among his silver and never have
+detected the cheat. But in the next moment the joyous mounting of
+his blood running riot in audacious whimsies was checked by the even
+voice of the prince himself.
+
+"The gratitude and love of this people," he said slowly, "are due to
+the daughter of its sovereign for what she has proposed. It is,
+however, to be remembered that by our ancient law the State and
+every satrapy therein shall receive no service, whether of blood or
+of bond, from an alien. The king himself could serve us only in that
+he was king. To his daughter as Princess of Yaque and wife of the
+Head of the House of the Litany, this service in the search for the
+sovereign and the Hereditary Treasure will be permitted, but she may
+serve us only from the throne."
+
+"Upon my soul, then that lets _us_ out," murmured Amory.
+
+And St. George remembered miserably how, in that dingy house in
+McDougle Street, he and Olivia had listened once before to the
+recital of that law from the prince's lips. If they had known how
+next they would hear it! If they had known then what that law would
+come to mean to her! What could she do now--what could even Olivia
+do now but assent?
+
+She could do a great deal, it appeared. She could incline her head,
+with a bewitching droop of eyelids, and look up to meet the eyes of
+the prince with a serenity that was like a smile.
+
+"In my country," said Olivia gravely, "when anything special arises
+they frequently find that there is no law to cover it. It would seem
+to us"--it was as though the humility of that "us" took from her
+superb daring--"that this is a matter requiring the advice of the
+High Council. Therefore," asked little Olivia gently, "will you not
+appoint, your Highness, a special session of the High Council to
+convene at noon to-morrow, to consider our proposition?"
+
+There was a scarcely perceptible stir among the members of the High
+Council, for even the liberals were, it would seem, taken aback by a
+departure which they themselves had not instituted. Olivia, still in
+submission to tradition which she could not violate, had gained the
+time for which she hoped. With a grace that was like the conferring
+of a royal favour, Prince Tabnit appointed the meeting of the High
+Council for noon on the following day.
+
+"May the gods permit the possible," he added, and once more extended
+his hand to Olivia. This time, with lowered eyes, she gave him the
+tips of her fingers and, as the beckoning music swelled a delicate
+prelude, she stepped from the dais and suffered the prince to lead
+her toward the banquet hall.
+
+Amory drew a long breath, and it came to St. George that if he,
+Amory, said anything about what he would give if he had a leased
+wire to the _Sentinel_ Office, there would no longer be room on the
+island for them both. But Amory said no such thing. Instead, he
+looked at St. George in distinct hesitation.
+
+"I say," he brought out finally, "St. George, by Jove, do you know,
+it seems to me I've seen Miss Frothingham before. And how jolly
+beautiful she is," he added almost reverently.
+
+"Maybe it was when you were a Phoenician galley slave and she went
+by in a trireme," offered St. George, trying to keep in sight the
+bright hair and the floating veil beyond the press of the crowd.
+Would he see Olivia and would he be able to speak with her, and did
+she know he was there, and would she be angry? Ah well, she could
+not possibly be angry, he thought; but with all this in his mind it
+was hardly reasonable of Amory to expect him to speculate on where
+Miss Frothingham might have been seen before. If it weren't for this
+Balator now, St. George said to himself restlessly, and suddenly
+observed that Balator was expecting them to follow him. So, in the
+slow-moving throng, all soft hues and soft laughter, they made their
+way toward the colonnade that cut off the banquet room. And at every
+step St. George thought, "she has passed here--and here--and here,"
+and all the while, through the mighty open rafters in the conical
+roof, were to be seen those strange banners joyously floating in the
+delicate, alien light. The wine of the moment flowed in his veins,
+and he moved under strange banners, with a strange ecstasy in his
+heart.
+
+Therefore, suddenly to hear Rollo's voice at his shoulder came as a
+distinct shock.
+
+"It's one of them little brown 'uns, sir," Rollo announced in his
+best tone of mystery. "He's settin' upstairs, sir, an' he's all fer
+settin' there _till_ he sees you. He says it's most important, sir."
+
+Amory heard.
+
+"Shall I go up?" he asked eagerly; "I'd like a whiff of a pipe,
+anyway. It'll be something to tie to."
+
+"Will you go?" asked St. George in undisguised gratitude. He was
+prepared to accept most risks rather than to lose sight of the star
+he was following.
+
+With a word to Balator who explained where, on his return, he could
+find them, Amory turned with Rollo, and slipped through the crowd.
+Having reasons of his own for getting back to the hall below, Amory
+was prepared to speed well the interview with "the little brown 'un"
+who, he supposed, was Jarvo.
+
+It was Jarvo--Jarvo, in a state of excitement, profound and
+incredible. The little man, from the annoyingly serene mode of mind
+in which he had left them, was become, for him, almost agitated. He
+sprang up from a divan in the great dressing-room of their apartment
+and approached Amory almost without greeting.
+
+"Adôn, adôn," he said earnestly, "you must leave the palace at
+once--at once. But to-night!"
+
+Amory hunted for his pipe, found and lighted it, pressing a
+cigarette upon Jarvo who accepted, and held it, alight, in the palm
+of his hand.
+
+"To-night," he repeated, as if it were a game.
+
+"Ah well, now," said Amory reasonably, "why, Jarvo? And we so
+comfortable."
+
+The little man looked at Amory beseechingly.
+
+"I know what I know," he said earnestly, "many things will happen.
+There is danger about the palace to-night--danger it may be for you.
+I do not know all, but I come to warn you, and to warn the adôn who
+has been kind to us. You have brought us here when we were alone in
+America," said Jarvo simply. "Akko and I will help you now. It was
+Akko who remembered the tower."
+
+Amory looked down at the bowl of his pipe, and shook his vestas in
+their box, and turned his eyes to Rollo, listening near by with an
+air of the most intense abstraction. Yes, all these things were
+real. They were all real, and here was he, Amory, smoking. And yet
+what was all this amazing talk about danger in the palace, and being
+warned, and remembering the tower?
+
+"Anybody would think I was Crass, writing head-lines," he told
+himself, and blew a cloud of smoke through which to look at Jarvo.
+
+"What are you talking about?" he demanded sternly.
+
+Jarvo had a little key in his hand, which he shook. The key was on a
+slender, carved ring, and it jingled. And when he offered it to him
+Amory abstractedly took it.
+
+"See, adôn," said Jarvo, "see! In the ilex grove on the road that we
+took last night there is a white tower--it may be that you have
+noticed it to-day. That tower is empty, and this is the key. There
+may be guards, but I shall know how to pass among them. You must
+come with me there to-night, the three. Even then it may be too
+late, I do not know. The gods will permit the possible. But this I
+know: the Royal Guard are of the lahnas, on whom the tax to make
+good the Hereditary Treasure will fall most heavily. They are filled
+with rage against your people--you and the king who is of your
+people. I do not know what they will do, but you are not safe for
+one moment in the palace. I come to warn you."
+
+Amory's pipe went out. He sat pulling at it abstractedly, trying to
+fit together what St. George had told him of the Hereditary Treasure
+situation. And more than at any other time since his arrival on the
+island his heart leaped up at the prospect of promised adventure.
+What if St. George's romantic apostasy were not, after all, to spoil
+the flavour of the kind of adventure for which he, Amory, had been
+hoping? He leaned eagerly forward.
+
+"What would you suggest?" he said.
+
+Jarvo's eyes brightened. At once he sprang to his feet and stood
+before Amory, taking soft steps here and there as he talked, in
+movement graceful and tenuous as the greyhound of which he had
+reminded St. George.
+
+"In the palace yard," explained the little man rapidly, "is a motor
+which came from Melita, bringing guests for the ceremony of
+to-night. They will remain in the palace until after the marriage of
+the prince, two days hence. But the motor--that must go back
+to-night to Melita, adôn. I have made for myself permission to take
+it there. But you--the three--must go with me. At the tower in the
+ilex grove I shall leave you, and I shall return. Is this good?"
+
+"Excellent. But what afterward?" demanded Amory. "Are we all to keep
+house in the tower?"
+
+Jarvo shook his head, like a man who has thought of everything.
+
+"Through to-morrow, yes," he said, "but to-morrow night, when the
+dark falls--"
+
+He bent forward and spoke softly.
+
+"Did not the adôn wish to ascend the mountain?" he asked.
+
+"Rather," said Amory, "but how, good heavens?"
+
+"I and Akko wish to ascend also; the prince has sent us no message,
+and we fear him," said Jarvo simply. "There are on the island, adôn,
+six carriers, trained from birth to make the ascent. They are the
+sons of those whose duty it was to ascend, and they the sons for
+many generations. The trail is very steep, very perilous. Six were
+taught to go up with messages long before the knowledge of the
+wireless way, long before the flight of the airships. They are
+become a tradition of the island. It is with them that you must
+ascend--if you have no fear."
+
+"Fear!" cried Amory. "But these men, what of them? They are in the
+employ of the State. How do you know they will take us?"
+
+Jarvo dropped his eyes.
+
+"I and Akko," he said quietly, "we are two of these six carriers,
+adôn."
+
+Then Amory leaped up, scattering the ashes of his pipe over the
+tiles. This, then, was what was the matter with the feet of the two
+men, about which they had all speculated on the deck of _The Aloha_,
+the feet trained from birth to make the ascent of the steep trail,
+feet become long, tenuous, almost prehensile--
+
+"It's miracles, that's what it is," declared Amory solemnly. "How on
+earth did they come to take you to New York?" he could not forbear
+asking.
+
+"The prince knew nothing of your country, adôn," answered Jarvo
+simply. "He might have needed us to enter it."
+
+"To climb the custom-house," said Amory abstractedly, and laughed
+out suddenly in sheer light-heartedness. Here was come to them an
+undertaking to which St. George himself must warm as he had warmed
+at the prospect of the voyage. To go up the mountain to the
+threshold of the king's palace, where lived the daughter of the
+king.
+
+Amory bent himself with a will to mastering each detail of the
+little man's proposals. Rollo, they decided, was at once to make
+ready a few belongings in the oil-skins. Immediately after the
+banquet St. George and Amory were to mingle with the throng and
+leave the palace--no difficult matter in the press of the
+departures--and, on the side of the courtyard beneath the windows of
+the banquet room, Jarvo, already joined by Rollo, would be awaiting
+them in the motor bound for Melita.
+
+"It sounds as if it couldn't be done," said Amory in intense
+enjoyment. "It's bully."
+
+He paced up and down the room, talking it over. He folded his arms,
+and looked at the matter from all sides and wondered, as touching a
+story being "covered" for Chillingworth, whether he were leaving
+anything unthought.
+
+"Chillingworth!" he said to himself in ecstasy. "Wouldn't
+Chillingworth dote to idolatry upon this sight?"
+
+Then Amory stood still, facing something that he had not seen
+before. He had come, in his walk, upon a little table set near the
+room's entrance, and bearing a decanter and some cups.
+
+"Hello," he said, "Rollo, where did this come from?"
+
+Rollo came forward, velvet steps, velvet pressing together of his
+hands, face expressionless as velvet too.
+
+"A servant of 'is 'ighness, sir," he said--Rollo did that now and
+then to let you know that his was the blood of valets--"left it some
+time ago, with the compliments of the prince. It looks like a good,
+nitzy Burgundy, sir," added Rollo tolerantly, "though the man did
+say it was bottled in something B.C., sir, and if it was it's most
+likely flat. You can't trust them vintages much farther back than
+the French Revolootion, beggin' your pardon, sir."
+
+Amory absently lifted the decanter, and then looked at it with some
+curiosity. The decanter was like a vase, ornamented with gold
+medallions covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+beauty and variety of design. Serpents, men contending with lions,
+sacred trees and apes were chased in the gold, and the little cups
+of sard were engraved in pomegranates and segments of fruit and
+pendent acorns, and were set with cones of cornelian. The cups were
+joined by a long cord of thick gold.
+
+Amory set his hand to the little golden stopper, perhaps
+hermetically sealed, he thought idly, at about the time of the
+accidental discovery of glass itself by the Phoenicians. Amory was
+not imaginative, but as he thought of the possible age of the wine,
+there lay upon him that fascination communicable from any link
+between the present and the living past.
+
+"Solomon and Sargon," he said to himself, "the geese in the capitol,
+Marathon, Alexander, Carthage, the Norman conquest, Shakespeare and
+Miss Frothingham!"
+
+He smiled and twisted the carven stopper.
+
+"And the girl is alive," he said almost wonderingly. "There has been
+so much Time in the world, and yet she is alive now. Down there in
+the banquet room."
+
+The odour of the contents of the vase, spicy, penetrating,
+delicious, crept out, and he breathed it gratefully. It was like no
+odour that he remembered. This was nothing like Rollo's "good, nitzy
+Burgundy"--this was something infinitely more wonderful. And the
+odour--the odour was like a draught. And wasn't this the wine of
+wines, he asked himself, to give them courage, exultation, the most
+superb daring when they started up that delectable mountain? St.
+George must know; he would think so too.
+
+"Oh, I say," said Amory to himself, "we must put some strength in
+Jarvo's bones too--poor little brick!"
+
+With that Amory drew the carven stopper, fitted in the little funnel
+that hung about the neck of the vase, poured a half-finger of the
+wine in each cup, and lifted one in his hand. But the mere odour was
+enough to make a man live ten lives, he thought, smiling at his own
+strange exultation. He must no more than touch it to his lips, for
+he wanted a clear head for what was coming.
+
+"Come, Jarvo," he cried gaily--was he shouting, he wondered, and
+wasn't that what he was trying to do--to shout to make some far-away
+voice answer him? "Come and drink to the health of the prince. Long
+may he live, long may he live--without us!"
+
+Amory had stood with his back to the little brown man while he
+poured the wine. As he turned, he lifted one cup to his lips and
+Rollo gravely presented the other to Jarvo. But with a bound that
+all but upset the velvet valet, the little man cleared the space
+between him and Amory and struck the cup from Amory's hand.
+
+"Adôn!" he cried terribly, "adôn! Do not drink--do not drink!"
+
+The precious liquid splashed to the floor with the falling cup and
+ran red about the tiles. Instantly a powerful and delightful
+fragrance rose, and the thick fumes possessed the air. Amory threw
+out his hands blindly, caught dizzily at Rollo, and was half dragged
+by Jarvo to the open window.
+
+"Oh, I say, sir--" burst out Rollo, more upset over the loss of the
+wine than he was alarmed at the occurrence. If it came to losing a
+good, nitzy Burgundy, Rollo knew what that meant.
+
+"Adôn," cried Jarvo, shaking Amory's shoulders, "did you taste the
+liquor--tell me--the liquor--did you taste?"
+
+Amory shook his head. Jarvo's face and the hovering Rollo and the
+whole room were enveloped in mist, and the wine was hot on his lips
+where the cup had touched them. Yet while he stood there, with that
+permeating fragrance in the air, it came to him vaguely that he had
+never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this,
+he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old
+days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy"
+Burgundy was no more than a flabby, _vin ordinaire_ beside it. Not
+that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word
+that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in
+his veins, he summed it up to himself triumphantly.
+
+But after all, the effect was only momentary. Almost as quickly as
+those strange fumes had arisen they were dissipated. And when
+presently Amory stood up unsteadily from the seat of the window, he
+could see clearly enough that Jarvo, with terrified eyes, was
+turning the vase in his hands.
+
+"It is the same," he was saying, "it must be the same. The gods have
+permitted the possible. I was here to tell you."
+
+"Tell me what?" demanded Amory with ungrateful irritation. "Is the
+stuff poison?" he asked, tottering in spite of himself as he crossed
+the floor toward him. But Jarvo turned his face, and upon it was
+such an incongruous terror that Amory involuntarily stood still.
+
+"There are known to be two," said Jarvo, holding the vase at arm's
+length, "and the one is abundant life, if the draught is not
+over-measured. But the other is ten thousand times worse than
+death."
+
+"What do you mean?" cried Amory roughly. "What are you talking
+about? If the stuff is poison can't you say so?"
+
+Jarvo looked at him swiftly.
+
+"These things are not spoken aloud in Yaque," he said simply, and
+after that he held his peace. Amory threatened him and laughed at
+him, but Jarvo shook his head. At last Amory scoffed at the whole
+matter and stretched out his hand for the vase.
+
+"Come," he said, "at all events I'll take it with me. It can't be
+very much worse than the American liqueurs."
+
+"My word for it, sir, beggin' your pardon," said Rollo earnestly,
+"it's a kind of what you might call med-i-eval Burgundy, sir."
+
+"It is not well," said Jarvo, handing the vase with reluctance, "yet
+take it--but see that it touches no lips. I charge you that, adôn."
+
+Amory smiled and slipped the little vase in his coat pocket.
+
+"It's all right," he said, "I won't let it get away from me. I can
+find my legs now; I'll go back down. Look sharp, Rollo. Be down
+there with the oil-skins. We put on this Tyrian purple stuff over
+the whole outfit," he explained to Jarvo, "and I suppose, you know,
+that you can get both robes back here for us, if we escape in them?"
+
+"Assuredly, adôn," said Jarvo, "and you must escape without delay.
+This wine must mean that the prince, too, wishes you harm. Now let
+me be before you for a little, so that no one may see us together. I
+shall go now, immediately, to the motor--it is waiting already by
+the wall on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+banquet hall. I shall not fail you."
+
+"On the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the banquet
+room," repeated Amory. "Thanks, Jarvo. You're all kinds of a good
+fellow."
+
+"Yes, adôn," gravely assented the little man from the threshold.
+
+Ten minutes later Amory followed. Already Rollo had packed the
+oil-skins, and Amory, his nerves steadied and the excitement of all
+that the night promised come upon him, hurried before him down the
+corridor, his thoughts divided in their allegiance between the
+delight of telling St. George what was toward, and the new and
+alluring delight of seeing Antoinette Frothingham near at hand in
+the banquet room. After all, he had had only the vaguest glimpse of
+a little figure in rose and silver, and he doubted if he could tell
+her from the princess, but for the interpreting gown.
+
+Amory looked up with an irrepressible thrill of delight. He was just
+at that moment crossing the high white audience-hall, the anteroom
+to the Hall of Kings--he, Amory, in Tyrian purple garments. If
+anything were needed to complete the picture it would be to meet
+face to face, there in that big, lonely room, a little figure in
+rose and silver. It made his heart beat even to think of the
+possibilities of that situation. He skirted the Hall of Kings, and
+stood in one of the archways of the colonnade, facing the banquet
+room.
+
+The banquet-table extended about three sides of the room, whose
+centre the guests faced. The middle space was left pure, unvexed by
+columns or furnishing. At the room's far end Amory glimpsed the
+prince, at his side Olivia's white veil, and her women about her;
+and, nearer, St. George and Balator in the place appointed. A guard
+came to conduct him, and he crossed to his seat and sank down with
+the look that could be made to mean whatever Amory meant.
+
+"I expect to be served," murmured the journalist in him, "by
+beautiful tame megatheriums, in sashes. And is that glyptodon
+salad?"
+
+St. George's eyes were upon the guests, so tranquilly seated, aware
+of the hour.
+
+"I fancy," he said in half-voice, "that presently we shall see
+little flames issuing from their hair, as there used from the hair
+of the ladies in Werner's ballets."
+
+Then as Balator leaned toward him in his splendid leisure, fostering
+his charm, there came an amazing interruption.
+
+The low key of the room was electrically raised by a cry, loosed
+from some other plight of being, like an odour of burning
+encroaching upon a garden.
+
+"Why have you not waited?" some one called, and the voice--clear,
+equal, imperious--evened its way upon the air and reduced to itself
+the soft speech of the others. Silence fell upon them all, and
+their eyes were toward a figure standing in the open interval of the
+room--a figure whose aspect thrilled St. George with sudden,
+inexplicable emotion.
+
+It was an old man, incredibly old, so that one thought first of his
+age. His beard and hair were not all grey, but he had grotesquely
+brown and wrinkled flesh. His stuff robe hung in straight folds
+about his singularly erect figure, and there was in his bearing the
+dignity of one who has understood all fine and gentle things, all
+things of quietude. But his look was vacant, as if the mind were
+asleep.
+
+"Why have you not waited?" he repeated almost wonderingly. "Why have
+you not sent for me?" and his eyes questioned one and another, and
+rested on the face of the prince upon the dais, with Olivia by his
+side. The guard, whom in some fashion the strange old man had
+eluded, hurried from the borders of the room. But he broke from them
+and was off up half the length of the hall toward the prince's seat.
+
+"Do you not know?" he cried as he went, "I am Malakh. Read one
+another's eyes and you will know. I am Malakh."
+
+As the guards closed about him he tottered and would have fallen
+save that they caught him roughly and pressed to a door, half
+carrying him, and he did not resist. But as speech was renewed
+another voice broke the murmur, and with great amazement St. George
+knew that this was Olivia's voice.
+
+"No," she cried--but half as if she distrusted her own strange
+impulse, "let him stay--let him stay."
+
+St. George saw the prince's look question her. He himself was unable
+to account for her unexpected intercession, and so, one would have
+said, was Olivia. She looked up at the prince almost fearfully, and
+down the length of the listening table, and back to the old man
+whose eyes were upon her face.
+
+"He is an old man, your Highness," St. George heard her saying, "let
+him stay."
+
+Prince Tabnit, who gave a curious impression of doing everything
+that he did in obedience to inertia rather than in its defiance,
+indicated some command to the puzzled guards, and they led old
+Malakh to a stone bench not far from the dais, and there he sank
+down, looking about him without surprise.
+
+"It is well," he said simply, "Malakh has come."
+
+While St. George was marveling--but not that the old man spoke the
+English, for in Yaque it was not surprising to find the very madmen
+speaking one's own tongue--Balator explained the man.
+
+"He is a poor mad creature," Balator said. "He walks the streets of
+Med saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say, 'king,' and so he is
+seeking the king. But he is mad, and they say that he always weeps,
+and therefore they pretend to believe that he says 'Malakh,' which
+is to say 'salt.' And they call him that for his tears. Doubtless
+the princess does not understand. Her Highness has a tender heart."
+
+St. George was silent. The incident was trivial, but Olivia had
+never seemed so near.
+
+Sometimes in the world of commonplace there comes an extreme hour
+which one afterward remembers with "Could that have been I? But
+could it have been I who did that?" And one finds it in one's heart
+to be certain that it was not one's self, but some one else--some
+one very near, some one who is always sharing one's own
+consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's moments. "Perhaps,"
+St. George would have said, "there is some such person who is
+nearly, but not quite, I myself. And if there is, it was he and not
+I who was at that banquet!" It was one of the hours which seem to
+have been made with no echo. It was; and then passed into other
+ways, and one remembered only a brightness. For example, St. George
+listened to what Balator said, and he heard with utmost
+understanding, and with the frequent pleasure of wonder, and was now
+and then exquisitely amused as one is amused in dreams. But even as
+he listened, if he tried to remember the last thing that was said,
+and the next to the last thing, he found that these had escaped him;
+and as he rose from the table he could not recall ten words that had
+been spoken. It was as if the some one very near, who is always
+sharing one's consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's
+moments, had taken St. George's part at the banquet while he,
+himself, sat there in the rôle of his own outer consciousness. But
+neither he nor that hypothetical "some one else," who was also he,
+lost for one instant the heavenly knowledge that Olivia was up there
+at the head of the table.
+
+Amory, in spite of diplomatic effort, had not succeeded in imparting
+to St. George anything of his talk with Jarvo. Balator was too near,
+and the place was somehow too generally attentive to permit a secret
+word. So, as they rose from the table, St. George was still in
+ignorance of what was toward and knew nothing of either the Ilex
+Tower or the possibilities of the morrow. He had only one thought,
+and that was to speak with Olivia, to let her know that he was there
+on the island, near her, ready to serve her--ah well, chiefly, he
+did not disguise from himself, what he wanted was to look at her and
+to hear her speak to him. But Amory had depended on the confusion of
+the rising to communicate the great news, and to tell about Jarvo,
+waiting in a motor out there in the palace courtyard, by the wall on
+the side opposite the windows of the banquet room. In an auspicious
+moment Amory looked warily about, thrilling with premonition of his
+friend's enthusiasm.
+
+Before he could speak, St. George uttered a startled exclamation,
+caught at Amory's arm, sprang forward, and was off up the long room,
+dragging Amory with him.
+
+About the dais there was suddenly an appalling confusion. Push of
+feet, murmurs, a cry and, visible over the heads between, a
+glistening of gold uniforms closing about the throne seats, flashing
+back to the long, open windows, disappearing against the night...
+
+"What is it?" cried Amory as he ran. "What is it?"
+
+"Quick," said St. George only, "I don't know. They've gone with
+her."
+
+Amory did not understand, but he saw that Olivia's seat was empty;
+and when he swept the heads for her white veil, it was not there.
+
+"Who has?" he said.
+
+St. George swerved to the side of the room toward the windows, and
+old Malakh stood there, crying out and pointing.
+
+"The guard, I think," St. George answered, and was over the low sill
+of a window, running headlong across the courtyard, Amory behind
+him. "There they go," St. George cried. "Good God, what are we to
+do? There they go."
+
+Amory looked. Down a side avenue--one of those tunnels of shadow
+that taught the necessity of mystery--a great motor car was
+speeding, and in the dimness the two men could see the white of
+Olivia's floating veil.
+
+At this, Amory wheeled and searched the length of wall across the
+yard. If only--if only--
+
+There on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+banquet room stood the motor that was that night to go back to
+Melita. Bolt upright on the seat was Jarvo, and climbing in the
+tonneau, with his neck stretched toward the confusion of the palace,
+was Rollo. Jarvo saw Amory, who beckoned; and in an instant the car
+was beside them and the two men were over the back of the tonneau in
+a flash.
+
+"That way," cried St. George, with no time to waste on the miracle
+of Jarvo's appearance, "that way--there. Where you see the white."
+
+At a touch the motor plunged away into the fragrant darkness. Amory
+looked back. Figures crowded the windows of the palace, and streamed
+from the banquet hall into the courtyard. Men hurried through the
+hall, and there was clamour of voices, and in the honey-coloured air
+the great bulk of the palace towered like a faithless sentinel, the
+alien banners in nameless colours sending streamers into the
+moon-lit upper spaces.
+
+On before, down nebulous ways, went the whiteness of the floating
+veil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BETWEEN-WORLDS
+
+
+Down nebulous ways they went, the thin darkness flowing past them.
+The sloping avenue ran all the width of the palace grounds, and here
+among slim-trunked trees faint fringes of the light touched away the
+dimness in the open spaces and expressed the borders of the dusk.
+Always the way led down, dipping deeper in the conjecture of shadow,
+and always before them glimmered the mist of Olivia's veil, an
+eidolon of love, of love's eternal Vanishing Goal.
+
+And St. George was in pursuit. So were Amory and Jarvo, and Rollo of
+the oil-skins, but these mattered very little, for it was St. George
+whose eyes burned in his pale face and were striving to catch the
+faintest motion in that fleeing car ahead.
+
+"Faster, Jarvo," he said, "we're not gaining on them. I think
+they're gaining on us. Put ahead, can't you?"
+
+Amory vexed the air with frantic questionings. "How did it happen?"
+he said. "Who did it? Was it the guard? What did they do it for?"
+
+"It looks to me," said St. George only, peering distractedly into
+the gloom, "as if all those fellows had on uniforms. Can you see?"
+
+Jarvo spoke softly.
+
+"It is true, adôn," he said, "they are of the guard. This is what
+they had planned," he added to Amory. "I feared the harm would be to
+you. It is the same. Your turn would be the next."
+
+"What do you mean?" St. George demanded.
+
+Amory, with some incoherence, told him what Jarvo had come to them
+to propose, and heightened his own excitement by plunging into the
+business of that night and the next, as he had had it from the
+little brown man's lips.
+
+"Up the mountain to-morrow night," he concluded fervently, "what do
+you think of that? Do you see us?"
+
+"Maniac, no," said St. George shortly, "what do we want to go up the
+mountain for if Miss Holland is somewhere else? Faster, Jarvo, can't
+you?" he urged. "Why, this thing is built to go sixty miles an hour.
+We're creeping."
+
+"Perhaps it's better to start in gentle and work up a pace, sir,"
+observed Rollo inspirationally, "like a man's legs, sir, beggin'
+your pardon."
+
+St. George looked at him as if he had first seen him, so that Amory
+once more explained his presence and pointed to the oil-skins. And
+St. George said only:
+
+"Now we're coming up a little--don't you think we're coming up a
+little? Throw it wide open, Jarvo--now, go!"
+
+"What are you going to do when you catch them?" demanded Amory. "We
+can't lunge into them, for fear of hurting Miss Holland. And who
+knows what devilish contrivance they've got--dum-dum bullets with a
+poison seal attachment," prophesied Amory darkly. "What are you
+going to do?"
+
+"I don't know what we're going to do," said St. George doggedly,
+"but if we can overtake them it won't take us long to find out."
+
+Never so slightly the pursuers were gaining. It was impossible to
+tell whether those in the flying car knew that they were followed,
+and if they did know, and if Olivia knew, St. George wondered
+whether the pursuit were to her a new alarm, or whether she were
+looking to them for deliverance. If she knew! His heart stood still
+at the thought--oh, and if they had both known, that morning at
+breakfast at the Boris, that _this_ was the way the genie would come
+out of the jar. But how, if he were unable to help her? And how
+could he help her when these others might have Heaven knew what
+resources of black art, art of all the colours of the Yaque
+spectrum, if it came to that? The slim-trunked trees flew past them,
+and the tender branches brushed their shoulders and hung out their
+flowers like lamps. Warm wind was in their faces, sweet,
+reverberant voices of the wood-things came chorusing, and ahead
+there in the dimness, that misty will-o'-the-wisp was her veil,
+Olivia's veil. St. George would have followed if it had led him
+between-worlds.
+
+In a manner it did lead him between-worlds. Emerging suddenly upon a
+broader avenue their car followed the other aside and shot through a
+great gateway of the palace wall--a wall built of such massive
+blocks that the gateway formed a covered passageway. From there,
+delicately lighted, greenly arched, and on this festal night, quite
+deserted, went the road by which, the night before, they had entered
+Med.
+
+"Now," said St. George between set teeth, "now see what you can do,
+Jarvo. Everything depends on you."
+
+Evidently Jarvo had been waiting for this stretch of open road and
+expecting the other car to take it. He bent forward, his wiry
+little frame like a quivering spring controlling the motion. The
+motor leaped at his touch. Away down the road they tore with the
+wind singing its challenge. Second by second they saw their
+gain increase. The uniforms of the guards in the car became
+distinguishable. The white of Olivia's veil merged in the
+brightness of her gown--was it only the shining of the gold of the
+uniforms or could St. George see the floating gold of her hair?
+Ah, wonderful, past all speech it was wonderful to be fleeing
+toward her through this pale light that was like a purer element
+than light itself. With the phantom moving of the boughs in the
+wood on either side light seemed to dance and drip from leaf to
+leaf--the visible spirit of the haunted green. The unreality of it
+all swept over him almost stiflingly. Olivia--was it indeed Olivia
+whom he was following down lustrous ways of a land vague as a
+star; or was his pursuit not for her, but for the exquisite,
+incommunicable Idea, and was he following it through a world
+forth-fashioned from his own desire?
+
+Suddenly indistinguishable sounds were in his ears, words from
+Amory, from Jarvo certain exultant gutturals. He felt the car
+slacken speed, he looked ahead for the swift beckoning of the veil,
+and then he saw that where, in the delicate distance, the other
+motor had sped its way, it now stood inactive in the road before
+them, and they were actually upon it. The four guards in the motor
+were standing erect with uplifted faces, their gold uniforms shining
+like armour. But this was not all. There, in the highway beside the
+car, the mist of her veil like a halo about her, Olivia stood alone.
+
+St. George did not reckon what they meant to do. He dropped over the
+side of the tonneau and ran to her. He stood before her, and all the
+joy that he had ever known was transcended as she turned toward
+him. She threw out her hands with a little cry--was it gladness, or
+relief, or beseeching? He could not be certain that there was even
+recognition in her eyes before she tottered and swayed, and he
+caught her unconscious form in his arms. As he lifted her he looked
+with apprehension toward the car that held the guards. To his
+bewilderment there was no car there. The pursued motor, like a
+winged thing of the most innocent vagaries, had taken itself off
+utterly. And on before, the causeway was utterly empty, dipping idly
+between murmurous green. But at the moment St. George had no time to
+spend on that wonder.
+
+He carried Olivia to the tonneau of Jarvo's car, jealous when Rollo
+lifted her gown's hem from the dust of the road and when Amory threw
+open the door. He held her in his arms, half kneeling beside her,
+profoundly regardless where it should please the others to dispose
+themselves. He had no recollection of hearing Jarvo point the way
+through the trees to a path that led away, as far from them as a
+voice would carry, to the Ilex Tower whose key burned in Amory's
+pocket, promising radiant, intangible things to his imagination. St.
+George understood with magnificent unconcern that Amory and Rollo
+were gone off there to wait for the return of him and Jarvo; he took
+it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken
+back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he
+knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving
+across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate
+destination in which he found himself believing with infinite faith.
+
+For this was Olivia, in his arms. St. George looked down at her, at
+the white, exquisite face with its shadow of lashes, and it seemed
+to him that he must not breathe, or remember, or hope, lest the gods
+should be jealous and claim the moment, and leave him once more
+forlorn. That was the secret, he thought, not to touch away the
+elusive moment by hope or memory, but just to live it, filled with
+its ecstasies, borne on the crest of its consciousness. It seemed to
+him in some intimately communicated fashion, that the moment, the
+very world of the island, was become to him a more intense object
+of consciousness than himself. And somehow Olivia was its
+expression--Olivia, here in his arms, with the stir of her breath
+and the light, light pressure of her body and the fall of her hair,
+not only symbols of the sovereign hour, but the hour's realities.
+
+On either side the phantom wood pressed close about them, and its
+light seemed coined by goblin fingers. Dissolving wind, persuading
+little voices musical beyond the domain of music that he knew,
+quick, poignant vistas of glades where the light spent itself in
+its longed-for liberty of colour, labyrinthine ways of shadow that
+taught the necessity of mystery. There was something lyric about it
+all. Here Nature moved on no formal lines, understood no frugality
+of beauty, but was lavish with a divine and special errantry to a
+divine and special understanding. And it had been given St. George
+to move with her merely by living this hour, with Olivia in his
+arms.
+
+The sweet of life--the sweet of life and the world his own. The
+words had never meant so much. He had often said them in exultation,
+but he had never known their truth: the world was literally his own,
+under the law. Nothing seemed impossible. His mind went back to the
+unexplained disappearing of that other motor and, however it had
+been, that did not seem impossible either. It seemed natural, and
+only a new doorway to new points of contact. In this amazing land no
+speculation was too far afield to be the food of every day. Here men
+understood miracle as the rest of the world understands invention.
+Already the mere existence of Yaque proved that the space of
+experience is transcended--and with the thought a fancy, elusive and
+profound, seized him and gripped at his heart with an emotion wider
+than fear. What had become of the other car? Had it gone down some
+road of the wood which the guards knew, or ... The words of Prince
+Tabnit came back to him as they had been spoken in that wonderful
+tour of the island. "The higher dimensions are being conquered.
+Nearly all of us can pass into the fifth at will, 'disappearing,' as
+you have the word." Was it possible that in the vanishing of the
+pursued car this had been demonstrated before him? Into this space,
+inclusive of the visible world and of Yaque as well, had the car
+passed _without the pursuers being able to point_ to the direction
+which it had taken? St. George smiled in derision as this flashed
+upon him, and it hardly held his thought for a moment, for his eyes
+were upon Olivia's face, so near, so near his own ... Undoubtedly,
+he thought vaguely, that other motor had simply swerved aside to
+some private opening of the grove and, from being hard-pressed and
+almost overtaken, was now well away in safety. Yet if this were so,
+would they not have taken Olivia with them? But to that strange and
+unapparent hyperspace they could not have taken her, because she did
+not understand. "...just as one," Prince Tabnit had said, "who
+understands how to die and come to life again would not be able to
+take with him any one who himself did not understand how to
+accompany him..."
+
+Some terrifying and exalting sense swept him into a new intimacy of
+understanding as he realized glimmeringly what heights and depths
+lay about his ceasing to see that car of the guard. Yet, with
+Olivia's head upon his arm, all that he theorized in that flash of
+time hung hardly beyond the border of his understanding. Indeed, it
+seemed to St. George as if almost--almost he could understand, as if
+he could pierce the veil and know utterly all the secrets of spirit
+and sense that confound. "We shall all know _when we are able to
+bear it_," he had once heard another say, and it seemed to him now
+that at last he was able to bear it, as if the sense of the
+uninterrupted connection between the two worlds was almost a part of
+his own consciousness. A moment's deeper thought, a quicker flowing
+of the imagination, a little more poignant projecting of himself
+above the abyss and he, too, would understand. It came to him that
+he had almost understood every time that he had looked at Olivia.
+Ah, he thought, and how exquisite, how matchless she was, and what
+Heaven beyond Heaven the world would hold for him if only she were
+to love him. St. George lifted the little hand that hung at her
+side, and stooped momentarily to touch his cheek to the soft hair
+that swept her shoulder. Here for him lay the sweet of life--the
+sweet of the world, ay, and the sweet of all the world's mysteries.
+This alien land was no nearer the truth than he. His love was the
+expression of its mystery. They went back through the great
+archway, and entered the palace park. Once more the slim-trunked
+trees flew past them with the fringes of light expressing the
+borders of the dusk. St. George crouched, half-kneeling, on the
+floor of the tonneau, his free hand protecting Olivia's face from
+the leaning branches of heavy-headed flowers. He had been so
+passionately anxious that she should know that he was on the island,
+near her, ready to serve her; but now, save for his alarm and
+anxiety about her, he felt a shy, profound gratitude that the hour
+had fallen as it had fallen. Whatever was to come, this nearness to
+her would be his to remember and possess. It had been his supreme
+hour. Whether she had recognized him in that moment on the road,
+whether she ever knew what had happened made, he thought, no
+difference. But if she was to open her eyes as they reached the
+border of the park, and if she was to know that it was like this
+that the genie had come out of the jar--the mere notion made him
+giddy, and he saw that Heaven may have little inner Heaven-courts
+which one is never too happy to penetrate.
+
+But Olivia did not stir or unclose her eyes. The great strain of the
+evening, the terror and shock of its ending, the very relief with
+which she had, at all events, realized herself in the hands of
+friends were more than even an island princess could pass through in
+serenity. And when at last from the demesne of enchantment the car
+emerged in the court of the palace, Olivia knew nothing of it and,
+as nearly as he could recall afterward, neither did St. George. He
+understood that the courtyard was filled with murmurs, and that as
+Olivia was lifted from the car the voice of Mrs. Medora Hastings, in
+all its excesses of tone and pitch, was tilted in a kind of
+universal reproving. Then he was aware that Jarvo, beseeching him
+not to leave the motor, had somehow got him away from all the tumult
+and the questioning and the crush of the other motors setting
+tardily off down the avenue in a kind cf majestic pursuit of the
+princess. After that he remembered nothing but the grateful gloom of
+the wood and the swift flight of the car down that nebulous way,
+thin darkness flowing about him.
+
+He was to go back to join Amory in some kind of tower, he knew; and
+he was infinitely resigned, for he remembered that this was in some
+way essential to his safety, and that it had to do with the ascent
+of Mount Khalak to-morrow night. For the rest St. George was certain
+of nothing save that he was floating once more in a sea of light,
+with the sweet of the world flowing in his veins; and upon his arm
+and against his shoulder he could still feel the thrill of the
+pressure of Olivia's head.
+
+The genie had come out of the jar--and never, never would he go
+back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE LINES LEAD UP
+
+
+In the late hours of the next afternoon Rollo, with a sigh, uncoiled
+himself from the shadow of the altar to the god Melkarth, in the
+Ilex Temple, and stiffly rose. Vicissitudes were not for Rollo, who
+had not fathomed the joys of adaptability; and the savour of the
+sweet herbs which, from Jarvo's wallet, he had that day served, was
+forgotten in his longing for a drop of tarragan vinegar and a bulb
+of garlic with which to dress the herbs. His lean and shadowed face
+wore an expression of settled melancholy.
+
+"Sorrow's nothing," he sententiously observed. "It's trouble that
+does for a man, sir."
+
+St. George, who lay at full length on a mossy sill of the king's
+chapel counting the hours of his inaction, continued to look out
+over the glistening tops of the ilex trees.
+
+"Speaking of trouble," he said, "what would you say, Rollo, to
+getting back to the yacht to-night, instead of going up the mountain
+with us?"
+
+Rollo dropped his eyes, but his face brightened under, as it were,
+his never-lifted mask.
+
+"Oh, sir," he said humbly, "a person is always willing to do
+whatever makes him the most useful."
+
+"Little Cawthorne and Bennietod," went on St. George, "ten to one
+will take to the trail to-night, if they haven't already. They'll be
+coming to Med and reorganizing the police force, or raising a
+standing army or starting a subway. You'd do well to drop down and
+give them some idea of what's happened, and I fancy you'd better all
+be somewhere about on the day after to-morrow, at noon. Not that
+there will be any wedding at that time," explained St. George
+carefully, "although there may be something to see, all the same.
+But you might tell them, you know, that Miss Holland is due to marry
+the prince then. Can you get back to the yacht alone?"
+
+Rollo hadn't thought of that, and his mask fell once more into its
+lines of misery.
+
+"I don't know, sir," he said doubtfully, "most men can go up a steep
+place all right. It's comin' down that's hard on the knees. And if I
+was to try it alone, sir--"
+
+Jarvo made a sign of reassurance.
+
+"That is not well," he said, "you would be dashed to pieces. Ulfin,
+one of the six, will wait for us to-night on the edge of the grove.
+He can conduct the way to the vessel."
+
+"Ah, sir," said Rollo, not without a certain self-satisfaction,
+"something is always sure to turn up, sir."
+
+From a tour of the temple Amory came listlessly back to the king's
+chapel. There, where the descendants of Abibaal had worshiped until
+their idols had been refined by Time to a kind of decoration, the
+Americans and Jarvo had spent the night. They had slept stretched on
+benches of beveled stone. They had waked to trace the figures in a
+length of tapestry representing the capture of Io on the coast of
+Argolis, doubtless woven by an eye-witness. They had bathed in a
+brook near the entrance where stood the altar for the sacrifice
+round which the priests and _hierodouloi_ had been wont to dance,
+and where huge architraves, metopes and tryglyphs, massive as those
+at Gebeil and Tortosa and hewn from living rock, rose from the
+fragile green of the wood like a huge arm signaling its eternal
+"Alas!" They had partaken of Jarvo's fruit and sweet herbs, and
+Rollo had served them, standing with his back to the niche where
+once had looked augustly down the image of the god. And now Amory,
+with a smile, leaned against a wall where old vines, grown
+miraculously in crannies, spread their tendrils upon the friendly
+hieroglyphic scoring of the crenelated stone, and summed up his
+reflections of the night.
+
+"I've got it," he announced, "I think it was up in the Adirondacks,
+summer before last. I think I was in a canoe when she went by in a
+launch, with the Chiswicks. Why, do you know, I think I dreamed
+about Miss Frothingham for weeks."
+
+St. George smiled suddenly and radiantly, and his smile was for the
+sake of both Rollo and Amory--Rollo whose sense of the commonplace
+nothing could overpower, Amory who talked about the Chiswicks in the
+Adirondacks. Why not? St. George thought happily. Here in the temple
+certain precious and delicate idols were believed to be hidden in
+alcoves walled up by mighty stone; and here, Jarvo was telling them,
+were secret exits to the road contrived by the priests of the temple
+at the time of their oppression by the worshipers of another god;
+but yet what special interest could he and Amory have in brooding
+upon these, or the ancient Phoenicians having "invited to traffic by
+a signal fire," when they could sit still and remember?
+
+"To-night," he said aloud, feeling a sudden fellowship for both
+Amory and Rollo, "to-night, when the moon rises, we shall watch it
+from the top of the mountain."
+
+Then he wondered, many hundred times, whether Olivia could possibly
+have recognized him.
+
+When the dark had fallen they set out. The ilex grove was very still
+save for a fugitive wind that carried faint spices, and they took a
+winding way among trunks and reached the edge of the wood without
+adventure. There Ulfin and another of the six carriers were waiting,
+as Jarvo had expected, and it was decided that they should both
+accompany Rollo down to the yacht.
+
+Rollo handed the oil-skins to St. George and Amory, and then stood
+crushing his hat in his hands, doing his best to speak.
+
+"Look sharp, Rollo," St. George advised him, "don't step one foot
+off a precipice. And tell the people on the yacht not to worry. We
+shall expect to see them day after to-morrow, somewhere about. Take
+care of yourself."
+
+"Oh, sir," said Rollo with difficulty, "good-by, sir. I '_ope_
+you'll be successful, sir. A person likes to succeed in what they
+undertake."
+
+Then the three went on down the glimmering way where, last night,
+they had pursued the floating pennon of the veil. There were few
+upon the highway, and these hardly regarded them. It occurred to St.
+George that they passed as figures in a dream will pass, in the
+casual fashion of all unreality, taking all things for granted. Yet,
+of course, to the passers-by upon the road to Med, there was nothing
+remarkable in the aspect of the three companions. All that was
+remarkable was the adventure upon which they were bound, and nobody
+could possibly have guessed that.
+
+Almost a mile lay between them and the point where the ascent of
+the mountain was to be begun. The road which they were taking
+followed at the foot of the embankment which girt the island, and it
+led them at last to a stretch of arbourescent heath, piled with
+black basaltic rocks. Here, where the light was dim like the glow
+from light reflected upon low clouds, they took their way among
+great branching cacti and nameless plants that caught at their
+ankles. A strange odour rose from the earth, mineral, metallic, and
+the air was thick with particles stirred by their feet and more
+resembling ashes than dust. This was a waste place of the island,
+and if one were to lift a handful of the soil, St. George thought,
+it was very likely that one might detect its elements; as, here the
+dust of a temple, here of a book, here a tomb and here a sacrifice.
+He felt himself near the earth, in its making. He looked away to the
+sugar-loaf cone of the mountain risen against the star-lit sky.
+Above its fortress-like bulk with circular ramparts burned the clear
+beacon of the light on the king's palace. As he saw the light, St.
+George knew himself not only near the earth but at one with the very
+currents of the air, partaker of now a hope, now a task, now a
+spell, and now a memory. It was as if love had made him one with the
+dust of dead cities and with their eternal spiritual effluence.
+
+At length they crossed the broad avenue that led from the
+Eurychôrus to Melita, and struck into the road that skirted the
+mountain; and where a thicket of trees flung bold branches across
+the way, three figures rose from the ground before them, and Akko
+stepped forward and saluted, his white teeth gleaming. Immediately
+Jarvo led the way through a strip of underbrush at the base of the
+mountain, and they emerged in a glade where the light hardly
+penetrated.
+
+Here were distinguishable the palanquins in which the ascent was to
+be made. These were like long baskets, upborne by a pole of great
+flexibility broadening to a wider support beneath the body of the
+basket and provided with rubber straps through which the arms were
+passed. When St. George and Amory were seated, Jarvo spoke
+hesitatingly:
+
+"We must bandage your eyes, adôn," he said.
+
+"Oh really, really," protested St. George, "we don't understand half
+we do see. Do let us see what we can."
+
+"You must be blindfolded, adôn," repeated Jarvo firmly.
+
+Amory, passing his arms reflectively through the rubber straps which
+Akko held for him, spoke cheerfully:
+
+"I'll go up blindfold," he submitted, "if I can smoke."
+
+"Neither of us will," said St. George with determination. "See
+here, Jarvo, we are both level-headed. We pledge you our word of
+honour, in addition, not to dive overboard. Now--lead on."
+
+"It has never been done," said the little brown man with obstinacy,
+"you will lose your reason, adôn."
+
+"Ah well now, if we do," said St. George, "pitch us over and leave
+us. Besides, I think we have. Lead on, please."
+
+Against the will of the others, he prevailed. The light oil-skins
+were placed in the baskets, each of which was shouldered by two men,
+Jarvo bearing the foremost pole of St. George's palanquin. All the
+carriers had drawn on long, soft shoes which, perhaps from some
+preparation in which they had been dipped, glowed with light,
+illuminating the ground for a little distance at every step.
+
+"Are you ready, adôn?" asked Jarvo and Akko at the same moment.
+
+"Ready!" cried St. George impatiently.
+
+"Ready," said Amory languidly, and added one thought more: "I hope
+for Chillingworth's sake," he said, "that Frothingham is a notary
+public. We'll have to have somebody's seal at the bottom of all this
+copy."
+
+The baskets were lightly lifted. Jarvo gave a sharp command, and all
+four of the men broke into a rhythmic chant. Jarvo, leading the way,
+sprang immediately upon the first foothold, where none seemed to
+be, and without pause to the next. So perfectly were the men trained
+that it was as if but one set of muscles were inspiring the
+movements made to the beat of that monotonous measure. In their
+strong hands the flexible pole seemed to give as their bodies gave,
+and so lightly did they leap upward that the jar of their alighting
+was hardly perceptible, as if, as had occurred to St. George as they
+ascended the lip of the island, gravity were here another matter.
+So, without pause, save in the rhythm of that strange march music,
+the remarkable progress was begun.
+
+St. George threw one swift glance upward and looked down,
+shudderingly. Beetling above them in the great starlight hung the
+gigantic pile, wall upon wall of rock hewn with such secret foothold
+that it was a miracle how any living thing could catch and cling to
+its forbidding surface. Only lifelong practice of the men, who from
+childhood had been required to make the ascent and whose fathers and
+fathers' fathers before them had done the same, could have accounted
+for that catlike ability to cling to the trail where was no trail.
+The sensation of the long swinging upward movement was unutterably
+alien to anything in life or in dreams, and the sheer height above
+and the momently-deepening chasm below were presences contending for
+possession.
+
+Strange fragrance stole from gum and bark of the decreasing
+vegetation. Dislodged stones rolled bounding from rock to rock into
+the abyss. To right and left the way went. There was not even the
+friendly beacon of the summit to beckon them. It seemed to St.
+George that their whole safety lay in motion, that a moment's
+cessation from the advance would hurl them all down the sides of the
+declivity. Since the ascent began he had not ceased to look down;
+and now as they rose free of the tree-tops that clothed the base of
+the mountain he could see across the plain, and beyond the bounding
+embankment of the island to the dark waste of the sea. Somewhere out
+there _The Aloha_ was rocking. Somewhere, away to the northwest, the
+lights of New York harbour shone. _Did_ they, St. George wondered
+vaguely; and, when he went back, how would they look to him? It
+seemed to him in some indeterminate fashion that when he saw them
+again there would be new lines and sides of beauty which he had
+never suspected, and as if all the world would be changed, included
+in this new world that he had found.
+
+Half-way up the ascent a resting-place was contrived for the
+carriers. The projection upon which the baskets were lowered was
+hardly three feet in width. Its edge dropped into darkness. Within
+reach, leaves rustled from the summit of a tree rooted somewhere in
+the chasm. The blackness below was vast and to be measured only by
+the memory of that upward course. Gemmed by its lighted hamlets the
+fair plain of the island lay, with Med and Melita glowing like lamps
+to the huge dusk.
+
+"St. George," said Amory soberly, "if it's all true--if these people
+do understand what the world doesn't know anything about--"
+
+"Yes," said St. George.
+
+"It makes a man feel--"
+
+"Yes," said St. George, "it does."
+
+This, they afterward remembered, was all that they said on the
+ascent. One wonders if two, being met among the "strengthless tribes
+of the dead," would find much more to say.
+
+Then they went on, scaling that invisible way, with the twinkling
+feet of the carriers drawing upward like a thread of thin gold which
+they were to climb. What, St. George thought as the way seemed to
+lengthen before them, what if there were no end? What if this were
+some gigantic trick of Destiny to keep him for the rest of his life
+in mid-air, ceaselessly toiling up, a latter-day Sisyphus, in a
+palanquin? He had dreamed of stairs in the darkness which men
+mounted and found to have no summits, and suppose this were such a
+stair? Suppose, among these marvels that were related to his dreams,
+he had, as it were, tossed a ball of twine in the air and, like the
+Indian jugglers, climbed it? Suppose he had built a castle in the
+clouds and tenanted it with Olivia, and were now foolhardily
+attempting to scale the air? Ah well, he settled it contentedly,
+better so. For this divine jugglery comes once into every life, and
+one must climb to the castle with madness and singing if he would
+attain to the temples that lie on the castle-plain.
+
+Gradually, as they approached the summit, the ascent became less
+precipitous. As they neared the cone their way lay over a kind of
+natural fosse at the cone's base; and, although the mountain did not
+reach the level of perpetual snow, yet an occasional cool breath
+from the dark told where in some natural cavern snow had lain
+undisturbed since the unremembered eruption of the sullen, volcanic
+peak. Then came a breath of over-powering sweetness from some secret
+thicket, and something was struck from the feet of the bearers that
+was like white pumice gravel. St. George no longer looked downward;
+the plain and the waste of the sea were in a forgotten limbo, and he
+searched eagerly on high for the first rays of the light that marked
+the goal of his longing.
+
+Yet he was unprepared when, swerving sharply and skirting an immense
+shoulder of rock, Jarvo suddenly emerged upon a broad retaining wall
+of stone bordering a smooth, moon-lit terrace extending by shallow
+flights of steps to the white doors of the king's palace itself.
+
+As St. George and Amory freed themselves and sprang to their feet
+their eyes were drawn to a glory of light shining over the low
+parapet which surrounded the terrace.
+
+"Look," cried St. George victoriously, "the moon!"
+
+From the sea the moon was momently growing, like a giant bubble, and
+a bright path had issued to the mountain's foot. "See," she would
+doubtless have said if she could, "I would have shown you the way
+here all your life if only you had looked properly." But at all
+events St. George's prophecy was fulfilled: From the top of Mount
+Khalak they were watching the moon rise. St. George, however, was
+not yet in the company whose image had pleasantly besieged him when
+he had prophesied. He turned impatiently to the palace. Jarvo,
+resting on the stones where he had sunk down, signaled them to go
+on, and the two needed no second bidding. They set off briskly
+across the plateau, Amory looking about him with eager curiosity,
+St. George on the crest of his divine expectancy.
+
+The palace was set on the west of the gentle slope to which the
+mountain-top had been artificially leveled. The terrace led up on
+three sides from the marge of the height to the great portals. Over
+everything hung that imponderable essence that was clearer and purer
+than any light--"better than any light that ever shone." In its
+glamourie, with that far ocean background, the palace of pale stone
+looked unearthly, a sky thing, with ramparts of air. The principle
+of the builders seemed not to have been the ancient dictum that
+"mass alone is admirable," for the great pile was shaped, with
+beauty of unknown line, in three enormous cylinders, one rising from
+another, the last magnificently curved to a huge dome on whose
+summit burned with inconceivable brilliance the light which had been
+a beacon to the longing eyes turned toward it from the deck of _The
+Aloha_. In the shadow of the palace rose two high towers,
+obelisk-shaped from the pure white stone. Scattered about the slope
+were detached buildings, consisting of marble monoliths resting upon
+double bases and crowned with carved cornices, or of truncated
+pyramids and pyramidions. These had plinths of delicately-coloured
+stone over which the light diffused so that they looked luminous,
+and the small blocks used to fill the apertures of the courses shone
+like precious things. Adjacent to one of the porches were two
+conical shrines, for images and little lamps; and, near-by, a fallen
+pillar of immense proportions lay undisturbed upon the court of
+sward across which it had some time shivered down.
+
+But if the palace had been discovered to be the preserved and
+transported Temple of Solomon it could not have stayed St. George
+for one moment of admiration. He was off up the slope, seeing only
+the great closed portals, and with Amory beside him he ran boldly up
+the long steps. It was a part of the unreality of the place that
+there seemed absolutely no sign of life about the King's palace. The
+windows glowed with the soft light within, but there were no guards,
+no servants, no sign of any presence. For the first time, when they
+reached the top of the steps, the two men hesitated.
+
+"Personally," said Amory doubtfully, "I have never yet tapped at a
+king's front door. What does one do?"
+
+St. George looked at the long stone porches, uncovered and girt by a
+parapet following the curve of the façade.
+
+"Would you mind waiting a minute?" he said.
+
+With that he was off along the balcony to the south--and afterward
+he wondered why, and if it is true that Fate tempts us in the way
+that she would have us walk by luring us with unseen roses budding
+from the air.
+
+Where the porch abruptly widened to a kind of upper terrace, like a
+hanging garden set with flowering trees, three high archways opened
+to an apartment whose bright lights streamed across the grass-plots.
+St. George felt something tug at his heart, something that urged him
+forward and caught him up in an ecstasy of triumph and hope
+fulfilled. He looked back at Amory, and Amory was leaning on the
+parapet, apparently sunk in reflections which concerned nobody. So
+St. George stepped softly on until he reached the first archway, and
+there he stopped, and the moment was to him almost past belief.
+Within the open doorway, so near that if she had lifted her eyes
+they must have met his own, was the woman whom he had come across
+the sea to seek.
+
+St. George hardly knew that he spoke, for it was as if all the world
+were singing her name.
+
+"Olivia!" he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE ISLE OF HEARTS
+
+
+The room in which St. George was looking was long and lofty and hung
+with pale tapestries. White pillars supporting the domed white
+ceiling were wound with garlands. The smoke from a little brazen
+tripod ascended pleasantly, and about the windows stirred in the
+faint wind draperies of exceeding thinness, woven in looms stilled
+centuries ago.
+
+Olivia was crossing before the windows. She wore a white gown strewn
+with roses, and she seemed as much at home on this alien
+mountain-top as she had been in her aunt's drawing-room at the
+Boris. But her face was sad, and there was not a touch of the
+piquancy which it had worn the night before in the throne-room, nor
+of its delicious daring as she had sped past him in the big Yaque
+touring car. Save for her, the room was deserted; it was as if the
+prince had come to the castle and found the Sleeping Princess the
+only one awake.
+
+If in that supreme moment St. George had leaped forward and taken
+her in his arms no one--no one, that is, in the fairy-tale of what
+was happening--would greatly have censured him. But he stood without
+for a moment, hardly daring to believe his happiness, hardly knowing
+that her name was on his lips.
+
+He had spoken, however, and she turned quickly, her look uncertainly
+seeking the doorway, and she saw him. For a moment she stood still,
+her eyes upon his face; then with a little incredulous cry that
+thrilled him with a sudden joyous hope that was like belief, she
+came swiftly toward him.
+
+St. George loved to remember that she did that. There was no waiting
+for assurance and no fear; only the impulse, gloriously obeyed, to
+go toward him.
+
+He stepped in the room, and took her hands in his and looked into
+her eyes as if he would never turn away his own. In her face was a
+dawning of glad certainty and welcome which he could not doubt.
+
+"You," she cried softly, "you. How is it possible? But how is it
+possible?"
+
+Her voice trembled a little with something so sweet that it raced
+through his veins with magic.
+
+"Did you rub the lamp?" he said. "Because I couldn't help coming."
+
+She looked at him breathlessly.
+
+"Have you," he asked her gravely, "eaten of the potatoes of Yaque?
+And are you going to say, 'Off with his head'? And can you tell me
+what is the population of the island?"
+
+At that they both laughed--the merry, irrepressible laugh of youth
+which explains that the world is a very good place indeed and that
+one is glad that one belongs there. And the memory of that breakfast
+on the other side of the world, of their happy talk about what would
+happen if they two were impossibly to meet in Yaque came back to
+them both, and set his heart beating and flooded her face with
+delicate colour. In her laugh was a little catching of the breath
+that was enchanting.
+
+"Not yet," she said, "your head is safe till you tell me how you got
+here, at all events. Now tell me--oh, tell me. I can't believe it
+until you tell me."
+
+She moved a little away from the door.
+
+"Come in," she said shyly, "if you've come all the way from America
+you must be very tired."
+
+St. George shook his head.
+
+"Come out," he pleaded, "I want to stand on top of a high mountain
+and show you the whole world."
+
+She went quite simply and without hesitation--because, in Yaque, the
+maddest things would be the truest--and when she had stepped from
+the low doorway she looked up at him in the tender light of the
+garden terrace.
+
+"If you are quite sure," she said, "that you will not disappear in
+the dark?"
+
+St. George laughed happily.
+
+"I shall not disappear," he promised, "though the world were to turn
+round the other way."
+
+They crossed the still terrace to the parapet and stood looking out
+to sea with the risen moon shining across the waters. The light wind
+stirred in the cedrine junipers, shaking out perfume; the great
+fairy pile of the palace rose behind them; and before them lay the
+monstrous moon-lit abyss than whose depths the very stars, warm and
+friendly, seemed nearer to them. To the big young American in blue
+serge beside the little new princess who had drawn him over seas the
+dream that one is always having and never quite remembering was
+suddenly come true. No wonder that at that moment the patient Amory
+was far enough from his mind. To St. George, looking down upon
+Olivia, there was only one truth and one joy in the universe, and
+she was that truth and that joy.
+
+"I can't believe it," he said boyishly.
+
+"Believe--what?" she asked, for the delight of hearing him say so.
+
+"This--me--most of all, you!" he answered.
+
+"But you must believe it," she cried anxiously, "or maybe it will
+stop being."
+
+"I will, I will, I am now!" promised St. George in alarm.
+
+Whereat they both laughed again in sheer light-heartedness. Then,
+resting his broad shoulders against a prism of the parapet, St.
+George looked down at her in infinite content.
+
+"You found the island," she said; "what is still more wonderful you
+have come here--but _here_--to the top of the mountain. Oh, did you
+bring news of my father?"
+
+St. George would have given everything save the sweet of the moment
+to tell her that he did.
+
+"But now," he added cheerfully, and his smile disarmed this of its
+over-confidence, "I've only been here two days or so. And, though it
+may look easy, I've had my hands full climbing up this. I ought to
+be allowed another day or two to locate your father."
+
+"Please tell me how you got here," Olivia demanded then.
+
+St. George told her briefly, omitting the yacht's ownership,
+explaining merely that the paper had sent him and that Jarvo and
+Akko had pointed the way and, save for that journey down nebulous
+ways in the wake of her veil the night before, sketching the
+incidents which had followed his arrival upon the island.
+
+"And one of the most agreeable hours I've had in Yaque," he
+finished, "was last night, when you were chairman of the meeting.
+That was magnificent."
+
+"You _were_ there!" cried Olivia, "I thought--"
+
+"That you saw me?" St. George pressed eagerly.
+
+"I think that I thought so," she admitted.
+
+"But you never looked at me," said St. George dolefully, "and I had
+on a forty-two gored dress, or something."
+
+"Ah," Olivia confessed, "but I had thought so before when I knew it
+couldn't be you."
+
+St. George's heart gave a great bound.
+
+"When before?" he wanted to know ecstatically.
+
+"Ah, before," she explained, "and then afterward, too."
+
+"When afterward?" he urged.
+
+(Smile if you like, but this is the way the happy talk goes in Yaque
+as you remember very well, if you are honest.)
+
+"Yesterday, when I was motoring, I thought--"
+
+"I was. You did," St. George assured her. "I was in the prince's
+motor. The procession was temporarily tied up, you remember. Did you
+really think it was I?"
+
+But this the lady passed serenely over.
+
+"Last night," she said, "when that terrible thing happened, who was
+it in the other motor? Who was it, there in the road when I--was it
+you? Was it?" she demanded.
+
+"Did you think it was I?" asked St. George simply.
+
+"Afterward--when I was back in the palace--I thought I must have
+dreamed it," she answered, "and no one seemed to know, and _I_
+didn't know. But I did fancy--you see, they think father has taken
+the treasure," she said, "and they thought if they could hide me
+somewhere and let it be known, that he would make some sign."
+
+"It was monstrous," said St. George; "you are really not safe here
+for one moment. Tell me," he asked eagerly, "the car you were
+in--what became of that?"
+
+"I meant to ask you that," she said quickly. "I couldn't tell, I
+didn't know whether it turned aside from the road, or whether they
+dropped me out and went on. Really, it was all so quick that it was
+almost as if the motor had stopped being, and left me there."
+
+"Perhaps it did stop being--in this dimension," St. George could not
+help saying.
+
+At this she laughed in assent.
+
+"Who knows," she said, "what may be true of us--_nous autres_ in the
+Fourth Dimension? In Yaque queer things are true. And of course you
+never can tell--"
+
+At this St. George turned toward her, and his eyes compelled hers.
+
+"Ah, yes, you can," he told her, "yes, you can."
+
+Then he folded his arms and leaned against the stone prisms again,
+looking down at her. Evidently the magician, whoever he was, did not
+mind his saying that, for the palace did not crumble or the moon
+cease from shining on the white walls.
+
+"Still," she answered, looking toward the sea, "queer things _are_
+true in Yaque. It is queer that you are here. Say that it is."
+
+"Heaven knows that it is," assented St. George obediently.
+
+Presently, realizing that the terrace did not intend to turn into a
+cloud out-of-hand, they set themselves to talk seriously, and St.
+George had not known her so adorable, he was once more certain, as
+when she tried to thank him for his pursuit the night before. He had
+omitted to mention that he had brought her back alone to the Palace
+of the Litany, for that was too exquisite a thing, he decided, to be
+spoiled by leaving out the most exquisite part. Besides, there was
+enough that was serious to be discussed, in all conscience, in spite
+of the moon.
+
+"Tell me," said St. George instead, "what has happened to you since
+that breakfast at the Boris. Remember, I have come all the way from
+New York to interview you, Mademoiselle the Princess."
+
+So Olivia told him the story of the passage in the submarine which
+had arrived in Yaque two days earlier than _The Aloha_; of the first
+trip up Mount Khalak in the imperial airship; of Mrs. Hastings'
+frantic fear and her utter refusal ever to descend; and of what she
+herself had done since her arrival. This included a most practical
+account of effort that delighted and amazed St. George. No wonder
+Mrs. Hastings had said that she always left everything "executive"
+to Olivia. For Olivia had sent wireless messages all over the island
+offering an immense reward for information about the king, her
+father; she had assigned forty servants of the royal household to
+engage in a personal search for such information and to report to
+her each night; she had ordered every house in Yaque, not excepting
+the House of the Litany and the king's palace itself, to be searched
+from dungeon to tower; and, as St. George already knew, she had
+brought about a special meeting of the High Council at noon that
+day.
+
+"It was very little," said the American princess apologetically,
+"but I did what I could."
+
+"What about the meeting of the High Council?" asked St. George
+eagerly; "didn't anything come of that?"
+
+"Nothing," she answered, "they were like adamant. I thought of
+offering to raise the Hereditary Treasure by incorporating the
+island and selling the shares in America. Nobody could ever have
+found what the shares stood for, but that happens every day. Half
+the corporations must be capitalized chiefly in the Fourth
+Dimension. That is all," she added wearily, "save that day after
+to-morrow I am to be married."
+
+"That," St. George explained, "is as you like. For if your father
+is on the island we shall have found him by day after to-morrow, at
+noon, if we have to shake all Yaque inside out, like a paper sack.
+And if he isn't here, we simply needn't stop."
+
+Olivia shook her head.
+
+"You don't know the prince," she said. "I have heard enough to
+convince me that it is quite as he says. He holds events in the
+hollow of his hand."
+
+"Amory proposed," said St. George, "that we sit up here and throw
+pebbles at him for a time. And Amory is very practical."
+
+Olivia laughed--her laugh was delicious and alluring, and St. George
+came dangerously near losing his head every time that he heard it.
+
+"Ah," she cried, "if only it weren't for the prince and if we had
+news of father, what a heavenly, heavenly place this would be, would
+it not?"
+
+"It would, it would indeed," assented St. George, and in his heart
+he said, "and so it is."
+
+"It's like being somewhere else," she said, looking into the abyss
+of far waters, "and when you look down there--and when you look up,
+you nearly _know_. I don't know what, but you nearly know. Perhaps
+you know that 'here' is the same as 'there,' as all these people
+say. But whatever it is, I think we might have come almost as near
+knowing it in New York, if we had only known how to try."
+
+"Perhaps it isn't so much knowing," he said, "as it is being where
+you can't help facing mystery and taking the time to be amazed.
+Although," added St. George to himself, "there are things that one
+finds out in New York. In a drawing-room, at the Boris, for
+instance, over muffins and tea."
+
+"It will be delightful to take all this back to New York," Olivia
+vaguely added, as if she meant the fairy palace and the fairy sea.
+
+"It will," agreed St. George fervently, and he couldn't possibly
+have told whether he meant the mystery of the island or the mystery
+of that hour there with her. There was so little difference.
+
+"Suppose," said Olivia whimsically, "that we open our eyes in a
+minute, and find that we are in the prince's room in McDougle
+Street, and that he has passed his hand before our faces and made us
+dream all this. And father is safe after all."
+
+"But it isn't all a dream," St. George said softly, "it can't
+possibly all be a dream, you know."
+
+She met his eyes for a moment.
+
+"Not your coming away here," she said, "if the rest is true I
+wouldn't want that to be a dream. You don't know what courage this
+will give us all."
+
+She said "us all," but that had to mean merely "us," as well. St.
+George turned and looked over the terrace. What an Arabian night it
+was, he was saying to himself, and then stood in a sudden amazement,
+with the uncertain idea that one of the Schererazade magicians had
+answered that fancy of his by appearing.
+
+A little shrine hung thick with vines, its ancient stone chipped and
+defaced, stood on the terrace with its empty, sightless niche turned
+toward the sea. Leaning upon its base was an old man watching them.
+His eyes under their lowered brows were peculiarly intent, but his
+look was perfectly serene and friendly. His stuff robe hung in
+straight folds about his singularly erect figure, and his beard and
+hair were not all grey. But he was very old, with incredibly brown
+and wrinkled flesh, and his face was vacant, as if the mind were
+asleep.
+
+As he looked, St. George knew him. Here on the top of this mountain
+was that amazing old man whom he had last seen in the banquet hall
+at the Palace of the Litany--that old Malakh for whom Olivia had so
+unexplainably interceded.
+
+"What is that man doing here?" St. George asked in surprise.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"He is a mad old man, they said," Olivia told him, "down there they
+call him Malakh--that means 'salt'--because they said he always
+weeps. We had stopped to look at a metallurgist yesterday--he had
+some zinc and some metals cut out like flowers, and he was making
+them show phosphorescent colours in his little dark alcove. The old
+man was watching him and trying to tell him something, but the
+metallurgist was rude to him and some boys came by and jostled him
+and pushed him about and taunted him--and the metallurgist actually
+explained to us that every one did that way to old Malakh. So I
+thought he was better off up here," concluded Olivia tranquilly.
+
+St. George was silent. He knew that Olivia was like this, but
+everything that proved anew her loveliness of soul caught at his
+heart.
+
+"Tell me," he said impulsively, "what made you let him stay last
+night, there in the banquet hall?"
+
+She flushed, and shook her head with a deprecatory gesture.
+
+"I haven't an idea," she said gravely, "I think I must have done it
+so the fairies wouldn't prick their feet on any new sorrow. One has
+to be careful of the fairies' feet."
+
+St. George nodded. It was a charming reason for the left hand to
+give the right, and he was not deceived.
+
+"Look at him," said St. George, almost reverently, "he looks like a
+shade of a god that has come back from the other world and found his
+shrine dishonoured."
+
+Some echo of St. George's words reached the old man and he caught
+at it, smiling. It was as if he had just been thinking what he
+spoke.
+
+"There are not enough shrines," he said gently, "but there are far
+too many gods. You will find it so."
+
+Something in his words stirred St. George strangely. There was about
+the old creature an air of such gentleness, such supreme repose and
+detachment that, even in that place of quiet, his presence made a
+kind of hush. He was old and pallid and fragile, but there lingered
+within him, while his spirit lingered, the perfume of all fine and
+gentle things, all things of quietude. When he had spoken the old
+man turned and moved slowly down the ways of strange light, between
+the fallen temples builded to forgotten gods, and he seemed like the
+very spirit of the ancient mountain, ignorant of itself and knowing
+all truth.
+
+"How strange," said St. George, looking after him, "how unutterably
+strange and sad."
+
+"That is good of you," said Olivia. "Aunt Dora and Antoinette
+thought I'd gone quite off my head, and Mr. Frothingham wanted to
+know why I didn't bring back some one who could have been called as
+a witness."
+
+"Witness," St. George echoed; "but the whole place is made of
+witnesses. Which reminds me: what is the sentence?"
+
+"The sentence?" she wondered.
+
+"The potatoes of Yaque," he reminded her, "and my head?"
+
+"Ah well," said Olivia gravely, "inasmuch as the moon came up in the
+east to-night instead of the west, I shall be generous and give you
+one day's reprieve."
+
+"Do you know, I _thought_ the moon came up in the east to-night,"
+cried St. George joyfully.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was half an hour afterward that Amory's languid voice from
+somewhere in the sky broke in upon their talk. As he came toward
+them across the terrace St. George saw that he was miraculously not
+alone.
+
+Afterward Amory told him what had happened and what had made him
+abide in patience and such wondrous self-effacement.
+
+When St. George had left him contemplating the far beauties of the
+little blur of light that was Med, Mr. Toby Amory set a match to one
+of his jealously expended store of Habanas and added one more aroma
+to the spiced air. To be standing on the doorstep of a king's
+palace, confidently expecting within the next few hours to assist in
+locating the king himself was a situation warranting, Amory thought,
+such fragrant celebration, and he waited in comparative content.
+
+The moon had climbed high enough to cast a great octagonal shadow on
+the smooth court, and the Habana was two-thirds memory when,
+immediately back of Amory, a long window opened outward, releasing
+an apparition which converted the remainder of the Habana into a
+fiery trail ending out on the terrace. It was a girl of rather more
+than twenty, exquisitely petite and pretty, and wearing a ruffley
+blue evening gown whose skirt was caught over her arm. She stopped
+short when she saw Amory, but without a trace of fear. To tell the
+truth, Antoinette Frothingham had got so desperately bored
+withindoors that if Amory had worn a black mask or a cloak of flame
+she would have welcomed either.
+
+For the last two hours Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham had sat in a white marble room of the king's palace,
+playing chess on Mr. Frothingham's pocket chess-board. Mr.
+Frothingham, who loathed chess, played it when he was tired so that
+he might rest and when he was rested he played it so that he might
+exercise his mind--on the principle of a cool drink on a hot day and
+a hot drink on a cool day. Mrs. Hastings, who knew nothing at all
+about the game, had entered upon the hour with all the suave
+complacency with which she would have attacked the making of a pie.
+Mrs. Hastings had a secret belief that she possessed great aptitude.
+
+Antoinette Frothingham, the lawyer's daughter, had leaned on the
+high casement and looked over the sea. The window was narrow, and
+deep in an embrasure of stone. To be twenty and to be leaning in
+this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly
+suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had
+been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle
+tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no
+possibility of any knight within an altitude of many hundred feet.
+
+"The dear little ponies' heads!" Mrs. Hastings had kept saying.
+"What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don't you think?
+That's what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings--at least,
+that's what he always said to me: 'Most games are so _needless_, but
+chess is really up and down poetic'"
+
+Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in
+silence.
+
+"Um," he had responded liberally.
+
+"I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, "neither he nor
+I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano
+in the middle of the ocean. It's this awful feeling," Mrs. Hastings
+had cried querulously, "of being neither on earth nor under the
+water nor in Heaven that I object to. And nobody can get to us."
+
+"That's just it, Mrs. Hastings," Antoinette had observed earnestly
+at this juncture.
+
+"Um," said Mr. Frothingham, then, "not at all, not at all. We have
+all the advantages of the grave and none of its discomforts."
+
+Whereupon Antoinette, rising suddenly, had slipped out of the white
+marble room altogether and had found the knight smoking in
+loneliness on the very veranda.
+
+Amory put his cap under his arm and bowed.
+
+"I hope," he said, "that I haven't frightened you."
+
+He was an American! Antoinette's little heart leaped.
+
+"I am having to wait here for a bit," explained Amory, not without
+vagueness.
+
+Miss Frothingham advanced to the veranda rail and contrived a shy
+scrutiny of the intruder.
+
+"No," she said, "you didn't frighten me in the least, of course.
+But--do you usually do your waiting at this altitude?"
+
+"Ah, no," answered Amory with engaging candour, "I don't. But
+I--happened up this way." Amory paused a little desperately. In that
+soft light he could not tell positively whether this was Miss
+Holland or that other figure of silver and rose which he had seen in
+the throne room. The blue gown was not interpretative. If she was
+Miss Holland it would be very shabby of him to herald the surprise.
+Naturally, St. George would appreciate doing that himself. "I'm
+looking about a bit," he neatly temporized.
+
+Antoinette suddenly looked away over the terrace as her eyes met
+his, smiling behind their pince-nez. Amory was good to look at, and
+he had never been more so than as he towered above her on the steps
+of the king's palace. Who was he--but who was he? Antoinette
+wondered rapidly. Had a warship arrived? Was Yaque taken? Or
+had--she turned eyes, round with sudden fear, upon Amory.
+
+"Did Prince Tabnit send you?" she demanded.
+
+Amory laughed.
+
+"No, indeed," he said. Amory had once lived in the South, and he
+accented the "no" very takingly. "I came myself," he volunteered.
+
+"I thought," explained Antoinette, "that maybe he opened a door in
+the dark, and you walked out. It _is_ rather funny that you should
+be here."
+
+"You are here, you know," suggested Amory doubtfully.
+
+"But I may be a cannibal princess," Antoinette demurely pointed out.
+It was not that her astonishment was decreasing; but why--modernity
+and the democracy spoke within her--waste the possibilities of a
+situation merely because it chances to be astonishing? Moments of
+mystery are rare enough, in all conscience; and when they do arrive
+all the world misses them by trying to understand them. Which is
+manifestly ungrateful and stupid. They do these things better in
+Yaque.
+
+"You maybe," agreed Amory evenly, "though I don't know that I ever
+met a desert island princess in a dinner frock. But then, I am a
+beginner in desert islands."
+
+"Are you an American?" inquired Antoinette earnestly.
+
+Amory looked up at the frowning façade of the king's palace, and he
+could have found it in his heart to believe his own answer.
+
+"I'm the ghost," he confessed, "of a poor beggar of a Phoenician who
+used to make water-jars in Sidon. I have been condemned to plow the
+high seas and explore the tall mountains until I find the Pitiful
+Princess. She must be up at the very peak, in distress, and I--"
+
+Amory stopped and looked desperately about him. Would St. George
+never come? How was he, Amory, to be accountable for what he told if
+he were left here alone in these extraordinary circumstances?
+
+Then Antoinette lightly clapped her hands.
+
+"A ghost!" she exclaimed with pleasure. "Miss Holland hoped the
+place was haunted. A Phoenician ghost with an Alabama accent."
+
+She had said "Miss Holland hoped."
+
+"Aren't you--aren't you Miss Holland?" demanded Amory promptly, a
+joyful note of uncertainty in his voice.
+
+Antoinette shook her head.
+
+"No," she said, "though I don't know why I should tell you that."
+
+From Amory's soul rolled a burden that left him treading air on
+Mount Khalak. She was not Miss Holland. What did he care how long
+St. George stayed away?
+
+"I am Tobias Amory," he said, "of New York. Most people don't know
+about the Sidonian ghost part. But I've told you because I thought,
+perhaps, you might be the Pitiful Princess."
+
+Antoinette's heart was beating pleasantly. Of New York! How--oh, how
+did he get here? Was there, then, a wishing-stone in that window
+embrasure where she had been sitting, and had the knight come
+because she had willed it? How much did he know? How much ought she
+to tell? Nothing whatever, prudently decided the lawyer's daughter.
+
+"I've had, I'm almost certain, the pleasure of seeing you before,"
+imparted Amory pleasantly, adjusting his pince-nez and looking down
+at her. She was so enchantingly tiny and he was such a giant.
+
+"In New York?" demanded Antoinette.
+
+"No," said Amory, "no. Do desert island princesses get to New York
+occasionally, then? No, I think I saw you in Yaque. Yesterday. In a
+silver automobile. Did I?"
+
+Antoinette dimpled.
+
+"We frightened them all to death," she recalled. "Did we frighten
+you?"
+
+"So much," admitted Amory, "that I took refuge up here."
+
+"Where were you?" Antoinette asked curiously. Really, he was very
+amusing--this big courtly creature. How agreeable of Olivia to stay
+away.
+
+"Ah, tell me how you got here," she impetuously begged. "Desert
+island people don't see people from New York every day."
+
+"Well then, O Pitiful Princess," said the Shade from Sidon, "it was
+like this--"
+
+It was easy enough to fleet the time carelessly, and assuredly that
+high moon-lit world was meant to be no less merry than the golden.
+Whoever has chanced to meet a delightful companion on some silver
+veranda up in the welkin knows this perfectly well; and whoever has
+not is a dull creature. But there are delightful folk who are wont
+to suspect the dullest of harbouring some sweet secret, some sense
+of "those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life
+worth enduring," and this was akin to such a sight.
+
+After a time, at Antoinette's conscientious suggestion, they
+strolled the way that St. George had taken. And to Olivia and the
+missing adventurer over by the parapet came Amory's soft query:
+
+"St George, may I express a friendly concern?"
+
+"Ah, come here, Toby," commanded St. George happily, "her Highness
+and I have been discussing matters of state."
+
+"Antoinette!" cried Olivia in amazement. From time immemorial
+royalty has perpetually been surprised by the behaviour of its
+ladies-in-waiting.
+
+"I've been remembering a verse," said Amory when he had been
+presented to Olivia, "may I say it? It goes:
+
+          "'I'll speak a story to you,
+              Now listen while I try:
+            I met a Queen, and she kept house
+              A-sitting in the sky.'"
+
+"Come in and say it to my aunt," Olivia applauded. "Aunt Dora is
+dying of ennui up here."
+
+They crossed the terrace in the hush of the tropic night. Through
+the fairy black and silver the four figures moved, and it was as if
+the king's palace--that sky thing, with ramparts of air--had at
+length found expression and knew a way to answer the ancient
+glamourie of the moon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A VIGIL
+
+
+Upon Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, drowsing over the
+pocket chess-board, the sound of footsteps and men's voices in the
+corridor acted with electrical effect. Then the door was opened and
+behind Olivia and Antoinette appeared the two visitors who seemed to
+have fallen from the neighbouring heavens. The two chess-pretenders
+looked up aghast. If there were a place in the world where
+chaperonage might be relaxed the uninformed observer would say that
+it would be the top of Mount Khalak.
+
+"Mercy around us!" cried Mrs. Medora Hastings, "if it isn't that
+newspaper man! He's probably come over here to cable it all over the
+front page of every paper in New York. Well," she added
+complacently, as if she had brought it all about, "it seems good to
+see some of your own race. How _did_ you get here? Some trick, I
+suppose?"
+
+"My dear fellows," burst out Mr. Augustus Frothingham fervently,
+"thank God! I'm not, ordinarily, unequal to my situations, but I
+confess to you, as I would not to a client, that I don't object to
+sharing this one. How did you come?"
+
+"It's a house-party!" said Antoinette ecstatically.
+
+Amory looked at her in her blue gown in the light of the white room,
+and his spirits soared heavenward. Why should St. George have an
+idea that he controlled the hour?
+
+From a tumult of questioning, none of which was fully answered
+before Mrs. Hastings put another query, the lawyer at length
+elicited the substance of what had occurred.
+
+"You came up the side of the mountain, carried by four of those
+frightful natives?" shrilled Mrs. Hastings. "Olivia, think. It's a
+wonder they didn't murder you first and throw you over afterward,
+isn't it, Olivia? Oh, and my poor dear brother. To think of his
+lying somewhere all mangled and bl--"
+
+Emotion overcame Mrs. Hastings. Her tortoise-shell glasses fell to
+her lap and both her side-combs tinkled melodiously to the tiled
+floor.
+
+"This reminds me," said Mr. Frothingham, settling back and finding a
+pencil with which to emphasize his story, "this reminds me very much
+of a case that I had on the June calendar--"
+
+In half an hour St. George and Amory saw that all serious
+consideration of their situation must be accomplished alone with
+Olivia; for in that time Mr. Frothingham had been reminded of two
+more cases and Mrs. Hastings had twice been reduced to tears by the
+picture of the possible fate of her brother. Moreover, there
+presently appeared supper--a tray of the most savoury delicacies, to
+produce which Olivia had slipped away and, St. George had no doubt,
+said over some spell in the kitchens. Supper in the white marble
+room of the king's palace was almost as wonderful as muffins and tea
+at the Boris.
+
+There were Olivia in her gown of roses on one side of the table and
+Antoinette on the other and between them the hungry and happy
+adventurers. Across the room under a tall silver vase that might
+have been the one proposed by Achilles at the funeral games for
+Patroclus ("that was the work of the 'skilful Sidonians'" St. George
+recalled with a thrill), Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham were
+conscientiously finishing their chess, since the lawyer believed in
+completing whatever he undertook, if for nothing more than a warning
+never to undertake it again. Manifestly the little ivory kings and
+queens and castles were in league with all the other magic of the
+night, for the game prolonged itself unconscionably, and the supper
+party found it far from difficult to do the same. St. George looked
+at Olivia in her gown of roses, and his eyes swept the high white
+walls of the room with its frescoes and inscriptions, its broken
+statues and defaced chests of stone and ancient armour, and so back
+to Olivia in her gown of roses, with her little ringless hands
+touching and lifting among the alien dishes as she ministered to
+him. What a dear little gown of roses and what beautiful hands, St.
+George thought; and as for the broken statues and the inscriptions
+and the contents of the stone chests, nobody had paid any attention
+to them for so long that they could hardly have missed his regard.
+Nor Amory's. For Amory was in the midst of a reminiscent reference
+to the Chiswicks, in the Adirondacks, and to Antionette Frothingham
+in a launch.
+
+At last they all were aware that the chess-board was being closed
+and Mrs. Hastings had risen.
+
+"I suppose," she was saying, "that they have an idea here, the poor
+deluded creatures, that it is very late. But I tell Olivia that we
+are so much farther east it _can't_ be very late in New York at this
+minute, and I intend to go to bed by my watch as I always do, and
+that is New York time. If I were in New York I wouldn't be sleepy
+now, and I'm no different here, am I? I don't think people are half
+independent enough."
+
+Mrs. Hastings stepped round a stone god, almost faceless, that stood
+in a little circular depression in the floor.
+
+"Olivia, where," she inquired, patting the bobbing, ticking jet on
+her gown, "where do you think that frightful, mad, old man is?"
+
+"I heard him cross the corridor a little while ago," Olivia
+answered. "I think he went to his room."
+
+"I must say, Olivia," said Mrs. Hastings with a damp sigh, "that you
+are very selfish where I am concerned--in _this_ matter."
+
+"Ah," said Olivia, "please, Aunt Dora. He is far too feeble to harm
+any one. And he's away there on the second floor."
+
+"I'm sure he's a murderer," protested Mrs. Hastings. "He has the
+murderer's eye. Mr. Hastings would have said he has. We all sleep on
+the ground floor here," she continued plaintively, "because we are
+so high up anyway that I think the air must be just as pure as it
+would be up stairs. I always leave my window up the width of my
+handkerchief-box."
+
+As they went out to the great corridor Olivia spoke softly to St.
+George.
+
+"Look up," she said.
+
+He looked, and saw that the vast circular chamber was of
+incalculable height, extending up to the very dome of the palace,
+and shaping itself to the lines of the topmost of the three huge
+cones. It was a great well of light, playing over strange frescoes
+of gods and daemons, of constellations and of beasts, and exquisite
+with all the secret colours of some other way of vision. As high as
+the eye could see, the precious metals upon the skeleton of the open
+roof shone in the bright light that was set there--the light on the
+summit of the king's palace.
+
+St. George turned from the glory of it and looked into her eyes.
+
+"'A new Heaven and a new earth,'" he said; but he did not mean the
+dome of light nor yet the splendour of the palace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Manifestly, there is no use in being asleep when one can dream
+rather better awake. St. George wandered aimlessly between his room
+and Amory's and took the time to reflect that when a man looks the
+way Amory did he might as well have Cupids painted on his coat.
+
+"St. George," Amory said soberly, "is this the way you've been
+feeling all the way here? Is this what you came for? Then, on my
+soul, I forgive you everything. I would have climbed ten mountains
+to meet Antoinette Frothingham."
+
+"I've been watching you, you son of Dixie," said St. George darkly;
+"don't you lose your head just when you need it most."
+
+"I have a notion yours is gone," defended Amory critically, "and
+mine is only going."
+
+"That's twice as dangerous," St. George wisely opined;
+"besides--mine is different."
+
+"So is mine," said Amory, "so is everybody's."
+
+St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace. Amory
+didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and
+St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the
+south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood;
+and there, because the night would have it no other way, he
+stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe,
+and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business
+of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a
+field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal
+experiences where words themselves are born. Better and more
+intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.
+
+He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith
+been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and
+thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies,
+breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of
+what will be. He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman
+mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to
+the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told
+himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His
+mother and the bishop at Tübingen and on the Baltic! Curiously
+enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the
+bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
+All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast
+kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was
+Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.
+
+He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman
+emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken
+with him, when something--he was not sure whether it was a voice or
+a touch--startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked
+drowsily out at the glorified blackness--as if black were no longer
+absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been
+pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more
+inclusive than white. The very dark seemed delicately vocal and to
+"fill the waste with sound" no less than the wash of the waves. St.
+George awoke deliciously confused by a returning sense of the sweet
+and the joy of the night.
+
+"'This was the loneliest beach between two seas,'" there flitted
+through his mind, "'and strange things had been done there in the
+ancient ages.'" He turned among the vines, half listening. "And in
+there is the king's daughter," he told himself, "and this is
+certainly 'the strangest thing that ever befell between two seas.'
+And I have a great mind to look up the old woman of that tale who
+must certainly be hereabout, dancing 'widdershins.'"
+
+Then, like a bright blade unsheathed in a quiet chamber, a cry of
+great and unmistakable fear rang out from the palace--a woman's
+cry, uttered but once, and giving place to a silence that was even
+more terrifying. In an instant St. George was on his feet, running
+with all his might.
+
+"Coming!" he called, "where are you--where are you?" And his heart
+pounded against his side with the certainty that the voice had been
+Olivia's.
+
+It was unmistakably Olivia's voice that replied to him.
+
+"Here!" she cried clearly, and St. George followed the sound and
+dashed through the long open window of the room next that in which
+he had first seen her that night.
+
+"Here," she repeated, "but be careful. Some one is in this room."
+
+"Don't be afraid," he cried cheerily into the dark. "It's all
+right," which is exactly what he would have said if there had been
+about dragons and real shades from Sidon.
+
+The room was now in darkness, and in the dim light cast by the high
+moon he could at first discern nothing. He heard a silken rustling
+and the tap of slippered feet. The next instant the apartment was
+quick with light, and in the curtained entrance to an inner room,
+Olivia, in a brown dressing-gown, her hair vaguely bright about her
+flushed face, stood confronting him.
+
+Between them, his thin hand thrown up, palm outward, to protect his
+eyes from the sudden light, was the old man whom St. George had last
+seen by the shrine on the terrace.
+
+St. George was prepared for a mere procession of palace ghosts, but
+at this strange visitor he stared for an uncomprehending moment.
+
+"What are you doing here?" he said wonderingly to him; "what in the
+world are you doing here?"
+
+The old man looked uncertainly about him, one hand spread against
+the pillar behind him, the other fumbling at his throat.
+
+"I think," he answered almost indistinguishably, "I think that I
+meant to sit here--to sit in the room beyond, where the mock stars
+shine."
+
+Olivia uttered an exclamation.
+
+"How could he possibly know that?" she said.
+
+"But what does he mean?" asked St. George.
+
+She crossed swiftly to a portiere hanging by slender rings from the
+full height of the lofty room, and at her bidding St. George
+followed her. She pushed aside the curtain, revealing a huge cave of
+the dark, a room whose walls were sunk in shadow. But overhead the
+ceiling was constellated in stars, so that it seemed to St. George
+as if he were looking into a nearer heaven, homing the far lights
+that he knew. The Pleiades, Orion, and the Southern Cross, blazing
+down with inconceivable brilliance, were caught and held captive in
+the cup of this nearer sky.
+
+"It is like this at night," Olivia said, "but we see nothing in the
+daytime, save the vague outlines of here and there a star. But how
+could he have known? There is no other door save this."
+
+The old man had followed them and stood, his eyes fixed on the
+shining points.
+
+"It is done well," he said softly, "it makes one feel the
+firmament."
+
+St. George, thrilling with the strangeness of what he saw, and the
+strangeness of being there with Olivia and this weird old man of the
+mountain, turned toward him almost fearfully. How did he know,
+indeed?
+
+"Ah well," he said, striving to reassure her, "I've no doubt he has
+wandered in here some evening, while you were at dinner. No doubt--"
+
+He stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the old man's hand. For as he
+lifted it St. George had thought that something glittered. Without
+hesitation he caught the old man's arm about the wrist, and turned
+his hand in his own palm. In the thin fingers he found a small
+sealed tube, filled with something that looked like particles of
+nickel.
+
+"Do you mind telling me what that is?" asked St. George.
+
+Old Malakh's eyes, liquid and brown and very peaceful, met his own
+without rebuke.
+
+"Do you mean the gem?" he asked gently. "It is a very beautiful
+ruby."
+
+Then St. George saw upon the hand that held the sealed tube a ring
+of matchless workmanship, set with a great ruby that smouldered in
+the shadow where they stood. Olivia looked at St. George with
+startled eyes.
+
+"He was not wearing this when we first saw him," she said. "I
+haven't seen him wearing it at all."
+
+St. George confronted the old man then and spoke with some
+determination.
+
+"Will you please tell us," he said, "what there is in this tube, and
+how you came by this ring?"
+
+Old Malakh looked down reflectively at his hand, and back to St.
+George's face. It was wonderful, the air of courtliness and urbanity
+and delicate breeding which persisted through age and infirmity and
+the fallow mind.
+
+"I wish that I might tell you," he said humbly, "but I have only
+little lights in my head, instead of words. And when I say them,
+they do not mean--what they _shine_. Do you not see? That is why
+every one laughs. But I know what the lights say."
+
+St. George looked at Olivia helplessly.
+
+"Will you tell me where his room is?" he said, "and I'll go back
+with him. I don't know what to make of this, quite, but don't be
+frightened. It's all right. Didn't you say he is on the second
+floor?"
+
+"Yes, but don't go alone with him," begged Olivia suddenly, "let me
+call some of the servants. We don't know what he may do."
+
+St. George shook his head, smiling a little in sheer boyish delight
+at that "we." "We" is a very wonderful word, when it is not put to
+unimportant uses by kings, editors and the like.
+
+"I'd rather not, thank you," he said. "I'll have a talk with him, I
+think."
+
+"His room is at the top of the stair, on the left," said Olivia
+reluctantly, "but I wish--"
+
+"We shall get on all right," St. George assured her, "and don't let
+this worry you, will you? I was smoking on the terrace. I'll be
+there for a while yet. Good night," he said from the doorway.
+
+"Good night," said Olivia. "Good night--and, oh, I thank you."
+
+St. George's expectation of having a talk with the old man was,
+however, unfounded. Old Malakh led the way to his room--a great
+place of carven seats and a frowning bed-canopy and high windows,
+and doors set deep in stone; and he begged St. George to sit down
+and permitted him to examine the sealed tube filled with little
+particles that looked like nickel, and spoke with gentle irrelevance
+the while. At the last St. George left him, feeling as if he were
+committing not so much an indignity as a social solecism when he
+locked the door upon the lonely creature, using for the purpose a
+key-like implement chained to the lock without and having a ring
+about the size of the iron crown of the Lombards.
+
+"Good night," old Malakh told him courteously, "good night. But yet
+all nights are good--save the night of the heart."
+
+St. George went back to the terrace. For hours he paced the paths of
+that little upper garden or lay upon the wall among the pungent
+vines. But now he forgot the iridescent dark and the companion-sea
+and the high moon and the king's palace, for it was not these that
+made the necromancy of the night. It was permitted him to watch
+before the threshold while Olivia slept, as lovers had watched in
+the youth of the world. Whatever the morrow held, to-night had been
+added to yesternight. Not until the dawn of that morrow whitened the
+sky and drew from the vapourous plain the first far towers of Med,
+the King's City, did St. George say good night to her glimmering
+windows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+GLAMOURIE
+
+
+There is a certain poster, all stars and poppies and deep grass; and
+over these hangs a new moon which must surely have been cut by fairy
+scissors, for it looks as much like a cake or a cowslip as it looks
+like a moon. But withal it sheds a light so eery and strangely
+silver that the poster seems, in spite of the poppies, to have been
+painted in Spring-wind.
+
+"Never," said some chance visitors vehemently, "have I seen such a
+moon as that!"
+
+"But ah, sir, and ah, madame," was the answer--it is not recorded
+whether the poster spoke or whether some one spoke for it--"wouldn't
+you like to?"
+
+Now, therefore, concerning the sweet of those hours in the king's
+palace the Vehement may be tempted to exclaim that in life things
+never happen like that. Ah--do they not so? You have only to go back
+to the days when young love and young life were yours to recall
+distinctly that the most impossible things were every-day
+occurrences. What about the time that you went down one street
+instead of up another and _that_ changed the entire course of your
+days and brought you two together? What about the song, the June,
+the letter that touched the world to gold before your eyes and
+caught you up in a place of clouds? Remembering that magic, it is
+quite impossible to assert that any charming thing whatever would
+not have happened. Is there not some wonderland in every life? And
+is not the ancient citadel of Love-upon-the-Heights that common
+wonderland? One must believe in all the happiness that one can.
+
+But if the Most Vehement--who are as thick as butterflies--still
+remain unconvinced and persist that they never heard of things
+fallen out thus, there is left this triumph:
+
+"Ah, sir, or ah, madame, wouldn't you like to?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A fugitive wind rollicking in from sea next morning swept through
+the palace and went on around the world; and thereafter it had an
+hundred odourous ways of attracting attention, which were merely its
+own tale of what pleasant things it had seen and heard on high.
+
+For example, that breakfast. A cloth had been laid at one end of the
+long stone table whereat, since the days of Abibaal, brother to
+Hiram, friend to David, kings had breakfasted and banqueted, and
+this cloth had now been set with the ancient plate of the
+palace--dishes that looked like helmets and urns and discs. Here
+Olivia and Antoinette, in charming print frocks, made a kind of tea
+in a kind of biblical samovar and served it in vessels that
+resembled individual trophies of the course. And here St. George and
+Amory praised the admirable English muffins which some one had
+taught the dubious cook to make; and Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+tip-fingered his way about his plate among alien fruits and
+queer-shaped cakes. "Are they cookies or are they manna?" Amory
+wondered, "for they remind me of coriander seeds." And here Mrs.
+Hastings, who always awoke a thought impatient and became
+ultra-complacent with no interval of real sanity, wistfully asked
+for a soft-boiled egg and added plaintively:
+
+"Though I dare say the very hens in Yaque lay something besides
+eggs--pineapples, very likely."
+
+"I suppose," speculated Amory, "that when we get perfectly
+intuitionized we won't have to eat either one because we'll know
+beforehand exactly how they both taste."
+
+"A _reductio ad absurdum_, my young friend," said the lawyer
+sternly; "the real purpose of eating will remain for ever
+unchanged."
+
+Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on the
+terrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss the
+weather report so," complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young people
+with Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace. For
+St. George had risen from his two hours' sleep with some
+clearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every niche
+and corner of the great pile where one--say a king--might be hidden
+with twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.
+
+What a morning it was! When the rollicking wind got to that part of
+the story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumes
+that even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, "thinking
+delicate thoughts." There never was a fairer temple of romance, a
+very temple of Young Love's Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St.
+George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries were
+become homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yet
+be well.
+
+To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, all
+octagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity and
+amazement might increase with every step. How they had ever raised
+those massive blocks of stone to that great height no one can
+guess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palace
+had originally been built upon level ground and had had its
+surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain. At all events
+there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked
+stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the
+planetary deities--Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white
+bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in
+the form of a rising flame--types taken from the heavens and from
+the abyss. There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven
+cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and little
+circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of
+Baal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth,
+with the lion's skin.
+
+From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step
+of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing
+size, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the painted
+ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic
+paws. Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled
+with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most
+luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort. The palace
+was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two
+thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance
+of this moment's civilization of the world. The heart of that
+elder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where they
+came upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and tools
+and empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallic
+plate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in one
+light, slightly fluorescent.
+
+"It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adôn," said Jarvo. "She was
+the daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touched
+in this room was left unmoved. But it was very many years ago--I
+have forgotten. Every one has forgotten."
+
+They went down among the very roots of the palace, three full
+storeys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lighting
+the way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding passages,
+and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones had
+been hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber of
+the tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, now
+hollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hall
+were lined with _loculi_ or niches, each as deep as the length of a
+man. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the long
+flags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven on
+the stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was a
+lofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was the
+resting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal of
+Tyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when the
+Phoenicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first passed the Straits of
+Gibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastings
+when they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and the
+Washingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they were
+nothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wall
+was a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, where
+slept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king of
+Persia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket of
+love-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probably
+at one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in the
+very palace. And if this is true the story of his omission to
+conquer the island may one day divert the world.
+
+Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored with
+winged circles.
+
+"Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnapped
+Egyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Phoenician
+merchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Here
+lie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holy
+office."
+
+Nothing was unbelievable--nothing had been unbelievable for so long
+that these four had almost learned that everything is possible.
+Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly you
+learn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world of
+possibilities. It is one of our two magics.
+
+"And this," Jarvo said softly, pausing before a vacant niche
+opposite the tomb of King Abibaal, "this will be the receptacle for
+the present king of Yaque, his Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of
+God."
+
+Olivia suddenly looked up at St. George, her face pale in the
+ghostly light. There it had been, waiting for them all the while,
+the sense of the vivid personal against the vague eternal. But her
+involuntary appeal to him, slight as it was, thrilled St. George
+with tenderness as vivid as this tragic element itself.
+
+They went back to the sun and the sweet messengering air above, and
+crossed a little vacant grassy court on the north side of the
+mountain. Here they saw that the palace climbed down the northern
+slope from the summit, and literally overhung the precipice where
+the supports were made fast by gigantic girders run in the living
+rock. A little observatory was built below the edge of the mountain,
+and this box of a place had a glass floor, and one felt like a fly
+on the sky as one stood there. It was said that a certain king of
+Yaque, sometime in the course of the Punic Wars, had thrown himself
+from this observatory in a rage because his court electrician had
+died, but how true this may be it is impossible to say because so
+little is known about electricity. Below the building lay quite the
+most wonderful part of the king's palace.
+
+Here in the long north rooms, hermetically quiet, was the heart of
+the treasure of the ancient island. Here, saved inexplicably from
+the wreck of the past, were a thousand testimonies to that lost and
+but half-guessed art of the elder world. Beautiful things, made in
+the days when King Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, lined the
+walls, and filled the stone shelves, together with curios of that
+later day when Phoenicia stood first in knowledge of the plastic and
+glyptic arts. Workers in gold and ivory, in gems and talismans, in
+brass and fine linen and purple had done the marvels which those
+courtier adventurers brought with them over the sea, and to these,
+from year to year, had been added the treasure of private
+chests--necklaces and coronals and hair-loops, bottles and vases of
+glass coloured with metallic oxides, and patterned aggry-beads, now
+sometimes found in ancient tombs on the Ashantee coasts. Beneath an
+altar set with censers and basins of gold was a chest brought from
+Amathus, its ogive lid carved with _bigæ_ or two-horsed chariots,
+and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the Hereditary
+Treasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered with
+bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the
+Phoenician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were
+set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the
+Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days
+remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected
+in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied
+from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered--annals,
+State documents, the Phoenician originals of histories preserved
+elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the
+secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose
+names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and
+Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy
+and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were
+chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of
+no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the
+Past, watching lonely on the mountain.
+
+"Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to the
+cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"
+
+"No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted to
+go somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure and
+you thought Clusium was the name of it."
+
+"I know," said Amory shamelessly, "and there are no end of names for
+it. But it's always the same thing. _Excepting this_."
+
+"Excepting this," St. George repeated fervently as they turned to
+go; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sang
+that, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faint
+voices from every shelf in the room,--voices that of old had
+thrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.
+
+Woke now to the eternal echo--an echo that touched delicately
+through the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on all
+that happened. Otherwise, if they four were not all a little
+echo-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face of
+danger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found time
+for the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, because
+they hold revelation. There were, too, some events; but an event is
+a clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.
+The delicious moments are when the intangibilities prevail and
+pervade and possess. In the king's palace there must have been
+shrines to intangibilities--as there should be everywhere--for they
+seemed to come there, and belong.
+
+The mere happenings included, for example, a talk that St. George
+had with Mr. Augustus Frothingham on the terrace after luncheon,
+in which St. George laid before the lawyer a plan which he had
+virtually matured and of which he himself thought very well.
+Thought so well, because of its possibilities, that his face was
+betrayingly eager as he told about it. It was, briefly, that
+inasmuch as four of the six men who could scale the mountain were
+now on its summit, and inasmuch as all the airships were there
+also, now, therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque,
+were in a perfectly impregnable position--counting out Fifth
+Dimension contingencies, which of course might include appearings
+as well as disappearings--and why shouldn't they stay there, and
+let the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked? And
+when the lawyer said, "But, my dear fellow," as he was bound to
+say, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, by
+noon of the following day, two determined persons who, if Jarvo
+would get word to them, would with perfect certainty find Mr. Otho
+Holland, the king, if he were on the island. And when "Well, but
+my dear fellow" occurred again, St. George replied with deference
+that he knew it, but although he never had managed an airship he
+fancied that perhaps he might help with one; and down there in the
+harbour was a yacht waiting to sail for New York, and therefore no
+one need even set foot on the island who didn't wish. And Mr.
+Frothingham laid one long hand on each coat-lapel and threw back
+his head until his hair rested on his collar, and he looked at the
+palace--that Titan thing of the sky with ramparts of air--and
+said, "Nothing in all my experience--" and St. George left him,
+deep in thought.
+
+On the way back he chanced upon Mrs. Hastings, seated on a bench of
+lapidescent wood in the portico--and a Titanic portico it looked by
+day--and, having sent for the palace chef, she was attempting to
+write down the recipe for the salad of that day's luncheon, although
+it was composed chiefly of fowls now extinct everywhere excepting in
+Yaque.
+
+"But my poultry man will get them for me," she urged with
+determination; "I have only to tell him the name of what I want, and
+he can always produce it in tins, nicely labeled."
+
+Later, St. George came upon old Malakh, leaning on the terrace wall,
+looking out to sea, and stood close beside him, marveling at the
+pallor and the thousand wrinkles of the man's strange face. The face
+was stranger by day than it had been by night--this St. George had
+felt when he went that morning to release him, and the old man
+leaned from the frowning bed-hangings to bid him a gentle good
+morning. Could he be, St. George now wondered vaguely, a citizen of
+the fifteenth or twentieth dimension, and, there, did they live to
+his incredible age? Then he noticed that the old man was not wearing
+the ruby ring.
+
+"I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakh
+answered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and at
+other things.
+
+To everything that he asked him the old man returned only his
+urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism.
+When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would
+consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George
+himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I
+would far rather talk with one madman with this madman's manners
+than to sup with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murder
+us, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Olivia
+had no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could one
+possibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle.
+
+All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing as
+only that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that went
+before. St. George was saying to himself that at last the _Here_ and
+the _Now_ were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for the
+morrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noon
+they all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leaves
+above carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. They
+leaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the glory
+of the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings of
+gulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did not
+know they gave--ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind told
+about that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their young
+courage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility of
+their understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. For
+the wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, and
+one has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth.
+Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spite
+of the little wing-like moments that hold not history but
+revelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendent
+sword of "To-morrow, at noon."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+BENEATH THE SURFACE
+
+
+Up came the dusk to the doors of the king's palace--a hurry of grey
+banners flowing into the empty ways where the sun had been. Upon
+this high dominion Night could not advance unheralded, and here the
+Twilight messengered her coming long after the dark lay thick on the
+lowland and on the toiling water.
+
+St. George, leaning from Amory's window, looked down on the shadows
+rising in exquisite hesitation, as if they came curling from the
+lighted censer of Med. There is no doubt at all, Olivia had said
+gravely, that the dusk is patterned, if only one could see
+it--figured in unearthly flowers, in wandering stars, in upper-air
+sprites, grey-winged, grey-bodied, so that sometimes glimpsing them
+one fancies them to be little living goblins. He smiled, remembering
+her words, and glanced over his shoulder down the long room where
+the other light was now beginning to creep about, first expressing,
+then embracing the chamber dusk. It seemed precisely the moment
+when something delicate should be caught passing from gloom to
+radiance, to be thankfully remembered. But only many-winged colours
+were visible, though he could hear a sound like little murmurous
+speech in the dusky roof where the air had a recurrent fashion of
+whispering knowingly.
+
+Indeed, the air everywhere in the palace had a fashion of whispering
+knowingly, for it was a place of ghostly draughts and blasts
+creeping through chambers cleft by yawning courts and open corridors
+and topped by that skeleton dome. And as St. George turned from the
+window he saw that the door leading into the hall, urged by some
+nimble gust, imaginative or prying, had swung ajar.
+
+St. George mechanically crossed the room to close the door, noting
+how the pale light warmed the stones of that cave-like corridor.
+With his hand upon the latch his eyes fell on something crossing the
+corridor, like a shadow dissolving from gloom to gloom. Well beyond
+the open door, stealing from pillar to pillar in the dimness and
+moving with that swiftness and slyness which proclaim a covert
+purpose as effectually as would a bell, he saw old Malakh.
+
+Now St. George was in felt-soled slippers and he was coatless,
+because in the adjoining room Jarvo, with a heated, helmet-like
+apparatus, was attempting to press his blue serge coat. In that
+room too was Amory, catching glimpses of himself in a mirror of
+polished steel, but within reach, on the divan where Jarvo had just
+laid it, was Amory's coat; and St. George caught that up, slipped it
+on, and was off down the corridor after the old man, moving as
+swiftly and slyly as he. St. George had no great faith in him or in
+what he might know, but the old man puzzled him, and mystification
+is the smell of a pleasant powder.
+
+The palace was very still. Presumably, Mrs. Hastings and Mr.
+Frothingham were already at chess in the drawing-room awaiting
+dinner. St. George heard a snatch of distant laughter, in quick
+little lilts like a song, and it occurred to him that its echo there
+was as if one were to pin a ruffle of lace to the grim stones. Some
+one answered the laugh, and he heard the murmurous touching of soft
+skirts entering the corridor as he dived down the ancient dark of
+one of the musty passages. There the silence was resumed. In the
+palace it was as though the stillness were some living sleeper,
+waking with protests, thankful for the death of any echo.
+
+No one was in the gallery. St. George, stepping softly, followed as
+near as he dared to that hurrying figure, flitting down the dark. A
+still narrower hallway connected the main portion of the palace with
+a shoulder of the south wing, and into this the old man turned and
+skirted familiarly the narrow sunken pool that ran the length of
+the floor, drawing the light to its glassy surface and revealing the
+shadows sent clustering to the indistinguishable roof.
+
+Midway the gallery sprang a narrow stairway, let in the wall and
+once leading to the ancient armoury, but now disused and piled with
+rubbish. Old Malakh went up two steps of this old stairway, turned
+aside, and slipped away so swiftly that his amazed pursuer caught no
+more than an after-flutter of his dun-coloured garments. St. George,
+his softly-clad feet making no noise upon the stones, bounded
+forward and saw, through a triangular aperture in the stones, and
+set so low that a man must crouch upon the step to enter, a yawning
+place of darkness.
+
+He might very well have been taking his life in his hands, for he
+could have no idea whether the aperture led to the imperial dungeons
+or to the imperial rain-water cistern; but St. George instantly bent
+and slipped down into that darkness, thick with the dust of the
+flight of the old man. With the distinctly pleasurable sensation of
+being still alive he found himself standing upright upon an uneven
+floor of masonry. He thrust out his arms and touched sides of mossy
+rock. Then just before him a pale flame flickered. The old man had
+kindled a little taper that hardly did more than make shallow
+hollows in the darkness through which he moved.
+
+It was easy to follow now, and St. George went breathlessly on
+past the rudely-hewn walls and giant pillars of that hidden way.
+He might have been lost with ease in any of the lower processes of
+the palace which they had that morning visited; but he could not
+be deceived about the chambers which he had once seen, and this
+subterranean course was new to him. Was it, he wondered, new to
+Olivia, and to Jarvo? Else why had it been omitted in that
+morning's search? And was this strange guide going on at random,
+or did he know--something? A suspicion leaped to St. George's mind
+that made his heart beat. The king--might he be down here
+after all, and might this weird old man know where? His own
+consciousness became chiefly conjecture, and every nerve was alert
+in the pursuit; not the less because he realized that if he were
+to lose this strange conductor who went on before, either in
+secure knowledge or in utter madness, he himself might wander for
+the rest of his life in that nether world.
+
+Past grim latchless doors sealing, with appropriate gestures, their
+forgotten secrets, past outlying passages winding into the heart of
+the mountain, past niches filled with shapeless crumbling rubbish
+they hurried--the mad old man and his bewildered pursuer. Twice the
+way turned, gradually narrowing until two could hardly have passed
+there, and at last apparently terminated in a short flight of
+steps. Old Malakh mounted with difficulty and St. George, waiting,
+saw him standing before a blank stone wall. Immediately and without
+effort the old man's scanty strength served to displace one of the
+wall's huge stones which hung upon a secret pivot and rolled
+noiselessly within. He stepped through the aperture, and St. George
+sprang behind him, watched his moment to cross the threshold,
+crouched in the leaping shadow of the displaced stone and
+looked--looked with the undistinguishing amazement that a man feels
+in the panorama of his dreams.
+
+The room was small and low and set with a circular bench, running
+about a central pillar. On the table was a confusion of things
+brilliantly phosphorescent, emitting soft light, and mingled with
+bulbs, coils and crucibles lying in a litter of egg-shells,
+feathers, ivory and paper. But it was not these that held St. George
+incredulous; it was the fire that glowed in their midst--a fire that
+leaped and trembled and blazed inextinguishable colour, smouldering,
+sparkling, tossing up a spray of strange light, lambent with those
+wizard hues of the pennons and streamers floating joyously from the
+dome of the Palace of the Litany--the fire from the subject hearts
+of a thousand jewels. There could be no doubting what he saw. There,
+flung on the table from the mouth of a carven casket and harbouring
+the captive light of ages gone, glittered what St. George knew
+would be the gems of the Hereditary Treasure of the kings of Yaque.
+
+But for old Malakh to know where the jewels were--that was as
+amazing as was their discovery. St. George, breathing hard in his
+corner, watched the long, fine hands of the old man trembling among
+the delicate tubes and spindles, lingering lovingly among the
+stones, touching among the necklaces and coronals of the dead queens
+whose dust lay not far away. It was as if he were summoning and
+discarding something shining and imponderable, like words. The
+contents of the casket which all Yaque had mourned lay scattered in
+this secret place of which only this strange, mad creature, a chance
+pensioner at the palace, had knowledge.
+
+Suddenly the memory of Balator's words smote St. George with new
+perception. "He walks the streets of Med," Balator had told him at
+the banquet, "saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say 'king,' and so
+he is seeking the king. But he is mad, and he weeps; and therefore
+they pretend to believe that he says, 'Malakh,' which is to say
+'salt,' and they call him that, for his tears."
+
+Could old Malakh possibly know something of the king? The hope
+returned to St. George insistently, and he watched, spending his
+thought in new and extravagant conjecture, his mental vision
+blurring the details of that heaped-up, glistening confusion; and on
+the opposite side of the table the old man lifted and laid down
+that rainbow stuff of dreams, delighting in it, speaking softly
+above it. Had he been the king's friend, St. George was asking--but
+why did no one know anything of him? Or had he been an enemy who had
+done the king violence--but how was that possible, in his age and
+feebleness? Mystifying as the matter was, St. George exulted as much
+as he marveled; for it would be his, at all events, to place the
+jewels in Olivia's hands and clear her father's name; he longed to
+step out of the dark and confront the old man and seize the casket
+out of hand, and he would probably have done so and taken his
+chances at getting back to the upper world, had he not been chained
+to his corner by the irresistible hope that the old man knew
+something more--something about the king. And while he wondered,
+reflecting that at any cost he must prevent the replacing of the
+pivotal stone, he saw old Malakh take up his taper, turn away from
+the table, and open a door which the room's central pillar had cut
+from his view.
+
+He was around the table in an instant. The open door revealed three
+stone steps which the old man was ascending, one at a time.
+Following him cautiously St. George heard a door grate outward at
+the head of the stair, saw the taper move forward in darkness, and
+the next moment found himself standing in the room of the tombs of
+the kings of Yaque. And he saw that the panel which had swung
+inward to admit them was set low in the monolithic tomb of King
+Abibaal himself.
+
+Old Malakh had crossed swiftly to the wall opposite the tomb, and
+stood before the vacant niche which was to be occupied, as Jarvo had
+announced, by "His Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of God." There,
+setting aside his taper, the old man stretched his arms upward to
+the empty shelf and with a gesture of inconceivable weariness bowed
+his head upon them and stood silent, the leaping candle-light
+silvering his hair.
+
+"Upon my soul," thought St George with finality, "he's murdered him.
+Old Malakh has murdered the king, and it's driven him crazy."
+
+With that he did step out of the dark, and he laid his hand suddenly
+upon the old man's shoulder.
+
+"Malakh," he said, "what have you done with the king?"
+
+The old man lifted his head and turned toward St. George a face of
+singular calm. It was as if so many phantoms vexed his brain that a
+strange reality was of little consequence. But as his eyes met those
+of St. George a sudden dimness came over them, the lids fluttered
+and dropped, and his lips barely formed his words:
+
+"The king," he said. "I did not leave the king. It was the king who
+somehow went away and left me here--"
+
+He threw out his hands blindly, tottered and swayed from the wall;
+and St. George received him as he fell, measuring his length upon
+the stones before King Otho's future tomb.
+
+St. George caught down the light and knelt beside him. Death seemed
+to have come "pressing within his face," and breathing hardly
+disquieted his breast. St. George fumbled at the old man's robe, and
+beneath his fingers the heart fluttered never so faintly. He
+loosened the cloth at the withered throat, passed his hand over the
+still forehead, and looked desperately about him.
+
+The other inmates of the palace were, he reflected, about two good
+city blocks from him; and he doubted if he could ever find his
+unaided way back to them. Mechanically, though he knew that he
+carried no flask, he felt conscientiously through his pockets--a
+habit of the boy in perplexity which never deserts the man
+in crises. In the inside pocket of the coat that he was
+wearing--Amory's coat--his fingers suddenly closed about
+something made of glass. He seized it and drew it forth.
+
+It was a little vase of rock-crystal, ornamented with gold
+medallions, covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+beauty and variety of design--gryphons, serpents, winged discs, men
+contending with lions. St. George stared at it uncomprehendingly. In
+the press of events of the last eight-and-forty hours Amory had
+quite forgotten to mention to him the prince's intended gift of
+wine, almost three thousand years old, sealed in Phoenicia.
+
+St. George drew the stopper. In an instant an odour, spicy,
+penetrating, delicious, saluted him and gave life to the dead air of
+the room. For a moment he hesitated. He knew that the flask had not
+been among Amory's belongings and that he himself had never seen it
+before. But the odour was, he thought, unmistakable, and so powerful
+that already he felt as if the liquor were racing through his own
+veins. He touched it to his lips; it was like a full draught of some
+marvelous elixir. Sudden confidence sat upon St. George, and
+thanking his guiding stars for the fortunate chance, he
+unhesitatingly set the flask to the old man's lips.
+
+There was a long-drawn, shuddering breath, a fluttering of the
+eyelids, a movement of the limbs, and after that old Malakh lay
+quite still upon the stones. Once more St. George thrust his hand
+within the bosom of the loose robe, and the heart was beating
+rapidly and regularly and with amazing force. In a moment deep
+breaths succeeded one another, filling the breast of the unconscious
+man; but the eyelids did not unclose, and St. George took up the
+taper and bent to scan the quiet face.
+
+St. George looked, and sank to his knees and looked again, holding
+the light now here, now there, and peering in growing bewilderment.
+What he saw he was wholly unable to define. It was as if a mask were
+slowly to dissolve and yet to lie upon the features which it had
+covered, revealing while it still made mock of concealing. Colour
+was in the lips, colour was stealing into the changed face. The
+_changed_ face--changed, St. George could not tell how; and the
+longer he looked, and though he rubbed his eyes and turned them
+toward the dark and then looked again, moving the taper, he could
+neither explain nor define what had happened.
+
+He set the candle on the floor and sprang away from the quiet
+figure, searching the dark. The great silent place, with its
+shoulders of sarcophagi jutting from the gloom was black save for
+the little ring of pallid light about that prostrate form. St.
+George sent his hand to his forehead, and shook himself a bit, and
+straightened his shoulders with a smile.
+
+"It must be the stuff you've tasted," he addressed himself solemnly.
+"Heaven knows what it was. It's the stuff you've tasted."
+
+Though he had barely touched his lips to the rock-crystal vase St.
+George's blood was pounding through his veins, and a curious
+exhilaration filled him. He looked about at the rims and corners of
+the tombs caught by the light, and he laughed a little--though this
+was not in the least what he intended--because it passed through
+his mind that if King Abibaal and Queen Mitygen, for example, might
+be treated with the contents of the mysterious vase they would no
+doubt come forth, Abibaal with memories of the Queen of Sheba in his
+eyes, and Queen Mitygen with her casket of Alexander's letters. Then
+St. George went down on his knees again, and raised the old man's
+head until it rested upon his own breast, and he passed the candle
+before his face, his hand trembling so that the light flickered and
+leaped up.
+
+This time there was no mistaking. The tissues of old Malakh's ashen
+face and throat and pallid hands were undergoing some subtle
+transfiguration. It was as if new blood had come encroaching in
+their veins. It was as if the muscles were become firm and full, as
+if the wrinkled skin had been made smooth, the lips grown fresh, as
+if--the word came to St. George as he stared, spell-stricken--as if
+_youth_ had returned.
+
+St. George slipped down upon the stones and sat motionless. There
+was a little blue, forked vein on the man's forehead, and upon this
+he fastened his eyes, mechanically following it downward and back.
+Lines had crossed it, and there had been a deep cleft between the
+eyes, but these had disappeared, leaving the brow almost smooth. The
+cheeks were now tinged with colour, and the throat, where he had
+pulled aside the robe, showed firm and white. Mechanically St.
+George passed his hand along the inert arm, and it was no more
+withered than his own--the arm of no greybeard, but of a man in the
+prime of life. What did it mean--what did it mean? St. George
+waited, the blood throbbing in his temples, a mist before his eyes.
+What did it mean?
+
+The minutes dragged by and still the unconscious man did not stir or
+unclose his eyes. From time to time St. George pressed his hand to
+the heart, and found it beating on rhythmically, powerfully. When he
+found himself sitting with averted head, as if he were afraid to
+look back at that changing face, a fear seized him that he had lost
+his reason and that what he imagined himself to see was a phase of
+madness. So he left the old man's side and sturdily tramped away
+into the huge dark of the room, resolutely explaining to himself
+that this was all very natural; the old man had been ill, improperly
+nourished, and the powerful stimulant of the wine had partly
+restored him. But even while he went over it St. George knew in his
+heart that what had happened was nothing that could be so explained,
+nothing that could be explained at all by anything within his ken.
+
+His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath
+of the place smote his face as he moved. He stumbled on a displaced
+tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and
+reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness. The taper rays
+struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet
+of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock. St. George remembered
+a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries,
+coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air. It
+seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far
+slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this
+ghost place. Back there, where the light glimmered beside the tomb
+of King Abibaal, nobody could tell what awaited him. If the man
+could change like this, might he not take on some shape too hideous
+to bear in the silence? St. George stood still, suddenly
+clenching his hands, trying to reach out through the dark and to
+grasp--himself, the self that seemed slipping away from him. But was
+he mad already, he wondered angrily, and hurried back to the far
+flickering light, stumbling, panting, not daring to look at the
+figure on the floor, not daring not to look.
+
+He resolutely caught up the candle and peered once more at the face.
+As steadily and swiftly as change in the aspect of the sky the face
+had gone on changing. St. George had followed to the chamber an old
+tottering man; the figure before him was a man of not more than
+fifty years.
+
+St. George let fall the candle, which flickered down, upright in its
+socket; and he turned away, his hand across his eyes. Since this was
+manifestly impossible he must be mad, something in the stuff that
+he had tasted had driven him mad. He felt strong as a lion, strong
+enough to lift that prostrate figure and to carry it through the
+winding passages into the midst of those above stairs, and to beg
+them in mercy to tell him how the man looked. What would _she_ say?
+He wondered what Olivia would say. Dinner would be over and they
+would be in the drawing-room--Olivia and Amory and Antoinette
+Frothingham; already the white room and the lights and Antoinette's
+laughter seemed to him of another world, a world from which he had
+irrevocably passed. Yet there they were above, the same roof
+covering them, and they did not know that down here in this place of
+the dead he, St. George, was beyond all question going mad.
+
+With a cry he pulled off Amory's coat, flung it over the unconscious
+man, and rushed out into the blackness of the corridor. He would not
+take the light--the man must not die alone there in the dark--and
+besides he had heard that the mad could see as well in the dark as
+in the light. Or was it the blind who could see in the dark? No
+doubt it was the blind. However, he could find his way, he thought
+triumphantly, and ran on, dragging his hand along the slippery
+stones of the wall--he could find his way. Only he must call out, to
+tell them who it was that was lost. So he called himself by name,
+aloud and sternly, and after that he kept on quietly enough, serene
+in the conviction that he had regained his self-control, fighting to
+keep his mind from returning to the face that changed before his
+eyes, like the appearances in the puppet shows. But suddenly he
+became conscious that it was his own name that he went shouting
+through the passages; and that was openly absurd, he reasoned, since
+if he wanted to be found he must call some one else's name. But he
+must hurry--hurry--hurry; no one could tell what might be happening
+back there to that face that changed.
+
+"Olivia!" he shouted, "Amory! Jarvo--oh, Jarvo! Rollo, you
+scoundrel--"
+
+Whereat the memory that Rollo was somewhere on a yacht assailed him,
+and he pressed on, blindly and in silence, until glimmering before
+him he saw a light shining from an open door. Then he rushed forward
+and with a groan of relief threw himself into the room. Opposite the
+door loomed the grim sarcophagus of King Abibaal, and beside it on
+the floor lay the figure with the face that changed. He had gone a
+circle in those tortuous passages, and this was the room of the
+tombs of the kings.
+
+He dragged himself across the chamber toward the still form. He must
+look again; no one could tell what might have happened. He pulled
+down the coat and looked. And there was surely nothing in the
+delicate, handsome, English-looking face upturned to his to give
+him new horror. It was only that he had come down here in the wake
+of a tottering old creature, and that here in his place lay a man
+who was not he. Which was manifestly impossible.
+
+Mechanically St. George's hand went to the man's heart. It was
+beating regularly and powerfully, and deep breaths were coming from
+the full, healthily-coloured lips. For a moment St. George knelt
+there, his blood tingling and pricking in his veins and pulsing in
+his temples. Then he swayed and fell upon the stones.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When St. George opened his eyes it was ten o'clock of the following
+morning, though he felt no interest in that. There was before him a
+great rectangle of light. He lifted his head and saw that the light
+appeared to flow from the interior of the tomb of King Abibaal. The
+next moment Amory's cheery voice, pitched high in consternation and
+relief, made havoc among the echoes with a background of Jarvo's
+smooth thanksgiving for the return of adôn.
+
+St. George, coatless, stiff from the hours on the mouldy stones,
+dragged himself up and turned his eyes in fear upon the figure
+beside him. It flashed hopefully through his mind that perhaps it
+had not changed, that perhaps he had dreamed it all, that perhaps
+...
+
+By his first glance that hope was dispelled. From beneath Amory's
+coat on the floor an arm came forth, pushing the coat aside, and a
+man slenderly built, with a youthful, sensitive face and somewhat
+critically-drooping lids, sat up leisurely and looked about him in
+slow surprise, kindling to distinct amusement.
+
+"Upon my soul," he said softly, "what an admission--what an
+admission! I can not have made such a night of it in years."
+
+Upon which Jarvo dropped unhesitatingly to his knees.
+
+"Melek! Melek!" he cried, prostrating himself again and again. "The
+King! The King! The gods have permitted the possible."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A MORNING VISIT
+
+
+In an upper room in the Palace of the Litany, fair with all the
+burnished devices of the early light, Prince Tabnit paced on that
+morning of mornings of his marriage day. Because of his great
+happiness the whole world seemed to him like some exquisite intaglio
+of which this day was the design.
+
+The room, "walled with soft splendours of Damascus tiles," was laid
+with skins of forgotten animals and was hung with historic
+tapestries dyed by ancient fingers in the spiral veins of the Murex.
+There were frescoes uniting the dream with its actuality, columns
+carved with both lines and names of beauty, pilasters decorated with
+chain and checker-work and golden nets. A stairway led to a high
+shrine where hung the crucified Tyrian sphinx. The room was like a
+singing voice summoning one to delights which it described. But
+whatever way one looked all the lines neither pointed nor seemed to
+have had beginning, but being divorced from source and direction
+expressed merely beauty, like an altar "where none cometh to pray."
+
+Prince Tabnit, in his trailing robe of white embroidered by a
+thousand needles, looked so akin to the room that one suspected it
+of having produced him, Athena-wise, from, say, the great black
+shrine. When he paused before the shrine he seemed like a child come
+to beseech some last word concerning the Riddle, rather than a man
+who believed himself to have mastered all wisdom and to have nailed
+the world-sphinx to her cross.
+
+     "Surely there is a vein for the silver
+      And a place for the gold where they fine it.
+      Iron is taken out of the earth
+      And brass is moulton out of the stone.
+      Man setteth an end to darkness
+      And searcheth out all perfection:
+      The stones of darkness and of the shadow of death,"
+
+he was repeating softly. "So it is," he added, "'and searcheth to
+the farthest bound.' Have I not done so? And do I not triumph?"
+
+Then the youth who had once admitted St. George and his friends to
+that far-away house in McDougle Street--with the hokey-pokey man
+outside the door--entered with the poetry of deference; and if, as
+he bent low, there was a lift and droop of his eyelids which tokened
+utter bewilderment, not to say agitation, he was careful that the
+prince should not see that.
+
+"Her Highness, the Princess of Yaque, Mrs. Hastings, Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham and Miss Frothingham ask audience, your Highness," he
+announced clearly.
+
+Prince Tabnit turned swiftly.
+
+"Whom do you say, Matten?" he questioned and when the boy had
+repeated the names, meditated briefly. He was at a loss to fathom
+what this strange visit might portend; beyond doubt, he reflected
+(in a world which was an intaglio of his own designing) it portended
+nothing at all. He hastened forward to wait upon them and paused
+midway the room, for the highest tribute that a Prince of the Litany
+could pay to another was to receive him in this chamber of the
+Crucified Sphinx.
+
+"Conduct them here, Matten," he commanded, and took up his station
+beside an hundred-branched candlestick made in Curium. There he
+stood when, having been led down corridors of ivory and through
+shining anterooms, Mrs. Hastings and Olivia and Antoinette appeared
+on the threshold of the chamber, followed by Mr. Frothingham. As the
+prince hastened forward to meet them with sweepings of his gown
+embroidered by a thousand needles and bent above their hands
+uttering gracious words, assuredly in all the history of Med and of
+the Litany the room of the Crucified Sphinx had never presented a
+more peculiar picture.
+
+Into that tranquil atmosphere, dream-pervaded, Mrs. Medora Hastings
+swept with all the certainty of an opinion bludgeoning the frail
+security of a fact. She had refused to have her belongings sent to
+the apartments in the House of the Litany placed that day at her
+disposal, preferring to dress for the coronation before she
+descended from Mount Khalak. She was therefore in a robe of black
+samite, trimmed with the fur of a whole chapter of extinct animals,
+and bangles and pendants of jewels bobbed and ticked all about her.
+But on her head she wore the bonnet trimmed with a parrot, set, as
+usual, frightfully awry. Beside her, with all the timidity of
+charming reality in the presence of fantasy, came Olivia and
+Antoinette--Olivia in a walking frock of white broadcloth, with an
+auto coat of hunting pink, and a cap held down by yards of cloudy
+veiling; Antoinette in a blue cloth gown, and about them both--stout
+little boots and suede gloves and smart shirt-waists--such an air of
+actuality as this chamber, prince and Sphinx and tradition and all,
+could not approach. Mr. Augustus Frothingham had struck his usual
+incontestable middle-ground by appearing in the blue velvet of a
+robe of State, over which he had slipped his light covert top-coat,
+and he carried his immaculate top-hat and a silver-headed stick.
+
+"Prince Tabnit," said Mrs. Medora Hastings without ceremony, "what
+have they done with that poor young man? Ask him, Olivia," she
+besought, sinking down upon a chair of verd antique and extending a
+limp, plump hand to the niece who always did everything executive.
+
+Olivia was very pale. She had hardly slept, night-long. Alarm at the
+inexplicable disappearance of St. George at dinner-time the day
+before and at the discovery that old Malakh was nowhere about had,
+by morning, deepened to unreasoning fear among them all. And then
+Olivia, knowing nothing of what had taken place in the room of the
+tombs, had resolved upon a desperate expedient, had bundled into an
+airship her almost prostrate aunt, Mr. Frothingham and his excited
+little daughter, and had borne down upon the Palace of the Litany
+two hours before noon. Amory, frantic with apprehension, had stayed
+behind with Jarvo, certain that St. George could not have left the
+mountain. But now that Olivia stood before the prince it required
+but a moment to convince her that Prince Tabnit really knew nothing
+of St. George's whereabouts. Indeed, since his gift of Phoenician
+wine, sealed three thousand years ago, and the immediate evanishment
+of the two Americans, his Highness had no longer vexed his thought
+with them, and he was genuinely amazed to know that (in a world
+which was an intaglio of his own designing) these two had actually
+spent yesterday at the king's palace on Mount Khalak. He perceived
+that he must give them more definite attention than his half-idle
+device of the wine--intended as that had been as a mere hyperspatial
+practical joke, not in the least irreconcilable with his office of
+host.
+
+"Mr. St. George came to Yaque to help me find my father," Olivia was
+concluding earnestly, "and if anything has happened to him, Prince
+Tabnit, I alone am responsible."
+
+The prince reflected for a moment, his eyes fixed upon the
+hundred-branched candlestick. Then:
+
+"Mr. St. George's disappearance," he said, "has prevented a still
+more unpleasant catastrophe."
+
+"Catastrophe!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, quite without tucking in her
+voice at the corners, "I have thought of no other word since I got
+to be royalty."
+
+"A world experience, a world experience, dear Madame," contributed
+Mr. Frothingham, his hands laid trimly along his blue velvet lap.
+
+"But that doesn't make it any easier to bear, no matter what anybody
+says," retorted the lady.
+
+"Inasmuch," pursued Prince Tabnit with infinite regret, "as these
+Americans have, as you say, assisted in the search for your father,
+the king, they have most unfortunately violated that ancient law
+which provides that no State or satrapy shall receive aid, whether
+of blood or of bond, from an alien. The Royal House alone is
+exempt."
+
+"And the penalty," demanded Olivia fearfully. "Is there a penalty?
+What is that, Prince Tabnit?"
+
+The voice of the prince was never more mellow.
+
+"Do not be alarmed, I beg," he hastened his reassurance. "Upon the
+return of Mr. St. George, he and his friend will simply be set
+adrift in a rudderless airship, an offering to the great idea of
+space."
+
+Mrs. Hastings swayed toward the prince in her chair of verd antique,
+and her voice seemed to become brittle in the air.
+
+"Oh, is that what you call being ahead of the time," she demanded
+shrilly, "getting behind science to behave like Nero? And for my
+part I don't see anything whatever about the island that is ahead of
+the times. You haven't even got silk shoe-laces. I actually had to
+use a cloth-of-gold sandal strap to lace my oxfords, and when I lost
+a cuff-link I was obliged to make shift with two sides of one of
+Queen Agothonike's ear-rings that I found in the museum at the
+palace. And that isn't all," went on the lady, wrong kindling wrong,
+"what do you do for paper and envelopes? There is not a quire to be
+found in Med. They offered me _wireless blanks_--an ultra form that
+Mr. Hastings would never have considered in good taste. And how
+about visiting cards? I tried to have a plate made, and they showed
+me a wireless apparatus for flashing from the doorstep the name of
+the visitor--an electrical entrance which Mr. Hastings would have
+considered most inelegant. Ahead of the times, with your rudderless
+airships! I have always said that the electric chair is a way to be
+barbarous and good form at the same time, and that is what I think
+about Yaque!"
+
+Mr. Frothingham's hands worked forward convulsively on his blue
+velvet knees.
+
+"My dear Madame," he interposed earnestly, "the history of criminal
+jurisprudence, not to mention the remarkable essay of the Marquis
+Beccaria--proves beyond doubt that the extirpation of the offender
+is the only possible safety for the State--"
+
+Olivia rose and stood before the prince, her eyes meeting his.
+
+"You will permit this sentence?" she asked steadily. "As head of the
+House of the Litany, you will execute it, Prince Tabnit?"
+
+"Alas!" said the prince humbly, "it is customary on the day of the
+coronation to set adrift all offenders. I am the servant of the
+State."
+
+"Then, Prince Tabnit, I can not marry you."
+
+At this Mrs. Hastings looked blindly about for support, and Mr.
+Frothingham and Antoinette flew to her side. In that moment the lady
+had seen herself, prophetically, in black samite and her parrot
+bonnet, set adrift in the penitential airship with her rebellious
+niece.
+
+For a moment Prince Tabnit hesitated: he looked at Olivia, who was
+never more beautiful than as she defied him; then he walked slowly
+toward her, with sweep and fall of his garments embroidered by a
+thousand needles. Antoinette and her father, ministering to Mrs.
+Hastings, heard only the new note that had crept into his voice, a
+thrill, a tremour--
+
+"Olivia!" he said.
+
+Her eyes met his in amazement but no fear.
+
+"In a land more alien to me than the sun," said the prince, "I saw
+you, and in that moment I loved you. I love you more than the life
+beyond life upon which I have laid hold. I brought you to this
+island to make you my wife. Do you understand what it is that I
+offer you?"
+
+Olivia was silent. She was trembling a little at the sheer enormity
+of the moment. Suddenly, Prince Tabnit seemed to her like a name
+that she did not know.
+
+"Will you not understand what I mean?" he besought with passionate
+earnestness. "Can I make my words mean nothing to you? Do you not
+see that it is indeed as I say--that I have grasped the secret of
+life within life, beyond life, transcending life, as his
+understanding transcends the man? The wonder of the island is but
+the alphabet of wisdom. The secrets of life and death and being
+itself are in my grasp. The hidden things that come near to you in
+beauty, in dream, in inspiration are mine and my people's. All
+these I can make yours--I offer you life of a fullness such as the
+people of the world do not dream. I will love you as the gods love,
+and as the gods we will live and love--it may be for ever. Nothing
+of high wisdom shall be unrevealed to us. We shall be what the world
+will be when it nears the close of time. Come to me--trust me--be
+beside me in all the wonder that I know. But above all, love me, for
+I love you more than life, and wisdom, and mystery!"
+
+Olivia understood, and she believed. The mystery of life had always
+been more real to her than its commonplaces, and all her years she
+had gone half-expecting to meet some one, unheralded, to whom all
+things would be clear, and who should make her know by some secret
+sign that this was so, and should share with her. She had no doubt
+whatever that Prince Tabnit spoke the truth--just as the daughter of
+the river-god Inachus knew perfectly that she was being wooed by a
+voice from the air. Indeed, the world over, lovers promise each
+other infinite things, and are infinitely believed.
+
+"I do understand you, Prince Tabnit," Olivia said simply, "I do
+understand something of what you offer me. I think that these things
+were not meant to be hidden from men always, so I can even believe
+that you have all that you say. But--there is something more."
+
+Olivia paused--and swiftly, as if some little listening spirit had
+released the picture from the air, came the memory of that night
+when she had stood with St. George on that airy rampart beside the
+wall of blossoming vines.
+
+"There is something more," she repeated, "when two love each other
+very much I think that they have everything that you have said, and
+more."
+
+He looked at her in silence. The stained light from some high window
+caught her veil in meshes of rose and violet--fairy colours,
+witnessing the elusive, fairy, invincible truth of what she said.
+
+"You mean that you do not love me?" said the prince gently.
+
+"I do not love you, your Highness," said Olivia, "and as for the
+wisdom of which you speak, that is worse than useless to you if you
+can do as you say with two quite innocent men." She hesitated,
+searching his face. "Is there no way," she said, "that I, the
+daughter of your king, can save them? I will appeal to the people!"
+
+The prince met her eyes steadily, adoringly.
+
+"It would avail nothing," he said, "they are at one with the law.
+Yet there is a way that I can help you. If Mr. St. George returns,
+as he must, he and his friends shall be set adrift with due
+ceremony--but in an imperial airship, with a man secretly in
+control. By night they can escape to their yacht. This I will
+do--upon one condition."
+
+"Oh--what is that?" she asked, and for all the reticence of her
+eagerness, her voice was a betrayal.
+
+Prince Tabnit turned to the window. Below, in the palace grounds,
+and without, in the Eurychôrus, a thousand people awaited the
+opening of the palace doors. They filled the majestic avenue, poured
+up the shadowed alleys that taught the necessity of mystery, were
+grouped beneath the honey-sweet trees; and above their heads, from
+every dome and column in the fair city, flowed and streamed the
+joyous, wizard, nameless colours of the pennons blown heavenward
+against the blue. They were come, this strange, wise, elusive
+people, to her marriage.
+
+The prince was smiling as he met her eyes; for the world was always
+the exquisite intaglio, and to-day was its design.
+
+"They know," he said simply, "what was to have been at noon to-day.
+Do you not understand my condition?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+IN THE HALL OF KINGS
+
+
+Somewhat before noon the great doors of the Palace of the Litany and
+of the Hall of Kings were thrown open, and the people streamed in
+from the palace grounds and the Eurychôrus. Abroad among
+them--elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs
+to dawn, not dusk--was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of
+expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself. Especially the youths
+and maidens--who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells--waited
+with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind
+of god even to the immortals. But there were also those who weighed
+the departures incident to the coming of the strange people from
+over-seas; and there were not lacking conservatives of the old
+régime to shake wise heads and declare that a barbarian is a
+barbarian, the world over.
+
+All that rainbow multitude, clad for festival, rose with the first
+light music that stole, winged and silken, from hidden cedar
+alcoves, and some minutes past the sounding of the hour of noon the
+chamfered doors set high in the south wall of the Hall of Kings were
+swung open, and at the head of the stair appeared Olivia.
+
+She was alone, for the custom of Yaque required that the island
+princesses should on the day of their recognition first appear alone
+before their people in token of their mutual faith. From the
+wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of
+Queen Mitygen herself. It was of fine lace woven in a single piece,
+and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of
+shadow. On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in
+the Phoenician fashion, once taken from a king's casket and sent
+secretly, upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy, to be bartered in
+the marts of Coele-Syria. Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay
+about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead
+queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder
+dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust. Girdling her
+waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered
+light. With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies--vivid,
+graphic, delineated not by light but by line.
+
+The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white,
+and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate
+few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the
+stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia's women, led by
+Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were
+entering by an opposite door. In the raised seats near the High
+Council, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham leaned to wave a
+sustaining greeting. Until that high moment Mrs. Medora Hastings had
+been by no means certain that Olivia would appear at all, though she
+openly nourished the hope that "everything would go off smoothly."
+("I don't care much for foreigners and never have," she confided to
+Mr. Frothingham, "still, I was thinking while I was at breakfast,
+after all, to the prince _we are_ the foreigners. There is something
+in that, don't you think? And then the dear prince--he is so very
+metaphysical!")
+
+Upon the beetling throne Olivia took her place, and her women sank
+about her like tiers of sunset clouds. She was so little and so
+beautiful and so unconsciously appealing that when Prince Tabnit and
+Cassyrus and the rest of the court entered, it is doubtful if an eye
+left Olivia, to homage them. But Prince Tabnit was the last to note
+that, for he saw only Olivia; and the world--the world was an
+intaglio of his own designing.
+
+With due magnificence the preliminary ceremonies of the coronation
+proceeded--musty necessities, like oaths and historical truths,
+being mingled with the most delicate observances, such as the
+naming of the former princesses of the island, from Adija, daughter
+of King Abibaal, to Olivia, daughter of King Otho; and such as
+counting the clouds for the misfortunes of the régime. This last
+duty fell to the office of the lord chief-chancellor, and from an
+upper porch he returned quickening with the intelligence that there
+was not a cloud in the sky, a state of the heavens known to no
+coronation since Babylon was ruled by Assyrian viceroys. The lord
+chief-chancellor and Cassyrus themselves brought forth the crown--a
+beautiful crown, shining like dust-in-the-sun--and Cassyrus, in a
+voice that trumpeted, rehearsed its history: how it had been made of
+jewels brought from the coffers of Amasis and Apries, when King
+Nebuchadnezzar wrested Phoenicia from Egypt, and, too, of all manner
+of precious stones sent by Queen Atossa, wife of Darius, when the
+Crotoniat Democedes, with two triremes and a trading vessel, visited
+Yaque before they went to survey Hellenic shores, with what
+disastrous result. And Olivia, standing in the queen's gown,
+listened without hearing one word, and turned to have her veil
+lifted by Antoinette and the daughter of a peer of Yaque; and she
+knelt before the people while the lord chief-chancellor set the
+crown on her bright hair. It was a picture that thrilled the lord
+chief-chancellor himself--who was a worshiper of beauty, and a man
+given to angling in the lagoon and making metric translations of the
+inscriptions.
+
+Then it was in the room as if a faint flame had been breathed upon
+and had upleaped in a thousand ways of expectancy, and as if a
+secret sign had been set in the lift and dip of the music--the music
+that was so like the great chamber with its lift and dip of carven
+line. The thrill with which one knows the glad news of an unopened
+letter was upon them all, and they heard that swift breath of an
+event that stirs before its coming. When Olivia's women fell back
+from the dais with wonder and murmur, the murmur was caught up in
+the great hall, and ran from tier to tier as amazement, as
+incredulity, and as thanksgiving.
+
+For there, beside the beetling throne, was standing a man, slenderly
+built, with a youthful, sensitive face and critically-drooping lids,
+and upon them all his eyes were turned in faint amusement warmed by
+an idle approbation.
+
+"Perfect--perfect. Quite perfect," he was saying below his breath.
+
+Olivia turned. The next moment she stood with outstretched arms
+before her father; and King Otho, in his long, straight robe,
+encrusted with purple amethysts, bent with exquisite courtesy above
+his daughter's hands.
+
+"My dear child," he murmured, "the picture that you make entirely
+justifies my existence, but hardly my absence. Shall we ask his
+Highness to do that?"
+
+It mattered little who was to do that so long as it was done. For to
+that people, steeped in dream, risen from the crudity of mere events
+to breathe in the rarer atmosphere of their significance, here was a
+happening worthy their attention, for it had the dignity of mystery.
+Even Mrs. Medora Hastings, billowing toward the throne with cries,
+was less poignantly a challenge to be heard. Upon her the king laid
+a tranquillizing hand and, with a droop of eyelids in recognition of
+Mr. Frothingham, he murmured: "Ah, Medora--Medora! Delight in the
+moment--but do not embrace it," while beside him, star-eyed, Olivia
+stood waiting for Prince Tabnit to speak.
+
+To Olivia, trembling a little as she leaned upon his arm, King Otho
+bent with some word, at which she raised to his her startled face,
+and turned from him uncertainly, and burned a heavenly colour from
+brow to chin. Then, her father's words being insistent in her ear,
+and her own heart being tumultuous with what he had told her, she
+turned as he bade her, and, following his glance, slipped beneath a
+shining curtain that cut from the audience chamber the still
+seclusion of the King's Alcove, a chamber long sacred to the
+sovereigns of Yaque.
+
+Confused with her wonder and questioning, hardly daring to
+understand the import of her father's words, Olivia went down a
+passage set between two high white walls of the palace, open
+to-day to the upper blue and to the floating pennons of the dome.
+Here, prickly-leaved plants had shot to the cornices with
+uncouth contorting of angled boughs, and in their inner green
+ruffle-feathered birds looked down on her with the uncanny
+interest of myriapods. She caught about her the lace of her skirts
+and of her floating veil, and the way echoed musically to the
+touch of her little sandals and was bright with the shining of her
+diadem. And at the end of the passage she lifted a swaying curtain
+of soft dyes and entered the King's Alcove.
+
+The King's Alcove laid upon one the delicate demands of calm open
+water--for its floor of white transparent tiles was cunningly traced
+with the reflected course of the carven roof, and one seemed to look
+into mirrored depths of disappearing line between spaces shaped like
+petals and like chevrons. In the King's Alcove one stood in a world
+of white and one's sight was exquisitely won, now by a niche open to
+a blue well of sea and space, now by silver plants lucent in high
+casements. And there one was spellbound with this mirroring of the
+Near which thus became the Remote, until one questioned gravely
+which was "there" and which was "here," for the real was extended
+into vision, and vision was quickened to the real, and nothing lay
+between. But to Olivia, entering, none of these things was clearly
+evident, for as the curtain of many dyes fell behind her she was
+aware of two figures--but the one, with a murmured word which she
+managed somehow to answer without an idea what she said or what it
+had said either, vanished down the way that she had come. And she
+stood there face to face with St. George.
+
+He had risen from a low divan before a small table set with figs and
+bread and a decanter of what would have been bordeaux if it had not
+been distilled from the vineyards of Yaque. He was very pale and
+haggard, and his eyes were darkly circled and still fever-bright.
+But he came toward her as if he had quite forgotten that this is a
+world of danger and that she was a princess and that, little more
+than a week ago, her name was to him the unknown music. He came
+toward her with a face of unutterable gladness, and he caught and
+crushed her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he could
+look to the distant soul of her. He led her to a great chair hewn
+from quarries of things silver and unremembered, and he sat at her
+feet upon a bench that might have been a stone of the altar of some
+forgotten deity of dreams, at last worshiped as it should long have
+been worshiped by all the host that had passed it by. He looked up
+in her face, and the room was like a place of open water where
+heaven is mirrored in earth, and earth reflects and answers heaven.
+
+St. George laughed a little for sheer, inextinguishable happiness.
+
+"Once," he said, "once I breakfasted with you, on tea and--if I
+remember correctly--gold and silver muffins. Won't you breakfast
+with me now?"
+
+Olivia looked down at him, her heart still clamourous with its
+anxiety of the night and of the morning.
+
+"Tell me where you can have been," she said only; "didn't you know
+how distressed we would be? We imagined everything--in this dreadful
+place. And we feared everything, and we--" but yet the "we" did not
+deceive St. George; how could it with her eyes, for all their
+avoidings, so divinely upon him?
+
+"Did you," he said, "ah--did you wonder? I wish I knew!"
+
+"And my father--where did you find him?" she besought. "It was you?
+You found him, did you not?"
+
+St. George looked down at a fold of her gown that was fallen across
+his knee. How on earth was he ever to move, he wondered vaguely, if
+the slightest motion meant the withdrawing of that fold. He looked
+at her hand, resting so near, so near, upon the arm of the chair;
+and last he looked again into her face; and it seemed wonderful and
+before all things wonderful, not that she should be here, jeweled
+and crowned, but that he should so unbelievably be here with her.
+And yet it might be but a moment, as time is measured, until this
+moment would be swept away. His eyes met hers and held them.
+
+"Would you mind," he said, "now--just for a little, while we wait
+here--not asking me that? Not asking me anything? There will be time
+enough in there--when _they_ ask me. Just for now I only want to
+think how wonderful this is."
+
+She said: "Yes, it is wonderful--unbelievable," but he thought that
+she might have meant the white room or her queen's robe or any one
+of all the things which he did not mean.
+
+"_Is_ it wonderful to you?" he asked, and he said again: "I wish--I
+wish I knew!"
+
+He looked at her, sitting in the moon of her laces and the stars of
+her gems, and the sense of the immeasurableness of the hour came
+upon him as it comes to few; the knowledge that the evanescent
+moment is very potent, the world where the siren light of the Remote
+may at any moment lie quenched in some ashen present. To him, held
+momentarily in this place that was like shoreless, open water, the
+present was inestimably precious and it lay upon St. George like the
+delicate claim of his love itself. What the next hour held for them
+neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him
+crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand
+lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her
+fingers to his lips.
+
+"Olivia--dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do--what
+will happen--oh, may I tell you _now_?"
+
+There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not
+withdrawn from his. And so he did tell her, told her all his heart
+as he had known his heart to be that last night on _The Aloha_, and
+in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those
+hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the
+vigil that followed, and always--always, ever since he could
+remember, only that he hadn't known that he was waiting for her, and
+now he knew--now he knew.
+
+"Must you not have known, up there in the palace," he besought her,
+"the night that I got there? And yesterday, all day yesterday, you
+must have known--didn't you know? I love you, Olivia. I couldn't
+have told you, I couldn't have let you know, only now, when we can't
+know what may come or what they may do--oh, say you forgive me.
+Because I love you--I love you."
+
+She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold
+of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the
+strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at
+him in almost unearthly beauty. He stood before her, waiting for the
+moment when she should lift her eyes. And the eyes were lifted, and
+he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the
+coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque.
+He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine
+moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that
+world that was like the shoreless open sea where earth reflects
+heaven, and heaven comes down.
+
+They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St. George half knelt
+beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and
+there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear.
+And because this fragment of the past since they had met was
+incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before
+them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that
+future, clinging to each other's hands. The little chamber of
+translucent white, where one looked down to a mirrored dome and up
+to a kind of sky, became to them a place bounded by the touch and
+the look and the voice of each other, as every place in the world is
+bounded for every heart that beats.
+
+"Sweetheart," said St. George presently, "do you remember that you
+are a princess, and I'm merely a kind of man?"
+
+Was it not curious, he thought, that his lips did not speak a new
+language of their own accord?
+
+"I know," corrected Olivia adorably, "that I'm a kind of princess.
+But what use is that when it only makes trouble for us?"
+
+"Us"--"makes trouble for us." St. George wondered how he could ever
+have thought that he even guessed what happiness might be when
+"trouble for us" was like this. He tried to say so, and then:
+
+"But do you know what you are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you
+see--dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world
+that you can never, never get back?"
+
+Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It
+seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his
+forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it
+back. To prove that _that_ was not incredible, St. George turned
+until his lips brushed her wrist.
+
+"Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very
+possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the
+rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming
+they will sometime know?"
+
+Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.
+
+"I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of
+that."
+
+"You'll never be sorry--never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely
+denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.
+
+"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
+
+That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he
+whimsically remembered something else:
+
+"You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is
+another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a
+queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And
+in New York--in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."
+
+"No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I _insist_ upon a
+flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the
+altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour
+dissolving to mirrored point and light--the mystic union of sight
+with dream--and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine
+resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different--a flat," she said
+shyly.
+
+Wouldn't it--wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?
+
+"Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.
+
+"But it will be different, just different enough to like better,"
+she admitted then. "You know that I think so," she said.
+
+"If only you knew how much I think so," he told her, "how I have
+thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris.
+Olivia, dear heart--when did you think so first--"
+
+She shook her head and laid her hands upon his and drew them to her
+face.
+
+"Now, now--now!" she cried, "and there never was any time but now."
+
+"But there will be--there will be," he said, his lips upon her hair.
+
+After a time--for Time, that seems to have no boundaries in the
+abstract, is a very fiend for bounding the divine concrete--after a
+time Amory spoke hesitatingly on the other side of the curtain of
+many dyes.
+
+"St. George," he said, "I'm afraid they want you. Mr. Holland--the
+king, he's got through playing them. He wants you to get up and give
+'em the truth, I think."
+
+"Come in--come in, Amory," St. George said and lifted the curtain,
+and "I beg your pardon," he added, as his eyes fell upon Antoinette
+in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated. She had followed
+Olivia from the hall, and had met Amory midway the avenue of prickly
+trees, and they had helpfully been keeping guard. Now they went on
+before to the Hall of Kings, and St. George, remembering what must
+happen there, turned to Olivia for one crowning moment.
+
+"You know," she said fearfully, "before father came the prince
+intended the most terrible things--to set you and Mr. Amory adrift
+in a rudderless airship--"
+
+St. George laughed in amusement. The poor prince with his impossible
+devices, thinking to harm him, St. George--_now_.
+
+"He meant to marry you, he thought," he said, "but, thank Heaven, he
+has your father to answer to--and me!" he ended jubilantly.
+
+And yet, after all, Heaven knew what possibilities hemmed them
+round. And Heaven knew what she was going to think of him when she
+heard his story. He turned and caught her to him, for the crowning
+moment.
+
+"You love me--you love me," he said, "no matter what happens or what
+they say--no matter what?"
+
+She met his eyes and, of her own will, she drew his face down to
+hers.
+
+"No matter what," she answered. So they went together toward the
+chamber which they had both forgotten.
+
+When they reached the Hall of Kings they heard King Otho's
+voice--suave, mellow, of perfect enunciation:
+
+"--some one," the king was concluding, "who can tell this
+considerably better than I. And it seems to me singularly fitting
+that the recognition of the part eternally played by the 'possible'
+be temporarily deferred while we listen to--I dislike to use the
+word, but shall I say--the facts."
+
+It seemed to St. George when he stood beside the dais, facing that
+strange, eager multitude with his strange unbelievable story upon
+his lips--the story of the finding of the king--as if his own voice
+were suddenly a part of all the gigantic incredibility. Yet the
+divinely real and the fantastic had been of late so fused in his
+consciousness that he had come to look upon both as the
+normal--which is perhaps the only sane view. But how could he tell
+to others the monstrous story of last night, and hope to be
+believed?
+
+None the less, as simply as if he had been narrating to
+Chillingworth the high moment of a political convention, St. George
+told the people of Yaque what had happened in that night in the room
+of the tombs with that mad old Malakh whom they all remembered. It
+came to him as he spoke that it was quite like telling to a field of
+flowers the real truth about the wind of which they might be
+supposed to know far more than he; and yet, if any one were to tell
+the truth about the wind who would know how to listen? He was not
+amazed that, when he had done, the people of Yaque sat in a profound
+silence which might have been the silence of innocent amazement or
+of utter incredulity.
+
+But there was no mistaking the face of Prince Tabnit. Its cool
+tolerant amusement suddenly sent the blood pricking to St. George's
+heart and filled him with a kind of madness. What he did was the
+last thing that he had intended. He turned upon the prince, and his
+voice went cutting to the farthest corner of the hall:
+
+"Men and women of Yaque," he cried, "I accuse your prince of the
+knowledge that can take from and add to the years of man at will. I
+accuse him of the deliberate and criminal use of that knowledge to
+take King Otho from his throne!"
+
+St. George hardly knew what effect his words had. He saw only
+Olivia, her hands locked, her lips parted, looking in his face in
+anguish; and he saw Prince Tabnit smile. Prince Tabnit sat upon the
+king's left hand, and he leaned and whispered a smiling word in the
+ear of his sovereign and turned a smiling face to Olivia upon her
+father's right.
+
+"I know something of your American newspapers, your Majesty," the
+prince said aloud, "and these men are doing their part excellently,
+excellently."
+
+"What do you mean, your Highness?" demanded St. George curtly.
+
+"But is it not simple?" asked the prince, still smiling. "You have
+contrived a sensation for the great American newspaper. No one can
+doubt."
+
+King Otho leaned back in the beetling throne.
+
+"Ah, yes," he said, "it is true. Something has been contrived.
+But--is the sensation of _his_ contriving, Prince?"
+
+Olivia stood silent. It was not possible, it was not possible, she
+said over mechanically. For St. George to have come with this story
+of a potion--a drug that had restored youth to her father, had
+transformed him from that mad old Malakh--
+
+"Father!" she cried appealingly, "don't you remember--don't you
+know?"
+
+King Otho, watching the prince, shook his head, smiling.
+
+"At dawn," he said, "there are few of us to be found remaining still
+at table with Socrates. I seem not to have been of that number."
+
+"Olivia!" cried St. George suddenly.
+
+She met his eyes for a moment, the eyes that had read her own, that
+had given message for message, that had seen with her the glory of a
+mystic morning willingly relinquished for a diviner dawn. Was she
+not princess here in Yaque? She laid her hand upon her father's
+hand; the crown that they had given her glittered as she turned
+toward the multitude.
+
+"My people," she said ringingly, "I believe that that man speaks the
+truth. Shall the prince not answer to this charge before the High
+Council now--here--before you all?"
+
+At this King Otho did something nearly perceptible with his
+eyebrows. "Perfect. Perfect. Quite perfect," he said below his
+breath. The next instant the eyelids of the sovereign drooped
+considerably less than one would have supposed possible. For from
+every part of the great chamber, as if a storm long-pent had forced
+the walls of the wind, there came in a thousand murmurs--soft,
+tremulous, definitive--the answering voice to Olivia's question:
+
+"Yes. Yes. Yes..."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
+
+
+In Prince Tabnit's face there was a curious change, as if one were
+suddenly to see hieroglyphics upon a star where before there had
+been only shining. But his calm and his magnificent way of authority
+did not desert him, as so grotesque a star would still stand lonely
+and high in the heavens. He spoke, and upon the multitude fell
+instant silence, not the less absolute that it harboured foreboding.
+
+"Whatever the people would say to me," said the prince simply, "I
+will hear. My right hand rests in the hand of the people. In return
+I decree allegiance to the law. Your princess stands before you,
+crowned. This most fortunate return of his Majesty, the King, can
+not set at naught the sacred oath which has just left her lips.
+Henceforth, in council and in audience, her place shall be at his
+Majesty's right hand, as was the place of that Princess Athalme,
+daughter of King Kab, in the dynasty of the fall of Rome. Is it not,
+therefore, but the more incumbent upon your princess to own her
+allegiance to the law of the island by keeping her troth with
+me--that troth witnessed and sanctioned by you yourselves? This
+ceremony concluded I will answer the demands of the loyal subjects
+whose interests alone I serve. For we obey that which is higher than
+authority--the law, born in the Beginning--"
+
+Prince Tabnit's voice might almost have taken his place in his
+absence, it was so soft, so fine of texture, no more consciously
+modulated than is the going of water or the way of a wing. It was
+difficult to say whether his words or, so to say, their fine fabric
+of voice, begot the silence that followed. But all eyes were turned
+upon Olivia. And, Prince Tabnit noting this, before she might speak
+he suddenly swept his flowing robes embroidered by a thousand
+needles to a posture of humility before his sovereign.
+
+"Your Majesty," he besought, "I pray your consent to the bestowal
+upon my most unworthy self of the hand of your daughter, the
+Princess Olivia."
+
+King Otho leaned upon the arm of his carven throne. Against its
+strange metal his hand was cameo-clear.
+
+"For the king," he was remembering softly, "'the Pyrenees, or so he
+fancied, ceased to exist.' For another 'the mountains of Daphne are
+everywhere.' Each of us has his impossible dream to prove that he
+is an impossible creature. Why not I? To be normal is the cry of all
+the hobgoblins ... And what does the princess say?" he asked aloud.
+
+"Her Highness has already given me the great happiness to plight me
+her troth," said Prince Tabnit.
+
+King Otho's eyebrows flickered from their parallel of repose.
+
+"In Yaque or in America," he murmured, "the Americans do as the
+Americans do. None of us is mentioned in Deuteronomy, but what is
+the will of the princess?" the American Sovereign asked.
+
+Mrs. Hastings, seated near the dais, heard; and as she turned, a
+rhinestone side-comb slipped from her hair, tinkled over the jewels
+of her corsage and shot into the lap of a member of the High
+Council. He, never having seen a side-comb, fancied that it might be
+an infernal machine which he had never seen either, and,
+palpitating, flashed it to the guardian hand of Mr. Frothingham. At
+the same moment:
+
+"Ah, why, Otho," said Mrs. Hastings audibly, "we had two ancestors
+at Bannockburn!"
+
+"Bannockburn!" argued Mr. Augustus Frothingham, below the voice,
+"Bannockburn. But what, my dear Mrs. Hastings, is Bannockburn beside
+the Midianites and the Moabites and the Hittites and the Ammonites
+and the Levites?"
+
+In this genealogical moment the prince leaned toward Olivia.
+
+"Choose," he said significantly, but so softly that none might hear,
+"oh, my beloved, choose!"
+
+The faces of the great assembly blurred and wavered before Olivia,
+and the low hum of the talk in the room was relative, like the
+voices of passers-by. She looked up at the prince and away from him
+in mute appeal to something that ought to help her and would not.
+For Olivia was of those who, never having seen the face of Destiny
+very near, are accustomed to look upon nothing as wholly
+irrevocable; and--for one of her graces--she had the feminine
+expectation that, if only events can be sufficiently postponed,
+something will intervene; which is perhaps a heritage of the
+gentlest women descended from Homeric days. If the island was so
+historic, little Olivia may have said, where was the interfering
+goddess? She looked unseeingly toward St. George and toward her
+father, and the sense of the bitter actuality of the choice suddenly
+wounded her, as the Actual for ever wounds the woman and the dream.
+
+Then suddenly, above the stir of expectation of the people, and the
+associate bustling of the High Council there came a vague confusion
+and trampling from outside, and the far outer doors of the hall were
+thrown open with a jar and a breath, vibrant as a murmur. There was
+a cry, the determined resistance of some of the Golden Guard, and
+shouts of expostulation and warning as they were flung aside by a
+powerful arm. In the disorder that followed, a miraculously-familiar
+figure--that familiarity and strangeness are both miracles ought to
+explain certain mysteries--was beside St. George and a thankful
+voice said in his ear:
+
+"Mr. St. George, sir, for the mercy of Heaven, sir--come back to the
+yacht. No person can tell what may happen ten minutes ahead, sir!"
+
+The oracle of this universal truth was Rollo, palpitating, his
+immaculate coat stained with earth, earth-stains on his cheeks, and
+his breast labouring in an excitement which only anxiety for his
+master could effect. But St. George hardly saw him. His eyes were
+fixed on some one who stood towering before the dais, like the old
+prints of the avenging goddesses. Clad in the hideous stripes which
+boards of directors consider _de rigueur_ for the soul that is to be
+won back to the normal, stood the woman Elissa, who, by all counts
+of Prince Tabnit, should have been singing a hymn with Mrs. Manners
+and Miss Bella Bliss Utter in the Bitley Reformatory, in Westchester
+County, New York.
+
+"Stop!" she cried in that perfect English which is not only a rare
+experience but a pleasant adventure, "what new horror is this?"
+
+To Prince Tabnit's face, as he looked at her, came once more that
+indefinable change--only this time nearer and more intimately
+explainable, as if something ethereal, trained to delicate lines,
+like smoke, should suddenly shape itself to a menace. St. George saw
+the woman step close to the dais, he saw Olivia's eyes questioning
+him, and in the hurried rising of the peers and of the High Council
+he heard Rollo's voice in his ear:
+
+"It's a gr'it go, sir," observed Rollo respectfully, "the woman has
+things to tell, sir, as people generally don't know. She's flew the
+coop at the place she was in--it seems she's been shut up some'eres
+in America, sir; an' she got 'old of the capting of a tramp boat o'
+some kind--one o' them boats as smells intoxicating round the
+'atches--an' she give 'im an' the mate a 'andful o' jewelry that
+she'd on 'er when she was took in an' 'ad someways contrived to 'ang
+on to, an' I'm blessed hif she wasn't able fer to steer fer the
+island, sir--we took 'er aboard the yacht only this mornin' with 'er
+'air down her back, an' we've brought 'er on here. An' she says--men
+can be gr'it beasts, sir, an' no manner o' mistake," concluded Rollo
+fervently.
+
+And a little hoarse voice said in St. George's ear:
+
+"Mr. St. George, sir--we ain't late, are we? We been flirtin' de
+ger-avel up dat ka-liff since de car-rack o' day."
+
+And there was Bennietod, with an edge of an old horse pistol
+showing beneath his cuff; and, round-eyed and alert as a bird newly
+alighted on a stranger sill, Little Cawthorne stood; and the sight
+put strength into St. George, and so did Little Cawthorne's words:
+
+"I didn't know whether they'd let us in or not," he said, "unless we
+had on a plaited décolletté, with biases down the back."
+
+Clearly and confidently in the silent room rang the voice of the
+woman confronting Prince Tabnit, and her eyes did not leave his
+face. St. George was struck with the change in her since that day in
+the Reformatory chapel. Then she had been like a wild, alien thing
+in dumb distress; now she was unchained and native. Her first words
+explained why, in the extreme dilemma in which St. George had last
+seen her, she had yet remained mute.
+
+"I release myself," she cried, "from my oath of silence, though
+until to-day I have spoken only to those who helped me to come back
+to you--my master. Have you nothing to say to me? Has the time
+seemed long? Is it a weary while since I left you to do your will
+and murder the woman whom you were now about to make your wife?"
+
+A cry of horror rose from the people, and then stillness came again.
+
+"Take the woman away," said Prince Tabnit only, "she is speaking
+madness."
+
+"I am speaking the truth," said the woman clearly. "I was of
+Melita--there are those here who will know my face. And it is not I
+alone who have served the State. I challenge you, Tabnit--here,
+before them all! Where are Gerya and Ibera, Cabulla and Taura? Have
+not their people, weeping, besought news of them in vain? And what
+answer have you given them?"
+
+Murmurs and sobs rose from the assembly, stilled by the tranquil
+voice of the prince.
+
+"Where are they?" he repeated gently, his voice vibrant in its rise
+and fall, its giving of delicate values. "But the people know where
+they are. They have attained to the perfect life and died the
+perfect death. For I have raised them to the supreme estate."
+
+Prince Tabnit, with uplifted face, sat motionless, looking out over
+the throng from beneath lowered lids; then his eyes, confident and a
+little mocking, returned to the woman. But they had for her no
+terror. She turned from him, confronting the pale, eager faces of
+the people; and in her beauty and distinction she was like Olivia's
+women, crowded beside the dais.
+
+"Men and women of Yaque," cried Elissa, "I will tell you to what
+'supreme estate' these friends whom you seek have long been raised.
+For here in Med and in Melita you will find many of those whom you
+have mourned as dead--you will find them as you yourselves have met
+and passed them, it may have been countless times, on your streets
+of Yaque--not young and beautiful as when they left you, but men and
+women of incredible age. Withered, shaken by palsy, infirm, they
+creep upon their lonely ways or go at will to drag themselves
+unrecognized along your highways, as helpless as the dead
+themselves. They number scores, and they are those who have
+displeased your prince by some little word, some little wrong, or,
+more than these, by some thwarting of the way of his ambition: Oblo,
+who disappeared from his place as keeper at the door; Ithobal,
+satrap of Melita; young Prince Kaal--ay, and how many more? You do
+not understand my words? I say that your prince has knowledge of
+some secret, accursed drug that can call back youth or make actual
+age--_age_, do you understand--just as we of Yaque bring both
+flowers and fruit to swift maturity!"
+
+Olivia uttered a little cry, not at the grotesque horror of what the
+woman had said but at the miracle of its unconscious support of the
+story and theory of St. George. And St. George heard; and suddenly,
+because another had voiced his own fantastic message, its
+incredibility and unreality became appalling, and yet he felt
+infinitely reconciled to both because he interpreted aright that
+little muffled exclamation from Olivia. What did it matter--oh, what
+did it matter whether or not the reality were grotesque? What seems
+to be happening is always the reality, if only one understands it
+sufficiently. And at all events there had been that hour in the
+King's Alcove. At last, as he weighed that hour against the fantasy
+of all the rest, St. George understood and lived the divine madness
+of all great moments, the madness that realizes one star and is
+content that all the heavens shall march unintelligibly past so long
+as that single shining is not dimmed.
+
+But King Otho was riding no such griffin with sun-gold wings. King
+Otho was genuinely and personally interested in the woman's words.
+He turned to Prince Tabnit with animation.
+
+"Really, Prince," he said, "is it so? Pray do not deny it unless
+there is no other way, for I am before all things interested. It is
+far more important to me that you tell me as much as you can tell,
+than that you deny or even disprove it."
+
+Prince Tabnit smiled in the eagerly interested face of his
+sovereign, and rose and came to the edge of the dais, his garments
+embroidered by a thousand needles touching and floating about him;
+and it was as if he reached those before him by a kind of spiritual
+magnetism, not without sublimity.
+
+"My people," he said--and his voice had all the tenderness that they
+knew so well--"this is some conspiracy of those to whom we have
+shown the utmost hospitality. I would have shielded your king, for
+he was also my sovereign and I owed him allegiance. But now that is
+no longer possible, and the time is come. Know then, oh my people of
+Yaque, that which my loyalty has led me wrongfully to conceal: that
+in the strange disappearance and return of your sovereign, King
+Otho, he who will may trace the loss of that which the island has
+mourned without ceasing. I accuse your king--he is no longer
+mine--of being now in possession of the Hereditary Treasure of
+Yaque."
+
+Then St. George came back with a thrill to actuality. In the press
+of the events of this morning, after his awakening in the room of
+the tombs, he had completely forgotten the soft fire of gems that
+had burned beneath the hands of old Malakh in that dark chamber
+under King Abibaal's tomb. He and Amory and Jarvo had, with the
+king, left the chamber by the upper passages, and Amory and Jarvo
+knew nothing of the jewels. Yet St. George was certain that he could
+not have been mistaken, and he listened breathlessly for what the
+king would say.
+
+King Otho, with a smile, nodded in perfect imperturbability.
+
+"That is true," he said, "I had forgotten all about it."
+
+They waited for him to speak, the people in amazed silence, Mrs.
+Medora Hastings saying unintelligible things in whispers, for which
+she had a genius.
+
+"It is true," said King Otho, "that I am responsible for the
+disappearance of the Hereditary Treasure. You will find it at this
+moment in a basement dungeon of the palace on Mount Khalak. On the
+very day, three months ago, that I dined with your prince I had made
+a discovery of considerable importance to me, namely, that the
+little island of Yaque is richer in most of the radio-active
+substances than all the rest of the world. The discovery gave me
+keener pleasure than I had known in years--I had suspected it for
+some time after I found the noctilucous stars on the ceiling of my
+sitting-room at the palace. And in the work-shop of the Princess
+Simyra I came upon a quantity of metallic uranium, and a great many
+other things which I question the taste of taking the time to
+describe. But my experiments there with the very perfect gems of
+your admirable collection had evidently been antedated by some of
+your own people, for the apparatus was intact. I shall be glad to
+show some charming effects to any one who cares to see them. I have
+succeeded in causing the diamonds of Darius to phosphoresce most
+wonderfully."
+
+The phosphorescence of the diamonds of Darius was to the people far
+less important than the joyous fact which they were not slow to
+grasp, that the Hereditary Treasure was, if they might believe the
+king's words, restored to them, and the burden of the tax averted.
+They did not understand, nor did they seek to understand; because
+they knew the inefficiency of details and they also knew the value
+of mere import.
+
+But the king, child of a social order that wreaks itself on
+particularizations, returned to his quest for a certain recounting.
+
+"Prince Tabnit," he said, "the High Council and the people of Yaque
+are impatient for your answer to this woman's words."
+
+"I rejoice with them and with your Majesty," replied Prince Tabnit
+softly, "that the treasure is safe. My own explanation is far less
+simple. If what this woman says is true, yet it is true in such wise
+as, strive as I may, I can not speak; nor, strive as you may, can
+you fathom. Therefore I say that the claim which she has made is
+idle, and not within my power to answer."
+
+At this St. George bounded to his feet. Amory looked up at him in
+terror, and Little Cawthorne and Bennietod went a step or two after
+him as he sprang forward, and Rollo's lean shadowed face, obvious as
+his way of speech, was wrinkled in terrified appeal.
+
+"An idle claim!" St. George thundered as he strode before the dais.
+"Is this woman's story and mine an idle claim, and one not within
+your power to answer? Then I will tell you how to answer, Prince
+Tabnit. I challenge you now, in the presence of your people--taste
+this!"
+
+Upon the carven arm of Prince Tabnit's throne St. George set
+something that he had taken from his pocket. It was the vase of
+rock-crystal from which, the night before in the room of the tombs,
+the king had drunk.
+
+What followed was the last thing that St. George had expected. It
+was as if his defiance had unlocked flood-gates. In an instant the
+vast assembly was in motion. With a sound of garments that was like
+far wind they were upon their feet and pressing toward the throne.
+With all the passion of their "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in response to
+Olivia's appeal they came, resistlessly demanding the answer to some
+dreadful question long shrouded in their hearts. Their armour was
+their silence; they made no sound save that ominous sweep of their
+robes and the conspiracy of their sandaled feet upon the tiles.
+
+St. George did not turn. Indeed, it did not once cross his mind that
+their hostility could possibly be toward him. Besides, his look was
+fixed upon the prince's face, and what he read there was enough. The
+peers, the High Council and those nearest the throne wavered and
+swerved from the man, leaving him to face what was to come.
+
+Whatever was to come he would have met nobly. He was of those
+infrequent folk of some upper air who exhibit a certain purity even
+in error, or in worse. He stood with his exquisite pale face
+uplifted, his white hair in a glory about it, his white gown
+embroidered by a thousand needles falling in virginal lines against
+the warm, pure colour of that room with its wraiths of hue and
+light. And he opened the heart of the green jewel that burned upon
+his breast.
+
+"Not for me the wine of youth," he said slowly, "but the poison of
+age. The poison which, without me to unlock the secret, all mankind
+must drink alone. May you drink it late, my friends!" he cried. "I,
+who hold in my soul the secret of the passing of time and youth,
+drink now to those among you and among all men who have won and kept
+the one thing dearer than these."
+
+He touched the green gem to his lips, and let it fall upon the
+embroidered laces on his breast. Then quietly and in another voice
+he began to speak.
+
+With the first words there came to St. George the thrill of
+something that had possessed him--when? In that ecstatic moment on
+_The Aloha_ when he had seen the light in the king's palace; in the
+instant when the Isle of Yaque had first lain subject before him, "a
+land which no one can define or remember--only desire;" in the
+divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the
+palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour
+of his joy in the King's Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes
+and touched his lips. Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies
+barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own--a shell, a duty, a
+vista--he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying. He
+listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched
+hands with the elemental and saw the ancient kindliness of all those
+people naked in their faces and knew himself for what he was.
+
+He listened, and yet there was no making captive the words of the
+prince in understanding. Prince Tabnit was speaking the English, and
+every word was clearly audible and, moreover, was probably daily
+upon St. George's lips. But if it had been to ransom the rest of the
+world from its night he could not have understood what the prince
+was saying. Every word was a word that belonged as much to St.
+George as to the prince; but in some unfathomable fashion the inner
+sense of what he said for ever eluded, dissolving in the air of
+which it was a part. And yet, past all doubting, St. George knew
+that he was hearing the essence of that strange knowledge which the
+Isle of Yaque had won while all the rest of mankind struggled for
+it--he knew with the certainty with which we recognize strange
+forces in a dozen of the every-day things of life, in electricity,
+in telepathy, in dreams. With the same certainty he realized that
+what the prince was saying would, if he could understand, lift a
+certain veil. Here, put in words at last, was manifestly the secret,
+that catch of understanding without which men are groping in the
+dark, perhaps that mere pointing of relations which would make
+clear, without blasphemy, time and the future, rebirth and old
+existence, it might be; and certainly the accident of personality.
+Here, crystallized, were the things that men almost know, the dream
+that has just escaped every one, the whisper in sleep that would
+have explained if one could remember when one woke, the word that
+has been thrillingly flashed to one in moments of absorption and has
+fled before one might catch the sound, the far hope of science, the
+glimpse that comes to dying eyes and is voiced in fragments by dying
+lips. Here without penetrating the great reserve or tracing any
+principle to its beginning, was the truth about both. And St. George
+was powerless to receive it.
+
+He turned fearfully to Olivia. Ah--what if she did not guess
+anything of the meaning of what she was hearing? For one instant he
+knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star. But
+when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and
+her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she
+might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near,
+how near they Stood; and to be with her on this side was
+dearer--nay, was nearer the Secret--than without her to pass the
+veil that they touched. Then he looked at Amory; wouldn't old Amory
+know, he wondered. Wouldn't his mere understanding of news teach him
+what was happening? But old Amory, the light flashing on his
+pince-nez, was keeping one eye on the prince and wondering if the
+chair that he had just placed for Antoinette was not in the draught
+of the dome; and little Antoinette was looking about her like a
+rosebud, new to the butterflies of June; and King Otho was
+listening, languid, heavy-lidded, sensitive to little values,
+sophisticating the moment; and Little Cawthorne stood with eyes
+raised in simple, tolerant wonder; and the others, Bennietod, Mrs.
+Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, showed faces like the pools
+in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples--one must
+suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly such
+faces. St. George saw how it was. Here, spoken casually by the
+prince, just as the Banal would speak of the visible and invisible
+worlds, here was the Sesame of understanding toward which the
+centuries had striven, the secret of the link between two worlds;
+and here, of all mankind, were only they two to hear--they two and
+that motionless company who knew what the prince knew and who kept
+it sealed within their eyes.
+
+St. George looked at the multitude in swift understanding. They
+were like a Greek chorus, signifying what is. They knew what the
+prince was saying, they had the secret and yet--they were _no
+nearer, no nearer_ than he. With their ancient kindliness naked in
+their faces, St. George knew that through his love he was as near to
+the Source as were they. And it was suddenly as it had been that
+first night when he had stridden buoyantly through the island; for
+he could not tell which was the secret of the prince and of these
+people and which was the blessedness of his love.
+
+None the less he clung desperately to the last words of Prince
+Tabnit in a vain effort to hold, to make clear, to sophisticate one
+single phrase, as one waking in the night says over, in a vain
+effort to fix it, some phantom sentence cried to him in dreams by a
+shadowy band destined to be dissolved when, in bright day, he would
+reclaim it. He even managed frantically to write down a jumble of
+words of which he could make nothing, save here and there a phrase
+like a touch of hands from the silence: "...the infinite moment that
+is pending" ... "all is become a window where had been a wall" ...
+"the wintry vision" ... they were all words that beckon without
+replying. And all the time it was curiously as if the Something
+Silent within St. George himself, that so long had striven to speak,
+were crying out at last in the prince's words--and he could not
+understand. Yet in spite of it all, in spite of this imminent
+satisfying of the strange, dreadful curiosity which possesses all
+mankind, St. George, even now, was far less keen to comprehend than
+he was to burst through the throng with Olivia in his arms, gain the
+waiting _Aloha_ and sail into the New York harbour with the prize
+that he had won. "I drink now to those among you and among all men
+who have won and kept that which is greater than these," the prince
+had said, and St. George perfectly understood. He had but to look at
+Olivia to be triumphantly willing that the gods should keep their
+secrets about time and the link between the two worlds so long as
+they had given him love. What should he care about time? He had this
+hour.
+
+When the prince ceased speaking the hall was hushed; but because of
+the tempest in the hearts of them all the silence was as if a strong
+wind, sweeping powerfully through a forest, were to sway no boughs
+and lift no leaves, only to strive noiselessly round one who walked
+there.
+
+Prince Tabnit wrapped his white mantle about him and sat upon his
+throne. Spell-stricken, they watched him, that great multitude, and
+might not turn away their eyes. Slowly, imperceptibly, as Time
+touches the familiar, the face of the prince took on its change--and
+one could not have told wherein the change lay, but subtly as the
+encroachment of the dark, or the alchemy of the leaves, or the
+betrayal of certain modes of death, the finger was upon him. While
+they watched he became an effigy, the hideous face of a fantasy of
+smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among
+the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death--the horror was
+that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying and withering
+at the bones.
+
+A long, whining cry came from Cassyrus, who covered his face with
+his mantle and fled. The spell being broken, by common consent the
+great hall was once more in motion--St. George would never forget
+that tide toward all the great portals and the shuddering backward
+glances at the white heap upon the beetling throne. They fled away
+into the reassuring sunlight, leaving the echoless hall deserted,
+save for that breathing one upon the throne.
+
+There was one other. From somewhere beside the dais the woman Elissa
+crept and knelt, clasping the knees of the man.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+OPEN SECRETS
+
+
+"Will you have tea?" asked Olivia.
+
+St. George brought a deck cushion and tucked it in the willow
+steamer chair and said adoringly that he would have tea. Tea. In a
+world where the essentials and the inessentials are so deliciously
+confused, to think that tea, with some one else, can be a kind of
+Heaven.
+
+"Two lumps?" pursued Olivia.
+
+"Three, please," St. George directed, for the pure joy of watching
+her hands. There were no tongs.
+
+"Aren't the rest going to have some?" Olivia absently shared her
+attention, tinkling delicately about among the tea things. "Doesn't
+every one want a cup of tea?" she inquired loud enough for nobody to
+hear. St. George, shifting his shoulder from the rail, looked
+vaguely over the deck of _The Aloha_, sighed contentedly, and smiled
+back at her. No one else, it appeared, would have tea; and there was
+none to regret it.
+
+St. George's cursory inspection had revealed the others variously
+absorbed, though they were now all agreed in breathing easily since
+Barnay, interlarding rational speech with Irishisms of thanksgiving,
+had announced five minutes before that the fires were up and that in
+half an hour _The Aloha_ might weigh anchor. The only thing now left
+to desire was to slip clear of the shadow of the black reaches of
+Yaque, shouldering the blue.
+
+Meanwhile, Antoinette and Amory sat in the comparative seclusion of
+the bow with their backs to the forward deck, and it was definitely
+manifest to every one how it would be with them, but every one was
+simply glad and dismissed the matter with that. Mr. Frothingham, in
+his steamer chair, looked like a soft collapsible tube of something;
+Bennietod, at ease upon the uncovered boards of the deck, was
+circumspectly having cheese sandwiches and wastefully shooting the
+ship's rockets into the red sunset, in general celebration; and
+Rollo, having taken occasion respectfully to submit to whomsoever it
+concerned that fact is ever stranger than fiction, had gone below.
+Mr. Otho Holland and Little Cawthorne--but their smiles were like
+different names for the same thing--were toasting each other in
+something light and dry and having a bouquet which Mr. Holland, who
+ought to know, compared favourably with certain vintages of 1000
+B.C. In a hammock near them reclined Mrs. Medora Hastings, holding
+two kinds of smelling salts which invariably revived her simply by
+inducing the mental effort of deciding which was the better. Her
+hair, which was exceedingly pretty, now rippled becomingly about her
+flushed face and was guiltless of side-combs--she had lost them both
+down a chasm in that headlong flight from the cliff's summit, and
+they irrecoverably reposed in the bed of some brook of the Miocene
+period. And Mrs. Hastings, her hand in that of her brother, lay in
+utter silence, smiling up at him in serene content.
+
+For King Otho of Yaque was turning his back upon his island domain
+for ever. In that hurried flight across the Eurychôrus among his
+distracted subjects, his resolution had been taken. Jarvo and Akko,
+the adieux to whom had been every one's sole regret in leaving the
+island, had miraculously found their way to the king and his party
+in their flight, and were despatched to Mount Khalak for such of
+their belongings as they could collect, and the island sovereign was
+well content.
+
+"Ah well now," he had just observed, languidly surveying the
+tropical horizon through a cool glass of winking amber bubbles, "one
+must learn that to touch is far more delicate than to lift. It is
+more wonderful to have been the king of one moment than the ruler of
+many. It is better to have stood for an instant upon a rainbow than
+to have taken a morning walk through a field of clouds. The
+principle has long been understood, but few have had--shall I
+say the courage?--to practise it. Yet 'courage' is a term
+from-the-shoulder, and what I require is a word of finger-tips,
+over-tones, ultra-rays--a word for the few who understand that to
+leave a thing is more exquisite than to outwear it. It is by its
+very fineness circumscribed--a feminine virtue. Women understand it
+and keep it secret. I flatter myself that I have possessed the high
+moment, vanished against the noon. Ah, my dear fellow--" he added,
+lifting his glass to St. George's smile.
+
+But little Cawthorne--all reality in his heliotrope outing and duck
+and grey curls--raised a characteristic plaint.
+
+"Oh, but I've done it," he mournfully reviewed. "When'll I ever be
+in another island, in front of another vacated throne? Why didn't I
+move into the palace, and set up a natty, up-to-date little
+republic? I could have worn a crown as a matter of taste--what's the
+use of a democracy if you aren't free to wear a crown? And what kind
+of American am I, anyway, with this undeveloped taste for acquiring
+islands? If they ever find this out at the polls my vote'll be
+challenged. What?"
+
+"Aw whee!" said Bennietod, intent upon a Roman candle, "wha' do you
+care, Mr. Cawt'orne? You don't hev to go back fer to be a
+child-slave to Chillingwort'. Me, I've gotta good call to jump
+overboard now an' be de sonny of a sea-horse, dead to rights!"
+
+St. George looked at them all affectionately, unconscious that
+already the experience of the last three days was slipping back into
+the sheathing past, like a blade used. But he was dawningly aware,
+as he sat there at Olivia's feet in glorious content, that he was
+looking at them all with new eyes. It was as if he had found new
+names for them all; and until long afterward one does not know that
+these moments of bestowing new names mark the near breathing of the
+god.
+
+The silence of Mrs. Hastings and her quiet devotion to her brother
+somehow gave St. George a new respect for her. Over by the
+wheel-house something made a strange noise of crying, and St. George
+saw that Mr. Frothingham sat holding a weird little animal, like a
+squirrel but for its stumpy tail and great human eyes, which he had
+unwittingly stepped on among the rocks. The little thing was licking
+his hand, and the old lawyer's face was softened and glowing as he
+nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. As he looked, St. George warmed
+to them all in new fellowship and, too, in swift self-reproach; for
+in what had seemed to him but "broad lines and comic masks" he
+suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts. The better
+and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his
+grasp were more important than Yaque itself. He remembered, with a
+thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must
+walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of
+the heart, before he can put much in or take much from the
+market-place. And lo! this fairy-land of his finding had
+proved--must it not always prove?--the essence of all Reality.
+
+His eyes went to Olivia's face in a flash of understanding and
+belief.
+
+"Don't you see?" he said, quite as if they two had been talking what
+he had thought.
+
+She waited, smiling a little, thrilled by his certainty of her
+sympathy.
+
+"None of this happened really," triumphantly explained St. George,
+"I met you at the Boris, did I not? Therefore, I think that since
+then you have graciously let me see you for the proper length of
+time, and at last we've fallen in love just as every one else does.
+And true lovers always do have trouble, do they not? So then, Yaque
+has been the usual trouble and happiness, and here we are--engaged."
+
+"I'm not engaged," Olivia protested serenely, "but I see what you
+mean. No, none of it happened," she gravely agreed. "It couldn't,
+you know. Anybody will tell you that."
+
+In her eyes was the sparkle of understanding which made St. George
+love her more every time that it appeared. He noted, the white cloth
+frock, and the coat of hunting pink thrown across her chair, and he
+remembered that in the infinitesimal time that he had waited for her
+outside the Palace of the Litany, she must have exchanged for these
+the coronation robe and jewels of Queen Mitygen. St. George liked
+that swift practicality in the race of faery, though he was
+completely indifferent to Mrs. Hastings' and Antoinette's claims to
+it; and he wondered if he were to love Olivia more for everything
+that she did, how he could possibly live long enough to tell her.
+When one has been to Yaque the simplest gifts and graces resolve
+themselves into this question.
+
+_The Aloha_ gently freed herself from the shallow green pocket where
+she had lain through three eventful days, and slipped out toward the
+waste of water bound by the flaunting autumn of the west. An island
+wind, fragrant of bark and secret berries, blew in puffs from the
+steep. A gull swooped to her nest in a cranny of the basalt. From
+below a servant came on deck, his broad American face smiling over a
+tray of glasses and decanters and tinkling ice. It was all very
+tranquil and public and almost commonplace--just the high tropic
+seas at the moment of their unrestrained sundown, and the odour of
+tea-cakes about the pleasantly-littered deck. And for the moment,
+held by a common thought, every one kept silent. Now that _The
+Aloha_ was really moving toward home, the affair seemed suddenly
+such a gigantic impossibility that every one resented every one
+else's knowing what a trick had been played. It was as if the
+curtain had just fallen and the lights of the auditorium had flashed
+up after the third act, and they had all caught one another
+breathless or in tears, pretending that the tragedy had really
+happened.
+
+"Promise me something," begged St. George softly, in sudden alarm,
+born of this inevitable aspect; "promise me that when we get to New
+York you are not going to forget all about Yaque--and me--and
+believe that none of us ever happened."
+
+Olivia looked toward the serene mystery of the distance.
+
+"New York," she said only, "think of seeing you in New York--now."
+
+"Was I of more account in Yaque?" demanded St. George anxiously.
+
+"Sometimes," said Olivia adorably, "I shall tell you that you were.
+But that will be only because I shall have an idea that in Yaque you
+loved me more."
+
+"Ah, very well then. And sometimes," said St. George contentedly,
+"when we are at dinner I shall look down the table at you sitting
+beside some one who is expounding some baneful literary theory, and
+I shall think: What do I care? He doesn't know that she is really
+the Princess of Far-Away. But I do."
+
+"And he won't know anything about our motor ride, alone, the night
+that I was kidnapped, either--the literary-theory person," Olivia
+tranquilly took away his breath by observing.
+
+St. George looked up at her quickly and, secretly, Olivia thought
+that if he had been attractive when he was courageous he was doubly
+so with the present adorably abashed look in his eyes.
+
+"When--alone?" St. George asked unconvincingly.
+
+She laughed a little, looking down at him in a reproof that was all
+approbation, and to be reproved like that is the divinest praise.
+
+"How did you know?" protested St. George in fine indignation.
+"Besides," he explained, "I haven't an idea what you mean."
+
+"I guessed about that ride," she went on, "the night before last,
+when you were walking up and down outside my window. I don't know
+what made me--and I think it was very forward of me. Do you want to
+know something?" she demanded, looking away.
+
+"More than anything," declared St. George. "What?"
+
+"I think--" Olivia said slowly, "that it began--then--just when I
+first thought how wonderful that ride would have been. Except--that
+it had begun a great while before," she ended suddenly.
+
+And at these enigmatic words St. George sent a quick look over the
+forward deck. It was of no use. Mr. Frothingham was well within
+range.
+
+"Heavens, good heavens, how happy I am," said St. George instead.
+
+"And then," Olivia went on presently, "sometimes when there are a
+lot of people about--literary-theory persons and all--I shall look
+across at you, differently, and that will mean that you are to
+remember the exact minute when you looked in the window up at the
+palace, on the mountain, and I saw you. Won't it?"
+
+"It will," said St. George fervently. "Don't try to persuade me that
+there wasn't any such mountain," he challenged her. "I suppose," he
+added in wonder, "that lovers have been having these secret signs
+time out of mind--and we never knew."
+
+Olivia drew a little breath of content.
+
+"Bless everybody," she said.
+
+So they made invasion of that pure, dim world before them; and the
+serene mystery of the distance came like a thought, drawn from a
+state remote and immortal, to clasp the hand of There in the hand of
+Here.
+
+"And then sometimes," St. George went on, his exultation proving
+greater than his discretion, "we'll take the yacht and pretend
+we're going back--"
+
+He stopped abruptly with a quick indrawn breath and the hope that
+she had not noticed. He was, by several seconds, too late.
+
+"Whose yacht is it?" Olivia asked promptly. "I wondered."
+
+St. George had dreaded the question. Someway, now that it was all
+over and the prize was his, he was ashamed that he had not won it
+more fairly and humiliated that he was not what she believed him, a
+pillar of the _Evening Sentinel_. But Amory had miraculously heard
+and turned himself about.
+
+"It's his," he said briefly, "I may as well confess to you, Miss
+Holland," he enlarged somewhat, "he's a great cheat. _The Aloha_ is
+his, and so am I, busy body and idle soul, for using up his yacht
+and his time on a newspaper story. You were the 'story,' you know."
+
+"But," said Olivia in bewilderment, "I don't understand. Surely--"
+
+"Nothing whatever is sure, Miss Holland," Amory sadly assured her,
+but his eyes were smiling behind his pince-nez. "You would think one
+might be sure of him. But it isn't so. Me, you may depend upon me,"
+he impressed it lightly. "I'm what I say I am--a poor beggar of a
+newspaper man, about to be held to account by one Chillingworth for
+this whole millenial occurrence, and sent off to a political
+convention to steady me, unless I'm fired. But St. George, he's a
+gay dilettante."
+
+Then Amory resumed a better topic of his own; and Olivia, when she
+understood, looked down at her lover as miserably as one is able
+when one is perfectly happy.
+
+"Oh," she said, "and up there--in the palace to-day--I did think for
+a minute that perhaps you wanted me to marry the prince so
+that--they could--."
+
+One could smile now at the enormity of that.
+
+"So that I could put it in the paper?" he said. "But, you see, I
+never could put it in any paper, even if I didn't love you. Who
+would believe me? A thousand years from now--maybe less--the
+_Evening Sentinel_, if it is still in existence, can publish the
+story, perhaps. Until then I'm afraid they'll have to confine
+themselves to the doings of the precincts."
+
+Olivia waived the whole matter for one of vaster importance.
+
+"Then why did you come to Yaque?" she demanded.
+
+Mr. Frothingham had left his place by the wheel-house and wandered
+forward. The steamer chair had a back that was both broad and high,
+and one sitting in its shadow was hermetically veiled from the rest
+of the deck. So St. George bent forward, and told her.
+
+After that they sat in silence, and together they looked back
+toward the island with its black rocks smitten to momentary gold by
+a last javelin of light. There it lay--the land locking away as
+realities all the fairy-land of speculation, the land of the
+miracles of natural law. They had walked there, and had glimpsed the
+shadowy threshold of the Morning. Suppose, St. George thought, that
+instead of King Otho, with his delicate sense of the merely visible,
+a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque? And instead
+of Mr. Frothingham, slave to the contestable, and Little Cawthorne
+in bondage to humour, and Amory and himself swept off their feet by
+a heavenly romance, suppose a party of savants and economists had
+arrived in Yaque, with a poet or two to bring away the fire--what
+then? St. George lost the doubt in the noon of his own certainty.
+There could be no greater good, he chanted to the god who had
+breathed upon him, than this that he and Amory shared now with the
+wise and simple world, the world of the resonant new names. He even
+doubted that, save in degree, there could be a purer talisman than
+the spirit that inextinguishably shone in the face of the childlike
+old lawyer as the strange little animal nestled in his coat and
+licked his hand. And these were open secrets. Open secrets of the
+ultimate attainment.
+
+They watched the land dissolving in the darkness like a pearl in
+wine of night. But at last, when momentarily they had turned happy
+eyes to each other's faces, they looked again and found that the
+dusk, taking ancient citadels with soundless tread, had received the
+island. And where on the brow of the mountain had sprung the white
+pillars of the king's palace glittered only the early stars.
+
+"Crown jewels," said Olivia softly, "for everybody's head."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Romance Island, by Zona Gale
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+<html lang="en">
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
+    content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
+<meta content="pg2html (binary v0.16)"
+    name="generator">
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of
+    Romance Island,
+    by Zona Gale
+</title>
+<style type="text/css">
+    <!--
+body {font-size: 100%; }
+    p { margin-left: 15%;
+        margin-right: 15%;
+        text-indent: 1.5em;
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+        text-align:  justify;
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+    h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { text-align: center; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; }
+    hr.short  {width: 10%; }
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+    p.note {text-indent: -0.5em; text-align: center;}
+    p.note2 {text-indent: -0.5em; margin-left: 30%;
+       margin-right: 30%;  margin-bottom: 0em;  }
+    p.noindent { text-indent: 0em }
+    p.toc  { text-indent: 0em;  text-align: center; margin-top: .5em;
+       margin-bottom: 0em; font-size: 90%; }
+    p.itoc { text-indent: 0em; text-align: center; font-size: 90%; }
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+    center { padding: .8em;}
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romance Island, by Zona Gale
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Romance Island
+
+Author: Zona Gale
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2004 [EBook #13731]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMANCE ISLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div style="height: 8em;"><br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<a name="image-0001"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image1.jpg" width="310" height="450"
+alt="frontispiece, uncaptioned, Olivia in white, standing">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<hr>
+<br>
+
+<h1>
+    ROMANCE ISLAND
+</h1>
+<br>
+     <h4><i>By</i></h4>
+<h2>
+    ZONA GALE
+</h2>
+<br>
+
+<h4>
+<small>WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY</small><br>
+ HERMANN C. WALL</h4>
+
+<br>
+ <h5>
+    INDIANAPOLIS<br>
+    THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY<br>
+    1906
+</h5>
+
+<hr>
+<br>
+<p class="note2">
+  "Who that remembers the first kind glance of her<br>
+   whom he loves can fail to believe in magic?"
+</p>
+<p class="ar">
+                &mdash;&nbsp;N<small>OVALIS</small>
+</p>
+<br>
+
+<hr>
+<br>
+
+<h3>CONTENTS</h3>
+<br>
+
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0001">
+  I</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; DINNER TIME</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0002">
+  II</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; A SCRAP OF PAPER </p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0003">
+  III</a> &nbsp; &nbsp; ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0004">
+  IV</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0005">
+  V</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; OLIVIA PROPOSES</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0006">
+  VI</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; TWO LITTLE MEN</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0007">
+  VII</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; DUSK, AND SO ON</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0008">
+  VIII</a> &nbsp;&nbsp; THE PORCH OF THE MORNING</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0009">
+  IX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE LADY OF KINGDOMS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0010">
+  X</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; TYRIAN PURPLE</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0011">
+  XI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE END OF THE EVENING</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0012">
+  XII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; BETWEEN-WORLDS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0013">
+  XIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE LINES LEAD UP</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0014">
+  XIV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; THE ISLE OF HEARTS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0015">
+  XV</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; A VIGIL</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0016">
+  XVI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; GLAMOURIE</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0017">
+  XVII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; BENEATH THE SURFACE</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0018">
+  XVIII</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; A MORNING VISIT</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0019">
+  XIX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; IN THE HALL OF KINGS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0020">
+  XX</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS</p>
+<p class="toc"><a href="#2HCH0021">
+  XXI</a>&nbsp;&nbsp; OPEN SECRETS</p>
+<br>
+<hr class="short">
+
+
+<p class="itoc">
+<b>Illustrations</b>: <a href="#image-0001"><i>Frontispiece</i></a>,
+<a href="#image-0002">2</a>, <a href="#image-0003">3</a>, <a href="#image-0004">4</a>, <a href="#image-0005">5</a>
+</p>
+<br>
+
+<hr>
+
+
+
+<a name="2H_TOC"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+
+
+<a name="2H_4_0001"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    ROMANCE ISLAND
+</h2>
+<a name="2HCH0001"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER I
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    DINNER TIME
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    As <i>The Aloha</i> rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the
+    harbour, St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous
+    parody upon capital letters:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
+    observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her&mdash;do you see? She
+    belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
+    of rope."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Instead&mdash;mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
+    own glorie"&mdash;he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and
+    was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might
+    three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch
+    counter. For in America, dreams of gold&mdash;not, alas, golden
+    dreams&mdash;do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly
+    happenings in this pleasant land of larvæ, few are so spectacular as
+    the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a
+    toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his <i>bien</i>. However, to
+    none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to
+    himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
+    humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do
+    if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
+    marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
+    among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen
+    his mother&mdash;an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
+    mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune&mdash;set
+    off for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop
+    Arthur Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look
+    upon whose portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain
+    of his charities seen St. George through college; and it made the
+    million worth while to his nephew merely to send him to Tübingen to
+    set his soul at rest concerning the date of one of the canonical
+    gospels. Next to the rich delight of planning that voyage, St.
+    George placed the buying of his yacht.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the dusty, inky office of the <i>New York Evening Sentinel</i> he had
+    been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting
+    words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his
+    typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone
+    bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought
+    and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes
+    remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked
+    toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass
+    slipping to the river's mouth; whereupon he had been seized by such
+    a passion to work hard and earn a white-and-brass craft of his own
+    that the story which he was hurrying for the first edition was quite
+    ruined.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had
+    gnarled, "we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up
+    this wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph
+    reads like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less
+    than fifteen minutes to do it in."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
+    ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
+    had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like
+    that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had
+    received for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
+    him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
+    common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
+    craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
+    He had found himself estimating the value&mdash;in money&mdash;of the
+    bric-à-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
+    alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
+    yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
+    bric-à-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
+    interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
+    night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
+    photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
+    comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
+    disagreeable task.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
+    transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
+    the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
+    things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
+    unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had
+    been <i>The Aloha</i>, which only that day had slipped to the river's
+    mouth in the view from his old window at the <i>Sentinel</i> office. St.
+    George had the grace to be ashamed to remember how smoothly the
+    social ills had adjusted themselves.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected
+    triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St.
+    George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys
+    which his fortune had brought to him. For although he had accurately
+    painted, for example, the delight of a cruise in a sea-going yacht
+    of his own, yet to step into his dory in the sunset, to watch <i>The
+    Aloha's</i> sides shine in the late light as he was rowed ashore past
+    the lesser crafts in the harbour; to see the man touch his cap and
+    put back to make the yacht trim for the night, and then to turn his
+    own face to his apartment where virtually the entire day-staff of
+    the <i>Evening Sentinel</i> was that night to dine&mdash;these were among the
+    pastimes of the lesser angels which his fancy had never compassed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A glow of firelight greeted St. George as he entered his apartment,
+    and the rooms wore a pleasant air of festivity. A table, with covers
+    for twelve, was spread in the living-room, a fire of cones was
+    tossing on the hearth, the curtains were drawn, and the sideboard
+    was a thing of intimation. Rollo, his man&mdash;St. George had easily
+    fallen in all the habits which he had longed to assume&mdash;was just
+    closing the little ice-box sunk behind a panel of the wall, and he
+    came forward with dignified deference.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everything is ready, Rollo?" St. George asked. "No one has
+    telephoned to beg off?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," answered Rollo, "and no, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George had sometimes told himself that the man looked like an
+    oval grey stone with a face cut upon it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is the claret warmed?" St. George demanded, handing his hat. "Did
+    the big glasses come for the liqueur&mdash;and the little ones will set
+    inside without tipping? Then take the cigars to the den&mdash;you'll have
+    to get some cigarettes for Mr. Provin. Keep up the fire. Light the
+    candles in ten minutes. I say, how jolly the table looks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," returned Rollo, "an' the candles 'll make a great
+    difference, sir. Candles do give out an air, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    One month of service had accustomed St. George to his valet's gift
+    of the Articulate Simplicity. Rollo's thoughts were doubtless
+    contrived in the cuticle and knew no deeper operance; but he always
+    uttered his impressions with, under his mask, an air of keen and
+    seasoned personal observation. In his first interview with St.
+    George, Rollo had said: "I always enjoy being kep' busy, sir. <i>To
+    me</i>, the busy man is a grand sight," and St. George had at once
+    appreciated his possibilities. Rollo was like the fine print in an
+    almanac.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the candles were burning and the lights had been turned on in
+    the little ochre den where the billiard-table stood, St. George
+    emerged&mdash;a well-made figure, his buoyant, clear-cut face accurately
+    bespeaking both health and cleverness. Of a family represented by
+    the gentle old bishop and his own exquisite mother, himself
+    university-bred and fresh from two years' hard, hand-to-hand
+    fighting to earn an honourable livelihood, St. George, of sound body
+    and fine intelligence, had that temper of stability within vast
+    range which goes pleasantly into the mind that meets it. A symbol of
+    this was his prodigious popularity with those who had been his
+    fellow-workers&mdash;a test beside which old-world traditions of the
+    urban touchstones are of secondary advantage. It was deeply
+    significant that in spite of the gulf which Chance had digged the
+    day-staff of the <i>Sentinel</i>, all save two or three of which were not
+    of his estate, had with flattering alacrity obeyed his summons to
+    dine. But, as he heard in the hall the voice of Chillingworth, the
+    difficulty of his task for the first time swept over him. It was
+    Chillingworth who had advocated to him the need of wooden type to
+    suit his literary style and who had long ordered and bullied him
+    about; and how was he to play the host to Chillingworth, not to
+    speak of the others, with the news between them of that million?
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the bell rang, St. George somewhat gruffly superseded Rollo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll go," he said briefly, "and keep out of sight for a few
+    minutes. Get in the bath-room or somewhere, will you?" he added
+    nervously, and opened the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At one stroke Chillingworth settled his own position by dominating
+    the situation as he dominated the city room. He chose the best chair
+    and told a good story and found fault with the way the fire burned,
+    all with immediate ease and abandon. Chillingworth's men loved to
+    remember that he had once carried copy. They also understood all the
+    legitimate devices by which he persuaded from them their best
+    effort, yet these devices never failed, and the city room agreed
+    that Chillingworth's fashion of giving an assignment to a new man
+    would force him to write a readable account of his own entertainment
+    in the dark meadows. Largely by personal magnetism he had fought his
+    way upward, and this quality was not less a social gift.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Toby Amory, who had been on the Eleven with St. George at
+    Harvard, looked along his pipe at his host and smiled, with
+    flattering content, his slow smile. Amory's father had lately had a
+    conspicuous quarter of an hour in Wall Street, as a result of which
+    Amory, instead of taking St. George to the cemetery at Clusium as he
+    had talked, himself drifted to Park Row; and although he now knew
+    considerably less than he had hoped about certain inscriptions, he
+    was supporting himself and two sisters by really brilliant work, so
+    that the balance of his power was creditably maintained. Surely the
+    inscriptions did not suffer, and what then was Amory that he should
+    object? Presently Holt, the middle-aged marine man, and Harding
+    who, since he had lost a lightweight sparring championship, was
+    sporting editor, solemnly entered together and sat down with the
+    social caution of their class. So did Provin, the "elder giant," who
+    gathered news as he breathed and could not intelligibly put six
+    words together. Horace, who would listen to four lines over the
+    telephone and therefrom make a half-column of American newspaper
+    humour or American newspaper tears, came in roaring pacifically and
+    marshaling little Bud, that day in the seventh heaven of his first
+    "beat." Then followed Crass, the feature man, whose interviews were
+    known to the new men as literature, although he was not above
+    publicly admitting that he was not a reporter, but a special writer.
+    Mr. Crass read nothing in the paper that he had not written, and St.
+    George had once prophesied that in old age he would use his
+    scrap-book for a manual of devotions, as Klopstock used his
+    <i>Messiah</i>. With him arrived Carbury, the telegraph editor, and later
+    Benfy, who had a carpet in his office and wrote editorials and who
+    came in evening clothes, thus moving Harding and Holt to instant
+    private conversation. The last to appear was Little Cawthorne who
+    wrote the fiction page and made enchanting limericks about every one
+    on the staff and went about singing one song and behaving, the
+    dramatic man flattered him, like a motif. Little Cawthorne entered
+    backward, wrestling with some wiry matter which, when he had
+    executed a manoeuvre and banged the door, was thrust through the
+    passage in the form of Bennie Todd, the head office boy,
+    affectionately known as Bennietod. Bennietod was in every one's
+    secret, clipped every one's space and knew every one's salary, and
+    he had lately covered a baseball game when the man whose copy he was
+    to carry had, outside the fence, become implicated in allurements.
+    He was greeted with noise, and St. George told him heartily that he
+    was glad he had come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He made me," defensively claimed Bennietod; frowning deferentially
+    at Little Cawthorne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello, St. George," said the latter, "come on back to the office.
+    Crass sits in your place and he wears cravats the colour of goblin's
+    blood. Come back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not he," said Chillingworth, smoking; "the Dead-and-Done-with
+    editor is too keen for that; I won't give him a job. He's ruined.
+    Egg sandwiches will never stimulate him now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George joined in the relieved laugh that followed. They were
+    remembering his young Sing Sing convict who had completed his
+    sentence in time to step in a cab and follow his mother to the
+    grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And
+    St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words
+    of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed
+    for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat
+    of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things
+    in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the
+    composing room had shaken mailed fists.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hi, you!" said Little Cawthorne, who was born in the South, "this
+    is a mellow minute. I could wish they came often. This shall be a
+    weekly occurrence&mdash;not so, St. George?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cawthorne," Chillingworth warned, "mind your manners, or they'll
+    make you city editor."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A momentary shadow was cast by the appearance of Rollo, who was
+    manifestly a symbol of the world Philistine about which these guests
+    knew more and in which they played a smaller part than any other
+    class of men. But the tray which Rollo bore was his passport.
+    Thereafter, they all trooped to the table, and Chillingworth sat at
+    the head, and from the foot St. George watched the city editor break
+    bread with the familiar nervous gesture with which he was wont to
+    strip off yards of copy-paper and eat it. There was a tacit
+    assumption that he be the conversational sun of the hour, and in
+    fostering this understanding the host took grateful refuge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is shameful," Chillingworth began contentedly. "Every one of
+    you ought to be out on the Boris story."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is the Boris story?" asked St. George with interest. But in
+    all talk St. George had a restful, host-like way of playing the rôle
+    of opposite to every one who preferred being heard.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll wager the boy hasn't been reading the papers these three
+    months," Amory opined in his pleasant drawl.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," St. George confessed; "no, I haven't. They make me homesick."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't maunder," said Chillingworth in polite criticism. "This is
+    Amory's story, and only about a quarter of the facts yet," he added
+    in a resentful growl. "It's up at the Boris, in West Fifty-ninth
+    Street&mdash;you know the apartment house? A Miss Holland, an heiress,
+    living there with her aunt, was attacked and nearly murdered by a
+    mulatto woman. The woman followed her to the elevator and came
+    uncomfortably near stabbing her from the back. The elevator boy was
+    too quick for her. And at the station they couldn't get the woman to
+    say a word; she pretends not to understand or to speak anything
+    they've tried. She's got Amory hypnotized too&mdash;he thinks she can't.
+    And when they searched her," went on Chillingworth with enjoyment,
+    "they found her dressed in silk and cloth of gold, and loaded down
+    with all sorts of barbarous ornaments, with almost priceless jewels.
+    Miss Holland claims that she never saw or heard of the woman before.
+    Now, what do you make of it?" he demanded, unconcernedly draining
+    his glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Splendid," cried St. George in unfeigned interest. "I say,
+    splendid. Did you see the woman?" he asked Amory.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," he said, "Andy fixed that for me. But she never said a word.
+    I <i>parlez-voused</i> her, and <i>verstehen-Sied</i> her, and she sighed and
+    turned her head."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you see the heiress?" St. George asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not I," mourned Amory, "not to talk with, that is. I happened to be
+    hanging up in the hall there the afternoon it occurred;" he modestly
+    explained.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What luck," St. George commented with genuine envy. "It's a
+    stunning story. Who is Miss Holland?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's lived there for a year or more with her aunt," said
+    Chillingworth. "She is a New Yorker and an heiress and a great
+    beauty&mdash;oh, all the properties are there, but they're all we've got.
+    What do you make of it?" he repeated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George did not answer, and every one else did.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mistaken identity," said Little Cawthorne. "Do you remember
+    Provin's story of the woman whose maid shot a masseuse whom she took
+    to be her mistress; and the woman forgave the shooting and seemed to
+    have her arrested chiefly because she had mistaken her for a
+    masseuse?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Too easy, Cawthorne," said Chillingworth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The woman is probably an Italian," said the telegraph editor,
+    "doing one of her Mafia stunts. It's time they left the politicians
+    alone and threw bombs at the bonds that back them."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hey, Carbury. Stop writing heads," said Chillingworth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Has Miss Holland lived abroad?" asked Crass, the feature man.
+    "Maybe this woman was her nurse or ayah or something who got fond of
+    her charge, and when they took it away years ago, she devoted her
+    life to trying to find it in America. And when she got here she
+    wasn't able to make herself known to her, and rather than let any
+    one else&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No more space-grabbing, Crass," warned Chillingworth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe," ventured Horace, "the young lady did settlement work and
+    read to the woman's kid, and the kid died, and the woman thought
+    she'd said a charm over it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Chillingworth grinned affectionately.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hold up," he commanded, "or you'll recall the very words of the
+    charm."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Bennietod gasped and stared.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, Bennietod?" Amory encouraged him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I t'ink," said the lad, "if she's a heiress, dis yere
+    dagger-plunger is her mudder dat's been shut up in a mad-house to a
+    fare-you-well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Chillingworth nodded approvingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your imagination is toning down wonderfully," he flattered him. "A
+    month ago you would have guessed that the mulatto lady was an
+    Egyptian princess' messenger sent over here to get the heart from an
+    American heiress as an ingredient for a complexion lotion. You're
+    coming on famously, Todd."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The German poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has,
+    in his epic of the <i>Oberon</i> made admirable use of much the same
+    idea, Mr. Chillingworth&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yells interrupted him. Mr. Benfy was too "well-read" to be wholly
+    popular with the staff.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, well, the woman was crazy. That's about all," suggested
+    Harding, and blushed to the line of his hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, I guess so," assented Holt, who lifted and lowered one
+    shoulder as he talked, "or doped."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Chillingworth sighed and looked at them both with pursed lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You two," he commented, "would get out a paper that everybody would
+    know to be full of reliable facts, and that nobody would buy. To be
+    born with a riotous imagination and then hardly ever to let it riot
+    is to be a born newspaper man. Provin?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The elder giant leaned back, his eyes partly closed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is she engaged to be married?" he asked. "Is Miss Holland engaged?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Chillingworth shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," he said, "not engaged. We knew that by tea-time the same day,
+    Provin. Well, St. George?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George drew a long breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By Jove, I don't know," he said, "it's a stunning story. It's the
+    best story I ever remember, excepting those two or three that have
+    hung fire for so long. Next to knowing just why old Ennis
+    disinherited his son at his marriage, I would like to ferret out
+    this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, tut, St. George," Amory put in tolerantly, "next to doing
+    exactly what you will be doing all this week you'd rather ferret out
+    this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On my honour, no," St. George protested eagerly, "I mean quite what
+    I say. I might go on fearfully about it. Lord knows I'm going to see
+    the day when I'll do it, too, and cut my troubles for the luck of
+    chasing down a bully thing like this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    If there was anything to forgive, every one forgave him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But give up ten minutes on <i>The Aloha</i>," Amory skeptically put it,
+    adjusting his pince-nez, "for anything less than ten minutes on <i>The
+    Aloha</i>?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll do it now&mdash;now!" cried St. George. "If Mr. Chillingworth will
+    put me on this story in your place and will give you a week off on
+    <i>The Aloha</i>, you may have her and welcome."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne pounded on the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where do I come in?" he wailed. "But no, all I get is another wad
+    o' woe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you say, Mr. Chillingworth?" St. George asked eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know," said Chillingworth, meditatively turning his glass.
+    "St. George is rested and fresh, and he feels the story. And
+    Amory&mdash;here, touch glasses with me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory obeyed. His chief's hand was steady, but the two glasses
+    jingled together until, with a smile, Amory dropped his arm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I <i>am</i> about all in, I fancy," he admitted apologetically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A week's rest on the water," said Chillingworth, "would set you on
+    your feet for the convention. All right, St. George," he nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George leaped to his feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hooray!" he shouted like a boy. "Jove, won't it be good to get
+    back?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He smiled as he set down his glass, remembering the day at his desk
+    when he had seen the white-and-brass craft slip to the river's
+    mouth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo, discreet and without wonder, footed softly about the table,
+    keeping the glasses filled and betraying no other sign of life. For
+    more than four hours he was in attendance, until, last of the
+    guests, Little Cawthorne and Bennietod departed together, trying to
+    remember the dates of the English kings. Finally Chillingworth and
+    Amory, having turned outdoors the dramatic critic who had arrived
+    at midnight and was disposed to stay, stood for a moment by the fire
+    and talked it over.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Remember, St. George," Chillingworth said, "I'll have no
+    monkey-work. You'll report to me at the old hour, you won't be late;
+    and you'll take orders&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As usual, sir," St. George rejoined quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon," Chillingworth said quickly, "but you see this
+    is such a deuced unnatural arrangement."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I understand," St. George assented, "and I'll do my best not to get
+    thrown down. Amory has told me all he knows about it&mdash;by the way,
+    where is the mulatto woman now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why," said Chillingworth, "some physician got interested in the
+    case, and he's managed to hurry her up to the Bitley Reformatory in
+    Westchester for the present. She's there; and that means, we need
+    not disguise, that nobody can see her. Those Bitley people are like
+    a rabble of wild eagles."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Right," said St. George. "I'll report at eight o'clock. Amory can
+    board <i>The Aloha</i> when he gets ready and take down whom he likes."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On my life, old chap, it's a private view of Kedar's tents to me,"
+    said Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. "I'll probably
+    win wide disrespect by my inability to tell a mainsail from a
+    cockpit, but I'm a grateful dog, in spite of that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they were gone St. George sat by the fire. He read Amory's
+    story of the Boris affair in the paper, which somewhere in the
+    apartment Rollo had unearthed, and the man took off his master's
+    shoes and brought his slippers and made ready his bath. St. George
+    glanced over his shoulder at the attractively-dismantled table, with
+    its dying candles and slanted shades.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gad!" he said in sheer enjoyment as he clipped the story and saw
+    Rollo pass with the towels.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was so absurdly like a city room's dream of Arcady.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0002"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER II
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    A SCRAP OF PAPER
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing
+    breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were
+    novel preparations for work in the <i>Sentinel</i> office. The
+    impossibility of it all delighted St. George rather more than the
+    reality, for there is no pastime, as all the world knows, quite like
+    that of practising the impossible. The days when, "like a man
+    unfree," he had fared forth from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely
+    to partake of an evil omelette, seemed enchantingly far away. It
+    was, St. George reflected, the experience of having been released
+    from prison, minus the disgrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the
+    printers' ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the
+    elation of the return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets.
+    When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its
+    fascination, but now he understood. "A newspaper office," so a
+    revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once
+    imparted to St. George, "is a place where a man with the
+    temperament of a savant and a recluse may bring his American vice of
+    commercialism and worship of the uncommon, and let them have it out.
+    Newspapers have no other use&mdash;except the one I began on." When St.
+    George entered the city room, Crass, of the goblin's blood cravats,
+    had vacated his old place, and Provin was just uncovering his
+    typewriter and banging the tin cover upon everything within reach,
+    and Bennietod was writhing over a rewrite, and Chillingworth was
+    discharging an office boy in a fashion that warmed St. George's
+    heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of
+    Chillingworth, the guest. He waved both arms at the foreman who
+    ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he
+    frowned a greeting at St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Get right out on the Boris story," he said. "I depend on you. The
+    chief is interested in this too&mdash;telephoned to know whom I had on
+    it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George knew perfectly that "the chief" was playing golf at Lenox
+    and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland
+    story, for he was a close friend of the bishop's, and St. George
+    knew his ways; but Chillingworth's methods always told, and St.
+    George turned away with all the old glow of his first assignment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances
+    and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman;
+    but he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one
+    apostate Chance who open great good luck of any sort. So, though the
+    journey to Westchester County was almost certain to result in
+    refusal, he meant to be confronted by that certainty before he
+    assumed it. To the warden on the wire St. George put his inquiry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are your visitors' days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thursdays," came the reply, and the warden's voice suggested
+    handcuffs by way of hospitality.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is St. George of the <i>Sentinel</i>. I want very much to see one
+    of your people&mdash;a mulatto woman. Can you fix it for me?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Certainly not," returned the warden promptly. "The <i>Sentinel</i> knows
+    perfectly that newspaper men can not be admitted here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, of course," St. George conceded, "but if you have a
+    mysterious boarder who talks Patagonian or something, and we think
+    that perhaps we can talk with her, why then&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It doesn't matter whether you can talk every language in South
+    America," said the warden bruskly. "I'm very busy now, and&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See here, Mr. Jeffrey," said St. George, "is no one allowed there
+    but relatives of the guests?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nobody,"&mdash;crisply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon, that is literal?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Relatives, with a permit," divulged the warden, who, if he had had
+    a sceptre would have used it at table, he was so fond of his little
+    power, "and the Readers' Guild."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah&mdash;the Readers' Guild," said St. George. "What days, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-day and Saturdays, ten o'clock. I'm sorry, Mr. St. George, but
+    I'm a very busy man and now&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good-by," St. George cried triumphantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In half an hour he was at the Grand Central station, boarding a
+    train for the Reformatory town. It was a little after ten o'clock
+    when he rang the bell at the house presided over by Chillingworth's
+    "rabble of wild eagles."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The Reformatory, a boastful, brick building set in grounds that
+    seemed freshly starched and ironed, had a discoloured door that
+    would have frowned and threatened of its own accord, even without
+    the printed warnings pasted to its panels stating that no
+    application for admission, with or without permits, would be
+    honoured upon any day save Thursday. This was Tuesday.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently, the chains having fallen within after a feudal rattling,
+    an old man who looked born to the business of snapping up a
+    drawbridge in lieu of a taste for any other exclusiveness peered at
+    St. George through absurd smoked glasses, cracked quite across so
+    that his eyes resembled buckles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good morning," said St. George; "has the Readers' Guild arrived
+    yet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man grated out an assent and swung open the door, which
+    creaked in the pitch of his voice. The bare hall was cut by a wall
+    of steel bars whose gate was padlocked, and outside this wall the
+    door to the warden's office stood open. St. George saw that a
+    meeting was in progress there, and the sight disturbed him. Then the
+    click of a key caught his attention, and he turned to find the old
+    man quietly and surprisingly swinging open the door of steel bars.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This way, sir," he said hoarsely, fixing St. George with his buckle
+    eyes, and shambled through the door after him locking it behind
+    them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    If St. George had found awaiting him a gold throne encircled by
+    kneeling elephants he could have been no more amazed. Not a word had
+    been said about the purpose of his visit, and not a word to the
+    warden; there was simply this miraculous opening of the barred door.
+    St. George breathlessly footed across the rotunda and down the dim
+    opposite hall. There was a mistake, that was evident; but for the
+    moment St. George was going to propose no reform. Their steps echoed
+    in the empty corridor that extended the entire length of the great
+    building in an odour of unspeakable soap and superior disinfectants;
+    and it was not until they reached a stair at the far end that the
+    old man halted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Top o' the steps," he hoarsely volunteered, blinking his little
+    buckle eyes, "first door to the left. My back's bad. I won't go up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, inhumanely blessing the circumstance, slipped something
+    in the old man's hand and sprang up the stairs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The first door at the left stood ajar. St. George looked in and saw
+    a circle of bonnets and white curls clouded around the edge of the
+    room, like witnesses. The Readers' Guild was about leaving; almost
+    in the same instant, with that soft lift and touch which makes a
+    woman's gown seem sewed with vowels and sibilants, they all arose
+    and came tapping across the bare floor. At their head marched a
+    woman with such a bright bonnet, and such a tinkle of ornaments on
+    her gown that at first sight she quite looked like a lamp. It was
+    she whom St. George approached.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon, madame," he said, "is this the Readers' Guild?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was nothing in St. George's grave face and deferential
+    stooping of shoulders to betray how his heart was beating or what a
+    bound it gave at her amazing reply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," she said, "how do you do?"&mdash;and her manner had that violent
+    absent-mindedness which almost always proves that its possessor has
+    trained a large family of children&mdash;"I am so glad that you can be
+    with us to-day. I am Mrs. Manners&mdash;forgive me," she besought with
+    perfectly self-possessed distractedness, "I'm afraid that I've
+    forgotten your name."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual
+    speechlessness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs.
+    Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to
+    compensate her total lack of attention.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and
+    caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and
+    muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter,
+    a little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a
+    wonderful meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately
+    for us you are just in time for our third floor council."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and
+    was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns
+    on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have
+    amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions
+    when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the
+    temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost
+    St. George an effort, which he was afterward glad to remember having
+    made, to turn to Mrs. Manners, who had that air of appointing
+    committees and announcing the programme by which we always recognize
+    a leader, and try to explain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am afraid," St. George said as they reached the stairs, "that you
+    have mistaken me, Mrs. Manners. I am not&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pray, pray do not mention it," cried Mrs. Manners, shaking her
+    little lamp-shade of a hat at him, "we make every allowance, and I
+    am sure that none will be necessary."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I am with the <i>Evening Sentinel</i>," St. George persisted, "I am
+    afraid that&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As if one's profession made any difference!" cried Mrs. Manners
+    warmly. "No, indeed, I perfectly understand. We all understand," she
+    assured him, going over some papers in one hand and preparing to
+    mount the stairs. "Indeed, we appreciate it," she murmured, "do we
+    not, Miss Utter?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little brown nut seemed to crack in a capacious smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Indeed, indeed!" she said fervently, accenting her emphasis by
+    briefly-closed eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hymn books. Now, have we hymn books enough?" plaintively broke in
+    Mrs. Manners. "I declare, those new hymn books don't seem to have
+    the spirit of the old ones, no matter what <i>any one</i> says," she
+    informed St. George earnestly as they reached an open door. In the
+    next moment he stood aside and the Readers' Guild filed past him. He
+    followed them. This was pleasantly like magic.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They entered a large chamber carpeted and walled in the garish
+    flowers which many boards of directors suppose will joy the
+    cheerless breast. There were present a dozen women inmates,&mdash;sullen,
+    weary-looking beings who seemed to have made abject resignation
+    their latest vice. They turned their lustreless eyes upon the
+    visitors, and a portly woman in a red waist with a little American
+    flag in a buttonhole issued to them a nasal command to rise. They
+    got to their feet with a starched noise, like dead leaves blowing,
+    and St. George eagerly scanned their faces. There were women of
+    several nationalities, though they all looked raceless in the ugly
+    uniforms which those same boards of directors consider <i>de rigueur</i>
+    for the soul that is to be won back to the normal. A little negress,
+    with a spirit that soared free of boards of directors, had tried to
+    tie her closely-clipped wool with bits of coloured string; an
+    Italian woman had a geranium over her ear; and at the end of the
+    last row of chairs, towering above the others, was a creature of a
+    kind of challenging, unforgetable beauty whom, with a thrill of
+    certainty, St. George realized to be her whom he had come to see.
+    So strong was his conviction that, as he afterward recalled, he even
+    asked no question concerning her. She looked as manifestly not one
+    of the canaille of incorrigibles as, in her place, Lucrezia Borgia
+    would have looked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder
+    and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned. She was young,
+    hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar
+    litheness which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was
+    of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of
+    the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more
+    penetrable. Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she
+    divined that in some way his coming affected her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We will have our hymn first." Mrs. Manners' words were buzzing and
+    pecking in the air. "What can I have done with that list of numbers?
+    We have to select our pieces most carefully," she confided to St.
+    George, "so to be sure that <i>Soul's Prison</i> or <i>Hands Red as
+    Crimson</i>, or, <i>Do You See the Hebrew Captive Kneeling?</i> or anything
+    personal like that doesn't occur. Now what can I have done with that
+    list?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her words reached St. George but vaguely. He was in a fever of
+    anticipation and enthusiasm. He turned quickly to Mrs. Manners.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "During the hymn," he said simply, "I would like to speak with one
+    of the women. Have I your permission?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Manners looked momentarily perplexed; but her eyes at that
+    instant chancing upon her lost list of hymns, she let fall an
+    abstracted assent and hurried to the waiting organist. Immediately
+    St. George stepped quietly down among the women already fluttering
+    the leaves of their hymn books, and sat beside the mulatto woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her eyes met his in eager questioning, but she had that temper of
+    unsurprise of many of the eastern peoples and of some animals. Yet
+    she was under some strong excitement, for her hands, large but
+    faultlessly modeled, were pressed tensely together. And St. George
+    saw that she was by no means a mulatto, or of any race that he was
+    able to name. Her features were classic and of exceeding fineness,
+    and her face was sensitive and highly-bred and filled with repose,
+    like the surprising repose of breathing arrested in marble. There
+    was that about her, however, which would have made one, constituted
+    to perceive only the arbitrary balance of things, feel almost
+    afraid; while one of high organization would inevitably have been
+    smitten by some sense of the incalculably higher organization of her
+    nature, a nature which breathed forth an influence, laid a
+    spell&mdash;did something indefinable. Sometimes one stands too closely
+    to a statue and is frightened by the nearness, as by the nearness
+    of one of an alien region. St. George felt this directly he spoke to
+    her. He shook off the impression and set himself practically to the
+    matter in hand. He had never had greater need of his faculty for
+    directness. His low tone was quite matter-of-fact, his manner
+    deferentially reassuring.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think," he said softly and without preface, "that I can help you.
+    Will you let me help you? Will you tell me quickly your name?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The woman's beautiful eyes were filled with distress, but she shook
+    her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your name&mdash;name&mdash;name?" St. George repeated earnestly, but she had
+    only the same answer. "Can you not tell me where you live?" St.
+    George persisted, and she made no other sign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "New York?" went on St. George patiently. "New York? Do you live in
+    New York?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a sudden gleam in the woman's eyes. She extended her hands
+    quickly in unmistakable appeal. Then swiftly she caught up a hymn
+    book, tore at its fly-leaf, and made the movement of writing. In an
+    instant St. George had thrust a pencil in her hand and she was
+    tracing something.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He waited feverishly. The organ had droned through the hymn and the
+    women broke into song, with loose lips and without restraint, as
+    street boys sing. He saw them casting curious, sullen glances, and
+    the Readers' Guild whispering among themselves. Miss Bella Bliss
+    Utter, looking as distressed as a nut can look, nodded, and Mrs.
+    Manners shook her head and they meant the same thing. Then St.
+    George saw the attendant in the red waist descend from the platform
+    and make her way toward him, the little American flag rising and
+    falling on her breast. He unhesitatingly stepped in the aisle to
+    meet her, determined to prevent, if possible, her suspicion of the
+    message. "Is it the barbarism of a gentleman," Amory had once
+    propounded, "or is it the gentleman-like manners of a barbarian
+    which makes both enjoy over-stepping a prohibition?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I compliment you," St. George said gravely, with his deferential
+    stooping of the shoulders. "The women are perfectly trained. This,
+    of course, is due to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The hard face of the woman softened, but St. George thought that one
+    might call her very facial expression nasal; she smiled with evident
+    pleasure, though her purpose remained unshaken.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They do pretty good," she admitted, "but visitors ain't best for
+    'em. I'll have to request you"&mdash;St. George vaguely wished that she
+    would say "ask"&mdash;"not to talk to any of 'em."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is a great privilege," he said warmly if a bit incoherently,
+    and held her in talk about an institution of the sort in Canada
+    where the women inmates wore white, the managers claiming that the
+    effect upon their conduct was perceptible, that they were far more
+    self-respecting, and so on in a labyrinth of defensive detail. "What
+    do you think of the idea?" he concluded anxiously, manfully holding
+    his ground in the aisle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think it's mostly nonsense," returned the woman tartly, "a big
+    expense and a sight of work for nothing. And now permit me to say&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George vaguely wished that she would say "let."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I agree with you," he said earnestly, "nothing could be simpler and
+    neater than these calico gowns."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The attendant looked curiously at him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They are gingham," she rejoined, "and you'll excuse me, I hope, but
+    visitors ain't supposed to converse with the inmates."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was vanquished by "converse."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon," he said, "pray forgive me. I will say good-by
+    to my friend."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He turned swiftly and extended his hand to the strange woman behind
+    him. With the cunning upon which he had counted she gave her own
+    hand, slipping in his the folded paper. Her eyes, with their
+    haunting watchfulness, held his for a moment as she mutely bent
+    forward when he left her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The hymn was done and the women were seating themselves, as St.
+    George with beating heart took his way up the aisle. What the paper
+    contained he could not even conjecture; but there <i>was</i> a paper and
+    it <i>did</i> contain something which he had a pleasant premonition would
+    be invaluable to him. Yet he was still utterly at loss to account
+    for his own presence there, and this he coolly meant to do.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was spared the necessity. On the platform Mrs. Manners had risen
+    to make an announcement; and St. George fancied that she must
+    preside at her tea-urn and try on her bonnets with just that same
+    formal little "announcement" air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My friends," she said, "I have now an unexpected pleasure for you
+    and for us all. We have with us to-day Mr. St. George, of New York.
+    Mr. St. George is going to sing for us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George stood still for a moment, looking into the expectant
+    faces of Mrs. Manners and the other women of the Readers' Guild, a
+    spark of understanding kindling the mirth in his eyes. This then
+    accounted both for his admittance to the home and for his welcome by
+    the women upon their errand of mercy. He had simply been very
+    naturally mistaken for a stranger from New York who had not arrived.
+    But since he had accomplished something, though he did not know
+    what, inasmuch as the slip of paper lay crushed in his hand unread,
+    he must, he decided, pay for it. Without ado he stepped to the
+    platform.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have explained to Mrs. Manners and to these ladies," he said
+    gravely, "that I am not the gentleman who was to sing for you.
+    However, since he is detained, I will do what I can."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This, mistaken for a merely perfunctory speech of self-depreciation,
+    was received in polite, contradicting silence by the Guild. St.
+    George, who had a rich, true barytone, quickly ran over his little
+    list of possible songs, none of which he had ever sung to an
+    audience that a canoe would not hold, or to other accompaniment than
+    that of a mandolin. Partly in memory of those old canoe-evenings St.
+    George broke into a low, crooning plantation melody. The song, like
+    much of the Southern music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the
+    college men had loved, something&mdash;or so one might have said who took
+    the canoe-music seriously&mdash;of the wildness and fierceness of old
+    tribal loves and plaints and unremembered wooings with a desert
+    background: a gallop of hoof-beats, a quiver of noon light above
+    saffron sand&mdash;these had been, more or less, in the music when St.
+    George had been wont to lie in a boat and pick at the strings while
+    Amory paddled; and these he must have reëchoed before the crowd of
+    curious and sullen and commonplace, lighted by that one wild,
+    strange face. When he had finished the dark woman sat with bowed
+    head, and St. George himself was more moved by his own effort than
+    was strictly professional.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Dear Mr. St. George," said Mrs. Manners, going distractedly through
+    her hand-bag for something unknown, "our secretary will thank you
+    formally. It was she who sent you our request, was it not? She
+    <i>will</i> so regret being absent to-day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She did not send me a request, Mrs. Manners," persisted St. George
+    pleasantly, "but I've been uncommonly glad to do what I could. I am
+    here simply on a mission for the <i>Evening Sentinel</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Manners drew something indefinite from her bag and put it back
+    again, and looked vaguely at St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your voice reminds me so much of my brother, younger," she
+    observed, her eyes already straying to the literature for
+    distribution.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With soft exclamatory twitters the Readers' Guild thanked St.
+    George, and Miss Bella Bliss Utter, who was of womankind who clasp
+    their hands when they praise, stood thus beside him until he took
+    his leave. The woman in the red waist summoned an attendant to show
+    him back down the long corridor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the grated door within the entrance St. George found the warden
+    in stormy conference with a pale blond youth in spectacles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Impossible," the warden was saying bluntly, "I know you. I know
+    your voice. You called me up this morning from the <i>New York
+    Sentinel</i> office, and I told you then&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But, my dear sir," expostulated the pale blond youth, waving a
+    music roll, "I do assure you&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What he says is quite true, Warden," St. George interposed
+    courteously, "I will vouch for him. I have just been singing for the
+    Readers' Guild myself."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The warden dropped back with a grudging apology and brows of tardy
+    suspicion, and the old man blinked his buckle eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gentlemen," said St. George, "good morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Outside the door, with its panels decorated in positive
+    prohibitions, he eagerly unfolded the precious paper. It bore a
+    single name and address: Tabnit, 19 McDougle Street, New York.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0003"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER III
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    St. George lunched leisurely at his hotel. Upon his return from
+    Westchester he had gone directly to McDougle Street to be assured
+    that there was a house numbered 19. Without difficulty he had found
+    the place; it was in the row of old iron-balconied apartment houses
+    a few blocks south of Washington Square, and No. 19 differed in no
+    way from its neighbours even to the noisy children, without toys,
+    tumbling about the sunken steps and dark basement door. St. George
+    contented himself with walking past the house, for the mere
+    assurance that the place existed dictated his next step.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was to write a note to Mrs. Medora Hastings, Miss Holland's
+    aunt. The note set forth that for reasons which he would, if he
+    might, explain later, he was interested in the woman who had
+    recently made an attempt upon her niece's life; that he had seen the
+    woman and had obtained an address which he was confident would lead
+    to further information about her. This address, he added, he
+    preferred not to disclose to the police, but to Mrs. Hastings or
+    Miss Holland herself, and he begged leave to call upon them if
+    possible that day. He despatched the note by Rollo, whom he
+    instructed to deliver it, not at the desk, but at the door of Mrs.
+    Hastings' apartment, and to wait for an answer. He watched with
+    pleasure Rollo's soft departure, recalling the days when he had sent
+    a messenger boy to some inaccessible threshold, himself stamping up
+    and down in the cold a block or so away to await the boy's return.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo was back almost immediately. Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland
+    were not at home. St. George eyed his servant severely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Rollo," he said, "did you go to the door of their apartment?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, sir," said Rollo stiffly, "the elevator boy told me they was
+    out, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Showing," thought St. George, "that a valet and a gentleman is a
+    very poor newspaper man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now go back," he said pleasantly, "go up in the elevator to their
+    door. If they are not in, wait in the lower hallway until they
+    return. Do you get that? Until they return."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll want me back by tea-time, sir?" ventured Rollo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Wait," St. George repeated, "until they return. At three. Or six.
+    Or nine o'clock. Or midnight."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Very good, sir," said Rollo impassively, "it ain't always wise,
+    sir, for a man to trust to his own judgment, sir, asking your
+    pardon. His judgment," he added, "may be a bit of the ape left in
+    him, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled at this evolutionary pearl and settled himself
+    comfortably by the open fire to await Rollo's return. It was after
+    three o'clock when he reappeared. He brought a note and St. George
+    feverishly tore it open.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whom did you see? Were they civil to you?" he demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I saw a old lady, sir," said Rollo irreverently. "She didn't say a
+    word to me, sir, but what she didn't say was civiler than many
+    people's language. There's a great deal in manner, sir," declaimed
+    Rollo, brushing his hat with his sleeve, and his sleeve with his
+    handkerchief, and shaking the handkerchief meditatively over the
+    coals.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George read the note at a glance and with unspeakable relief.
+    They would see him. A refusal would have delayed and annoyed him
+    just then, in the flood-tide of his hope.
+</p>
+<p class="block">
+     "My Dear Mr. St. George," the note ran. "My niece is not at
+     home, and I can not tell how your suggestion will be received
+     by her, though it is most kind. I may, however, answer for
+     myself that I shall be glad to see you at four o'clock this
+     afternoon.
+</p>
+<p class="note">                   "Very truly yours, </p>
+<p class="ar">
+                               "M<small>EDORA</small> H<small>ASTINGS</small>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Grateful for her evident intention to waste no time, St. George
+    dressed and drove to the Boris, punctually sending up his card at
+    four o'clock. At once he was ushered to Mrs. Hastings' apartment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George entered her drawing-room incuriously. Three years of
+    entering drawing-rooms which he never thereafter was to see had
+    robbed him of that sensation of indefinable charm which for many a
+    strange room never ceases to yield. He had found far too many tables
+    upholding nothing which one could remember, far too many pictures
+    that returned his look, and rugs that seemed to have been selected
+    arbitrarily and because there was none in stock that the owner
+    really liked. He was therefore pleasantly surprised and puzzled by
+    the room which welcomed him. The floor was tiled in curious blocks,
+    strangely hieroglyphed, as if they had been taken from old tombs.
+    Over the fireplace was set a panel of the same stone, which, by the
+    thickness of the tiles, formed a low shelf. On this shelf and on
+    tables and in a high window was the strangest array of objects that
+    St. George had ever seen. There were small busts of soft rose stone,
+    like blocks of coral. There was a statue or two of some indefinable
+    white material, glistening like marble and yet so soft that it had
+    been indented in several places by accidental pressure. There were
+    fans of strangely-woven silk, with sticks of carven rock-crystal,
+    and hand mirrors of polished copper set in frames of gems that he
+    did not recognize. Upon the wall were mended bits of purple
+    tapestry, embroidered or painted or woven in singular patterns of
+    flora and birds that St. George could not name. There were rolls of
+    parchment, and vases of rock-crystal, and a little apparatus, most
+    delicately poised, for weighing unknown, delicate things; and jars
+    and cups without handles, all baked of a soft pottery having a nap
+    like the down of a peach. Over the windows hung curtains of lace,
+    woven by hands which St. George could not guess, in patterns of such
+    freedom and beauty as western looms never may know. On the floor and
+    on the divans were spread strange skins, some marked like peacocks,
+    some patterned like feathers and like seaweed, all in a soft fur
+    that was like silk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mingled with these curios were the ordinary articles of a cultivated
+    household. There were many books, good pictures, furniture with
+    simple lines, a tea-table that almost ministered of itself, a
+    work-basket filled with "violet-weaving" needle-work, and a gossipy
+    clock with well-bred chimes. St. George was enormously attracted by
+    the room which could harbour so many pagan delights without itself
+    falling their victim. The air was fresh and cool and smelled of the
+    window primroses.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a few moments Mrs. Hastings entered, and if St. George had been
+    bewildered by the room he was still more amazed by the appearance
+    of his hostess. She was utterly unlike the atmosphere of her
+    drawing-room. She was a bustling, commonplace little creature, with
+    an expressionless face, indented rather than molded in features. Her
+    plump hands were covered with jewels, but for all the richness of
+    her gown she gave the impression of being very badly dressed; things
+    of jet and metal bobbed and ticked upon her, and her side-combs were
+    continually falling about. She sat on the sofa and looked at the
+    seat which St. George was to have and began to talk&mdash;all without
+    taking the slightest heed of him or permitting him to mention the
+    <i>Evening Sentinel</i> or his errand. If St. George had been painted
+    purple he felt sure that she would have acted quite the same.
+    Personality meant nothing to her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now this distressing matter, Mr. St. George," began Mrs. Hastings,
+    "of this frightful mulatto woman. I didn't see her myself&mdash;no, I had
+    stopped in on the first floor to visit my lawyer's wife who was ill
+    with neuralgia, and I didn't see the creature. If I had been with my
+    niece I dare say it wouldn't have occurred. That's what I always say
+    to my niece. I always say, 'Olivia, nothing <i>need</i> occur to vex one.
+    It always happens because of pure heedlessness.' Not that I accuse
+    my own niece of heedlessness in this particular. It was the elevator
+    boy who was heedless. That is the trouble with life in a great
+    city. Every breath you draw is always dependent on somebody else's
+    doing his duty, and when you consider how many people habitually
+    neglect their duty it is a wonder&mdash;I always say that to Olivia&mdash;it
+    is a wonder that anybody is alive to <i>do</i> a duty when it presents
+    itself. 'Olivia,' I always say, 'nobody needs to die.' And I really
+    believe that they nearly all do die out of pure heedlessness. Well,
+    and so this frightful mulatto creature: you know her, I understand?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings leaned back and consulted St. George through her
+    tortoise-shell glasses, tilting her head high to keep them on her
+    nose and perpetually putting their gold chain over her ear, which
+    perpetually pulled out her side-combs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I saw her this morning," St. George said. "I went up to the
+    Reformatory in Westchester, and I spoke with her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mercy!" ejaculated Mrs. Hastings, "I wonder she didn't tear your
+    eyes out. Did they have her in a cage or in a cell? What was the
+    creature about?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She was in a missionary meeting at the moment," St. George
+    explained, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mercy!" said Mrs. Hastings in exactly the same tone. "Some trick, I
+    expect. That's what I warn Olivia: 'So few things nowadays are done
+    through necessity or design.' Nearly everything is a trick. Every
+    invention is a trick&mdash;a cultured trick, one might say. Murder is a
+    trick, I suppose, to a murderer. That's why civilization is bad for
+    morals, don't you think? Well, and so she talked with you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "she did not say one word. But
+    she wrote something, and that is what I have come to bring you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What was it&mdash;some charm?" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Oh, nobody knows
+    what that kind of people may do. I'll meet any one face to face, but
+    these juggling, incantation individuals appal me. I have a brother
+    who travels in the Orient, and he tells me about hideous things they
+    do&mdash;raising wheat and things," she vaguely concluded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah!" said St. George quickly, "you have a brother&mdash;in the Orient?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes. My brother Otho has traveled abroad I don't know how many
+    years. We have a great many stamps. I can't begin to pronounce all
+    the names," the lady assured him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And this brother&mdash;is he your niece, Miss Holland's father?" St.
+    George asked eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Certainly," said Mrs. Hastings severely; "I have only one brother,
+    and it has been three years since I have seen him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pardon me, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "this may be most
+    important. Will you tell me when you last heard from him and where
+    he was?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I should have to look up the place," she answered, "I couldn't
+    begin to pronounce the name, I dare say. It was somewhere in the
+    South Atlantic, ten months or more ago."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," St. George quietly commented.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, and now this frightful creature," resumed Mrs. Hastings, "do,
+    pray, tell me what it was she wrote."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George produced the paper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is it," he said. "I fancy you will not know the street. It is
+    19 McDougle Street, and the name is simply Tabnit."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. And is it a letter?" his hostess demanded, "and whatever does
+    it say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is not a letter," St. George explained patiently, "and this is
+    all that it says. The name is, I suppose, the name of a person. I
+    have made sure that there is such a number in the street. I have
+    seen the house. But I have waited to consult you before going
+    there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, what is it you think?" Mrs. Hastings besought him. "Do you
+    think this person, whoever it is, can do something? And whatever can
+    he do? Oh dear," she ended, "I do want to act the way poor dear Mr.
+    Hastings would have acted. Only I know that he would have gone
+    straight to Bitley, or wherever she is, and held a revolver at that
+    mulatto creature's head, and <i>commanded</i> her to talk English. Mr.
+    Hastings was a very determined character. If you could have seen the
+    poor dear man's chin! But of course I can't do that, can I? And
+    that's what I say to Olivia. 'Olivia, one doesn't <i>need</i> a man's
+    judgment if one will only use judgment oneself.' What is it you
+    think, Mr. St. George?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before St. George could reply there entered the room, behind a low
+    announcement of his name, a man of sixty-odd years, nervous,
+    slightly stooped, his smooth pale face unlighted by little deep-set
+    eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, Mr. Frothingham!" said Mrs. Hastings in evident relief, "you
+    are just in time. Mr. St. John was just telling me horrible things
+    about this frightful mulatto creature. This is Mr. St. John. Mr.
+    Frothingham is my lawyer and my brother Otho's lawyer. And so I
+    telephoned him to come in and hear all about this. And now do go on,
+    Mr. St. John, about this hideous woman. What is it you think?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you do, Mr. St. John?" said the lawyer portentously. His
+    greeting was almost a warning, and reminded St. George of the way in
+    which certain brakemen call out stations. St. George responded as
+    blithely to this name as to his own and did not correct it. "And
+    what," went on the lawyer, sitting down with long unclosed hands
+    laid trimly along his knees, "have you to contribute to this most
+    remarkable occurrence, Mr. St. John?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George briefly narrated the events of the morning and placed the
+    slip of paper in the lawyer's hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah! We have here a communication in the nature of a confession,"
+    the lawyer observed, adjusting his gold pince-nez, head thrown back,
+    eyebrows lifted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Only the address, sir," said St. George, "and I was just saying to
+    Mrs. Hastings that some one ought to go to this address at once and
+    find out whatever is to be got there. Whoever goes I will very
+    gladly accompany."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham had a fashion of making ready to speak and
+    soliciting attention by the act, and then collapsing suddenly with
+    no explosion, like a bad Roman candle. He did this now, and whatever
+    he meant to say was lost to the race; but he looked very wise the
+    while. It was rather as if he discarded you as a fit listener, than
+    that he discarded his own comment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know but I ought to go myself," rambled Mrs. Hastings,
+    "perhaps Mr. Hastings would think I ought. Suppose, Mr. Frothingham,
+    that we both go. Dear, dear! Olivia always sees to my shopping and
+    flowers and everything executive, but I can't let her go into these
+    frightful places, can I?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a rustling at the far end of the room, and some one
+    entered. St. George did not turn, but as her soft skirts touched and
+    lifted along the floor he was tinglingly aware of her presence. Even
+    before Mrs. Hastings heard her light footfall, even before the clear
+    voice spoke, St. George knew that he was at last in the presence of
+    the arbiter of his enterprise, and of how much else he did not know.
+    He was silent, breathlessly waiting for her to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May I come in, Aunt Dora?" she said. "I want to know to what place
+    it is impossible for me to go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She came from the long room's boundary shadow. There was about her a
+    sense of white and gray with a knot of pale colour in her hat and an
+    orchid on her white coat. Mrs. Hastings, taking no more account of
+    her presence than she had of St. George's, tilted back her head and
+    looked at the primroses in the window as closely as at anything, and
+    absently presented him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia," she said, "this is Mr. St. John, who knows about that
+    frightful mulatto creature. Mr. St. George," she went on, correcting
+    the name entirely unintentionally, "my niece, Miss Holland. And I'm
+    sure I wish I knew what the necessary thing to be done <i>is</i>. That is
+    what I always tell you, you know, Olivia. 'Find out the necessary
+    thing and do it, and let the rest go.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It reminds me very much," said the lawyer, clearing his throat, "of
+    a case that I had on the April calendar&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland had turned swiftly to St. George:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know the mulatto woman?" she asked, and the lawyer passed by
+    the April calendar and listened.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I went to the Bitley Reformatory this morning to see her," St.
+    George replied. "She gave me this name and address. We have been
+    saying that some one ought to go there to learn what is to be
+    learned."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham in a silence of pursed lips offered the paper. Miss
+    Holland glanced at it and returned it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you tell us what your interest is in this woman?" she asked
+    evenly. "Why you went to see her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, Miss Holland," St. George replied, "you know of course that
+    the police have done their best to run this matter down. You know it
+    because you have courteously given them every assistance in your
+    power. But the police have also been very ably assisted by every
+    newspaper in town. I am fortunate to be acting in the interests of
+    one of these&mdash;the <i>Sentinel</i>. This clue was put in my hands. I came
+    to you confident of your coöperation."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings threw up her hands with a gesture that caught away the
+    chain of her eye-glass and sent it dangling in her lap, and her
+    side-combs tinkling to the tiled floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mercy!" she said, "a reporter!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I never receive reporters!" she cried, "Olivia&mdash;don't you
+    know? A newspaper reporter like that fearful man at Palm Beach, who
+    put me in the Courtney's ball list in a blue silk when I never wear
+    colours."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now really, really, this intrusion&mdash;" began Mr. Frothingham, his
+    long, unclosed hands working forward on his knees in undulations, as
+    a worm travels.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland turned to St. George, the colour dyeing her face and
+    throat, her manner a bewildering mingling of graciousness and
+    hauteur.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My aunt is right," she said tranquilly, "we never have received any
+    newspaper representative. Therefore, we are unfortunate never to
+    have met one. You were saying that we should send some one to
+    McDougle Street?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was aware of his heart-beats. It was all so unexpected
+    and so dangerous, and she was so perfectly equal to the
+    circumstance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was asking to be allowed to go myself, Miss Holland," he said
+    simply, "with whoever makes the investigation."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings was looking mutely from one to another, her forehead
+    in horizons of wrinkles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure, Olivia, I think you ought to be careful what you say,"
+    she plaintively began. "Mr. Hastings never allowed his name to go in
+    any printed lists even, he was so particular. Our telephone had a
+    private number, and all the papers had instructions never to mention
+    him, even if he was murdered, unless he took down the notice
+    himself. Then if anything important did happen, he often did take it
+    down, nicely typewritten, and sometimes even then they didn't use
+    it, because they knew how very particular he was. And of course we
+    don't know how&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's eyes blazed, but he did not lift them. The affront was
+    unstudied and, indeed, unconscious. But Miss Holland understood how
+    grave it was, for there are women whose intuition would tell them
+    the etiquette due upon meeting the First Syndic of Andorra or a
+    noble from Gambodia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We want the truth about this as much as Mr. St. George does," she
+    said quickly, smiling for the first time. St. George liked her
+    smile. It was as if she were amused, not absent-minded nor yet a
+    prey to the feminine immorality of ingratiation. "Besides," she
+    continued, "I wish to know a great many things. How did the mulatto
+    woman impress you, Mr. St. George?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland loosened her coat, revealing a little flowery waist,
+    and leaned forward with parted lips. She was very beautiful, with
+    the beauty of perfect, blooming, colourful youth, without line or
+    shadow. She was in the very noon of youth, but her eyes did not
+    wander after the habit of youth; they were direct and steady and a
+    bit critical, and she spoke slowly and with graceful sanity in a
+    voice that was without nationality. She might have been the
+    cultivated English-speaking daughter of almost any land of high
+    civilization, or she might have been its princess. Her face showed
+    her imaginative; her serene manner reassured one that she had not,
+    in consequence, to pay the usury of lack of judgment; she seemed
+    reflective, tender, and of a fine independence, tempered, however,
+    by tradition and unerring taste. Above all, she seemed alive,
+    receptive, like a woman with ten senses. And&mdash;above all again&mdash;she
+    had charm. Finally, St. George could talk with her; he did not
+    analyze why; he only knew that this woman understood what he said in
+    precisely the way that he said it, which is, perhaps, the fifth
+    essence in nature.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May I tell you?" asked St. George eagerly. "She seemed to me a very
+    wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world. She
+    is not mulatto&mdash;her features are quite classic; and she is not a
+    fanatic or a mad-woman. She is, of her race, a strangely superior
+    creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that
+    at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some
+    tremendous secret. I think we must find out what that is, first, for
+    your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth
+    while."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," cried Miss Holland, "delightful. I begin to be glad that it
+    happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I
+    thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did
+    make me wonder, but I hardly believed that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The newspapers," Mr. Frothingham said acidly, "became very much
+    involved in their statements concerning this matter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This 'Tabnit,'" said Miss Holland, and flashed a smile of pretty
+    deference at the lawyer to console him for her total neglect of his
+    comment, "in McDougle Street. Who can he be?&mdash;he <i>is</i> a man, I
+    suppose. And where is McDougle Street?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George explained the location, and Mrs. Hastings fretfully
+    commented.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure, Olivia," she said, "I think it is frightfully unwomanly
+    in you&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To take so much interest in my own murder?" Miss Holland asked in
+    amusement. "Aunt Dora, I'm going to do more: I suggest that you and
+    Mr. Frothingham and I go with Mr. St. George to this address in
+    McDougle Street&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear Olivia!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, "it's in the very heart of
+    the Bowery&mdash;isn't it, Mr. St. John? And only think&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was as if Mrs. Hastings' frustrate words emerged in the fantastic
+    guise of her facial changes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, it isn't quite the Bowery, Mrs. Hastings," St. George
+    explained, "though it won't look unlike."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wish I knew what Mr. Hastings would have done," his widow
+    mourned, "he always said to me: 'Medora, do only the necessary
+    thing.' Do you think this <i>is</i> the necessary thing&mdash;with all the
+    frightful smells?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is perfectly safe," ventured St. George, "is it not, Mr.
+    Frothingham?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham bowed and tried to make non-partisanship seem a
+    tasteful resignation of his own will.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am at Mrs. Hastings' command," he said, waving both hands, once,
+    from the wrist.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know the place is really only a few blocks from Washington
+    Square," St. George submitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings brightened.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I have some friends in Washington Square," she said, "people
+    whom I think a great deal of, and always have. If you really feel,
+    Olivia&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do," said Miss Holland simply, "and let us go now, Aunt Dora. The
+    brougham has been at the door since I came in. We may as well drive
+    there as anywhere, if Mr. St. George is willing."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall be happy," said St. George sedately, longing to cry:
+    "Willing! Willing! Oh, Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland&mdash;<i>willing</i>!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland and St. George and the lawyer were alone for a few
+    minutes while Mrs. Hastings rustled away for her bonnet. Miss
+    Holland sat where the afternoon light, falling through the corner
+    window, smote her hair to a glory of pale colour, and St. George's
+    eyes wandered to the glass through which the sun fell. It was a thin
+    pane of irregular pieces set in a design of quaint, meaningless
+    characters, in the centre of which was the figure of a sphinx,
+    crucified upon an upright cross and surrounded by a border of coiled
+    asps with winged heads. The window glittered like a sheet of gems.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What wonderful glass," involuntarily said St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is it not?" Miss Holland said enthusiastically. "My father sent it.
+    He sent nearly all these things from abroad."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wonder where such glass is made," observed St. George; "it is
+    like lace and precious stones&mdash;hardly more painted than carved."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She bent upon him such a sudden, searching look that St. George felt
+    his eyes held by her own.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you know anything of my father?" she demanded suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Only that Mrs. Hastings has just told me that he is abroad&mdash;in the
+    South Atlantic," St. George wonderingly replied.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, I am very foolish," said Miss Holland quickly, "we have not
+    heard from him in ten months now, and I am frightfully worried. Ah
+    yes, the glass is beautiful. It was made in one of the South
+    Atlantic islands, I believe&mdash;so were all these things," she added;
+    "the same figure of the crucified sphinx is on many of them."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you know what it means?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the symbol used by the people in one of the islands, my
+    father said," she answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "These symbols usually, I believe," volunteered Mr. Frothingham,
+    frowning at the glass, "have little significance, standing merely
+    for the loose barbaric ideas of a loose barbaric nation."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George thought of the ladies of Doctor Johnson's Amicable
+    Society who walked from the town hall to the Cathedral in Lichfield,
+    "in linen gowns, and each has a stick with an acorn; but for the
+    acorn they could give no reason."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked long at the glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She," he said finally, "our false mulatto, ought to stand before
+    just such glass."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland laughed. She nodded her head a little, once, every time
+    she laughed, and St. George was learning to watch for that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The glass would suit any style of beauty better than steel bars,"
+    she said lightly as Mrs. Hastings came fluttering back. Mrs.
+    Hastings fluttered ponderously, as humblebees fly. Indeed, when one
+    considered, there was really a "blunt-faced bee" look about the
+    woman.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The brougham had on the box two men in smart livery; the footman,
+    closing the door, received St. George's reply to Mrs. Hastings'
+    appeal to "tell the man the number of this frightful place."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dare say I haven't been careful," Mrs. Hastings kept anxiously
+    observing, "I have been heedless, I dare say. And I always think
+    that what one must avoid is heedlessness, don't you think? Didn't
+    Napoleon say that if only Cæsar had been first in killing the men
+    who wanted to kill him&mdash;something about Pompey's statue being kept
+    clean. What was it&mdash;why should they blame Cæsar for the condition of
+    the public statues?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear Mrs. Hastings," Mr. Frothingham reminded her, his long
+    gloved hands laid trimly along his knees as before, "you are in my
+    care."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The statue problem faded from the lady's eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Poor, dear Mr. Hastings always said you were so admirable at
+    cross-questioning," she recalled, partly reassured.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," cried Miss Holland protestingly, "Aunt Dora, this is an
+    adventure. We are going to see 'Tabnit.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent, ecstatically reviewing the events of the last
+    six hours and thinking unenviously of Amory, rocking somewhere with
+    <i>The Aloha</i> on a mere stretch of green water:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If Chillingworth could see me now," he thought victoriously, as the
+    carriage turned smartly into McDougle Street.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0004"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER IV
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    No. 19 McDougle Street had been chosen as a likely market by a
+    "hokey-pokey" man, who had wheeled his cart to the curb before the
+    entrance. There, despite Mrs. Hastings' coach-man's peremptory
+    appeal, he continued to dispense stained ice-cream to the little
+    denizens of No. 19 and the other houses in the row. The brougham,
+    however, at once proved a counter-attraction and immediately an
+    opposition group formed about the carriage step and exchanged
+    penetrating comments upon the livery.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mrs. Hastings, you and Miss Holland would better sit here,
+    perhaps," suggested St. George, alighting hurriedly, "until I see if
+    this man is to be found."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Please," said Miss Holland, "I've always been longing to go into
+    one of these houses, and now I'm going. Aren't we, Aunt Dora?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you think&mdash;" ventured Mr. Frothingham in perplexity; but Mr.
+    Frothingham's perplexity always impressed one as duty-born rather
+    than judicious, and Miss Holland had already risen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" protested Mrs. Hastings faintly, accepting St. George's
+    hand, "do look at those children's aprons. I'm afraid we'll all
+    contract fever after fever, just coming this far."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Unkempt women were occupying the doorstep of No. 19. St. George
+    accosted them and asked the way to the rooms of a Mr. Tabnit. They
+    smiled, displaying their wonderful teeth, consulted together, and
+    finally with many labials and uncouth pointings of shapely hands
+    they indicated the door of the "first floor front," whose wooden
+    shutters were closely barred. St. George led the way and entered the
+    bare, unclean passage where discordant voices and the odours of
+    cooking wrought together to poison the air. He tapped smartly at the
+    door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Immediately it was opened by a graceful boy, dressed in a long,
+    belted coat of dun-colour. He had straight black hair, and eyes
+    which one saw before one saw his face, and he gravely bowed to each
+    of the party in turn before answering St. George's question.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Assuredly," said the youth in perfect English, "enter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They found themselves in an ample room extending the full depth of
+    the house; and partly because the light was dim and partly in sheer
+    amazement they involuntarily paused as the door clicked behind them.
+    The room's contrast to the squalid neighbourhood was complete. The
+    apartment was carpeted in soft rugs laid one upon another so that
+    footfalls were silenced. The walls and ceiling were smoothly covered
+    with a neutral-tinted silk, patterned in dim figures; and from a
+    fluted pillar of exceeding lightness an enormous candelabrum shed
+    clear radiance upon the objects in the room. The couches and divans
+    were woven of some light reed, made with high fantastic backs, in
+    perfect purity of line however, and laid with white mattresses. A
+    little reed table showed slender pipes above its surface and these,
+    at a touch from the boy, sent to a great height tiny columns of
+    water that tinkled back to the square of metal upon which the table
+    was set. A huge fan of blanched grasses automatically swayed from
+    above. On a side-table were decanters and cups and platters of a
+    material frail and transparent. Before the shuttered window stood an
+    observable plant with coloured leaves. On a great table in the
+    room's centre were scattered objects which confused the eye. A light
+    curtain stirring in the fan's faint breeze hung at the far end of
+    the room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a career which had held many surprises, some of which St. George
+    would never be at liberty to reveal to the paper in whose service he
+    had come upon them, this was one of the most alluring. The mere
+    existence of this strange and luxurious habitation in the heart of
+    such a neighbourhood would, past expression, delight Mr. Crass, the
+    feature man, and no doubt move even Chillingworth to approval.
+    Chillingworth and Crass! Already they seemed strangers. St. George
+    glanced at Miss Holland; she was looking from side to side, like a
+    bird alighted among strange flowers; she met his eyes and dimpled
+    in frank delight. Mrs. Hastings sat erectly beside her, her
+    tortoise-rimmed glasses expressing bland approval. The improbability
+    of her surroundings had quite escaped her in her satisfied discovery
+    that the place was habitable. The lawyer, his thin lips parted, his
+    head thrown back so that his hair rested upon his coat collar,
+    remained standing, one long hand upon a coat lapel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," said Miss Holland softly, "it <i>is</i> an adventure, Aunt Dora."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George liked that. It irritated him, he had once admitted, to
+    see a woman live as if living were a matter of life and death. He
+    wished her to be alive to everything, but without suspiciously
+    scrutinizing details, like a census-taker. To appreciate did not
+    seem to him properly to mean to assess. Miss Holland, he would have
+    said, seemed to live by the beats of her heart and not by the waves
+    of her hair&mdash;but another proof, perhaps, of "if thou likest her
+    opinions thou wilt praise her virtues."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was but a moment before the curtain was lifted, and there
+    approached a youth, apparently in the twenties, slender and
+    delicately formed as a woman, his dark face surmounted by a great
+    deal of snow-white hair. He was wearing garments of grey, cut in
+    unusual and graceful lines, and his throat was closely wound in
+    folds of soft white, fastened by a rectangular green jewel of
+    notable size and brilliance. His eyes, large and of exceeding beauty
+    and gentleness, were fixed upon St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sir," said St. George, "we have been given this address as one
+    where we may be assisted in some inquiries of the utmost importance.
+    The name which we have is simply 'Tabnit.' Have I the honour&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Their host bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am Prince Tabnit," he said quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, filled with fresh amazement, gravely named himself and,
+    making presentation of the others, purposely omitted the name of
+    Miss Holland. However, hardly had he finished before their host
+    bowed before Miss Holland herself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And you," he said, "you to whom I owe an expiation which I can
+    never make,&mdash;do you know it is my servant who would have taken your
+    life?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the brief interval following this naïve assertion, his guests
+    were not unnaturally speechless. Miss Holland, bending slightly
+    forward, looked at the prince breathlessly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have suffered," he went on, "I have suffered indescribably since
+    that terrible morning when I missed her and understood her mission.
+    I followed quickly&mdash;I was without when you entered, but I came too
+    late. Since then I have waited, unwilling to go to you, certain that
+    the gods would permit the possible. And now&mdash;what shall I say?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He hesitated, his eyes meeting Miss Holland's. And in that moment
+    Mrs. Hastings found her voice. She curved the chain of her
+    eye-glasses over her ear, threw back her head until the
+    tortoise-rims included her host, and spoke her mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, Prince Tabnit," she said sharply&mdash;quite as if, St. George
+    thought, she had been nursery governess to princes all her life&mdash;"I
+    must say that I think your regret comes somewhat late in the day.
+    It's all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has
+    tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a
+    servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous
+    and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her voice, never modulated in her excitements, was so full that no
+    one heard at that instant a quick, indrawn breath from St. George,
+    having something of triumph and something of terror. Even as he
+    listened he had been running swiftly over the objects in the room to
+    fasten every one in his memory, and his eyes had rested upon the
+    table at his side. A disc of bronze, supported upon a carven tripod,
+    caught the light and challenged attention to its delicate traceries;
+    and within its border of asps and goat's horns he saw cut in the
+    dull metal a sphinx crucified upon an upright cross&mdash;an exact
+    facsimile of the device upon that strange opalized glass from some
+    far-away island which he had lately noted in the window in Mrs.
+    Hastings' drawing-room. Instantly his mind was besieged by a volley
+    of suppositions and imaginings, but even in his intense excitement
+    as to what this simple discovery might bode, he heard the prince's
+    soft reply to Mrs. Hastings:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Madame," said the prince, "she is a loyal creature. Whatever she
+    does, she believes herself to be doing in my service. I trusted her.
+    I believed that such error was impossible to her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Error!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, looking about her for support and
+    finding little in the aspect of Mr. Augustus Frothingham, who
+    appeared to be regarding the whole proceeding as one from which he
+    was to extract data to be thought out at some future infinitely
+    removed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As for St. George, he had never had great traffic with a future
+    infinitely removed; he had a youthful and somewhat imaginative
+    fashion of striking before the iron was well in the fire.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your servant believed, then, your Highness," he said clearly,
+    "that in taking Miss Holland's life she was serving you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must regretfully conclude so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George rose, holding the little brazen disc which he had taken
+    from the table, and confronted his host, compelling his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps you will tell us, Prince Tabnit," he said coolly, "what it
+    is that the people who use this device find against Miss Holland's
+    father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George heard Olivia's little broken cry.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the same!" she exclaimed. "Aunt Dora&mdash;Mr. Frothingham&mdash;it is
+    the crucified sphinx that was on so many of the things that father
+    sent. Oh," she cried to the prince, "can it be possible that you
+    know him&mdash;that you know anything of my father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    To St. George's amazement the face of the prince softened and glowed
+    as if with peculiar delight, and he looked at St. George with
+    admiration.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is it possible," he murmured, half to himself, "that your race has
+    already developed intuition? Are you indeed so near to the Unknown?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He took quick steps away and back, and turned again to St. George, a
+    strange joy dawning in his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If there be some who are ready to know!" he said. "Ah," he recalled
+    himself penitently to Miss Holland, "your father&mdash;Otho Holland, I
+    have seen him many times."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Seen Otho</i>!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, as pink and trembling and
+    expressionless as a disturbed mold of jelly. "Oh, poor, dear Otho!
+    Did he live where there are people like your frightful servant?
+    Olivia, think! Maybe he is lying at the bottom of a gorge, all
+    wounded and bloody, with a dagger in his back! Oh, my poor, dear
+    Otho, who used to wheel me about!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings collapsed softly on the divan, her glasses fallen in
+    her lap, her side-combs slipping silently to the rug. Olivia had
+    risen and was standing before Prince Tabnit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me," she said trembling, "when have you seen him? Is he well?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit swept the faces of the others and his eyes returned to
+    Miss Holland and dropped to the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The last time that I saw him, Miss Holland," he answered, "was
+    three months ago. He was then alive and well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Something in his tone chilled St. George and sent a sudden thrill of
+    fear to his heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He was then alive and well?" St. George repeated slowly. "Will you
+    tell us more, your Highness? Will you tell us why the death of his
+    daughter should be considered a service to the prince of a country
+    which he had visited?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are very wonderful," observed the prince, smiling meditatively
+    at St. George, "and your penetration gives me good news&mdash;news that
+    I had not hoped for, yet. I can not tell you all that you ask, but I
+    can tell you much. Will you sit down?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He turned and glanced at the curtain at the far end of the room.
+    Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were
+    placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties
+    not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and
+    Finnish and all but Icelandic cafés in every block.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pray do me the honour," the prince besought, taking the dishes from
+    the hands of the boy. "It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell
+    you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before
+    him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the
+    smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business
+    toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He
+    impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from
+    the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer
+    atmosphere. The lawyer's face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+    never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of
+    affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a
+    tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that
+    had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and
+    with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white
+    berries, such as the Japanese call "pinedews"; there was a tea
+    distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury
+    and fantastic. So potent was the spell of the prince's hospitality,
+    and so gracious the insistence with which he set before them the
+    strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia, eager almost to tears
+    for news of her father, and Mrs. Hastings, as critical and
+    suspicious as some beetle with long antennæ, might not refuse them.
+    As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might be Cagliostro's
+    spagiric food, or "extract of Saturn," for aught that his previous
+    experience equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and was
+    constrained to nibble again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they had been served, Prince Tabnit abruptly began speaking,
+    the while turning the fine stem of his glass in his delicate
+    fingers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You do not know," he said simply, "where the island of Yaque lies?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings sat erect.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yaque!" she exclaimed. "That was the name of the place where your
+    father was, Olivia. I know I remembered it because it wasn't like
+    the man What's-his-name in <i>As You Like It</i>, and because it didn't
+    begin with a J."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The island is my home," Prince Tabnit continued, "and now, for the
+    first time, I find myself absent from it. I have come a long
+    journey. It is many miles to that little land in the eastern seas,
+    that exquisite bit of the world, as yet unknown to any save the
+    island-men. We have guarded its existence, but I have no fear to
+    tell you, for no mariner, unaided by an islander, could steer a
+    course to its coasts. And I can tell you little about the island for
+    reasons which, if you will forgive me, you would hardly understand.
+    I must tell you something of it, however, that you may know the
+    remarkable conditions which led to the introduction of Mr. Holland
+    to Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The island of Yaque," continued the prince, "or Arqua, as the name
+    was written by the ancient Ph&oelig;nicians, has been ruled by hereditary
+    monarchs since 1050 B.C., when it was settled."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What date did I understand you to say, sir?" demanded Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled faintly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am well aware," he said, "that to the western mind&mdash;indeed, to
+    any modern mind save our own&mdash;I shall seem to be speaking in
+    mockery. None the less, what I am saying is exact. It is believed
+    that the enterprises of the Ph&oelig;nicians in the early ages took them
+    but a short distance, if at all, beyond the confines of the
+    Mediterranean. It is merely known that, in the period of which I
+    speak, a more adventurous spirit began to be manifested, and the
+    Straits of Gibraltar were passed and settlements were made in
+    Iberia. But how far these adventurers actually penetrated has been
+    recorded only in those documents that are in the hands of my
+    people&mdash;descendants of the boldest of these mariners who pushed
+    their galleys out into the Atlantic. At this time the king of Tyre
+    was Abibaal, soon to be succeeded by his son Hiram, the friend, you
+    will remember, of King David,&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham, who did not go to the theatre for fear of exciting
+    his imagination, uttered the soft non-explosion which should have
+    been speech.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "King Abibaal," continued the prince, "who maintained his court in
+    great pomp, had a younger and favourite son who bore his own name.
+    He was a wild youth of great daring, and upon the accession of
+    Hiram to the throne he left Tyre and took command of a galley of
+    adventuresome spirits, who were among the first to pass the
+    straits and gain the open sea. The story of their wild voyage I
+    need not detail; it is enough to say that their trireme was
+    wrecked upon the coast of Yaque; and Abibaal and those who joined
+    him&mdash;among them many members of the court circle and even of the
+    royal family&mdash;settled and developed the island. And there the race
+    has remained without taint of admixture, down to the present day.
+    Of what was wrought on the island I can tell you little, though
+    the time will come when the eyes of the whole world will be
+    turned upon Yaque as the forerunner of mighty things. Ruled over
+    by the descendants of Abibaal, the islanders have dwelt in peace
+    and plenty for nearly three thousand years&mdash;until, in fact, less
+    than a year ago. Then the line thus traceable to King Hiram
+    himself abruptly terminated with the death of King Chelbes,
+    without issue."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Again Mr. Frothingham attempted to speak, and again he collapsed
+    softly, without expression, according to his custom. As for St.
+    George, he was remembering how, when he first went to the paper, he
+    had invariably been sent to the anteroom to listen to the daily
+    tales of invention, oppression and projects for which a continual
+    procession of the more or less mentally deficient wished the
+    <i>Sentinel</i> to stand sponsor. St. George remembered in particular one
+    young student who soberly claimed to have invented wireless
+    telegraphy and who molested the staff for months. Was this olive
+    prince, he wondered, going to prove himself worth only a half-column
+    on a back page, after all?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I understand you to say," said St. George, with the weary
+    self-restraint of one who deals with lunatics, "that the line of
+    King Hiram, the friend of King David of Israel, became extinct less
+    than a year ago?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do not conceal your incredulity," he said liberally, "for I
+    forgive it. You see, then," he went on serenely, "how in Yaque the
+    question of the succession became engrossing. The matter was not
+    merely one of ascendancy, for the Yaquians are singularly free from
+    ambition. But their pride in their island is boundless. They see in
+    her the advance guard of civilization, the peculiar people to whom
+    have come to be intrusted many of the secrets of being. For I should
+    tell you that my people live a life that is utterly beyond the ken
+    of all, save a few rare minds in each generation. My people live
+    what others dream about, what scientists struggle to fathom, what
+    the keenest philosophers and economists among you can not formulate.
+    We are," said Prince Tabnit serenely, "what the world will be a
+    thousand years from now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings broke in plaintively, "that I hope
+    your servant, for instance, is not a sample of what the world is
+    coming to!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled indulgently, as if a child had laid a little,
+    detaining hand upon his sleeve.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Be that as it may," he said evenly, "the throne of Yaque was still
+    empty. Many stood near to the crown, but there seemed no reason for
+    choosing one more than another. One party wished to name the head of
+    the House of the Litany, in Med, the King's city, who was the chief
+    administrator of justice. Another, more democratic than these,
+    wished to elevate to the throne a man from whose family we had won
+    knowledge of both perpetual motion and the Fourth Dimension&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled angelically, as one who resignedly sees the last
+    fragments of a shining hope float away. This quite settled it. The
+    olive prince was crazy. Did not St. George remember the old man in
+    the frayed neckerchief and bagging pockets who had brought to the
+    office of the <i>Sentinel</i> chart after chart about perpetual motion,
+    until St. George and Amory had one day told him gravely that they
+    had a machine inside the office then that could make more things go
+    for ever than he had ever dreamed of, though they had <i>not</i> said
+    that the machine was named Chillingworth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You have knowledge of both these things?" asked St. George
+    indulgently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yaque understood both those laws," said the prince quietly, "when
+    William the Conqueror came to England."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He hesitated for a moment and then, regardless of another soft
+    explosion from Mr. Frothingham's lips, he added:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you not see? Will you not understand? It is our knowledge of the
+    Fourth Dimension which has enabled us to keep our island a secret."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George suddenly thrilled from head to foot. What if he were
+    speaking the truth? What if this man were speaking the truth?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Moreover," resumed the prince, "there were those among us who had
+    long believed that new strength would come to my people by the
+    introduction of an inhabitant of one of the continents. His coming
+    would, however, necessitate his sovereignty among us, in fulfilment
+    of an ancient Ph&oelig;nician law, providing that the state, and every
+    satrapy therein, shall receive no service, either of blood or of
+    bond, nor enter into the marriage contract with an alien; from which
+    law only the royal house is exempt. Thus were the two needs of our
+    land to be served by the means to which we had recourse. For there
+    being no way to settle the difficulty, we vowed to leave the matter
+    to Chance, that great patient arbiter of destinies of which your
+    civilization takes no account, save to reduce it to slavery.
+    Accordingly each inhabitant of the island took a solemn oath to
+    await, with an open mind free from choice or prejudice, the
+    settlement of the event, certain that the gods would permit the
+    possible. Five days after this decision our watchers upon the hills
+    sighted a South African transport bound for the Azores to coal. A
+    hundred miles from our coast she was wrecked, and it was thought
+    that all on board had been lost. A submarine was ordered to the
+    spot&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mean," interrupted St. George, "that you were able to see
+    the wreck at that distance?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Certainly," said the prince. "Pray forgive me," he added winningly,
+    "if I seem to boast. It is difficult for me to believe that your
+    appliances are so immature. We were using steamship navigation and
+    limiting our vision at the time of Pericles, but the futility of
+    these was among our first discoveries."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Involuntarily St. George turned to Miss Holland. What would she
+    think, he found himself wondering. Her eyes were luminous and her
+    breath was coming quickly; he was relieved to find that she had not
+    the infectious vulgarity to doubt the possibility of what seemed
+    impossible. This was one of the qualities of Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham, who had assumed an air of polite interest and an
+    accurately cynical smile, and the manner of generously lending his
+    professional attention to any of the vagaries of the client. Mrs.
+    Hastings stirred uneasily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure," she said fretfully, "that I must be very stupid, but I
+    simply can <i>not</i> follow you. Why, you talk about things that don't
+    exist! My husband, who was a very practical and advanced man, would
+    have shown you at once that what you say is impossible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here was the attitude of the Commonplace the world over, thought St.
+    George: to believe in wireless telegraphy simply because it has
+    been found out, and to disbelieve in the Fourth Dimension because it
+    has not been.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can not explain these things," admitted the prince gravely, "and
+    I dare say that you could prove that they do not exist, just as a
+    man from another planet could show us to his own satisfaction that
+    there are no such things as music or colour."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Go on, please," said Olivia eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia, I'm sure," protested Mrs. Hastings, "I think it's very
+    unwomanly of you to show such an interest in these things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you bear with me for one moment, Mrs. Hastings?" begged the
+    prince, "and perhaps I shall be able to interest you. The submarine
+    returned, bringing the sole survivor of the wreck of the African
+    transport."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, now," Mrs. Hastings assured him blandly, "you are dealing with
+    things that can happen. My brother Otho, my niece's father, was just
+    this last year the sole survivor of the wreck of a very important
+    vessel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have the honour, Mrs. Hastings, to be narrating to you the
+    circumstances attending the discovery of your brother and Miss
+    Holland's father, after the wreck of that vessel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My father?" cried Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "After this manner, Chance had rewarded us. We crowned your father
+    King of Yaque."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0005"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER V
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    OLIVIA PROPOSES
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit's announcement was received by his guests in the
+    silence of amazement. If they had been told that Miss Holland's
+    father was secretly acting as King of England they could have been
+    no more profoundly startled than to hear stated soberly that he had
+    been for nearly a year the king of a cannibal island. For the
+    cannibal phase of his experience seemed a foregone conclusion. To
+    St. George, profoundly startled and most incredulous, the possible
+    humour of the situation made first appeal. The picture of an
+    American gentleman seated upon a gold throne in a leopard-skin coat,
+    ordering "oysters and foes" for breakfast, was irresistible.
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "But he shaved with a shell when he chose,<br>
+          'Twas the manner of Primitive Man"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+    floated through his mind, and he brought himself up sharply.
+    Clearly, somebody was out of his head, but it must not be he.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What?" cried Mrs. Hastings in two inelegant syllables, on the
+    second of which her uncontrollable voice rose. "My brother Otho, a
+    vestry-man at St. Mark's&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aunt Dora!" pleaded Olivia. "Tell us," she besought the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "King Otho I of Yaque," the prince was begining, but the title was
+    not to be calmly received by Mrs. Hastings.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>King</i> Otho!" she articulated. "Then&mdash;am I royalty?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "All who may possibly succeed to the throne Blackstone holds to be
+    royalty," said the lawyer in an edictal voice, and St. George looked
+    away from Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>The Princess Olivia</i>!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "King Otho," continued the prince, "ruled wisely and well for seven
+    months, and it was at the beginning of that time that the imperial
+    submarine was sent to the Azores with letters and a packet to you.
+    The enterprise, however, was attended by so great danger of
+    discovery that it was never repeated. This is why, for so long, you
+    have had no word from the king. And now I come," said the prince
+    with hesitation, "to the difficult part of my narrative."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He paused and Mr. Frothingham rushed to his assistance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As the family solicitor," said the lawyer, pursing his lips, and
+    waving his hands, once, from the wrists, "would you not better
+    divulge to my ear alone, the&mdash;a&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;no!" flashed Olivia. "No, Mr. Frothingham&mdash;please."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince inclined his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will it surprise you, Miss Holland," he said, "to learn that I made
+    my voyage to this country expressly to seek you out?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To seek me?" exclaimed Olivia. "But&mdash;has anything happened to my
+    father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We hope not," replied the prince, "but what I have to tell will
+    none the less occasion you anxiety. Briefly, Miss Holland, it is
+    more than three months since your father suddenly and mysteriously
+    disappeared from Yaque, leaving absolutely no clue to his
+    whereabouts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    A little cry broke from Olivia's lips that went to St. George's
+    heart. Mrs. Hastings, with a gesture that was quite wild and sent
+    her bonnet hopelessly to one side, burst into a volley of
+    exclamations and demands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who did it?" she wailed. "Who did it? Otho is a gentleman. He
+    would never have the bad taste to disappear, like all those
+    dreadful people's wives, if somebody hadn't&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear Madame," interposed Mr. Frothingham, "calm&mdash;calm
+    yourself. There are families of undisputed position which
+    record disappearances in several generations."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Please," pleaded Olivia. "Ah, tell us," she begged the prince
+    again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is, unfortunately, but little to tell, Miss Holland," said
+    the prince with sympathetic regret. "I had the honour, three months
+    ago, to entertain the king, your father, at dinner. We parted at
+    midnight. His Majesty seemed&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "His Majesty!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, smiling up at the opposite
+    wall as if her thought saw glories.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;in the best of health and spirits," continued the prince. "A
+    meeting of the High Council was to be held at noon on the following
+    day. The king did not appear. From that moment no eye in Yaque has
+    fallen upon him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One moment, your Highness," said St. George quickly; "in the
+    absence of the king, who presides over the High Council?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As the head of the House of the Litany, the chief administrator of
+    justice, it is I," said the prince with humility.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes," St. George said evenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But what have you done?" cried Olivia. "Have you had search made?
+    Have you&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everything," the prince assured her. "The island is not large. Not
+    a corner of it remains unvisited. The people, who were devoted to
+    the king, your father, have sought night and day. There is, it is
+    hardly right to conceal from you," the prince hesitated, "a
+    circumstance which makes the disappearance the more alarming."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell us. Keep nothing from us, I beg, Prince Tabnit," besought
+    Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For centuries," said the prince slowly, "there has been in the
+    keeping of the High Council of the island a casket, containing what
+    is known as the Hereditary Treasure. This casket, with some of the
+    finest of its jewels, was left by King Abibaal himself. Since his
+    time every king of the island has upon his death bequeathed to the
+    casket the finest jewel in his possession; and its contents are now
+    therefore of inestimable value. The circumstance to which I refer is
+    that two days after the disappearance of the king, your father,
+    which spread grief and alarm through all Yaque, it was discovered
+    that the Hereditary Treasure was gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Gone!" burst from the lips of the prince's auditors.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As utterly as if the Fifth Dimension had received it," the prince
+    gravely assured them. "The loss, as you may imagine, is a grievous
+    one. The High Council immediately issued a proclamation that if the
+    treasure be not restored by a certain date&mdash;now barely two weeks
+    away&mdash;a heavy tax will be levied upon the people to make good, in
+    the coin of the realm, this incalculable loss. Against this the
+    people, though they are a people of peace, are murmurous."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Indeed!" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Great loyalty it is that sets up the
+    loss of their trumpery treasure over and above the loss of their
+    king, my brother Otho! If," she shrilled indignantly, "we are not
+    unwise to listen to this at all. What is it you think? What is it
+    your people think?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She raised her head until she had framed the prince in
+    tortoise-shell. Mrs. Hastings never held her head quite still. It
+    continually waved about a little, so that usually, even in peace, it
+    intimated indignation; and when actual indignation set in, the jet
+    on her bonnet tinkled and ticked like so many angry sparrows.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Madame," said the prince, "there are those among his Majesty's
+    subjects who would willingly lay down their lives for him. But he is
+    a stranger to us&mdash;come of an alien race; and the double
+    disappearance is a most tragic occurrence, which the burden of the
+    tax has emphasized. To be frank, were his Majesty to reappear in
+    Yaque without the treasure having been found&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh!" breathed Mrs. Hastings, "they would kill him!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince shuddered and set his white teeth in his nether lip.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The gods forbid," he said. "Such primeval punishment is as unknown
+    among us as is war itself. How little you know my people; how
+    pitifully your instincts have become&mdash;forgive me&mdash;corrupted by
+    living in this barbarous age of yours, fumbling as you do at
+    civilization. With us death is a sacred rite, the highest tribute
+    and the last sacrifice to the Absolute. Our dying are carried to the
+    Temple of the Worshipers of Distance, and are there consecrated.
+    The limit of our punishment would be aerial exposure&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean?" cried St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I mean that in extreme cases we have, with due rite and ceremonial,
+    given a victim to an airship, without ballast or rudder, and
+    abundantly provisioned. Then with solemn ritual we have set him
+    adrift&mdash;an offering to the great spirits of space&mdash;so that he may
+    come to know. This," the prince paused in emotion, "this is the
+    worst that could befall your father."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How horrible!" cried Olivia. "Oh, how horrible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh," Mrs. Hastings moaned, "he was born to it. He was born to it.
+    When he was six he tied kites to his arms and jumped out the window
+    of the cupola and broke his collar bone&mdash;oh, Otho,&mdash;oh Heaven,&mdash;and
+    I made him eat oatmeal gruel three times a day when he was getting
+    well."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit," said St. George, "I beg you not to jest with us.
+    Have consideration for the two to whom this man is dear."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am speaking truth to you," said the prince earnestly. "I do not
+    wish to alarm these ladies, but I am bound in honour to tell you
+    what I know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah then," said St. George, his narrowed eyes meeting those of the
+    prince, "since the taking of life is unknown to you in Yaque, will
+    you explain how it was that your servant adopted such unerring
+    means to take the life of Miss Holland? And why?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My servant," said the prince readily, "belongs to the lahnas or
+    former serfs of the island. Upon her people, now the owners of rich
+    lands, the tax will fall heavily. Crazed by what she considers her
+    people's wrongs following upon the coming of the stranger sovereign,
+    the poor creature must have developed the primitive instincts of
+    your race. Before coming to this country my servant had never heard
+    of murder save as a superseded custom of antiquity, like the
+    crucifying of lions. Her discovery of your daily practice of murder,
+    and of murder practised as a cure for crime&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sir," began the lawyer imposingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;wakened in her the primitive instincts of humanity, and her
+    instinct took the deplorable and fanatic form of your own courts,"
+    finished the prince. "Her bitterness toward his Majesty she sought
+    to visit upon his daughter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia sprang to her feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must go to my father. I must go to Yaque," she cried ringingly.
+    "Prince Tabnit, will you take me to him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Into the prince's face leaped a fire of admiration for her beauty
+    and her daring. He bowed before her, his lowered lashes making thick
+    shadows on his dark cheeks.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I insist upon this," cried little Olivia firmly, "and if you do not
+    permit it, Prince Tabnit, we must publish what you have told us
+    from one end of the city to the other."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, by Jove," thought St. George, "and one's country will have a
+    Yaque exhibit in its own department at the next world's fair."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia! My child! Miss Holland&mdash;," began the lawyer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince spoke tranquilly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is precisely this errand," he said, "that has brought me to
+    America. Do you not see that, in the event of your father's failure
+    to return to his people, you will eventually be Queen of Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George found himself looking fixedly at Mrs. Hastings' false
+    front as the only reality in the room. If in a minute Rollo was
+    going to waken him by bringing in his coffee, he was going to
+    throttle Rollo&mdash;that was all. Olivia Holland, an American heiress,
+    the hereditary princess of a cannibal island! St. George still
+    insisted upon the cannibal; it somehow gave him a foothold among the
+    actualities.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I!" cried Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings, brows lifted, lips parted, winked with lightning
+    rapidity in an effort to understand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George pulled himself together.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your Highness," he said sternly, "there are several things upon
+    which I must ask you to enlighten us. And the first, which I hope
+    you will forgive, is whether you have any direct proof that what
+    you tell us of Miss Holland's father is true."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's it! That's it!" Mr. Frothingham joined him with all the
+    importance of having made the suggestion. "We can hardly proceed in
+    due order without proofs, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince turned toward the curtain at the room's end and the youth
+    appeared once more, this time bearing a light oval casket of
+    delicate workmanship. It was of a substance resembling both glass
+    and metal of changing, rainbow tints, and it passed through St.
+    George's mind as he observed it that there must be, to give such a
+    dazzling and unreal effect, more than seven colours in the spectrum.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A spectrum of seven colours," said the prince at the same moment,
+    "could not, of course, produce this surface. I confess that until I
+    came to this country I did not know that you had so few colours. Our
+    spectrum already consists of twelve colours visible to the naked
+    eye, and at least five more are distinguishable through our powerful
+    magnifying glasses."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. It was as if he had suddenly been permitted
+    to look past the door that bars and threatens all knowledge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince unlocked the casket. He drew out first a quantity of
+    paper of extreme thinness and lightness on which, embossed and
+    emblazoned, was the coat of arms of the Hollands&mdash;a sheaf of wheat
+    and an unicorn's head&mdash;and this was surmounted by a crown.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This," said the prince, "is now the device upon the signet ring of
+    the King of Yaque, the arms of your own family. And here chances to
+    be a letter from your father containing some instructions to me. It
+    is true that writing has with us been superseded by wireless
+    communication, excepting where there is need of great secrecy. Then
+    we employ the alphabet of any language we choose, these being almost
+    disused, as are the Cuneiform and Coptic to you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And how is it," St. George could not resist asking, "that you know
+    and speak the English?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled swiftly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To you," he said, "who delve for knowledge and who do not know that
+    it is absolute and to be possessed at will, this can not now be made
+    clear. Perhaps some day..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia had taken the paper from the prince and pressed it to her
+    lips, her eyes filling with tears. There was no mistaking that
+    evidence, for this was her father's familiar hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Otho always did write a fearful scrawl," Mrs. Hastings commented,
+    "his l's and his t's and his vowels were all the same height. I used
+    to tell him that I didn't know whatever people would think."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I may, moreover," continued the prince, "call to mind several
+    articles which were included in the packet sent from the Azores by
+    his Majesty. You have, for example, a tapestry representing an ibis
+    hunt; you have an image in pink sutro, or soft marble, of an ancient
+    Ph&oelig;nician god&mdash;Melkarth. And you have a length of stained glass
+    bearing the figure of the Tyrian sphinx, crucified, and surrounded
+    by coiled asps."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, it is true," said Olivia, "we have all these things."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, the trash must be quite expensive," observed Mrs. Hastings. "I
+    don't care much for so many colours myself, perhaps because I always
+    wear black; though I did wear light colours a good deal when I was a
+    girl."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What else, Mr. St. George?" inquired the prince pleasantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothing else," cried Olivia passionately. "I am satisfied. My
+    father is in danger, and I believe that he is in Yaque, for he would
+    never of his own will desert a place of trust. I must go to him.
+    And, Aunt Dora, you and Mr. Frothingham must go with me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, Olivia!" wailed Mrs. Hastings, a different key for every
+    syllable, "think&mdash;consider! Is it the necessary thing to do? And
+    what would your poor dear uncle have done? And is there a better way
+    than his way? For I always say that it is not really necessary to do
+    as my poor dear husband would have done, providing only that we can
+    find a better way. Oh," she mourned, lifting her hands, "that this
+    frightful thing should come to me at my age. Otho may be married to
+    a cannibal princess, with his sons catching wild goats by the hair
+    like Tennyson and the whistling parrots&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Madame," said the prince coldly, "forgets what I have been saying
+    of my country."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do not forget," declared Mrs. Hastings sharply, "but being behind
+    civilization and being ahead of civilization comes to the same thing
+    more than once. In morals it does."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. Olivia's splendid daring in her passionate
+    decision to go to her father stirred him powerfully; moreover, her
+    words outlined a possible course of his own whose magnitude startled
+    him, and at the same time filled him with a sudden, dazzling hope.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But where is your island, Prince Tabnit?" he asked. "You've
+    naturally no consul there and no cable, since you are not even on
+    the map."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yaque," said the prince readily, "lies almost due southwest from
+    the Azores."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham stirred skeptically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But such an island," he said pompously, "so rich in material for
+    the archaeologist, the anthropologist, the explorer in all fields of
+    antiquity&mdash;ah, it is out of the question, out of the question!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is difficult," said the prince patiently, "most difficult for me
+    to make myself intelligible to you&mdash;as difficult, if you will
+    forgive me, as if you were to try to explain calculus to one of the
+    street boys outside. But directly your phase of civilization has
+    opened to you the secrets of the Fourth Dimension, much will be
+    discovered to you which you do not now discern or dream, and among
+    these, Yaque. I do not jest," he added wearily, "neither do I expect
+    you to believe me. But I have told you the truth. And it would be
+    impossible for you to reach Yaque save in the company of one of the
+    islanders to whom the secret is known. I can not explain to you, any
+    more than I can explain harmony or colour."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, I'm sure," cried Mrs. Hastings fretfully, "I don't know why
+    you all keep wandering from the subject so. Now, my brother Otho&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit,"&mdash;Olivia's voice never seemed to interrupt, but
+    rather to "divide evidence finely" at the proper moment&mdash;"how long
+    will it take us to reach Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George thrilled at that "us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My submarine," replied the prince, "is plying about outside the
+    harbour. I arrived in four days."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By the way," St. George submitted, "since your wireless system is
+    perfected, why can not we have news of your island from here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The curve of the earth," explained the prince readily, "prevents.
+    We have conquered only those problems with which we have had to
+    deal. The curve of the earth has of course never entered our
+    calculation. We have approached the problem from another
+    standpoint."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We have much to do, Prince Tabnit," said Olivia; "when may we
+    leave?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Command me," said Prince Tabnit, bowing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-morrow!" cried Olivia, "to-morrow, at noon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings' voice broke over the name like ice upon a
+    warm promontory. Mrs. Hastings' voice was suited to say "Keziah" or
+    "Katinka," not Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you go, Mr. Frothingham?" demanded Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham's long hands hung down and he looked as if she had
+    proposed a jaunt to Mars.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My physician has ordered a sea-change," he mumbled doubtfully, "my
+    daughter Antoinette&mdash;I&mdash;really&mdash;there is nothing in all my
+    experience&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings in tears was superintending the search for
+    both side-combs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aunt Dora," said Olivia, "you're not going to fail me now. Prince
+    Tabnit&mdash;at noon to-morrow. Where shall we meet?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George listened, glowing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May I have the honour," suggested the prince, "of waiting upon you
+    at noon to conduct you? And I need hardly say that we undertake the
+    journey under oath of secrecy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anything&mdash;anything!" cried Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, my dear Olivia," breathed Mrs. Hastings weakly, "taking me, at
+    my age, into this awful place of Four Dimentias&mdash;or whatever it was
+    you said."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We will be ready to go with you at noon," said Olivia steadily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George held his peace as they made their adieux. A great many
+    things remained to be thought out, but one was clear enough.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The boy servant ran before them to the door. They made their way to
+    the street in the early dusk. A hurdy-gurdy on the curb was bubbling
+    over with merry discords, and was flanked by garrulous Italians with
+    push-carts, lighted by flaring torches. Men were returning from
+    work, children were quarreling, women were in doorways, and a
+    policeman was gossiping with the footman in a knot of watching
+    idlers. With a sigh that was like a groan, Mrs. Hastings sank back
+    on the cushions of the brougham.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel," she said, eyes closed, "as if I had been in a pagan temple
+    where they worship oracles and what's-his-names. What time is it? I
+    haven't an idea. Dear, dear, I want to get home and feel as if my
+    feet were on land and water again. I want some strong sleep and a
+    good sound cup of coffee, and then I shall know what's actually
+    what."
+</p>
+<p>
+    To St. George the slow drive up town was no less unreal than their
+    visit. His head was whirling, a hundred plans and speculations
+    filled his mind, and through these Mrs Hastings' chatter of
+    forebodings and the lawyer's patterned utterance hardly found their
+    way. At his own street he was set down, with Mrs. Hastings'
+    permission to call next day.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Holland gave him her hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can not thank you," she said, "I can not thank you. But try to
+    know, won't you, what this has been to me. Until to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Until to-morrow. St. George stood in the brightness of the street
+    looking after the vanishing carriage, his hand tingling from her
+    touch. Then he went up to his apartment and met Rollo&mdash;sleek,
+    deferential, the acme of the polite barbarism in which the prince
+    had made St. George feel that he and his world were living. Ah, he
+    thought, as Rollo took his hat, this was no way to live, with the
+    whole world singing to be discovered anew.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He sat down before the trim little white table with its pretty china
+    and silver and its one rose-shaded candle, but the doubtful content
+    of comfort was suddenly not enough. The spirit of the road and of
+    the chase was in his veins, and he was aglow with "the taste for
+    pilgriming." He looked about on the simple luxury with which he had
+    surrounded himself, and he welcomed his farewell to it. And when
+    Rollo had gone up stairs to complain in person of the shad-roe, St.
+    George spoke aloud:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If Miss Holland sails for Yaque to-morrow on the prince's
+    submarine," he said, "<i>The Aloha</i> and I will follow her."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0006"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    TWO LITTLE MEN
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Next morning St. George was early astir. He had slept little and his
+    dreams had been grotesques. He threw up his blind and looked across
+    buildings to the grey park. The sky was marked with rose, the still
+    reservoir gave back colour upon its breast, and the tower upon its
+    margin might have been some guttural-christened castle on the Rhine.
+    St. George drew a deep breath of good, new air and smiled for the
+    sake of the things that the day was to bring him. He was in the
+    golden age when the youthful expectation of enjoyment is just
+    beginning to be savoured by the inevitable longing for more light,
+    and he seemed to himself to be alluringly near the verge of both.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His first care the evening before had been to hunt out
+    Chillingworth. He had found him in a theatre and had got him out to
+    the foyer and kept him through the third act, pouring in his ears as
+    much as he felt that it was well for him to know. Chillingworth had
+    drawn his square, brown hands through his hair and, in lieu of
+    copy-paper, had nibbled away his programme and paced the corner by
+    the cloak-room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It looks like a great big thing," said the city editor; "don't you
+    think it looks like a great big thing?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Extraordinarily so," assented St. George, watching him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Can you handle it alone, do you think?" Chillingworth demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, that depends," replied St. George. "I'll see it
+    through, if it takes me to Yaque. But I'd like you to promise, Mr.
+    Chillingworth, that you won't turn Crass loose at it while I'm gone,
+    with his feverish head-lines. Mrs. Hastings and her niece must be
+    spared that, at all events."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you be a sentimental idiot," snapped Chillingworth, "and
+    spoil the biggest city story the paper ever had. Why, this may draw
+    the whole United States into a row, and mean war and a new
+    possession and maybe consulates and governorships and one thing or
+    another for the whole staff. St. George, don't spoil the sport.
+    Remember, I'm dropsical and nobody can tell what may happen. By the
+    way, where did you say this prince man is?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, I didn't say," St. George had answered quietly. "If you'll
+    forgive me, I don't think I shall say."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, you don't," ejaculated Chillingworth. "Well, you please be
+    around at eight o'clock in the morning."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George watched him walking sidewise down the aisle as he always
+    walked when he was excited. Chillingworth was a good sort at heart,
+    too; but given, as the bishop had once said of some one else, to
+    spending right royally a deal of sagacity under the obvious
+    impression that this is the only wisdom.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At his desk next morning Chillingworth gave to St. George a note
+    from Amory, who had been at Long Branch with <i>The Aloha</i> when the
+    letter was posted and was coming up that noon to put ashore
+    Bennietod.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May Cawthorne have his day off to-morrow and go with me?" the
+    letter ended. "I'll call up at noon to find out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yah!" growled Chillingworth, "it's breaking up the whole staff,
+    that's what it's doin'. You'll all want cut-glass typewriters next."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If I should sail to-day," observed St. George, quite as if he were
+    boarding a Sound steamer, "I'd like to take on at least two men. And
+    I'd like Amory and Cawthorne. You could hardly go yourself, could
+    you, Mr. Chillingworth?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, I couldn't," growled Chillingworth, "I've got to keep my tastes
+    down. And I've got to save up to buy kid gloves for the staff. Look
+    here&mdash;" he added, and hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes?" St. George complied in some surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bennietod's half sick anyway," said Chillingworth, "he's thin as
+    water, and if you would care&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By all means then," St. George assented heartily, "I would care
+    immensely. Bennietod sick is like somebody else healthy. Will you
+    mind getting Amory on the wire when he calls up, and tell him to
+    show up without fail at my place at noon to-day? And to wait there
+    for me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne, with a pair of shears quite a yard long, was
+    sitting at his desk clipping jokes for the fiction page. He was
+    humming a weary little tune to the effect that "Billy Enny took a
+    penny but now he hadn't many&mdash;Lookie They!" with which he whiled
+    away the hours of his gravest toil, coming out strongly on the
+    "Lookie They!" until Benfy on the floor above pounded for quiet
+    which he never got.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Cawthorne," said St. George, "it may be that I'm leaving to-night
+    on the yacht for an island out in the southeast. And the chief says
+    that you and Amory are to go along. Can you go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne's blue eyes met St. George's steadily for a moment,
+    and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can get the page done in an hour," he promised, "and I can pack
+    my thirty cents in ten minutes. Will that do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, this goes," he said. "Ask Chillingworth. Don't tell
+    any one else."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'Billy Enny took a penny,'" hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect
+    tranquillity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand
+    doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to
+    face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away.
+    Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world
+    which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present
+    knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced
+    his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk
+    more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early
+    morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand
+    Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only
+    avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out
+    incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For
+    only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to
+    be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid
+    wonderment at crêpe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed
+    woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in
+    McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive
+    comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour
+    gone astray.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted
+    him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons
+    brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the
+    latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of
+    furniture remained.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find
+    the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and
+    he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could
+    have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls,
+    to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so
+    emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured
+    a title. But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted
+    and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable
+    characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the
+    prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and
+    questioned a group of boys in the passage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yup," shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation
+    distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement
+    as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, "he means de
+    bloke wid de black block. Aw, he lef' early dis mornin' wid 's junk
+    follerin.' Dey's two of 'em. Wot's he t'ink? Dis ain't no Nigger's
+    Rest. Dis yere's all Eyetalian."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street. It was not yet ten
+    o'clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and
+    for his life he could not have waited longer. Perhaps it was not
+    true at all; perhaps none of it had happened. The McDougle Street
+    part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth? But as he
+    sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better.
+    The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time,
+    and she had said "Until to-morrow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to
+    her apartment. He found the drawing-room in confusion&mdash;the furniture
+    covered with linen, the bric-à-brac gone, and three steamer trunks
+    strapped and standing outside the door. All of which mattered to him
+    less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and
+    very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had
+    been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober
+    little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he
+    could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.
+    She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To
+    complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before
+    the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and
+    a muffin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."
+</p>
+<p>
+    For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the
+    little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Really leaving," she assented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham
+    sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great
+    comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added
+    naïvely, "but he must take her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he
+    reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the
+    daughter of its sovereign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place
+    below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince,
+    it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to assure them
+    that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no
+    impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt
+    withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St.
+    George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a
+    world of uncertainty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided
+    between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear
+    lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have a muffin&mdash;do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in
+    America for a time&mdash;let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St.
+    George, I want&mdash;oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you
+    see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now
+    to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was
+    a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through
+    the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds
+    without packing a bag and feeding the peacocks and leaving, pinned
+    to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought.
+    "Forgive me&mdash;what are you going to do all alone there in that
+    strange land, and such a land?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he
+    was lost in anticipative admiration; when she was neither he admired
+    more than ever.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know," said Olivia gravely, "I only know that I must go.
+    You see that, do you not&mdash;that I must go?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes," St. George assured her, "I do indeed, believe me. Don't
+    you think," he said, "that I might give you a lamp to rub if you
+    need help? And then I'll appear."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He nodded gravely.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, in Yaque. I shall rise out of a jar like the Evil Genie; and
+    though I shall be quite helpless you will still have the lamp. And I
+    shall be no end glad to have appeared."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But suppose," said Olivia merrily, "that when I have eaten a
+    pomegranate or a potato or something in Yaque I forget all about
+    America? And when you step out of the jar I say 'Off with his head,'
+    by mistake. How shall I know it is you when the jar is opened?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall ask you what the population of Yaque is," he assured her,
+    "and how the island compares with Manhattan, and if this is your
+    first visit, and how you are enjoying your stay; and then you will
+    recognize the talk of civilization and spare me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she protested, "I've longed to say 'Off with his head' to too
+    many people who have said all that to me. And you mustn't say that a
+    holiday always seems like Sunday, either."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereat they both laughed, and it seemed an uncommonly pleasant
+    world, and even the sad errand that was taking Olivia to Yaque
+    looked like a hope.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then the talk ran on pleasantly, and things went very briskly
+    forward, and there was no dearth of fleet little smiles at this and
+    that. What was she to bring him from Yaque&mdash;a pet ibis? No, he had
+    no taste for ibises&mdash;unless indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension
+    ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a
+    magic field-glass, with which one might see what is happening at an
+    infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he
+    wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her
+    errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the
+    puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor
+    children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of
+    science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with
+    mere tricks of jars of genii instead of applied electricity and its
+    daring. What an Arabian Nights' Entertainment we might have had if
+    only Scheherazade had ever heard of the Present! As for the
+    thousand-and-one-nights, they would not have contained all her
+    invention. No wonder that the time went trippingly for the two who
+    were concerned in such bewildering speculation as the prince had
+    made possible and who were furthering acquaintanceship besides.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, at all events," begged St. George at length, "will
+    you remember something while you are away?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your kindness, always," she returned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But will you remember," said St. George with his boy's eagerness,
+    "that there is some one who hopes no less than you for your success,
+    and who will be infinitely proud of any command at all from you? And
+    will you remember that, though I may not be successful, I shall at
+    least be doing something to try to help you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are very good," she said gently, "I shall remember. For already
+    you have not only helped me&mdash;you have made the whole matter
+    possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And what of that," propounded St. George gloomily, "if I can't help
+    you just when the danger begins? I insist, Miss Holland, that it
+    takes far more good nature to see some one else set off at adventure
+    than it takes to go one's self. Won't you let me come back here at
+    twelve o'clock and go down with you to the boat?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By all means," Olivia assented, "my aunt and I shall both be glad,
+    Mr. St. George. Then you can wish us well. What is a submarine
+    like," she wanted to know; "were you ever on one?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never, excepting a number of times," replied St. George, supremely
+    unconscious of any vagueness. He was rapidly losing count of all
+    events up to the present. He was concerned only with these things:
+    that she was here with him, that the time might be measured by
+    minutes until she would be caught away to undergo neither knew what
+    perils, and that at any minute Mrs. Hastings might escape from the
+    chemist's.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was
+    quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did
+    make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her
+    drawing-room had been untenanted. And in the meantime no one knows
+    what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so
+    perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon
+    the shore for a word of farewell. But, indeed, if it were not for
+    the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would
+    become very tame affairs. When the first man and maid said even the
+    most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the
+    right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion. Very likely
+    the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination.
+    Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the
+    preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it. And, enchantment
+    being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been
+    that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat
+    staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and
+    Olivia was taking her tea. Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very
+    literal interfering goddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so
+    that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent
+    and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness. But it
+    must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore
+    were "<i>les antipodes des grâces</i>." She was followed by a footman,
+    his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan
+    and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hastings
+    had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and
+    whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug. She sat
+    down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another
+    sort of energy and became fragments of talk. Mrs. Hastings was like
+    the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the goddess of silence, but
+    could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.
+</p>
+
+<a name="image-0002"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image2.jpg" width="314" height="450"
+alt="uncaptioned, St. George, Olivia, and Mrs. Hastings">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+
+<p>
+    "Good morning, Mr. St. George," she said. "I'm sure I've quite
+    forgotten everything. Olivia dear, I've had all the prescriptions
+    made up that I've ever taken to Rutledge's, because no one can tell
+    what the climate will be like, it's so low on the map. I've looked
+    up the Azores&mdash;that's where we get some of our choicest cheese. And
+    camphor&mdash;I've got a pound of camphor. And I must say positively that
+    I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the
+    camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now
+    it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound. And then the flaxseed,
+    Olivia dear. I've got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George doubted if she knew when he said good morning, although
+    she named him Mr. St. John, gave him permission to go to the boat,
+    hoped in one breath that he would come again to see them, and in the
+    next that he would send them a copy of whatever the <i>Sentinel</i> might
+    publish about them, in serene oblivion of the state of the
+    post-office department in Yaque. Mrs. Hastings, in short, was one of
+    the women who are thrown into violent mental convulsions by the
+    prospect of a journey; this was not at all because she was setting
+    sail specifically for Yaque, for the moment that she saw a porter or
+    a pier, though she was bound only for the Bronx or Staten Island,
+    she was affected in the same way.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As Olivia gave St. George her hand he came perilously near telling
+    her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he
+    were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the
+    submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator
+    bell for so long that the boy deliberately stopped on the floor
+    below and waited, with the diabolical independence of the American
+    lords of the lift, "for to teach 'im a lessing," this one explained
+    to a passing chamber-maid.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hurried to his apartment to leave a note for Amory who
+    was directed upon his arrival to bide there and await his host's
+    return. Then he paced the floor until it was time to go back to the
+    Boris, deaf to Rollo's solemn information that the dust comes up out
+    of the varnish of furniture during the night, like cream out of
+    milk. By the time he had boarded a down-town car, St. George had
+    tortured himself to distraction, and his own responsibility in this
+    submarine voyage loomed large and threatening. Therefore, it
+    suddenly assumed the proportion of mountains yet unseen when, though
+    it wanted ten minutes to twelve when he reached the Boris, his card
+    was returned by a faint polite clerk with the information that Mrs.
+    Hastings and Miss Holland had been gone from the hotel for half an
+    hour. There was a note for him in their box the clerk believed, and
+    presently produced it&mdash;a brief, regretful word from Olivia telling
+    him that the prince had found that they must leave fully an hour
+    earlier than he had planned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sick with apprehension, cursing himself for the ease and dexterity
+    with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St.
+    George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of
+    chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had
+    bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod
+    would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of
+    anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer
+    hallway and saw that which caused that confidence to balloon
+    smilingly back to support him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In the vestibule of the Boris, deaf to the hovering attention of a
+    door-boy more curious than dutiful, stood two men of the stature and
+    complexion of Prince Tabnit of Yaque. They were dressed like the
+    youth who had answered the door of the prince's apartment, and they
+    were speaking softly with many gestures and evidently in some
+    perplexity. The drooping spirits of St. George soared to Heaven as
+    he hastened to them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are asking for Miss Holland, the daughter of King Otho of
+    Yaque," he said, with no time to smile at the pranks of the
+    democracy with hereditary titles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The men stared and spoke almost together.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We are," they said promptly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She is not here," explained St. George, "but I have attended to
+    some affairs for her. Will you come with me to my apartment where we
+    may be alone?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The men, who somehow made St. George think of tan-coloured
+    greyhounds with very gentle eyes, consulted each other, not with the
+    suspicion of the vulgar but with the caution of the thorough-bred.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pardon," said one, "if we may be quite assured that this is Miss
+    Holland's friend to whom we speak&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hesitated. The hall-boy listened with an air of polite
+    concern, and there were curious over-shoulder glances from the
+    passers-by. Suddenly St. George's face lighted and he went swiftly
+    through his pockets and produced a scrap of paper&mdash;the fragment that
+    had lain that morning on the floor of the prince's deserted
+    apartment, and that bore the arms of the King of Yaque. It was the
+    strangers' turn to regard him with amazement. Immediately, to St.
+    George's utmost embarrassment, they both bowed very low and
+    pronounced together:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Pardon, adôn!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My name is St. George," he assured them, "and let's get into a
+    cab."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They followed him without demur.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George leaned back on the cushions and looked at them&mdash;lean
+    lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great
+    repose. They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had
+    felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley
+    Reformatory&mdash;as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way
+    rhymed with a word which he did not know.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is it," St. George asked as they rolled away, "what is it that
+    you have come to tell Miss Holland?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Only one of the men spoke, the other appearing content to show two
+    rows of exceptionally white teeth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May we not know, adôn," asked the man respectfully, "whether the
+    prince has given her his news? And if the prince is still in your
+    land?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The prince's servant, Elissa, has tried to stab Miss Holland and
+    has got herself locked up," St. George imparted without hesitation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    An exclamation of horror broke from both men.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To stab&mdash;to <i>kill</i>!" they cried.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so," said St. George, "and the prince, upon being discovered,
+    disclosed some very important news to Miss Holland, and she and her
+    friends started an hour ago for Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is well, that is well!" cried the little man, nodding, and
+    momentarily hesitated; "but yet his news&mdash;what news, adôn, has he
+    told her?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    For a moment St. George regarded them both in silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, well now, what news had he?" he asked briefly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The men answered readily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit was commissioned by the Yaquians to acquaint the
+    princess with the news of the strange disappearance of her father,
+    the king, and to supplicate her in his place to accept the
+    hereditary throne of Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jupiter!" said St. George under breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a flash the whole matter was clear to him. Prince Tabnit had
+    delivered no such message from the people of Yaque, but had
+    contented himself with the mere intimation that in some vanishing
+    future she would be expected to ascend the throne. And he had done
+    this only when Olivia herself had sought him out after an attempt
+    had been made upon her life by his servant. It seemed to St. George
+    far from improbable that the woman had been acting under the
+    prince's instructions and, that failing, he himself had appeared and
+    obligingly placed the daughter of King Otho precisely within the
+    prince's power. Now she was gone with him, in the hope of aiding her
+    father, to meet Heaven knew what peril in this pagan island; and he,
+    St. George, was wholly to blame from first to last.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good Heavens," he groaned, "are you sure&mdash;but are you sure?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is simple, adôn," said the man, "we came with this message from
+    the people of Yaque. A day before we were to land, Akko and I&mdash;I am
+    Jarvo&mdash;overheard the prince plan with the others to tell her
+    nothing&mdash;nothing that the people desire. When they knew that we had
+    heard they locked us up and we have only this morning escaped from
+    the submarine. If the prince has told her this message everything is
+    well. But as for us, I do not know. The prince has gone."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He told her nothing&mdash;nothing," said St. George, "but that her
+    father and the Hereditary Treasure have disappeared. And he has
+    taken her with him. She has gone with him."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Deaf alike to their exclamations and their questions St. George sat
+    staring unseeingly through the window, his mind an abyss of fear.
+    Then the cab drew up at the door of his hotel and he turned upon the
+    two men precipitantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See," he cried, "in a boat on the open sea, would you two be at all
+    able to direct a course to Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Both men smiled suddenly and brilliantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But we have stolen a chart," announced Jarvo with great simplicity,
+    "not knowing what thing might befall."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George wrenched at the handle of the cab door. He had a glimpse
+    of Amory within, just ringing the elevator bell, and he bundled the
+    two little men into the lobby and dashed up to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on, old Amory," he told him exultingly. "Heaven on earth, put
+    out that pipe and pack. We leave for Yaque to-night!"
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0007"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    DUSK, AND SO ON
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Dusk on the tropic seas is a ceremony performed with reverence, as
+    if the rising moon were a priestess come among her silver vessels.
+    Shadows like phantom sails dip through the dark and lie idle where
+    unseen crafts with unexplained cargoes weigh anchor in mid-air. One
+    almost hears the water cunningly lap upon their invisible sides.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To Little Cawthorne, lying luxuriously in a hammock on the deck of
+    <i>The Aloha</i>, fancies like these crowded pleasantly, and slipped away
+    or were merged in snatches of remembered songs. His hands were
+    clasped behind his head, one foot was tapping the deck to keep the
+    hammock in motion while strange compounds of tune and time broke
+    aimlessly from his lips.
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "Meet me by moonlight alone,<br>
+           And then I will tell you a tale.<br>
+           Must be told in the moonlight alone<br>
+           In the grove at the end of the vale"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+    he caroled contentedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, the light of his pipe cheerfully glowing, lay at full length
+    in a steamer chair. <i>The Aloha</i> was bounding briskly forward, a
+    solitary speck on the bosom of darkening purple, and the men sitting
+    in the companionship of silence, which all the world praises and
+    seldom attains, had been engaging in that most entertaining of
+    pastimes, the comparison of present comfort with past toil. Little
+    Cawthorne's satisfaction flowered in speech.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Two weeks ago to-night," he said, running his hands through his
+    grey curls, "I took the night desk when Ellis was knocked out. And
+    two weeks ago to-morrow morning we were the only paper to be beaten
+    on the Fownes will story. Hi&mdash;you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Happy, Cawthorne?" Amory removed his pipe to inquire with idle
+    indulgence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Am I happy?" affirmed Little Cawthorne ecstatically in four tones,
+    and went on with his song:
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,<br>
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,<br>
+           But there's something about the moon's ray<br>
+           That is sweeter to you and to me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you make that up?" inquired Amory with polite interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I did if I want to," responded Little Cawthorne. "Everything's true
+    out here&mdash;go on, tell everything you like. I'll believe you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George came out of the dark and leaned on the rail without
+    speaking. Sometimes he wondered if he were he at all, and he liked
+    the doubt. He felt pleasantly as if he had been cut loose from all
+    old conditions and were sailing between skies to some unknown
+    planet. This was not only because of the strange waters rushing
+    underfoot but because of the flowering and singing of something
+    within him that made the world into which he was sailing an alien
+    place, heavenly desirable. A week ago that day <i>The Aloha</i> had
+    weighed anchor, and these seven days, in fairly fortunate weather,
+    her white nose had been cleaving seas to traverse which had so long
+    been her owner's dream; and yet her owner, in pleasant apostasy, had
+    turned his back upon the whole matter of what he had been used to
+    dream, and now ungratefully spent his time in trying to count the
+    hours to his journey's end.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Somewhere out yonder, he reflected, as he leaned on the rail, this
+    southern moonlight was flooding whatever scene <i>she</i> looked on; the
+    lapping of the same sea was in her ears; and his future and hers
+    might be dependent upon those two perplexed tan-coloured greyhounds
+    below. By which one would have said that matters had been going
+    briskly forward with St. George since the morning that he had
+    breakfasted with Olivia Holland.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Exactly when the end of the journey would be was not evident either
+    to him or to the two strange creatures who proposed to be his
+    guides. Or rather to Jarvo, who was still the spokesman; lean
+    little Akko, although his intelligence was unrivaled, being content
+    with monosyllables for stepping-stones while the stream of Jarvo's
+    soft speech flowed about him. Barnay, the captain, frankly
+    distrusted them both, and confided to St. George that "them two
+    little jool-eyed scuts was limbs av the old gint himself, and they
+    reminded him, Barnay, of a pair of haythen naygurs," than which he
+    could say no more. But then, Barnay's wholesale skepticism was his
+    only recreation, save talking about his pretty daughter "of school
+    age," and he liked to stand tucking his beard inside his collar and
+    indulging in both. In truth, Barnay, who knew the waters of the
+    Atlantic fairly well, was sorely tried to take orders from the two
+    little brown strangers who, he averred, consulted a "haythen
+    apparaytus" which they would cheerfully let him see but of which he
+    could "make no more than av the spach av a fish," and then directed
+    him to take courses which lay far outside the beaten tracks of the
+    high seas.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, who had had several talks with them, was puzzled and
+    doubtful, and more than once confided to himself that the lives of
+    the passenger list of <i>The Aloha</i> might be worth no more than coral
+    headstones at the bottom of the South Atlantic. But he always
+    consoled himself with the cheering reflection that he had had to
+    come&mdash;there was no other way half so good. So <i>The Aloha</i> continued
+    to plow her way as serenely as if she were heading toward the white
+    cliffs of Dover and trim villas and a custom-house. And the sea lay
+    a blue, uninhabited glory save as land that Barnay knew about marked
+    low blades of smoke on the horizon and slipped back into blue
+    sheaths.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was the evening of the seventh day, and that noon Jarvo had
+    looked despondent, and Barnay had sworn strange oaths, and St.
+    George had been disquieted. He stood up now, going vaguely down into
+    his coat pockets for his pipe, his erect figure thrown in relief
+    against the hurrying purple. St. George was good to look at, and
+    Amory, with the moonlight catching the glass of his pince-nez,
+    smoked and watched him, shrewdly pondering upon exactly how much
+    anxiety for the success of the enterprise was occupying the breast
+    of his friend and how much of an emotion a good bit stronger. Amory
+    himself was not in love, but there existed between him and all who
+    were a special kinship, like that between a lover of music and a
+    musician.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne rose and shuffled his feet lazily across deck.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where is that island, anyway?" he wanted to know, gazing
+    meditatively out to sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George turned as if the interruption was grateful.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The island. I don't see any island," complained Little Cawthorne.
+    "I tell you," he confided, "I guess it's just Chillingworth's little
+    way of fixing up a nice long vacation for us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They smiled at memory of Chillingworth's grudging and snarling
+    assents to even an hour off duty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From below came Bennietod, walking slowly. The seaman's life was not
+    for Bennietod, and he yearned to reach land as fervently as did St.
+    George, though with other anxiety. He sat down on the moon-lit deck
+    and his face was like that of a little old man with uncanny
+    shrewdness. His week among them had wrought changes in the head
+    office boy. For Bennietod was ambitious to be a gentleman. His
+    covert imitations had always amused St. George and Amory. Now in the
+    comparative freedom of <i>The Aloha</i> his fancy had rein and he had
+    adopted all the habits and the phrases which he had long reserved
+    and liked best, mixing them with scraps of allusions to things which
+    Benfy had encouraged him to read, and presenting the whole in his
+    native lower East-side dialect. Bennietod was Bowery-born and
+    office-bred, and this sad metropolitanism almost made of him a good
+    philosopher.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd like immensely to say something," observed St. George abruptly,
+    when his pipe was lighted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, yes. All right," shrilled Little Cawthorne with resignation, "I
+    suppose you all feel I'm the Jonah and you thirst to scatter me to
+    the whales."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I want to know," St. George went on slowly, "what you think. On my
+    life, I doubt if I thought at all when we set out. This all promised
+    good sport, and I took it at that. Lately, I've been wondering, now
+    and then, whether any of you wish yourselves well out of it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    For a moment no one spoke. To shrink from expression is a
+    characteristic in which the extremes of cultivation and mediocrity
+    meet; the reserve of delicacy in St. George and Amory would have
+    been a reserve of false shame in Bennietod, and of an exaggerated
+    sense of humour in Little Cawthorne. It was not remarkable that from
+    the moment the enterprise had been entered upon, its perils and its
+    doubtful outcome had not once been discussed. St. George vaguely
+    reckoned with this as he waited, while Amory smoked on and blew
+    meditative clouds and regarded the bowl of his pipe, and Little
+    Cawthorne ceased the motion of his hammock, and Bennietod hugged his
+    knees and looked shrewdly at the moon, as if he knew more about the
+    moon than he would care to tell. St. George felt his heart sink a
+    little. Then Little Cawthorne rose and squared valiantly up to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What," inquired the little man indignantly, "are you trying to do?
+    Pick a fight?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at him in surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Because if you are," continued little Cawthorne without preamble,
+    "we're three to one. And three of us are going to Yaque. We'll put
+    you ashore if you say so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled at him gratefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;Bennietod?" inquired Little Cawthorne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Bennietod, pale and manifestly weak, grinned cheerfully and fumbled
+    in sudden abashment at an amazing checked Ascot which he had derived
+    from unknown sources.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bes' t'ing t'ever I met up wid," he assented, "ef de deck'd lay
+    down levil. I'm de sonny of a sea-horse if it ain't."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Amory?" demanded the little man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked along his pipe and took it briefly from his lips and
+    shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't say these things," he pleaded in his pleasant drawl, "or I'll
+    swear something horrid."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George merely held his pipe by the bowl and nodded a little, but
+    the hearts of all of them glowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After dinner they sat long on deck. Rollo, at his master's
+    invitation, joined them with a mandolin, which he had been
+    discovered to play considerably better than any one else on board.
+    Rollo sat bolt upright in a reclining chair to prove that he did not
+    forget his station and strummed softly, and acknowledged approval
+    with:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir. A little music adds an air to any occasion, <i>I</i> always
+    think, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The moon was not yet full, but its light in that warm world was
+    brilliant. The air was drowsy and scented with something that might
+    have been its own honey or that might have come from the strange
+    blooms, water-sealed below. Now and then St. George went aside for a
+    space and walked up and down the deck or sent below for Jarvo. Once,
+    as Jarvo left St. George's side, Little Cawthorne awoke and sat
+    upright and inquiring, in his hammock.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What <i>is</i> the matter with his feet?" he inquired peevishly. "I
+    shall certainly ask him directly."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's the seventh day out," Amory observed, "and still nobody
+    knows."
+</p>
+<p>
+    For Jarvo and Akko had another distinction besides their diminutive
+    stature and greyhound build. Their feet, clad in soft soleless
+    shoes, made of skins, were long and pointed and of almost uncanny
+    flexibility. It had become impossible for any one to look at either
+    of the little men without letting his eyes wander to their curiously
+    expressive feet, which, like "courtier speech," were expressive
+    without revealing anything.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I t'ink," Bennietod gave out, "dat dey're lost Eyetalian
+    organ-grinder monkeys, wid huming intelligence, like Bertran's
+    Bimi."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What a suspicious child it is," yawned Little Cawthorne, and went
+    to sleep again. Toward midnight he awoke, refreshed and happy, and
+    broke into instant song:
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,<br>
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,<br>
+           But there's something about the moon's ray&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+    he was chanting in perfect tonelessness, when St. George cried out.
+    The others sprang to their feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Lights!" said St. George, and gave the glass to Amory, his hand
+    trembling, and very nearly snatched it back again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Far to the southeast, faint as the lost Pleiad, a single golden
+    point pricked the haze, danced, glimmered, was lost, and reappeared
+    to their eager eyes. The impossibility of it all, the impossibility
+    of believing that they could have sighted the lights of an island
+    hanging there in the waste and hitherto known to nobody simply
+    because nobody knew the truth about the Fourth Dimension did not
+    assail them. So absorbed had St. George become in the undertaking,
+    so convincing had been the events that led up to it, and so ready
+    for anything in any dimension were his companions, that their
+    excitement was simply the ancient excitement of lights to the
+    mariner and nothing more; save indeed that to St. George they spoke
+    a certain language sweeter than the language of any island lying in
+    the heart of mere science or mere magic either.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When it became evident that the lights were no will-o'-the-wisps,
+    born of the moon and the void, but the veritable lights that shine
+    upon harbours, Bennietod tumbled below for Jarvo, who came on deck
+    and gazed and doubted and well-nigh wept for joy and poured forth
+    strange words and called aloud for Akko. Akko came and nodded and
+    showed white teeth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-morrow," he said only.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Barnay came.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fwhat matther?" He put it cynically, scowling critically at Jarvo
+    and Akko. "All in the way av fair fight, that'll be about Mor-rocco,
+    if I've the full av my wits about me, an' music to my eyes, by the
+    same token."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo fixed him with his impenetrable look.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the light of the king's palace on the summit of Mount
+    Khalak," he announced simply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The light of the king's palace. St. George heard and thrilled with
+    thanksgiving. It would be then the light at her very threshold,
+    provided the impossible is possible, as scientists and devotees have
+    every reason to think. But was she there&mdash;was she there? If there
+    was an oracle for the answer, it was not St. George. The little
+    white stars danced and signaled faintly on the far horizon. Whatever
+    they had to reveal was for nearer eyes than his.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The glass passed from hand to hand, and in turn they all swept the
+    low sky where the faint points burned; but when some one had cried
+    that the lights were no longer visible, and the others had verified
+    the cry by looking blankly into a sudden waste of milky black&mdash;black
+    water, pale light&mdash;and turned baffled eyes to Jarvo, the little man
+    spoke smoothly, not even reaching a lean, brown hand for the glass.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But have no fear, adôn," he reassured them, "the chart is not
+    exact&mdash;it is that which has delayed us. It will adjust itself. The
+    light may long disappear, but it will come again. The gods will
+    permit the possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They looked at one another doubtfully when the two little brown men
+    had gone below, where Barnay had immediately retired, tucking his
+    beard in his collar and muttering sedition. If the two strange
+    creatures were twin Robin Goodfellows perpetrating a monstrous
+    twentieth century prank, if they were gigantic evolutions of Puck
+    whose imagination never went far beyond threshing corn with shadowy
+    flails, at least this very modern caper demanded respect for so
+    perfectly catching the spirit of the times. At all events it was
+    immensely clever of them to have put their finger upon the public
+    pulse and to have realized that the public imagination is ready to
+    believe anything because it has seen so much proved. Still, "science
+    was faith once"; and besides, to St. George, charts and compasses of
+    all known and unknown systems of seamanship were suddenly become
+    but the dead letter of the law. The spirit of the whole matter was
+    that Olivia might be there, under the lights that his own eyes would
+    presently see again. "Who, remembering the first kind glance of her
+    whom he loves, can fail to believe in magic?" It is very likely that
+    having met Olivia at all seemed at that moment so wonderful to St.
+    George that any of the "frolic things" of science were to be
+    accepted with equanimity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For an hour or more the moon, flooding the edge of the deck of <i>The
+    Aloha</i>, cast four shadows sharply upon the smooth boards. Lined up
+    at the rail stood the four adventurers, and the glass passed from
+    one to another like the eye of the three Grey Sisters. The far
+    beacon appeared and disappeared, but its actuality might not be
+    doubted. If Jarvo and Akko were to be trusted, there in the velvet
+    distance lay Yaque, and Med, the King's City, and the light upon the
+    very palace of its American sovereign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's pulses leaped and trembled. Amory lifted lazy lids and
+    watched him with growing understanding and finally, upon a pretext
+    of sleep, led the others below. And St. George, with a sense of
+    joyful companionship in the little light, paced the deck until dawn.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0008"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER VIII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    By afternoon the island of Yaque was an accomplished fact of
+    distinguishable parts. There it lay, a thing of rock and green, like
+    the islands of its sister latitudes before which the passing ships
+    of all the world are wont to cast anchor. But having once cast
+    anchor before Yaque the ships of all the world would have had great
+    difficulty in landing anybody.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sheer and almost smoothly hewn from the utmost coast of the island
+    rose to a height of several hundred feet one scarcely deviating wall
+    of rock; and this apparently impregnable wall extended in either
+    direction as far as the sight could reach. Above the natural rampart
+    the land sloped upward still in steep declivities, but cut by
+    tortuous gorges, and afar inland rose the mountain upon whose summit
+    the light had been descried. There the glass revealed white towers
+    and columns rising from a mass of brilliant tropical green, and now
+    smitten by the late sun; but save these towers and columns not a
+    sign of life or habitation was discernible. No smoke arose, no
+    wharf or dock broke the serene outline of the black wall lapped by
+    the warm sea; and there was no sound save that of strong torrents
+    afar off. Lonely, inscrutable, the great mass stood, slightly
+    shelved here and there to harbour rank and blossomy growths of green
+    and presenting a rugged beauty of outline, but apparently as
+    uninhabitable as the land of the North Silences.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Consternation and amazement sat upon the faces of the owner of <i>The
+    Aloha</i> and his guests as they realized the character of the
+    remarkable island. St. George and Amory had counted upon an
+    adventure calling for all diplomacy, but neither had expected the
+    delight of hazard that this strange, fairy-like place seemed about
+    to present. Each felt his blood stirring and singing in his veins at
+    the joy of the possibilities that lay folded before them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We shall be obliged to land upon the east coast then, Jarvo?"
+    observed St. George; "but how long will it take us to sail round the
+    island?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Very long," Jarvo responded, "but no, adôn, we land on this coast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How is that possible?" St. George asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, hi&mdash;you," said Little Cawthorne, "I'm a goat, but I'm no
+    mountain goat. See the little Swiss kid skipping from peak to peak
+    and from crag to crag&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do we scale the wall?" inquired St. George, "or is there a passage
+    in the rock?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Bennietod hugged himself in uncontrollable ecstasy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hully Gee, a submarine passage, in under de sea, like Jules Werne,"
+    he said in a delight that was almost awe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is a way over the rock," said Jarvo, "partly hewn, partly
+    natural, and this is known to the islanders alone. That way we must
+    take. It is marked by a White Blade blazoned on the rock over the
+    entrance of the submarines. The way is cunningly concealed&mdash;hardly
+    will the glass reveal it, adôn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Barnay shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You've a bad time comin' with the home-sickness," he prophesied,
+    tucking his beard far down in his collar until he looked, for
+    Barnay, smooth-shaven. "I've sailed the sou' Atlantic up an' down
+    fer a matther av four hundhred years, more or less, an' I niver as
+    much as seed hide <i>nor</i> hair av the place before this prisint. There
+    ain't map or chart that iver dhrawed breath that shows ut, new or
+    old. Ut's been lifted out o' ground to be afther swallowin' us in&mdash;a
+    sweet dose will be the lot av us, mesilf with as foine a gir-rl av
+    school age as iver you'll see in anny counthry."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah yes, Barnay," said St. George soothingly&mdash;but he would have
+    tried now to soothe a man in the embrace of a sea-serpent in just
+    the same absent-minded way, Amory thought indulgently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sun was lowering and birds of evening were beginning to brood
+    over the painted water when <i>The Aloha</i> cast anchor. In the late
+    light the rugged sides of the island had an air of almost sinister
+    expectancy. There was a great silence in their windless shelter
+    broken only by the boom and charge of the breakers and the gulls and
+    choughs circling overhead, winging and dipping along the water and
+    returning with discordant cries to their crannies in the black rock.
+    Before the yacht, blazoned on a dark, water-polished stratum of the
+    volcanic stone, was the White Blade which Jarvo told them marked the
+    subterranean entrance to the mysterious island.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George and his companions and Barnay, Jarvo and Akko were on
+    deck. Rollo, whose soul did not disdain to be valet to a steam
+    yacht, was tranquilly mending a canvas cushion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The adôn will wait until sunrise to go ashore?" asked Jarvo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Sunrise</i>!" cried St. George. "Heaven on earth, no. We'll go now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was no need to ask the others. Whatever might be toward, they
+    were eager to be about, though Rollo ventured to St. George a
+    deprecatory: "You know, sir, one can't be too careful, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you prefer to stay aboard?" St. George put it quietly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, no, sir," said Rollo with a grieved face, "one should meet
+    danger with a light heart, sir," and went below to pack the
+    oil-skins.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hear me now," said Barnay in extreme disfavour. "It's I that am to
+    lay hereabouts and wait for you, sorr? Lord be good to me, an' fwhat
+    if she lays here tin year', and you somewheres fillin' the eyes av
+    the aygles with your brains blowed out, neat?" he demanded
+    misanthropically. "Fwhat if she lays here on that gin'ral theory
+    till she's rotted up, sorr?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now, Barnay," said St. George grimly, "you couldn't have an
+    easier career."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne, from leaning on the rail staring out at the
+    island, suddenly pulled himself up and addressed St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here we are," he complained, "here has been me coming through the
+    watery deep all the way from Broadway, with an octopus clinging to
+    each arm and a dolphin on my back, and you don't even ask how I
+    stood the trip. And do you realize that it's sheer madness for the
+    five of us to land on that island together?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?" asked St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little man shook his grey curls.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What if it's as Barnay says?" he put it. "What if they should bag
+    us all&mdash;who'll take back the glad news to the harbour? Lord, you
+    can't tell what you're about walking into. You don't even know the
+    specific gravity of the island," he suggested earnestly. "How do
+    you know but your own weight will flatten you out the minute you
+    step ashore?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed. "He thinks he is reading the fiction page," he
+    observed indulgently. "Still, I fancy there is good sense on the
+    page, for once. We don't know anything about anything. I suppose we
+    really ought not to put all five eggs in one basket. But, by Jove&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked over at Amory with troubled eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As host of this picnic," he said, "I dare say I ought to stay
+    aboard and let you fellows&mdash;but I'm hanged if I will."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Little Cawthorne reflected, frowning; and you could as well have
+    expected a bird to frown as Little Cawthorne. It was rather the name
+    of his expression than a description of it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Suppose," he said, "that Bennietod and I sit rocking here in this
+    bay&mdash;if it is a bay&mdash;while you two rest your chins on the top of
+    that ledge of rock up there, and look over. And about to-morrow or
+    day after we two will venture up behind you, or you could send one
+    of the men back&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My thunder," said Bennietod wistfully, "ain't I goin' to get to
+    climb in de pantry window at de palace&mdash;nor fire out of a
+    loophole&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bennietod an' I couldn't talk to a prince anyway," said Little
+    Cawthorne; "we'd get our language twisted something dizzy, and
+    probably tell him 'yes, ma'am.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's eyes softened as he looked at the little man. He knew
+    well enough what it cost him to make the suggestion, which the good
+    sense of them all must approve. Not only did Little Cawthorne always
+    sacrifice himself, which is merely good breeding, but he made
+    opportunities to do so, which is both well-bred and virtuous. When
+    Rollo came up with the oil-skins they told him what had been
+    decided, and Rollo, the faithful, the expressionless, dropped his
+    eyelids, but he could not banish from his voice the wistfulness that
+    he might have been one to stay behind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sometimes it <i>is</i> best for a person to change his mind, sir," was
+    his sole comment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently the little green dory drew away from <i>The Aloha</i>, and they
+    left her lying as much at her ease as if the phantom island before
+    her were in every school-boy's geography, with a scale of miles and
+    a list of the principal exports attached.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If we had diving dresses, adôn," Jarvo suggested, "we might have
+    gone down through the sluice and entered by the lagoon where the
+    submarines pass."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jove," said Amory, trying to row and adjust his pince-nez at the
+    same time, "Chillingworth will never forgive us for missing that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You couldn't have done it," shouted Little Cawthorne derisively,
+    from the deck of the yacht, "you didn't wear your rubbers. If
+    anybody sticks a knife in you send up a r-r-r-ocket!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The landing, effected with the utmost caution, was upon a flat
+    stone already a few inches submerged by the rising tide. Looking up
+    at the jagged, beetling world above them their task appeared
+    hopeless enough. But Jarvo found footing in an instant, and St.
+    George and Amory pressed closely behind him, Rollo and little Akko
+    silently bringing up the rear and carrying the oil-skins. Slowly and
+    cautiously as they made their way it was but a few minutes until the
+    three standing on the deck, and Barnay open-mouthed in the dory, saw
+    the sinuous line of the five bodies twist up the tortuous course
+    considerably above the blazoned emblem of the White Blade.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever
+    before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble
+    and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent,
+    perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from
+    below it had appeared. But it seemed interminable. Even when the sea
+    lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of
+    <i>The Aloha</i> were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued
+    to stretch upward, melting into the sky's late blue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk
+    came swiftly out of the east. At snail's pace, now with heads bent
+    to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up by the arms or to
+    leap a wicked-looking crevice, the four took their way up the black
+    side of the rock. Birds of the cliffs, disturbed from long rest,
+    wheeled and screamed about them, almost brushing their faces with
+    long, fearless wings. There was an occasional shelf where, with
+    backs against the wall spotted with crystals of feldspar, they
+    waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge. Great
+    slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of
+    calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava
+    covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp
+    shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray. Gradually rock-slides
+    and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches,
+    but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral crevasses
+    made the vague trail slippery and the occasional earth sodden and
+    treacherous. For a quarter of a mile their way lay over a kind of
+    porous gravel into which their feet sank, and beyond at the summit
+    of a ridge Jarvo halted and threw back to them a summary warning to
+    prepare for "a long leap." A sharp angle of rock, jutting out, had
+    been split down the middle by some ancient force&mdash;very likely a
+    Paleozoic butterfly had brushed it with its wing&mdash;and the edges had
+    been worn away in a treacherous slope to the very lip of the
+    crumbling promontory. From this edge to the edge of the opposite
+    abutment there was a gap of wicked width, and between was a sheer
+    drop into space wherefrom rose the sound of tumbling waters. When
+    Jarvo had taken the leap, easily and gracefully, alighting on the
+    other side like the greyhound that he resembled, and the others,
+    following, had cleared the edge by as safe a margin as if the abyss
+    were a minor field-day event, St. George and Amory looked back with
+    sudden wonder over the path by which they had come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel as if I weighed about ninety pounds," said St. George; "am I
+    fading away or anything?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory stood still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was thinking the same thing," he said. "By Jove&mdash;do you
+    suppose&mdash;what if Little Cawthorne hit the other end of the
+    nail, as usual? Suppose the specific gravity&mdash;suppose there is
+    something&mdash;suppose it doesn't hold good in this dimension that
+    a body&mdash;by Jove," said Amory, "wouldn't that be the deuce?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at Jarvo, bounding up the stony way as easily as
+    if he were bounding down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now," he said, "you know on the moon an ordinary man would
+    weigh only twenty-six or seven pounds. Why not here? We aren't held
+    down by any map!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    They laughed at the pleasant enormity of the idea and were hurrying
+    on when Akko, behind them, broke his settled silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In America," he said, "a man feels like a mountain. Here he feels
+    like a man."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean by that?" demanded St. George uneasily. But Akko
+    said no more, and St. George and Amory, with a disquieting idea that
+    each was laughing at the other, let the matter drop.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From there on the way was easier, leveling occasionally, frequently
+    swelling to gentle ridges, and at last winding up a steep trail that
+    was not difficult to keep in spite of the fast falling night. And at
+    length Jarvo, rounding a huge hummock where converging ridges met,
+    scrambled over the last of these and threw himself on the ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now," he said simply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The two men stood beside him and looked down. It seemed to St.
+    George that they looked not at all upon a prospect but upon the
+    sudden memory of a place about which he might have dreamed often and
+    often and, waking, had not been able to remember, though its
+    familiarity had continued insistently to beat at his heart; or that
+    in what was spread before him lay the satisfaction of Burne-Jones'
+    wistful definition of a picture: "... a beautiful, romantic dream of
+    something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any
+    light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only
+    desire..." yet it was to St. George as if he had reached no strange
+    land, no alien conditions; but rather that he had come home. It was
+    like a home-coming in which nothing is changed, none of the little
+    improvements has been made which we resent because no one has
+    thought to tell us of them; but where everything is even more as one
+    remembers than one knew that one remembered.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0003"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image3.jpg" width="294" height="450"
+alt="uncaptioned, view of city and mountain castle">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<p>
+    At his feet lay a pleasant valley filled with the purple of deep
+    twilight. Far below a lagoon caught the late light and spread it in
+    a pattern among hidden green. In the midst of the valley towered the
+    mountain whose summit, royally crowned by shining towers, had been
+    visible from the open sea. At its feet, glittering in the abundant
+    light shed upon its white wall and dome and pinnacle, stood Med, the
+    King's City&mdash;but its light was not the light of the day, for that
+    was gone; nor of the moon, not risen; and no false lights vexed the
+    dark. Yet he was looking into a cup of light, as clear as the light
+    in a gazing-crystal and of a quality as wholly at variance with
+    reality. The rocky coast of Yaque was literally a massive, natural
+    wall; and girt by it lay the heart of the island, fertile and
+    populous and clothed in mystery. This new face which Nature turned
+    to him was a glorified face, and some way <i>it meant what he meant</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was off for a few steps, trampling impatiently over the
+    coarse grass of the bank. Somewhere in that dim valley&mdash;was she
+    there, was she there? Was she in trouble, did she need him, did she
+    think of him? St. George went through the ancient, delicious list
+    as conscientiously as if he were the first lover, and she were the
+    first princess, and this were the first ascent of Yaque that the
+    world had ever known. For by some way of miracle, the mystery of the
+    island was suddenly to him the very mystery of his love, and the two
+    so filled his heart that he could not have told of which he was
+    thinking. That which had lain, shadowy and delicious, in his soul
+    these many days&mdash;not so very many, either, if one counts the
+    suns&mdash;was become not only a thing of his soul but a thing of the
+    outside world, almost of the visible world, something that had
+    existed for ever and which he had just found out; and here, wrapped
+    in nameless light, lay its perfect expression. When a shaft of
+    silver smote the long grass at his feet, and the edge of the moon
+    rose above the mountain, St. George turned with a poignant
+    exultation&mdash;did a mere victory over half a continent ever make a man
+    feel like that?&mdash;and strode back to the others.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come on," he called ringingly in a voice that did everything but
+    confess in words that something heavenly sweet was in the man's
+    mind, "let's be off!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory was carefully lighting his pipe.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel sort of tense," he explained, "as if the whole place would
+    explode if I threw down my match. What do you think of it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George did not answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a place where all the lines lead up," he was saying to
+    himself, "as they do in a cathedral."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The four went the fragrant way that led to the heart of the island.
+    First the path followed the high bank the branches of whose tropical
+    undergrowth brushed their faces with brief gift of perfume. On the
+    other side was a wood of slim trunks, all depths of shadow and
+    delicacies of borrowed light in little pools. Everywhere, everywhere
+    was a chorus of slight voices, from bark and air and secret moss,
+    singing no forced notes of monotone, but piping a true song of the
+    gladness of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It
+    came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would
+    always sound if, somehow, one were able to hear the sweetness that
+    poured itself out. Even that familiar sense in the night-woods that
+    something is about to happen was deliciously present with him; and
+    though Amory went on quietly enough, St. George swam down that green
+    way, much as one dreams of floating along a street, above-heads.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The path curved, and went hesitatingly down many terraces. Here,
+    from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged
+    into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering
+    upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to
+    meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than
+    any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a
+    veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the
+    censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and
+    curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see
+    about them. Yet it did not occur to either to distrust the
+    phenomenon, or to regard it as unnatural or the fruit of any
+    unnatural law. It was somehow quite as convincing to them as is his
+    first sight of electric light to the boy of the countryside, and no
+    more to be regarded as witchcraft.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. It was as if he were on the threshold of
+    Far-Away, within the Porch of the Morning of some day divine. The
+    place was so poignantly like the garden of a picture that one has
+    seen as a child, and remembered as a place past all speech
+    beautiful, and yet failed ever to realize in after years, or to make
+    any one remember, or, save fleetingly in dreams to see once more,
+    since the picture-book is never, never chanced upon again. Sometimes
+    he had dreamed of a great sunny plain, with armies marching;
+    sometimes he had awakened at hearing the chimes, and fancied
+    sleepily that it was infinite music; sometimes, in the country in
+    the early morning, he had had an unreasonable, unaccountable moment
+    of perfect happiness: and now the fugitive element of them all
+    seemed to have been crystallized and made his own in that floating
+    walk down the wooded terraces of this unknown world. And yet he
+    could not have told whether the element was contained in that
+    beauty, or in his thought of Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At last they emerged upon a narrow, grassy terrace where white steps
+    mounted to a wide parapet. Jarvo ran up the steps and turned:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Behold Med, adôn," he said modestly, as if he had at that moment
+    stirred it up in a sauce-pan and baked it before their astonished
+    eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They were standing at the top of an immense flight of steps
+    extending as far to right and left as they could see, and leading
+    down by easy stages and wide landings to the white-paved city
+    itself. The clear light flooded the scene&mdash;lucid, vivid,
+    many-peopled. Far as the eye could see, broad streets extended,
+    lined with structures rivaling in splendour and beauty those
+    unforgotten "topless towers." Temples, palaces, and public buildings
+    rose, storey upon storey, built of hewn stones of great size; and
+    noble arches faced an open square before a temple of colossal
+    masonry crowning an eminence in the centre of the city. Directly in
+    line with this eminence rose the mountain upon whose summit stood
+    the far-seen pillars where burned the solitary light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    If an enchanted city had risen from the waves because some one had
+    chanced to speak the right word, it could have been no more
+    bewildering; and yet the look of this city was so substantial, so
+    adapted to all commonplace needs, so essentially the scene of
+    every-day activity and purpose, that dozens of towns of petty
+    European principalities seem far less actual and practicable homes
+    of men. Busy citizens hurrying, the bark of a dog, the mere tone of
+    a temple bell spoke the ordinary occupations of all the world; and
+    upon the chief street the moon looked down as tranquilly as if the
+    causeway were a continuation of Fifth Avenue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But it was as if the spirit of adventure in St. George had suddenly
+    turned and questioned him, saying:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What of Olivia?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    For Olivia gone to a far-away island to find her father was subject
+    of sufficient anxiety; but Olivia in the power of a pretender who
+    might have at command such undreamed resources was more than cool
+    reason could comprehend. That was the principal impression that Med,
+    the King's City, made upon St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To the right, adôn," Jarvo was saying, "where the walls are
+    highest&mdash;that is the palace of the prince, the Palace of the
+    Litany."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the king's palace?" St. George asked eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo lifted his face to the solitary summit light upon the
+    mountain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But how does one ascend?" cried St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By permission of Prince Tabnit," replied Jarvo, "one is borne up
+    by six imperial carriers, trained in the service from birth. One
+    attempting the ascent alone would be dashed in pieces."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No municipal line of airships?" ventured Amory in slow
+    astonishment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo did not quite get this.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The airships, adôn," he said, "belong to the imperial household and
+    are kept at the summit of Mount Khalak."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A trust," comprehended Amory; "an absolute monarchy is a bit of a
+    trust, anyhow. Of course, it's sometimes an outraged trust..." he
+    murmured on.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The adôn," said Jarvo humbly, "will understand that we, I and Akko,
+    have borne great risk. It is necessary that we make our peace with
+    all speed, if that may be. The very walls are the ears of Prince
+    Tabnit, and it is better to be behind those walls. May the gods
+    permit the possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mean to say," asked St. George, "that we too would better
+    look out the prince at once?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The adôn is wise," said Jarvo simply, "but nothing is hid from
+    Prince Tabnit."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George considered. In this mysterious place, whose ways were as
+    unknown to him and to his companions as was the etiquette of the
+    court of the moon, clearly diplomacy was the better part of valour.
+    It was wiser to seek out Prince Tabnit, if he had really arrived on
+    the island, than to be upon the defensive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, very well," he said briefly, "we will visit the prince."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Farewell, adôn," said Jarvo, bowing low, "may the gods permit the
+    possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course you will communicate with us to-morrow," suggested St.
+    George, "so that if we wish to send Rollo down to the yacht&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The gods will permit the possible, adôn," Jarvo repeated gently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a flash of Akko's white teeth and the two little men were
+    gone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George and Amory turned to the descending of the wide white
+    steps. Such immense, impossible white steps and such a curious place
+    for these two to find themselves, alone, with a valet. Struck by the
+    same thought they looked at each other and nodded, laughing a
+    little.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Alone in the distance," said Amory, emptying his pipe, "and not a
+    cab to be seen."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo thrust forward his lean, shadowed face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shall I look about for a 'ansom, sir?" he inquired with perfect
+    gravity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly heard.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's like cutting into a great, smooth sheet of white paper," he
+    said whimsically, "and making any figure you want to make."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before they reached the bottom of the steps they divined, issuing
+    from an isolated, temple-seeming building below, a train of
+    sober-liveried attendants, all at first glance resembling Jarvo and
+    Akko. These defiled leisurely toward the strangers and lined up
+    irregularly at the foot of the steps.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Enter Trouble," said Amory happily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They found themselves confronting, in the midst of the attendants,
+    an olive man with no angles, whose face, in spite of its health and
+    even wealth of contour, was ridiculously grave, as if the
+    <i>papier-mâché</i> man in the down-town window should have had a sudden
+    serious thought just before his <i>papier-mâché</i> incarnation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Permit me," said the man in perfect English and without bowing, "to
+    bring to you the greeting of his Highness, Prince Tabnit, and his
+    welcome to Yaque. I am Cassyrus, an officer of the government. At
+    the command of his Highness I am come to conduct you to the palace."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The prince is most kind," said St. George, and added eagerly: "He
+    is returned, then?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Assuredly. Three days ago," was the reply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the king&mdash;is he returned?" asked St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The man shook his head, and his very anxiety seemed important.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "His Majesty, the King," he affirmed, "is still most lamentably
+    absent from his throne and his people."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And his daughter?" demanded St. George then, who could not
+    possibly have waited an instant longer to put that question.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The daughter of his Majesty, the King," said Cassyrus, looking
+    still more as if he were having his portrait painted, "will in three
+    days be recognized publicly as Princess of Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's heart gave a great bound. Thank Heaven, she was here,
+    and safe. His hope and confidence soared heavenward. And by some
+    miracle she was to take her place as the people of Yaque had
+    petitioned. But what was the meaning of that news of the prince's
+    treachery which Jarvo and Akko had come bearing? The prince had
+    faithfully fulfilled his mission and had conducted the daughter of
+    the King of Yaque safely to her father's country. What did it all
+    mean?
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly noted the majestic square through which they
+    were passing. Impressions of great buildings, dim white and misty
+    grey and bathed in light, bewilderingly succeeded one another;
+    but, as in the days which followed the news of his inheritance, he
+    found himself now in a temper of unsurprise, in that mental
+    atmosphere&mdash;properly the normal&mdash;which regards all miracle as
+    natural law. He even omitted to note what was of passing
+    strangeness: that neither the retinue of the minister nor the
+    others upon the streets cast more than casual glances at their
+    unusual visitors. But when the great gates of the palace were
+    readied his attention was challenged and held, for though mere
+    marvels may become the air one breathes, beauty will never cease
+    to amaze, and the vista revealed was of almost disconcerting
+    beauty.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Avenues of brightness, arches of green, glimpses of airy columns, of
+    boundless lawns set with high, pyramidal shrines, great places of
+    quiet and straight line, alleys whose shadow taught the necessity of
+    mystery, the sound of water&mdash;the pure, positive element of it
+    all&mdash;and everywhere, above, below and far, that delicate, labyrinth
+    light, diffused from no visible source. It was as if some strange
+    compound had changed the character of the dark itself, transmuting
+    it to a subtle essence more exquisite than light, inhabiting it with
+    wonders. And high above their heads where this translucence seemed
+    to mix with the upper air and to fuse with moonbeams, sprang almost
+    joyously the pale domes and cornices of the palace, sending out
+    floating streamers and pennons of colours nameless and unknown.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jupiter," said the human Amory in awe, "what a picture for the
+    first page of the supplement."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly heard him. The picture held so perfectly the
+    elusive charm of the Question&mdash;the Question which profoundly
+    underlies all things. It was like a triumphant burst of music which
+    yet ends on a high note, with imperfect close, hinting passionately
+    at some triumph still loftier.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From either side of the wall of the palace yard came glittering a
+    detachment of the Royal Golden Guard, clad in uniforms of unrelieved
+    cloth-of-gold. These halted, saluted, wheeled, and between their
+    shining ranks St. George and Amory footed quietly on, followed by
+    Rollo carrying the yellow oil-skins. To St. George there was relief
+    in the motion, relief in the vastness, and almost a boy's delight in
+    the pastime of living the hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yet Royal Golden Guard, majestic avenues, and towered palace with
+    its strange banners floating in strange light, held for him but one
+    reality. And when they had mounted the steps of the mighty entrance,
+    and the sound of unrecognized music reached him&mdash;a very myth of
+    music, elusive, vagrant, fugued&mdash;and the palace doors swung open to
+    receive them, he could have shouted aloud on the brilliant
+    threshold:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He says she is here in Yaque."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0009"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER IX
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    So there were St. George and Amory presently domiciled in a prince's
+    palace such as Asia and Europe have forgotten, as by and by they
+    will forget the Taj Mahal and the Bon Marché. And at nine o'clock
+    the next morning in a certain Tyrian purple room in the west wing of
+    the Palace of the Litany the two sat breakfasting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One always breakfasts," observed St. George. "The first day that
+    the first men spend on Mars I wonder whether the first thing they do
+    will be to breakfast."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Poor old Mars has got to step down now," said Amory. "We are one
+    farther on. I don't know how it will be, but if I felt on Mars the
+    way I do now, I should assent to breakfast. Shouldn't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On my life, Toby," said St. George, "as an idealist you are
+    disgusting. Yes, I should."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The table had been spread before an open window, and the window
+    looked down upon the palace garden, steeped in the gold of the sunny
+    morning, and formal with aisles of mighty, flowering trees. Within,
+    the apartment was lofty, its walls fashioned to lift the eye to
+    light arches, light capitals, airy traceries, and spaces of the hue
+    of old ivory, held in heavenly quiet. The sense of colour, colour
+    both captive and atmospheric, was a new and persistent delight, for
+    it was colour purified, specialized, and infinitely extended in
+    either direction from the crudity of the seven-winged spectrum. The
+    room was like an alcove of outdoors, not divorced from the open air
+    and set in contra-distinction, but made a continuation of its space
+    and order and ancient repose&mdash;a kind of exquisite porch of light.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Across this porch of light Rollo stepped, bearing a covered dish.
+    The little breakfast-table and the laden side-table were set with
+    vessels of rock-crystal and drinking-cups of silver gilt, and
+    breakfast consisted of delicately-prepared sea-food, a pulpy fruit,
+    thin wine and a paste of delicious powdered gums. These things Rollo
+    served quite as if he were managing oatmeal and eggs and china. One
+    would have said that he had been brought up between the covers of an
+    ancient history, nothing in consequence being so old or so new as to
+    amaze him. Upon their late arrival the evening before he had
+    instantly moved about his duties in all the quiet decorum with which
+    he officiated in three rooms and a bath, emptying the oil-skins,
+    disposing of their contents in great cedar chests, and, from
+    certain rich and alien garments laid out for the guests, pretending
+    as unconcernedly to fleck lint as if they had been broadcloth from
+    Fifth Avenue. He stood bending above the breakfast-table, his lean,
+    shadowed hands perfectly at home, his lean, shadowed face all
+    automatic attention.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Rollo," said St. George, "go and look out the window and see if
+    Sodom is smoking."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," said Rollo, and moved to the nearest casement and bent
+    his look submissively below.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Everything quiet, sir," he reported literally; "a very warm day,
+    sir. But it's easy to sleep, sir, no matter how warm the days are if
+    only the nights are cool. Begging your pardon, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't see Jezebel down there in the trees," he pressed him, "or
+    Elissa setting off to found Carthage? Chaldea and Egypt all calm?"
+    he anxiously put it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo stirred uneasily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's a couple o' blue-tailed birds scrappin' in a palm tree,
+    sir," he submitted hopefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," said St. George, "yes. There would be. Now, if you like," he
+    gave his servant permission, "you may go to the festivals or the
+    funeral games or wherever you choose to-day. Or perhaps," he
+    remembered with solicitude, "you would prefer to be present at the
+    wedding-of-the-land-water-with-the-sea-water, providing, as I
+    suspect, Tyre is handy?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you, sir," said Rollo doubtfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mind you put your money on the crack disc-thrower, though," warned
+    St. George, "and you might put up a couple of darics for me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," languidly begged Amory, "pray no. You are getting your periods
+    mixed something horrid."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A person's recreation is as good for him as his food, sir,"
+    proclaimed Rollo, sententious, anxious to agree.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Food," said Amory languidly, "this isn't food&mdash;it's molten history,
+    that's what it is. Think&mdash;this is what they had to eat at the cafés
+    boulevardes of Gomorrah. And to think we've been at Tony's, before
+    now. Do you remember," he asked raptly, "those brief and savoury
+    banquets around one o'clock, at Tony's? From where Little Cawthorne
+    once went away wearing two omelettes instead of his overshoes? Don't
+    tell me that Tonycana and all this belong to the same system in
+    space. Don't tell me&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped abruptly and his eyes sought those of St. George. It was
+    all so incredible, and yet it was all so real and so essentially,
+    distractingly natural.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I feel as if we had stepped through something, to somewhere else.
+    And yet, somehow, there is so little difference. Do you suppose when
+    people die <i>they</i> don't notice any difference, either?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's
+    going to look in print. Think of Crass&mdash;digging for head-lines."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl;
+    but there were times&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the
+    absolute."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory nodded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an
+    Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out
+    with the camera, while the light is good."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The lateness of the hour of their arrival at the palace the evening
+    before had prevented the prince from receiving them, but he had sent
+    a most courteous message announcing that he himself would wait upon
+    them at a time which he appointed. While they were abiding his
+    coming, Rollo setting aside the dishes, Amory smoking, strolling up
+    and down, and examining the faint symbolic devices upon the walls'
+    tiling, St. George stood before one of the casements, and looked
+    over the aisles of flowering tree-tops to the grim, grey sides of
+    Mount Khalak, inscrutable, inaccessible, now not even hinting at the
+    walls and towers upon its secret summit. He was thinking how
+    heavenly curious it was that the most wonderful thing in his
+    commonplace world of New York&mdash;that is, his meeting with
+    Olivia&mdash;should, out here in this world of things wonderful beyond
+    all dream, still hold supreme its place as the sovereign wonder, the
+    sovereign delight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dare say that means something," he said vaguely to himself, "and
+    I dare say all the people who are&mdash;in love&mdash;know what it does mean,"
+    and at this his spirit of adventure must have nodded at him, as if
+    it understood, too.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When, in a little time, Prince Tabnit appeared at the open door of
+    the "porch of light," it was as if he had parted from St. George in
+    McDougle Street but the night before. He greeted him with exquisite
+    cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He
+    was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem
+    burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly
+    tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One
+    might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested
+    certain of his smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wonder," he asked with engaging hesitation when he was seated,
+    "whether I may have a&mdash;cigarette? That is the name? Yes, a
+    cigarette. Tobacco is unknown in Yaque. We have invented no colonies
+    useful for the luxury. How can it be&mdash;forgive me&mdash;that your people,
+    who seem remote from poetry, should be the devisers and popularizers
+    of this so poetic pastime? To breathe in the green of earth and the
+    light of the dead sun! The poetry of your American smoke delights
+    me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled as he offered the prince his case.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In America," he said, "we devised it as a vice, your Highness. We
+    are obliged to do the same with poetry, if we popularize it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And St. George was thinking:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Miss Holland. He has seen Miss Holland&mdash;perhaps yesterday. Perhaps
+    he will see her to-day. And how in this world am I ever to mention
+    her name?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the prince was in the idlest and most genial of humours. He
+    spoke at once of the matters uppermost in the minds of his guests,
+    gave them news of the party from New York, told how they were in
+    comfort in the palace on the summit of Mount Khalak, struck a
+    momentary tragic note in mention of the mystery still mantling the
+    absence of the king and repeated the announcement already made by
+    Cassyrus, the premier, that in two days' time, failing the return of
+    the sovereign, the king's daughter would be publicly recognized,
+    with solemn ceremonial, as Princess of Yaque. Then he turned to St.
+    George, his eyes searching him through the haze of smoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your own coming to Yaque," he said abruptly, "was the result of a
+    sudden decision?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so, your Highness," replied St. George. "It was wholly
+    unexpected."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then we must try to make it also an unexpected pleasure," suggested
+    the prince lightly. "I am come to ask you to spend the day with me
+    in looking about Med, the King's City."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He dropped the monogrammed stub of his cigarette in a little jar of
+    smaragdos, brought, he mentioned in passing, from a despoiled temple
+    of one of the Chthonian deities of Tyre, and turned toward his
+    guests with a winning smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come," he said, "I can no longer postpone my own pleasure in
+    showing you that our nation is the Lady of Kingdoms as once were
+    Babylon and Chaldea."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was as if the strange panorama of the night before had once more
+    opened its frame, and they were to step within. As the prince left
+    them St. George turned to Rollo for the novelty of addressing a
+    reality.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How do you wish to spend the day, Rollo?" he asked him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo looked pensive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Could I stroll about a bit, sir?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stroll!" commanded St. George cheerfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Thank you, sir," said Rollo. "I always think a man can best learn
+    by observation, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Observe!" supplemented his master pleasantly, as a detachment of
+    the guard appeared to conduct Amory and him below.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't black up the sandals," Amory warned Rollo as he left him,
+    "and be back early. We may want you to get us ready for a mastodon
+    hunt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," said Rollo with simplicity, "I'll be back quite some
+    time before tea-time, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was smiling as they went down the corridor. He had been
+    vain of his love that, in Yaque as in America, remained the thing it
+    was, supreme and vital. But had not the simplicity of Rollo taken
+    the leap in experience, and likewise without changing? For a moment,
+    as he went down the silent corridors, lofty as the woods, vocal with
+    faint inscriptions on the uncovered stone, the old human doubt
+    assailed him. The very age of the walls was a protest against the
+    assumption that there is a touchstone that is ageless. Even if there
+    is, even if love is unchanging, the very temper of unconcern of his
+    valet might be quite as persistent as love itself. But the gallery
+    emptying itself into a great court open to the blue among graven
+    rafters, St. George promptly threw his doubt to the fresh,
+    heaven-kissing wind that smote their faces, and against mystery and
+    argument and age alike he matched only the happy clamour of his
+    blood. Olivia Holland was on the island, and all the age was gold.
+    In Yaque or on the continents there can be no manner of doubt that
+    this is love, as Love itself loves to be.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They emerged in the appeasing air of that perfect morning, and the
+    sweetness of the flowering trees was everywhere, and wide roads
+    pointed invitingly to undiscovered bournes, and overhead in the
+    curving wind floated the flags and streamers of those joyous, wizard
+    colours.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went out into the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating
+    at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds
+    captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals
+    itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey
+    that he has taken long ago&mdash;Long Ago and Far Away are the great
+    touchstones&mdash;and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget
+    the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and forget
+    the fabric, then he will understand the spirit that informed that
+    first morning in Yaque. It was a morning all compact of wonder and
+    delight&mdash;wonder at that which half-revealed itself, delight in the
+    ever-present possibility that here, there, at any moment, Olivia
+    Holland might be met. As for the wonder, that had taken some three
+    thousand years to accumulate, as nearly as one could compute; and as
+    for the delight, that had taken less than ten days to make possible;
+    and yet there is no manner of doubt which held high place in the
+    mind of St. George as the smooth miles fled away from hurrying
+    wheels.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Such wheels! Motors? St. George asked himself the question as he
+    took his place beside the prince in the exquisitely light vehicle,
+    Amory following with Cassyrus, and the suites coming after, like the
+    path from a lanthorn. For the vehicles were a kind of electric
+    motor, but constructed exquisitely in a fashion which, far from
+    affronting taste, delighted the eye by leading it to lines of
+    unguessed beauty. They were motors as the ancients would have built
+    them if they had understood the trick of science, motors in which
+    the lines of utility were veiled and taught to be subordinate. The
+    speed attained was by no means great, and the motion was gentle and
+    sacrificed to silence. And when St. George ventured to ask how they
+    had imported the first motors, the prince answered that as Columbus
+    was sailing on the waters of the Atlantic at adventure, the people
+    of Yaque were touring the island in electric motors of much the same
+    description, though hardly the clumsiness, of those which he had
+    noticed in New York.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This was the first astonishment, and other astonishments were to
+    follow. For as they went about the island it was revealed that the
+    remainder of the world is asleep with science for a pillow and the
+    night-lamp of philosophy casting shadows. Yet as the prince
+    exhibited wonders, one after another, St. George, dimly conscious
+    that these are the things that men die to discover, would have given
+    them all for one moment's meeting with Olivia on that high-road of
+    Med. If you come to think of it, this may be why science always has
+    moved so slowly, creeping on from point to point.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Thus it came about that when Prince Tabnit indicated a low,
+    pillared, temple-like building as the home of perpetual motion,
+    which gave the power operating the manufactures and water supply of
+    the entire island, St. George looked and understood and resolved to
+    go over the temple before he left Yaque, and then fell a-wondering
+    whether, when he did so, Olivia would be with him. When the prince
+    explained that it is ridiculous to suppose that combustion is the
+    chief means of obtaining light and heat, or that Heaven provided
+    divinely-beautiful forests for the express purpose of their being
+    burned up; and when he told him that artificial light and heat were
+    effected in a certain reservoir (built with a classic regard for the
+    dignity of its use as a link with unspoken forces) St. George
+    listened, and said over with attention the name of the substance
+    acted upon by emanations&mdash;and wondered if Olivia were not afraid of
+    it. So it was all through the exhibition of more wonders scientific
+    and economic than any one has dreamed since every one became a
+    victim of the world's habit of being afraid to dream. Although it is
+    true that when St. George chanced to observe that there were about
+    Med few farms of tilled ground, the prince's reply did startle him
+    into absorbed attention:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are referring to agriculture?" Prince Tabnit said after a
+    moment's thought. "I know the word from old parchments brought from
+    Ph&oelig;nicia by our ancestors. But I did not know that the art is in
+    practice anywhere in the world. Do you mean to assure me," cried the
+    prince suddenly, "that the vegetables which I ate in America were
+    raised by what is known as 'tilling the soil'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How else, your Highness?" doubted St. George, wondering if he were
+    responsible for the fading mentality of the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit looked away toward the splendour of some new thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How beautiful," he said, "to subsist on the sun and the dust.
+    Beautiful and lost, like the dreams of Mitylene. But I feel as if I
+    were reading in Genesis," he declared. "Is it possible that in this
+    'age of science' of yours it has not occurred to your people that if
+    plants grow by slowly extracting their own elements from the soil,
+    those elements artificially extracted and applied to the seed will
+    render growth and fruitage almost instantaneous?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "At all events we've speculated about it," St. George hastened to
+    impart with pride, "just as we do about telephones that will let
+    people see one another when they talk. But nearly every one smiles
+    at both."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't smile," the prince warned him. "Yaque has perfected both
+    those inventions only since she ceased to smile at their
+    probability. Nothing can be simpler than instantaneous vegetation.
+    Any Egyptian juggler can produce it by using certain acids. We have
+    improved the process until our fruits and vegetables are produced as
+    they are needed, from hour to hour. This was one of the so-called
+    secrets of the ancient Ph&oelig;nicians&mdash;has it never occurred to you as
+    important that the Ph&oelig;nician name for Dionysos, the god of
+    wine-growers, was lost?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mentally St. George added another barrel to the cargo of <i>The
+    Aloha</i>, and wondered if the <i>Sentinel</i> would start botanical gardens
+    and a lighting plant and turn them to the account of advertisers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    All the time, mile upon mile, was unrolling before them the
+    unforgetable beauty of the island. So perfectly were its features
+    marshaled and so exact were its proportions that, as in many great
+    experiences and as in all great poems, one might not, without
+    familiarity, recall its detail, but must instead remain wrapped in
+    the glory of the whole. The avenues, wide as a river, swept between
+    white banks of majestic buildings combining with the magic of great
+    mass the pure beauty of virginal line. Line, the joy of line, the
+    glory of line, almost, St. George thought, the divinity of line, was
+    everywhere manifest; and everywhere too the divinity of colour, no
+    longer a quality extraneous, laid on as insecure fancy dictates,
+    but, by some law long unrevealed, now actually identified with the
+    object which it not so much decorated as purified. The most
+    interesting of the thoroughfares led from the Eurychôrus, or public
+    square, along the lagoon. This fair water, extending from Med to
+    Melita, was greenly shored and dotted with strange little pleasure
+    crafts with exquisite sweeping prows and silken canopies. Before a
+    white temple, knee-deep in whose flowered ponds the ibises dozed
+    and contemplated, was anchored the imperial trireme, with
+    delicately-embroidered sails and prow and poop of forgotten metals.
+    From within, temple music sounded softly and was never permitted to
+    be silenced, as the flame of the Vestals might never be
+    extinguished. Here on the shores had begun the morning traffic of
+    itinerant merchants of Med and Melita, compelled by law to carry on
+    their exchange in the morning only, when the light is least lovely.
+    Upon canopied wagons drawn by strange animals, with shining horns,
+    were displayed for sale all the pleasantest excuses for
+    commerce&mdash;ostrich feathers, gums, gems, quicksilver, papyrus, bales
+    of fair cloth, pottery, wine and oranges. The sellers of salt and
+    fish and wool and skins were forced down under the wharfs of the
+    lagoon, and there endeavoured to attract attention by displaying
+    fanciful and lovely banners and by liberating faint perfumes of the
+    native orris and algum. Street musicians, playing tunefully upon the
+    zither and upon the crowd, wandered, wearing wreaths of fir, and
+    clustered about stalls where were offered tenuous blades, and
+    statues, and temple vessels filled with wine and flowers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At the head of the street leading to the temple of Baaltis (My
+    Lady&mdash;Aphrodite) the prince's motor was checked while a procession
+    of pilgrims, white-robed and carrying votive offerings, passed
+    before them, the votive tablet to the Lady Tanith and the Face of
+    Baal being borne at the head of the line by a dignitary in a smart
+    electric victoria. This was one of the frequent Festival Embassies
+    to Melita, to combine religious rites with mourning games and the
+    dedication of the tablet, and there was considerable delay incident
+    to the delivery of a wireless message to the dignitary with the
+    tablet of the Semitic inscription. St. George wondered vaguely why,
+    in a world of marvels, progress should not already have outstripped
+    the need of any communication at all. This reminded him of something
+    at which the prince had hinted away off in another æon, in another
+    world, when St. George had first seen him, and there followed ten
+    minutes of talk not to be forgotten.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Would it be possible for you to tell me, your Highness," St. George
+    asked,&mdash;and thereafter even a lover must have forgiven the brief
+    apostasy of his thought&mdash;"how it can be that you know the English?
+    How you are able to speak it here in Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The motor moved forward as the procession passed, and struck into a
+    magnificent country avenue bordered by trees, tall as elms and
+    fragrant as acacias.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can tell you, yes," said the prince, "but I warn you that you
+    will not in the least understand me. I dare say, however, that I may
+    illustrate by something of which you know. Do there chance to be,
+    for example, any children in America who are regarded as prodigies
+    of certain understanding?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean," St. George asked, "children who can play on a musical
+    instrument without knowing how they do it, and so on?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so," said the prince with interest.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Many, your Highness," affirmed St. George. "I myself know a child
+    of seven who can play most difficult piano compositions without ever
+    having been taught, or knowing in the least how he does it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you think of any one else?" asked the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said St. George, "I know a little lad of about five, I should
+    say, who can add enormous numbers and instantly give the accurate
+    result. And he has no idea how he does that, and no one has ever
+    taught him to count above twelve. Oh&mdash;every one knows those cases, I
+    fancy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Has any one ever explained them, Mr. St. George?" asked the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How should they?" asked St. George simply. "They are prodigies."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so," said the prince again. "It is almost incredible that
+    these instances seem to suggest to no one that there must be other
+    ways to 'learn' music and mathematics&mdash;and, therefore, everything
+    else&mdash;than those known to your civilization. Let me assure you that
+    such cases as these, far from being miracles and prodigies, are
+    perfectly normal when once the principle is understood, as we of
+    Yaque understand it. It is the average intelligence among your
+    people which is abnormal, inasmuch as it is unable to perform these
+    functions which it was so clearly intended to exercise."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mean," asked St. George, "that we need not learn&mdash;as we
+    understand 'learn'?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Precisely," said the prince simply. "You are accustomed, I was told
+    in New York, to say that there is 'no royal road to learning.' On
+    the contrary, I say to you that the possibilities of these children
+    are in every one. But to my intense surprise I find that we of Yaque
+    are the only ones in the world who understand how to use these
+    possibilities. Our system of education consists simply in mastering
+    this principle. After that, all knowledge&mdash;all languages, for
+    instance&mdash;everything&mdash;belongs to us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked away to the rugged sides of Mount Khalak, lying in
+    its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima
+    Thule. It was all right&mdash;what he had just been hearing was a part of
+    this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet <i>he</i>
+    was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic,
+    perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the
+    prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that
+    he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might
+    have been his of his own accord if only he had understood how to
+    call them in!
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That would make a very jolly thing of college," he pensively
+    conceded. "You could not show me how it is managed, your Highness?"
+    he besought. "That will hardly come in bulk, too&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince shook his head, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I could not 'show you,' as you say," he answered, "any more than I
+    could, at present, send a wireless communication without the
+    apparatus&mdash;though it will be only a matter of time until that is
+    accomplished, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George pulled himself up sharply. He glanced over his shoulder
+    and saw Amory polishing his pince-nez and looking quite as if he
+    were leaning over hansom-doors in the park, and he turned quickly to
+    the prince, half convinced that he had been mocked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Suppose, your Highness," he said, "that I were to print what you
+    have just told me on the front page of a New York morning paper,
+    for people to glance over with their coffee? Do you think that even
+    the most open-minded among them would believe that there is such a
+    place as Yaque?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince smiled curiously, and his long-fringed lids drooped in
+    momentary contemplation. The auto turned into that majestic avenue
+    which terminates in the Eurychôrus before the Palace of the Litany.
+    St. George's eye eagerly swept the long white way. At its far end
+    stood Mount Khalak. <i>She</i> must have passed over this very ground.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is," the prince's smooth voice broke in upon his dream, "no
+    such place as Yaque&mdash;as you understand 'place.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I beg your pardon, your Highness?" St. George doubted blankly. Good
+    Heavens. Maybe there had arrived in Yaque no Olivia, as he
+    understood Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You showed some surprise, I remember," continued the prince, "when
+    I told you, in McDougle Street, that we of Yaque understand the
+    Fourth Dimension."
+</p>
+<p>
+    McDougle Street. The sound smote the ear of St. George much as would
+    the clang of the fire patrol in the midst of light opera.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, yes," he said, his attention now completely chained. Yet even
+    then it was not that he cared so absorbingly about the Fourth
+    Dimension. But what if this were all some trick and if, in this
+    strange land, Olivia had simply been flashed before his eyes by the
+    aid of mirrors?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I find," said the prince with deliberation, "that in America you
+    are familiar with the argument that, if your people understood
+    only length and breadth and did <i>not</i> understand the Third
+    Dimension&mdash;thickness&mdash;you could not then conceive of lifting, say,
+    a square or a triangle and laying it down upon another square or
+    triangle. In other words, you would not know anything of <i>up</i> and
+    <i>down</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded. This was the familiar talk of college
+    class-rooms.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "As it is," pursued the prince, "your people do perfectly understand
+    lifting a square and placing it upon a square, or a triangle upon a
+    triangle. But you do not know anything about placing a cube upon a
+    cube, or a pyramid upon a pyramid <i>so that both occupy the same
+    space at the same time</i>. We of Yaque have mastered that principle
+    also," the prince tranquilly concluded, "and all that of which this
+    is the alphabet. That is why we are able to keep our island unknown
+    to the world&mdash;not to say 'invisible.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    For a moment St. George looked at him speechlessly; then, in spite
+    of himself, a slow smile overspread his face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But," he said, "your Highness, there is not a mathematician in the
+    civilized world who has not considered that problem and cast it
+    aside, with the word that if fourth-dimensional space does exist it
+    can not possibly be inhabited."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quite so," said the prince, "and yet here we are."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And, if you come to think of it&mdash;as St. George did&mdash;that is the only
+    answer to a world of impossibilities already proved possible. But
+    the vista which all this opened smote him with irresistible humour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now, I suppose, your Highness," he said, "that our ocean
+    liners sail clean through the island of Yaque, then, and never even
+    have their smoke pushed sidewise?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince laughed pleasantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have you ever," he asked, "had occasion to explain the principles
+    of hydraulics, or chess, or philosophical idealism to a
+    three-year-old child, or a charwoman? You must forgive me, but
+    really I can think of no better comparison. I am quite as powerless
+    now as you have been if you have ever attempted it. I can only
+    assure you that such things <i>are</i>. Without Jarvo or Akko or some one
+    who understood, you might have sailed the high seas all your life
+    and never have come any nearer to Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George reflected.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Is Yaque the only example of this kind of thing," he asked, "that
+    the Fourth Dimension would reveal?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "By no means," said the prince in surprise, "the world is
+    literally teeming with like revelations, once the key is in your
+    hands. The Fourth Dimension is only the beginning. We utilize that
+    to isolate our island. But the higher dimensions are gradually
+    being conquered, too. Nearly all of us can pass into the Fifth at
+    will, 'disappearing,' as you have the word, from the lower
+    dimensions. It is well-known to you that in a land whose people
+    knew length and breadth, but no <i>up</i> and <i>down</i>, an object might
+    be pushed, but never lifted <i>up</i> or put <i>down</i>. If it were to be
+    lifted, such a people would believe it to have 'disappeared.' So,
+    from you who know only three dimensions, Yaque has 'disappeared,'
+    until one of us guides you here. Also we pass at will into the
+    Fifth Dimension and even higher, and seem to 'disappear'; the only
+    difference is that, there, we should not be able yet to guide one
+    who did not himself understand how to pass there. Just as one who
+    understands how to die and to come to life, as you have the
+    phrase, would not be able to take with him any one who did not
+    understand how to take himself there..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George listened, grasping at straws of comprehension,
+    remembering how he had heard all this theorized about and smiled at;
+    but most of all he was beset by a practical consideration.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then," he said suddenly, the question leaping to his lips almost
+    against his will, "if you hold this key to all knowledge, how is it
+    that the king&mdash;Mr. Holland&mdash;could get away from you, and the
+    Hereditary Treasure be lost?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince sighed profoundly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We have by no means," he said, "perfected our knowledge. We are at
+    one with the absolute in knowledge&mdash;true. But the affairs of every
+    day most frequently elude us. Not even the most advanced among us
+    are perfect intuitionists. We have by no means reached that
+    desirable and inevitable day when our minds shall flow together,
+    without need of communication, without possibility of secret. We
+    still suffer the disadvantage of a slight barrier of personality."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And it is into one of these lapses," thought St. George
+    irreverently, "that the king has disappeared." Aloud he asked
+    curiously concerning a matter which was every moment becoming more
+    incomprehensible.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But how, your Highness," he said simply, "did your people ever
+    consent to have an American for your king?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before the prince could reply there occurred a phenomenon that sent
+    all thought of such insubstantialities as the secrets of the Fourth
+    Dimension far in the background.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince's motor, closely followed by the others of the train, had
+    reached a little eminence from which the island unrolled in fair
+    patterns. Before them the smooth road unwound in varied light. At
+    their left lay a still grove from whose depths was glimpsed a slim
+    needle of a tower, rising, arrow-like, from the green. In the
+    distance lay Med, with shining domes. The water of the lagoon gave
+    brightness here and there among the hills. And as St. George and the
+    prince looked over the prospect they saw, far down the avenue toward
+    Med, a little, moving speck&mdash;a speck moving with a rapidity which
+    neither the prince's motor nor any known motor of Yaque had ever
+    before permitted itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In an instant the six members of the Royal Golden Guard, who upon
+    beautiful, spirited horses rode in advance of the train of the
+    prince, wheeled and thundered back, lifting glittering hands of
+    warning. "Aside! Aside!" shrieked the main Golden Guard, "a motor is
+    without control!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Immediately there was confusion. At a touch the prince's car was
+    drawn to the road's extreme edge, and the Golden Guards rode
+    furiously back along the train, hailing the peaceful, slow-going
+    machines into orderly retreat. They were all sufficiently amenable,
+    for at sight of the alarming and unprecedented onrush of the growing
+    speck that was bearing full down upon them, anxiety sat upon every
+    face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George watched. And as the car drew nearer the thought which, at
+    first sight of its speed, had vaguely flashed into being, took
+    definite shape, and his blood leaped to its music. Whose hand would
+    be upon that lever, whose daring would be directing its flight,
+    whose but one in all Yaque&mdash;and that Olivia's?
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was Olivia. That was plain even in the mere instant that it took
+    the great, beautiful motor, at thirty miles an hour, to flash past
+    them. St. George saw her&mdash;coat of hunting pink and fluttering veil
+    and shining eyes; he was dimly conscious of another little figure
+    beside her, and of the unmistakable and agonized Mrs. Hastings in
+    the tonneau; but it was only Olivia's glance that he caught as it
+    swept the prince. There was the faintest possible smile, and she was
+    gone; and St. George, his heart pounding, sat staring stupidly after
+    that shining cloud of dust, frantically wondering whether she could
+    just possibly have seen him. For this was no trick of the
+    imagination, his galloping heart told him that. And whether or not
+    Yaque was a place, the world, the world was within his grasp,
+    instinct with possibilities heavenly sweet. His eyes met Amory's in
+    the minute when Cassyrus, prime minister of Yaque, had it borne in
+    upon him that this was no runaway machine, but the ordinary and
+    preferred pace of the daughter of their king; and while Cassyrus, at
+    the enormity of the conception, breathed out expostulations in
+    several languages&mdash;some of them known to us only by means of
+    inscriptions on tombs&mdash;Amory spoke to St. George:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who was the other girl?" he asked comprehensively.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What other girl?" St. George blankly murmured.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And at this, Amory turned away with a look that could be made to
+    mean whatever Amory meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On went the imperial train faring back to Med over the road lately
+    stirred to shining dust by the wheels of Olivia's auto. Olivia's
+    auto. St. George was secretly saying over the words with a kind of
+    ecstatic non-comprehension, when the prince spoke:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That," he said, "may explain why an American has been able to
+    govern us. Chance crowned him, but he made himself king."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit hesitated and his eyes wandered&mdash;and those of St.
+    George followed&mdash;to a far winding dot in that opal valley, a mere
+    speck of silver with a prick of pink, fleeing in a cloud of sunny
+    dust.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do not know if you will know what I mean," said the prince, "but
+    hers is the spirit, and the spirit of her father, the king, which
+    Yaque had never known. It is the spirit which we of Ph&oelig;nicia seem
+    to have lost since the wealth of the world accumulated at her ports
+    and she gave her trust to the hands of mariners and mercenaries, and
+    later bowed to the conqueror. It is the spirit that not all the
+    continental races, I fancy, have for endowment, but yours possesses
+    in rich measure. For this we would exchange half that we have
+    achieved."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded, glowing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is a great tribute, your Highness," he said simply, and in his
+    heart he laid it at Olivia's feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Thereafter, in the long ride to Melita, during luncheon upon a high
+    white terrace overlooking the sailless sea, and in the hours on the
+    unforgetable roads of the islands, St. George, while incommunicable
+    marvels revealed themselves linked with incommunicable beauty, sat
+    in the prince's motor, his eyes searching the horizon for that
+    fleeing speck of silver and pink. It did not appear again. And when
+    the train of the prince rolled into the yard of the Palace of the
+    Litany it trembled upon St. George's lips to ask whether the
+    formalities of the court would permit him that day to scale the
+    skies and call upon the royal household.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For whatever he says, I've got to do," thought St. George, "but no
+    matter what he says, I shall go. Doesn't Amory realize that we've
+    been more than twelve hours on this island, and that nothing has
+    been done?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    And then as they crossed the grassy court in the delicate hush of
+    the merging light&mdash;the nameless radiance already penetrating the
+    dusk&mdash;the prince spoke smoothly, as if his words bore no import
+    deeper than his smile:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are come," he said courteously, "in time for one of the
+    ceremonies of our régime most important&mdash;to me. You will, I hope, do
+    honour to the occasion by your presence. This evening, in the Hall
+    of Kings in the Palace of the Litany, will occur the ceremony of my
+    betrothal."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your betrothal, your Highness?" repeated St. George uncertainly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You will be attended by an escort," the prince continued, "and
+    Balator, the commander of the guard, will receive you in the hall.
+    May the gods permit the possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He swept through the portico before them, and they followed dumbly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The betrothal of the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George heard, and his eager hope went down in foreboding. He
+    turned, hardly daring to read his own dread in the eyes of Amory.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, as St. George had said, was delicious, especially his drawl;
+    but there were times&mdash;now, for example, when all that the eyes of
+    Amory expressed was what his lips framed, <i>sotto-voce</i>:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An American heiress, betrothed to the prince of a cannibal island!
+    Wouldn't Chillingworth turn in his grave at his desk?"
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0010"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER X
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    TYRIAN PURPLE
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    The "porch of light" proved to be an especially fascinating place at
+    evening. Evening, which makes most places resemble their souls
+    instead of their bodies, had a grateful task in the beautiful room
+    whose spirit was always uppermost, and Evening moved softly in its
+    ivory depths, preluding for Sleep. Here, his lean, shadowed face all
+    anxiety, Rollo stood, holding at arm's length a parti-coloured robe
+    with floating scarfs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It seems to me, sir," he said doubtfully, "that this one would 'ave
+    done better. Beggin' your pardon, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George shook his head distastefully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It doesn't matter," he said, and broke into a slow smile as he
+    looked at Amory. The robes which the prince had provided for the
+    evening were rather harder to become accustomed to than the notion
+    of intuitive knowledge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There's an air about this one though, sir," opined Rollo firmly,
+    "there's a cut&mdash;a sort of <i>way</i> with the seams, so to speak, sir,
+    that the other can't touch. And cut is what counts, sir, cut counts
+    every time."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes, I dare say, Rollo," said St. George, "and as a judge of
+    'cut' I don't say you can be equaled. But I do say that in the
+    styles of Deuteronomy you aren't necessarily what you might call
+    up."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, sir," said Rollo, dropping his eyes, "but a well-dressed man
+    was a well-dressed man, sir, then <i>as</i> now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As a matter of fact the well-knit, athletic young figures looked
+    uncommonly well in the garments <i>à la mode</i> in Yaque. One would have
+    said that if the garments followed Deuteronomy fashions they had at
+    all events been cut by the scissors of a court tailor to Louis XV.
+    The result was beautiful and bizarre, but it did not suggest
+    stageland because the colours were so good.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dare say," said St. George, examining the exquisitely fine cloth
+    whose shades were of curious depth and richness, "that this may be
+    regular Tyrian purple."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory waved his long sleeves.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop," he languidly begged, "you make me feel like a golden text."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George went back to the row of open casements and resumed his
+    walk up and down before the windows that looked away to the huge
+    threatening bulk of Mount Khalak. Since the prince's announcement
+    that afternoon St. George had done little besides continuing that
+    walk. Now it wanted hardly half an hour to the momentous ceremony of
+    the evening, big with at least one of the dozen portents of which he
+    accused it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Amory," he burst out as he walked, "if you didn't know anything
+    about it, would you say that the prince could possibly have made her
+    consent to marry him?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, left in the middle of the great room, stood polishing his
+    pince-nez exactly as if he had been waiting at the end of
+    Chillingworth's desk of a bright, American morning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If I didn't know anything about it," he said cheerfully, "I should
+    say that he had. As it is, having this afternoon watched a certain
+    motor wear its way past me, I should say that nothing in Yaque is
+    more unlikely. And that's about as strong as you could put it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We don't know what the man may have threatened," said St. George
+    morosely, "he may have played upon her devotion to her father to
+    some ridiculous extent. He may have refused to land the submarine at
+    Yaque at all otherwise&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George broke off suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Toby!" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked over and nodded. He had seen that look before on St.
+    George's face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's not going to marry the prince," said St. George, "and if her
+    father is alive and in a hole, he's going to be pulled out. And
+    she's <i>not</i> going to marry the prince."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why, no," assented Amory, "no."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had guessed a good deal of the truth since he had been watching
+    St. George flee over seas upon a yacht, shod, so to speak, with
+    fire, and he had arrived at the suspicion that <i>The Aloha</i> was
+    winged by little Loves and guided under water by plenty of blue and
+    green dragons. But he had not, until now, been thoroughly certain
+    that St. George's spirit of adventure had another name; and though
+    theoretically his sympathies leaped to the look in his friend's
+    eyes, yet he found himself wondering practically what effect romance
+    would be having upon their enterprise. After all, from a newspaper
+    point of view, to relinquish any part of the adventure was a kind of
+    tragedy, and it cost Amory something to emphasize his assent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Of course she won't," he said, "and now let's toddle down and see
+    about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the tread of the feet of a detachment of the Royal Golden Guard
+    was heard without, Rollo advanced to the door with a dignity which
+    amounted to melancholy. The setting of a palace and the proximity of
+    a prince had raised his office to the majesty of skilled labour. He
+    always threw open the door now as who should say, "Enter. But mind
+    you have a reason."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At sight of the long liberty of the corridor where the light lay
+    mysteriously touching tiles and tapestries to festal colours,
+    Amory's spirits rose contagiously, and his eyes shone behind his
+    pince-nez.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Me," he said, looking ahead with enjoyment at the glittering
+    escort, "me&mdash;done in a fabric of about the eleventh shade of the
+    Yaque spectrum&mdash;made loose and floppy, after a modish Canaanitish
+    model. I'll wager that when the first-born of Canaan was in the
+    flood-tide of glory, this very gown was worn by one of the most
+    beautiful women in the pentapolis of Philistia. I'm going to
+    photograph the model for the Sunday supplement, and name it <i>The
+    Nebuchadnezzar</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory murmured on, and St. George hardly heard him. He could almost
+    count by minutes now the time until he should see her. Would she see
+    him, and might he just possibly speak with her, and what would the
+    evening hold for her? As he went forth where she would be, the spell
+    of the place was once more laid upon him, as it had been laid in the
+    hour of his coming. Once more, as in the hour when he had first
+    looked down upon the valley brimming with a light "better than any
+    light that ever shone" he was at one with the imponderable things
+    which, always before, had just eluded him. Now, as then, the thought
+    of Olivia was the symbol for them all. So the two went on through
+    the winding galleries&mdash;silent, haunted&mdash;to the great staircase, and
+    below into the crowded court. And when they reached the threshold
+    of the audience-chamber they involuntarily stood still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The hall was like a temple in its sense of space and height and
+    clear air, but its proportions did not impress one, and indeed one
+    could not remember its boundaries as one does not consider the
+    boundaries of a grove. It was amphitheatre-shaped, and about it ran
+    a splendid colonnade, in the niches of whose cornices were beautiful
+    grotesques&mdash;but Yaque seemed to be a land whose very grotesques had
+    all the dignity of the ultimate instead of crying for the indulgence
+    due a phase. The roof was inlaid with prisms of clear stone, and on
+    high were pilasters carved with the Tyrian sphinxes crucified upon
+    upright crosses, surmounted by parhelions of burnished metal. All
+    the seats faced a great dais at the chamber's far end where three
+    thrones were set.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But it was the men and women in the great chamber who filled St.
+    George with wonder. The women&mdash;they were beautiful women,
+    slow-moving, slow-eyed, of soft laughter and sudden melancholy, and
+    clear, serene profiles and abundant hair. And they were all <i>alive</i>,
+    fully and mysteriously alive, alive to their finger-tips. It was as
+    if in comparison all other women acted and moved in a kind of
+    half-consciousness. It was as if, St. George thought vaguely, one
+    were to step through the frame of a pre-Raphaelite tapestry and
+    suddenly find its strange women rejoicing in fulfillment instead of
+    yearning, in noon instead of dusk. As he stood looking down the vast
+    chamber, all springing columns and light lines lifting through the
+    honey-coloured air, it smote St. George that these people, instead
+    of being far away, were all near, surprisingly, unbelievably near to
+    him,&mdash;in a way, nearer to his own elusive personality than he was
+    himself. They were all obviously of his own class; he could
+    perfectly imagine his mother, with her old lace and Roman mosaics,
+    moving at home among them, and the bishop, with his wise, kindly
+    smile. Yet he was irresistibly reminded of a certain haunting dream
+    of his childhood in which he had seemed to himself to walk the world
+    alone, with every one else allied against him because they all knew
+    something that he did not know. That was it, he thought suddenly,
+    and felt his pulse quickening at the intimation: <i>They all knew
+    something that he did not know</i>, that he could not know. But, as
+    they swept him with their clear-eyed, impersonal look, a look
+    that seemed in some exquisite fashion to take no account of
+    individuality, he was gratefully aware of a curious impression
+    that they would like to have had him know, too.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They wish I knew&mdash;they'd rather I did know," St. George found
+    himself thinking in a strange excitement, "if only I could know&mdash;if
+    only I could know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked about him, smiling a little at his folly. He saw the
+    light flash on Amory's glasses as they turned inquisitively on this
+    and that, and somehow the sight steadied him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well," he assured himself, "I'll look them up in a thousand
+    years or so, and we'll dine together, and then we'll say: 'Don't you
+    remember how I didn't know?'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Immediately there presented himself to them a little man who proved
+    to be Balator, lord-chief-commander of the Royal Golden Guard, and
+    now especially directed by the prince, he pleasantly told them, to
+    be responsible for their entertainment and comfort during the
+    ceremony to follow. They were, in fact, his guests for the evening,
+    but St. George and Amory were uncertain whether, considering his
+    office, this was a high honour or a kind of exalted durance.
+    However, as the man was charming the doubt was not important. He had
+    an attenuated face, so conveniently brown by race as to suggest the
+    most soldierly exposure, and he had great, peaceable, slow-lidded
+    eyes. He was, they subsequently learned, an authority upon insect
+    life in Yaque, for he had never had the smallest opportunity to go
+    to war.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As Balator led his guests to their seats near the throne every one
+    looked on them, as they passed, with the serenest fellowship, and no
+    regard persisted longer than a glance, friendly and fugitive.
+    Balator himself not only refrained from stoning the barbarians with
+    commonplaces, but he did not so much as mention America to them or
+    treat them otherwise than as companions, as if his was not only the
+    cosmopolitanism that knows no municipal or continental aliens of its
+    own class, but a kind of inter-dimensional cosmopolitanism as well.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Which," said Amory afterward, "was enviable. The next man from
+    Trebizond or Saturn or Fez whom I meet I'm going to greet and treat
+    as if he lived the proverbial 'twenty minutes out.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A great clock boomed and throbbed through the palace, striking an
+    hour that was no more intelligible than the jargon of a ship's clock
+    to a landsman. Somewhere an orchestra thrilled into haunting sound,
+    poignant with disclosures barely missed. Overhead, through the
+    mighty rafters of the conical roof, the moon looked down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That'll be the same old moon," said Amory. "By Jove! Won't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will, please Heaven," said St. George restlessly; "I don't know.
+    Will it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Near the throne was seated a company of dignitaries who wore upon
+    their breasts great stars and were soberly dressed in a kind of
+    scholar's gown. Some whispered together and nodded and looked as
+    solemn as tithing men; and others were feverishly restless and
+    continually took papers from their graceful sleeves. By
+    developments these were revealed to be the High Council of Yaque,
+    conservative and radical, even in dimensional isolation. Farther
+    back rose tier upon tier of seats sacred to the wives and daughters
+    of the ministry, and St. George even looked hopelessly and
+    mechanically among these for the face that he sought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To some seats slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his
+    attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of
+    purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to
+    have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs.
+    Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham, in indescribably gorgeous apparel elaborately bent to
+    receive&mdash;and a member of the High Council bent to hand&mdash;two
+    glittering articles which St. George was certain were side-combs.
+    There the lady sat, tilting her head to keep her tortoise-shell
+    glasses on her nose, perpetually curving their chain over her ear, a
+    gesture by which the side-combs were perpetually displaced. If the
+    island people had been painted purple, St. George felt sure that she
+    would have acted quite the same. Personality meant nothing to
+    her&mdash;not, as with them, because it had been merged in something
+    greater, but because, with her, it was overborne by self. And there
+    sat Mr. Frothingham (who did not attend the play during court
+    because he believed that a man of affairs should not unduly
+    stimulate the imagination), his head thrown back so that his long
+    hair rested on his amazing collar, his hands laid trimly along his
+    knees. In that crystal air, instinct with its delicate, dominant
+    implication of things imponderable, the personality of each
+    persisted undisturbed, in a kind of adamantine unconsciousness.
+    Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St. George
+    smiled a shade bitterly. Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?
+    Is love's uttermost gift so little? But as the music swelled with
+    premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very
+    transitoriness disclosed: the persistence of love, love's mere
+    immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is
+    elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to
+    which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by
+    the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about
+    the walls and from the alcoves of the lofty roof. Then a veil
+    hanging between two pillars was drawn aside, and the prince's train
+    appeared. There were a detachment of the guard, splendid in their
+    unrelieved gold, and the officers of the court, at their head
+    Cassyrus, the premier, who had manifestly been compounded of Heaven
+    to be a drum-major, and had so undeviating a look that he seemed
+    always to have been caught, red-handed, at his post. Last came
+    Prince Tabnit, dressed in pure white save for a collar of precious
+    stones from which hung the strange green gem that St. George
+    remembered. His clear face and the whiteness of his hair lent to him
+    an air of almost unearthly distinction. His delicate hands wearing
+    no jewels were at his sides, and his head was magnificently erect.
+    He mounted the dais as the music sank to silence, and without
+    preface began to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My people," he said, and St. George felt himself thrilling with the
+    strength and tenderness of that voice, "in the continuance of this
+    our time of trial we come among you that we may win strength and
+    courage from your presence. Since one mind dwells in us all, we have
+    no need of words of cheer. That no message from his Majesty, the
+    King, has come to us is known to you all, with mourning. But the
+    gods&mdash;to whom 'here' is the same as 'there'&mdash;will permit the
+    possible, and they have permitted to us the presence of the daughter
+    of our sovereign, by the grace of the infinite, heir to the throne
+    of Yaque. In two days, should his Majesty not then have returned to
+    his sorrowing people, she will, in accordance with our custom, be
+    crowned Hereditary Princess of Yaque and, after one year, Queen of
+    Yaque and your rightful sovereign."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the prince paused, a little breath of assent was in the room,
+    more potent than any crudity of applause.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Next," pursued the prince, "we would invite your attention to our
+    own affairs, which are of importance solely as they are affected by
+    the immemorial tradition of the House of the Litany. Therefore, in
+    accordance with the custom of our predecessors for two thousand
+    years," lightly pursued the prince, "we have named this day as the
+    day of our betrothal. Moreover, this is determined upon in justice
+    to the daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque, whose marriage the
+    law forbids until the choice of the head of the House of the Litany
+    has been made..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George listened, and his hope soared heavenward as the hope of
+    young love will soar, in spite of itself, at the mere sight of open
+    sky. The daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque! Of course they were
+    to be considered. Why should he fear that, because Olivia was in
+    Yaque, the mere mention of a betrothal referred to Olivia? He was
+    bold enough to smile at his fears, to smile even when, as the prince
+    ceased speaking, the music sounded again, as it were from the air,
+    in a chorus of pure young voices with a ripple of unknown strings in
+    accompaniment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly, at the opening of great doors, a flood of saffron light
+    was poured upon a stair, and at the summit appeared the leisurely
+    head of a procession which the two men were destined never to
+    forget. Across the gallery and down the stair&mdash;it might have been
+    the Golden Stair linking Near with Far&mdash;came a score of exquisite
+    women in all the glory of their youth, of perfect physical beauty
+    and splendid strength and fullness of life; and the wonder was not
+    their beauty more than a kind of dryad delicacy of that beauty,
+    which was yet not frailty but a look of angelic strength. But they
+    were not remote&mdash;they were gloriously human, almost, one would say,
+    divinely human, all gentle movement and warmth and tender breath.
+    They were not remote, save as one's own soul would be remote by its
+    very excess of intimacy with life, Little maids, so shy that their
+    actuality was certain, came before them carrying flowers, and these
+    were followed by youths scattering fragrant burning powder whose
+    fallen flames were instantly pounced upon and extinguished by small
+    furry lemurs trained to lay silver discs upon the flames. And as
+    they all ranged themselves about the throne a little figure appeared
+    at the top of the stairway alone, beneath the lifted curtain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She was veiled; but the elastic step, the girlish grace, the poise
+    and youthful dignity were not to be mistaken. The room whirled round
+    St. George, and then closed in about him and grew dark. For this was
+    the woman advancing to her betrothal; from the manner of her
+    entrance there could be no doubt of that. And it was none of the
+    daughters of the twenty peers. It was Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She wore a trailing gown of rainbow hues, more like the hues of
+    water than of texture, and the warm light fell upon these as she
+    descended and variously multiplied them to beauty. Her little feet
+    were sandaled and a veil of indescribable thinness was wound about
+    her abundant hair and fell across her face, but the gold of her hair
+    escaped the veil and rippled along her gown. Carven chains and
+    necklaces were upon her throat, and bracelets of beaten gold and
+    jewels upon her arms. About her forehead glittered a jeweled band
+    with pendent gems which, at her moving, were like noon sun upon
+    water.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As he realized that this was indeed she whom he had come to seek,
+    only to find her hedged about with difficulties&mdash;and it might be by
+    divinities&mdash;which he had not dreamed of coping, a kind of madness
+    seized St. George. The lights danced before his eyes, and his
+    impulse had to do with rushing up to the dais and crying everybody
+    defiance but Olivia. On the moon-lit deck of <i>The Aloha</i> he had
+    dreamed out the island and the rescue of the island princess, and a
+    possible home-going on his yacht to a home about which he had even
+    dared to dream, too. But it had not once occurred to him to forecast
+    such a contingency as this, or, later, so to explain to himself
+    Prince Tabnit's change of purpose in permitting her recognition as
+    Princess of Yaque&mdash;indeed, if what Jarvo and Akko had told him in
+    New York were accurate, in bringing her to the island at all. And
+    yet what, he thought crazily, if his guess at her part in this
+    betrothal were far wrong? What if her father's safety were not the
+    only consideration? What if, not unnaturally dazzled by the
+    fairy-land which had opened to her ... even while he feared, St.
+    George knew far better. But the number of terrors possible to a man
+    in love is equal to those of battle-fields.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory bent toward him, murmuring excitedly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Jupiter," he said, "is she the American girl?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "She's Miss Holland," answered St. George miserably.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No&mdash;no, not the princess," said Amory, "the other."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked. On the stair was a little figure in rose and
+    silver&mdash;very tiny, very fair, and no doubt the lawyer's daughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I dare say it is," he told him, as one would say, "Now what the
+    deuce of it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit had risen to receive Olivia, and St. George had to see
+    him extend his hand and assist her beside him upon the dais. In the
+    absence of her father she was obliged to stand alone. Then the
+    little figure in rose and silver and one of the daughters of the
+    peers advanced and lifted her veil, and St. George wanted to shout
+    with sudden exultation. This then was she&mdash;so near, so near. Surely
+    no great harm could come to them so long as the sea and the mystery
+    of the island no longer lay between them. Did she know of his
+    presence? Although he and Amory were seated so near the throne, they
+    were at one side, and her clear, pure profile was turned toward
+    them. And Olivia did not lift her eyes throughout the prime
+    minister's long address, of which St. George and Amory, so lapped
+    were they in wild projects and importunities, heard nothing until,
+    uttered with indescribable pompousness, as if Cassyrus were a
+    dowager and had made the match himself, the concluding words beat
+    upon St. George's heart like stones. They were the formal
+    announcement of the betrothal of Olivia, daughter of his Majesty,
+    Otho I of Yaque, to Tabnit, Prince of Yaque and Head of the House of
+    the Litany.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George saw Prince Tabnit kneel before Olivia and place a ring
+    upon her hand&mdash;no doubt the ring which had betrothed the island
+    princesses for three thousand years. He saw the High Council
+    standing with bowed heads, like the necessary archangels in an old
+    painting; he caught the flash of the turquoise-blue ephod of the
+    head of the religious order, as the benediction was pronounced by
+    its wearer. And through it all he said to himself that all would be
+    well if only she understood, if only she had the supreme
+    self-consciousness to play the game. After all he knew her so
+    little. He was certain of her exquisite, playful fancy, but had she
+    imagination? Would she see the value of the moment and watch herself
+    moving through it? Or would she live it with that feminine,
+    unhumourous seriousness which is woman's weakness? She had an
+    exquisite independence, he was certain that she had humour, and he
+    remembered how alive she had seemed to him, receptive, like a woman
+    with ten senses. But after all, would not her graceful sanity of
+    view, that sense of tradition and unerring taste which he so
+    reverenced, yet handicap her now and prevent her from daring
+    whatever she must dare?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory was beside himself. It was all very well to feel a great
+    sympathy for St. George, but the sight was more than journalistic
+    flesh and blood could look upon with sympathetic calm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An American girl!" he breathed in spite of himself. "Why, St.
+    George, if we can leave this island alive&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well, <i>you</i> won't," St. George explained, with brutal directness,
+    "unless you can cut that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before silence had again fallen, the prime minister, all his fever
+    of importance still upon him, once more faced the audience. This
+    time his words came to St. George like a thunderbolt:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In three days' time, at noon, in this the Hall of Kings," he cried,
+    letting each phrase fall as if he were its proud inventor,
+    "immediately following the official recognition of Olivia, daughter
+    of Otho I, as Hereditary Princess of Yaque, there will be
+    solemnized, according to the immemorial tradition of the island last
+    observed six hundred and eighty-four years ago by Queen Pentellaria,
+    the marriage of Olivia of Yaque, to his Highness, Prince Tabnit,
+    head of the House of the Litany, and chief administrator of justice.
+    <i>For the law prescribes that no unmarried woman shall sit upon the
+    throne of Yaque.</i> At noon of the third day will be observed the
+    double ceremony of the recognition and the marriage. May the gods
+    permit the possible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a soft insistence of music from above, a stir and breath
+    about the room, the premier backed away to his seat, and St. George,
+    even with the horrified tightening at his heart, was conscious of a
+    vague commotion from the vicinity of Mrs. Medora Hastings. Then he
+    saw the prince rise and turn to Olivia, and extend his hand to
+    conduct her from the hall. The great banquet room beyond the
+    colonnade was at once thrown open, and there the court circle and
+    the ministry were to gather to do honour to the new princess, whom
+    Prince Tabnit was to lead to the seat at his right hand at the
+    table's head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To the amazement of his Highness, Olivia made no movement to accept
+    the hand that he offered. Instead, she sat slightly at one side of
+    the great glittering throne, looking up at him with something like
+    the faintest conceivable smile which, while one saw, became once
+    more her exquisite, girlish gravity. When the music sank a little
+    her voice sounded above it with a sweet distinctness:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "One moment, if you please, your Highness," she said clearly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was the first time that St. George had heard her voice since its
+    good-by to him in New York. And before her words his vague fears for
+    her were triumphantly driven. The spirit that he had hoped for was
+    in her face, and something else; St. George could have sworn that he
+    saw, but no one else could have seen the look, a glimpse of that
+    delicate roguery that had held him captive when he had breakfasted
+    with her&mdash;several hundred years before, was it?&mdash;at the Boris. Ah,
+    he need not have feared for her, he told himself exultantly. For
+    this was Olivia&mdash;of America&mdash;standing in a company of the women who
+    seemed like the women of whom men dream, and whose presence, save in
+    glimpses at first meetings, they perhaps never wholly realize. These
+    were the women of the land which "no one can define or remember."
+    And yet, as he watched her now, St. George was gloriously conscious
+    that Olivia not only held her own among them, but that in some charm
+    of vividness and of <i>knowledge of laughter</i>, she transcended them
+    all.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A ripple of surprise had gone round the room. For all the air of the
+    ultimate about the island-women, St. George doubted whether ever in
+    the three thousand years of Yaque's history a woman had raised her
+    voice from that throne upon a like occasion. And such a tender,
+    beguiling, cajoling little voice it was. A voice that held little
+    remarques upon whatever it had just said, and that made one
+    breathless to know what would come next.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bully!" breathed Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If the princess wishes to speak with us&mdash;" he began, and Olivia
+    made a charming gesture of dissent, and all the jewels in her hair
+    and upon her white throat caught the light and were set glittering.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she said gently, "no, your Highness. I wish to speak in the
+    presence of my people."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She gave the "my" no undue value, yet it fell from her lips with
+    delicious audacity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Indeed," she said, "I think, your Highness, that I will speak to my
+    people myself."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0011"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE END OF THE EVENING
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    The Hall of Kings was very still as Olivia rose. She stood with one
+    hand touching her veil's hem, the other resting on the low, carved
+    arm of the throne, and at the coming and going of her breath her
+    jewels made the light lambent with the indeterminate colours of
+    those strange, joyous banners floating far above her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her voice was very sweet and a little tremulous&mdash;and it is the very
+    grace of a woman's courage that her voice tremble never so slightly.
+    It seemed to St. George that he loved her a thousand times the more
+    for that mere persuasive wavering of her words. And, while he
+    listened to what he felt to be the prelude of her message, it seemed
+    to him that he loved her another thousand times the more&mdash;what
+    heavenly ease there is in this arithmetic of love&mdash;for the tender
+    meaning which, upon her lips, her father's name took on. When,
+    speaking with simplicity and directness of the subject that lay
+    uppermost in the minds of them all, she asked their utmost endeavour
+    in their common grief, it was clear that what she said transcended
+    whatever phenomena of mere experience lay between her and those who
+    heard her, and they understood. The <i>rapport</i> was like that among
+    those who hear one music. But St. George listened, and though his
+    mind applauded, it ran on ahead to the terrifying future. This was
+    all very well, but how was it to help her in the face of what was to
+    happen in three days' time?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Therefore," Olivia's words touched tranquilly among the flying ends
+    of his own thought, "I am come before you to make that sacrifice
+    which my love for my father, and my grief and my anxiety demand. I
+    count upon your support, as he would count upon it for me. I ask
+    that one heart be in us all in this common sorrow. And I am come
+    with the unalterable determination both to renounce my throne
+    there"&mdash;never was anything more enchanting than the way those two
+    words fell from her lips&mdash;"and to postpone my marriage"&mdash;there never
+    was anything more profoundly disquieting than <i>those</i> two words in
+    such a connection&mdash;"until such time as, by your effort and by my
+    own, we may have news of my father, the king; and until, by your
+    effort or by my own, the Hereditary Treasure shall be restored."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So, serenely and with the most ingenuous confidence, did the
+    daughter of the absent King Otho make disposition of the hour's
+    events. Amory leaned forward and feverishly polished his pince-nez.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you think of that?" he put it, beneath his breath, "what
+    <i>do</i> you think of that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, watching that little figure&mdash;so adorably, almost
+    pathetically little in its corner of the great throne&mdash;knew that he
+    had not counted upon her in vain. Over there on the raised seats
+    Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham were looking on
+    matters as helplessly as they would look at a thunder-storm or a
+    circus procession, and they were taking things quite as seriously.
+    But Olivia, in spite of the tragedy that the hour held for her, was
+    giving the moment its exact value, guiltless of the feminine
+    immorality of panic. To give a moment its due without that panic,
+    is, St. George knew, a kind of genius, like creating beauty, and
+    divining another's meaning, and redeeming the spirit of a thing from
+    its actuality. But by that time the arithmetic of his love was by
+    way of being in too many figures to talk about. Which is the proper
+    plight of love.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Every one had turned toward Prince Tabnit, and as St. George looked
+    it smote him whimsically that that impassive profile was like the
+    profiles upon the ancient coins which, almost any day, might be cast
+    up by a passing hoof on the island mold. Indeed, St. George thought,
+    one might almost have spent the prince's profile at a fig-stall,
+    and the vender would have jingled it among his silver and never have
+    detected the cheat. But in the next moment the joyous mounting of
+    his blood running riot in audacious whimsies was checked by the even
+    voice of the prince himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The gratitude and love of this people," he said slowly, "are due to
+    the daughter of its sovereign for what she has proposed. It is,
+    however, to be remembered that by our ancient law the State and
+    every satrapy therein shall receive no service, whether of blood or
+    of bond, from an alien. The king himself could serve us only in that
+    he was king. To his daughter as Princess of Yaque and wife of the
+    Head of the House of the Litany, this service in the search for the
+    sovereign and the Hereditary Treasure will be permitted, but she may
+    serve us only from the throne."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Upon my soul, then that lets <i>us</i> out," murmured Amory.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And St. George remembered miserably how, in that dingy house in
+    McDougle Street, he and Olivia had listened once before to the
+    recital of that law from the prince's lips. If they had known how
+    next they would hear it! If they had known then what that law would
+    come to mean to her! What could she do now&mdash;what could even Olivia
+    do now but assent?
+</p>
+<p>
+    She could do a great deal, it appeared. She could incline her head,
+    with a bewitching droop of eyelids, and look up to meet the eyes of
+    the prince with a serenity that was like a smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In my country," said Olivia gravely, "when anything special arises
+    they frequently find that there is no law to cover it. It would seem
+    to us"&mdash;it was as though the humility of that "us" took from her
+    superb daring&mdash;"that this is a matter requiring the advice of the
+    High Council. Therefore," asked little Olivia gently, "will you not
+    appoint, your Highness, a special session of the High Council to
+    convene at noon to-morrow, to consider our proposition?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a scarcely perceptible stir among the members of the High
+    Council, for even the liberals were, it would seem, taken aback by a
+    departure which they themselves had not instituted. Olivia, still in
+    submission to tradition which she could not violate, had gained the
+    time for which she hoped. With a grace that was like the conferring
+    of a royal favour, Prince Tabnit appointed the meeting of the High
+    Council for noon on the following day.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "May the gods permit the possible," he added, and once more extended
+    his hand to Olivia. This time, with lowered eyes, she gave him the
+    tips of her fingers and, as the beckoning music swelled a delicate
+    prelude, she stepped from the dais and suffered the prince to lead
+    her toward the banquet hall.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory drew a long breath, and it came to St. George that if he,
+    Amory, said anything about what he would give if he had a leased
+    wire to the <i>Sentinel</i> Office, there would no longer be room on the
+    island for them both. But Amory said no such thing. Instead, he
+    looked at St. George in distinct hesitation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I say," he brought out finally, "St. George, by Jove, do you know,
+    it seems to me I've seen Miss Frothingham before. And how jolly
+    beautiful she is," he added almost reverently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maybe it was when you were a Ph&oelig;nician galley slave and she went
+    by in a trireme," offered St. George, trying to keep in sight the
+    bright hair and the floating veil beyond the press of the crowd.
+    Would he see Olivia and would he be able to speak with her, and did
+    she know he was there, and would she be angry? Ah well, she could
+    not possibly be angry, he thought; but with all this in his mind it
+    was hardly reasonable of Amory to expect him to speculate on where
+    Miss Frothingham might have been seen before. If it weren't for this
+    Balator now, St. George said to himself restlessly, and suddenly
+    observed that Balator was expecting them to follow him. So, in the
+    slow-moving throng, all soft hues and soft laughter, they made their
+    way toward the colonnade that cut off the banquet room. And at every
+    step St. George thought, "she has passed here&mdash;and here&mdash;and here,"
+    and all the while, through the mighty open rafters in the conical
+    roof, were to be seen those strange banners joyously floating in the
+    delicate, alien light. The wine of the moment flowed in his veins,
+    and he moved under strange banners, with a strange ecstasy in his
+    heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Therefore, suddenly to hear Rollo's voice at his shoulder came as a
+    distinct shock.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's one of them little brown 'uns, sir," Rollo announced in his
+    best tone of mystery. "He's settin' upstairs, sir, an' he's all fer
+    settin' there <i>till</i> he sees you. He says it's most important, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory heard.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Shall I go up?" he asked eagerly; "I'd like a whiff of a pipe,
+    anyway. It'll be something to tie to."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you go?" asked St. George in undisguised gratitude. He was
+    prepared to accept most risks rather than to lose sight of the star
+    he was following.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With a word to Balator who explained where, on his return, he could
+    find them, Amory turned with Rollo, and slipped through the crowd.
+    Having reasons of his own for getting back to the hall below, Amory
+    was prepared to speed well the interview with "the little brown 'un"
+    who, he supposed, was Jarvo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was Jarvo&mdash;Jarvo, in a state of excitement, profound and
+    incredible. The little man, from the annoyingly serene mode of mind
+    in which he had left them, was become, for him, almost agitated. He
+    sprang up from a divan in the great dressing-room of their apartment
+    and approached Amory almost without greeting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Adôn, adôn," he said earnestly, "you must leave the palace at
+    once&mdash;at once. But to-night!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory hunted for his pipe, found and lighted it, pressing a
+    cigarette upon Jarvo who accepted, and held it, alight, in the palm
+    of his hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-night," he repeated, as if it were a game.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well, now," said Amory reasonably, "why, Jarvo? And we so
+    comfortable."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The little man looked at Amory beseechingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know what I know," he said earnestly, "many things will happen.
+    There is danger about the palace to-night&mdash;danger it may be for you.
+    I do not know all, but I come to warn you, and to warn the adôn who
+    has been kind to us. You have brought us here when we were alone in
+    America," said Jarvo simply. "Akko and I will help you now. It was
+    Akko who remembered the tower."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked down at the bowl of his pipe, and shook his vestas in
+    their box, and turned his eyes to Rollo, listening near by with an
+    air of the most intense abstraction. Yes, all these things were
+    real. They were all real, and here was he, Amory, smoking. And yet
+    what was all this amazing talk about danger in the palace, and being
+    warned, and remembering the tower?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Anybody would think I was Crass, writing head-lines," he told
+    himself, and blew a cloud of smoke through which to look at Jarvo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are you talking about?" he demanded sternly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo had a little key in his hand, which he shook. The key was on a
+    slender, carved ring, and it jingled. And when he offered it to him
+    Amory abstractedly took it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "See, adôn," said Jarvo, "see! In the ilex grove on the road that we
+    took last night there is a white tower&mdash;it may be that you have
+    noticed it to-day. That tower is empty, and this is the key. There
+    may be guards, but I shall know how to pass among them. You must
+    come with me there to-night, the three. Even then it may be too
+    late, I do not know. The gods will permit the possible. But this I
+    know: the Royal Guard are of the lahnas, on whom the tax to make
+    good the Hereditary Treasure will fall most heavily. They are filled
+    with rage against your people&mdash;you and the king who is of your
+    people. I do not know what they will do, but you are not safe for
+    one moment in the palace. I come to warn you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory's pipe went out. He sat pulling at it abstractedly, trying to
+    fit together what St. George had told him of the Hereditary Treasure
+    situation. And more than at any other time since his arrival on the
+    island his heart leaped up at the prospect of promised adventure.
+    What if St. George's romantic apostasy were not, after all, to spoil
+    the flavour of the kind of adventure for which he, Amory, had been
+    hoping? He leaned eagerly forward.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What would you suggest?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo's eyes brightened. At once he sprang to his feet and stood
+    before Amory, taking soft steps here and there as he talked, in
+    movement graceful and tenuous as the greyhound of which he had
+    reminded St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In the palace yard," explained the little man rapidly, "is a motor
+    which came from Melita, bringing guests for the ceremony of
+    to-night. They will remain in the palace until after the marriage of
+    the prince, two days hence. But the motor&mdash;that must go back
+    to-night to Melita, adôn. I have made for myself permission to take
+    it there. But you&mdash;the three&mdash;must go with me. At the tower in the
+    ilex grove I shall leave you, and I shall return. Is this good?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Excellent. But what afterward?" demanded Amory. "Are we all to keep
+    house in the tower?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo shook his head, like a man who has thought of everything.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Through to-morrow, yes," he said, "but to-morrow night, when the
+    dark falls&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He bent forward and spoke softly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did not the adôn wish to ascend the mountain?" he asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Rather," said Amory, "but how, good heavens?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I and Akko wish to ascend also; the prince has sent us no message,
+    and we fear him," said Jarvo simply. "There are on the island, adôn,
+    six carriers, trained from birth to make the ascent. They are the
+    sons of those whose duty it was to ascend, and they the sons for
+    many generations. The trail is very steep, very perilous. Six were
+    taught to go up with messages long before the knowledge of the
+    wireless way, long before the flight of the airships. They are
+    become a tradition of the island. It is with them that you must
+    ascend&mdash;if you have no fear."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Fear!" cried Amory. "But these men, what of them? They are in the
+    employ of the State. How do you know they will take us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo dropped his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I and Akko," he said quietly, "we are two of these six carriers,
+    adôn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Amory leaped up, scattering the ashes of his pipe over the
+    tiles. This, then, was what was the matter with the feet of the two
+    men, about which they had all speculated on the deck of <i>The Aloha</i>,
+    the feet trained from birth to make the ascent of the steep trail,
+    feet become long, tenuous, almost prehensile&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's miracles, that's what it is," declared Amory solemnly. "How on
+    earth did they come to take you to New York?" he could not forbear
+    asking.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The prince knew nothing of your country, adôn," answered Jarvo
+    simply. "He might have needed us to enter it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To climb the custom-house," said Amory abstractedly, and laughed
+    out suddenly in sheer light-heartedness. Here was come to them an
+    undertaking to which St. George himself must warm as he had warmed
+    at the prospect of the voyage. To go up the mountain to the
+    threshold of the king's palace, where lived the daughter of the
+    king.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory bent himself with a will to mastering each detail of the
+    little man's proposals. Rollo, they decided, was at once to make
+    ready a few belongings in the oil-skins. Immediately after the
+    banquet St. George and Amory were to mingle with the throng and
+    leave the palace&mdash;no difficult matter in the press of the
+    departures&mdash;and, on the side of the courtyard beneath the windows of
+    the banquet room, Jarvo, already joined by Rollo, would be awaiting
+    them in the motor bound for Melita.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It sounds as if it couldn't be done," said Amory in intense
+    enjoyment. "It's bully."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He paced up and down the room, talking it over. He folded his arms,
+    and looked at the matter from all sides and wondered, as touching a
+    story being "covered" for Chillingworth, whether he were leaving
+    anything unthought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Chillingworth!" he said to himself in ecstasy. "Wouldn't
+    Chillingworth dote to idolatry upon this sight?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Amory stood still, facing something that he had not seen
+    before. He had come, in his walk, upon a little table set near the
+    room's entrance, and bearing a decanter and some cups.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Hello," he said, "Rollo, where did this come from?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo came forward, velvet steps, velvet pressing together of his
+    hands, face expressionless as velvet too.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A servant of 'is 'ighness, sir," he said&mdash;Rollo did that now and
+    then to let you know that his was the blood of valets&mdash;"left it some
+    time ago, with the compliments of the prince. It looks like a good,
+    nitzy Burgundy, sir," added Rollo tolerantly, "though the man did
+    say it was bottled in something B.C., sir, and if it was it's most
+    likely flat. You can't trust them vintages much farther back than
+    the French Revolootion, beggin' your pardon, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory absently lifted the decanter, and then looked at it with some
+    curiosity. The decanter was like a vase, ornamented with gold
+    medallions covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+    beauty and variety of design. Serpents, men contending with lions,
+    sacred trees and apes were chased in the gold, and the little cups
+    of sard were engraved in pomegranates and segments of fruit and
+    pendent acorns, and were set with cones of cornelian. The cups were
+    joined by a long cord of thick gold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory set his hand to the little golden stopper, perhaps
+    hermetically sealed, he thought idly, at about the time of the
+    accidental discovery of glass itself by the Ph&oelig;nicians. Amory was
+    not imaginative, but as he thought of the possible age of the wine,
+    there lay upon him that fascination communicable from any link
+    between the present and the living past.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Solomon and Sargon," he said to himself, "the geese in the capitol,
+    Marathon, Alexander, Carthage, the Norman conquest, Shakespeare and
+    Miss Frothingham!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He smiled and twisted the carven stopper.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the girl is alive," he said almost wonderingly. "There has been
+    so much Time in the world, and yet she is alive now. Down there in
+    the banquet room."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The odour of the contents of the vase, spicy, penetrating,
+    delicious, crept out, and he breathed it gratefully. It was like no
+    odour that he remembered. This was nothing like Rollo's "good, nitzy
+    Burgundy"&mdash;this was something infinitely more wonderful. And the
+    odour&mdash;the odour was like a draught. And wasn't this the wine of
+    wines, he asked himself, to give them courage, exultation, the most
+    superb daring when they started up that delectable mountain? St.
+    George must know; he would think so too.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I say," said Amory to himself, "we must put some strength in
+    Jarvo's bones too&mdash;poor little brick!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    With that Amory drew the carven stopper, fitted in the little funnel
+    that hung about the neck of the vase, poured a half-finger of the
+    wine in each cup, and lifted one in his hand. But the mere odour was
+    enough to make a man live ten lives, he thought, smiling at his own
+    strange exultation. He must no more than touch it to his lips, for
+    he wanted a clear head for what was coming.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come, Jarvo," he cried gaily&mdash;was he shouting, he wondered, and
+    wasn't that what he was trying to do&mdash;to shout to make some far-away
+    voice answer him? "Come and drink to the health of the prince. Long
+    may he live, long may he live&mdash;without us!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory had stood with his back to the little brown man while he
+    poured the wine. As he turned, he lifted one cup to his lips and
+    Rollo gravely presented the other to Jarvo. But with a bound that
+    all but upset the velvet valet, the little man cleared the space
+    between him and Amory and struck the cup from Amory's hand.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Adôn!" he cried terribly, "adôn! Do not drink&mdash;do not drink!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The precious liquid splashed to the floor with the falling cup and
+    ran red about the tiles. Instantly a powerful and delightful
+    fragrance rose, and the thick fumes possessed the air. Amory threw
+    out his hands blindly, caught dizzily at Rollo, and was half dragged
+    by Jarvo to the open window.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, I say, sir&mdash;" burst out Rollo, more upset over the loss of the
+    wine than he was alarmed at the occurrence. If it came to losing a
+    good, nitzy Burgundy, Rollo knew what that meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Adôn," cried Jarvo, shaking Amory's shoulders, "did you taste the
+    liquor&mdash;tell me&mdash;the liquor&mdash;did you taste?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory shook his head. Jarvo's face and the hovering Rollo and the
+    whole room were enveloped in mist, and the wine was hot on his lips
+    where the cup had touched them. Yet while he stood there, with that
+    permeating fragrance in the air, it came to him vaguely that he had
+    never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this,
+    he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old
+    days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy"
+    Burgundy was no more than a flabby, <i>vin ordinaire</i> beside it. Not
+    that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word
+    that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in
+    his veins, he summed it up to himself triumphantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But after all, the effect was only momentary. Almost as quickly as
+    those strange fumes had arisen they were dissipated. And when
+    presently Amory stood up unsteadily from the seat of the window, he
+    could see clearly enough that Jarvo, with terrified eyes, was
+    turning the vase in his hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the same," he was saying, "it must be the same. The gods have
+    permitted the possible. I was here to tell you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me what?" demanded Amory with ungrateful irritation. "Is the
+    stuff poison?" he asked, tottering in spite of himself as he crossed
+    the floor toward him. But Jarvo turned his face, and upon it was
+    such an incongruous terror that Amory involuntarily stood still.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There are known to be two," said Jarvo, holding the vase at arm's
+    length, "and the one is abundant life, if the draught is not
+    over-measured. But the other is ten thousand times worse than
+    death."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?" cried Amory roughly. "What are you talking
+    about? If the stuff is poison can't you say so?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo looked at him swiftly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "These things are not spoken aloud in Yaque," he said simply, and
+    after that he held his peace. Amory threatened him and laughed at
+    him, but Jarvo shook his head. At last Amory scoffed at the whole
+    matter and stretched out his hand for the vase.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come," he said, "at all events I'll take it with me. It can't be
+    very much worse than the American liqueurs."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My word for it, sir, beggin' your pardon," said Rollo earnestly,
+    "it's a kind of what you might call med-i-eval Burgundy, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is not well," said Jarvo, handing the vase with reluctance, "yet
+    take it&mdash;but see that it touches no lips. I charge you that, adôn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory smiled and slipped the little vase in his coat pocket.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's all right," he said, "I won't let it get away from me. I can
+    find my legs now; I'll go back down. Look sharp, Rollo. Be down
+    there with the oil-skins. We put on this Tyrian purple stuff over
+    the whole outfit," he explained to Jarvo, "and I suppose, you know,
+    that you can get both robes back here for us, if we escape in them?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Assuredly, adôn," said Jarvo, "and you must escape without delay.
+    This wine must mean that the prince, too, wishes you harm. Now let
+    me be before you for a little, so that no one may see us together. I
+    shall go now, immediately, to the motor&mdash;it is waiting already by
+    the wall on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+    banquet hall. I shall not fail you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "On the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the banquet
+    room," repeated Amory. "Thanks, Jarvo. You're all kinds of a good
+    fellow."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, adôn," gravely assented the little man from the threshold.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Ten minutes later Amory followed. Already Rollo had packed the
+    oil-skins, and Amory, his nerves steadied and the excitement of all
+    that the night promised come upon him, hurried before him down the
+    corridor, his thoughts divided in their allegiance between the
+    delight of telling St. George what was toward, and the new and
+    alluring delight of seeing Antoinette Frothingham near at hand in
+    the banquet room. After all, he had had only the vaguest glimpse of
+    a little figure in rose and silver, and he doubted if he could tell
+    her from the princess, but for the interpreting gown.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked up with an irrepressible thrill of delight. He was just
+    at that moment crossing the high white audience-hall, the anteroom
+    to the Hall of Kings&mdash;he, Amory, in Tyrian purple garments. If
+    anything were needed to complete the picture it would be to meet
+    face to face, there in that big, lonely room, a little figure in
+    rose and silver. It made his heart beat even to think of the
+    possibilities of that situation. He skirted the Hall of Kings, and
+    stood in one of the archways of the colonnade, facing the banquet
+    room.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The banquet-table extended about three sides of the room, whose
+    centre the guests faced. The middle space was left pure, unvexed by
+    columns or furnishing. At the room's far end Amory glimpsed the
+    prince, at his side Olivia's white veil, and her women about her;
+    and, nearer, St. George and Balator in the place appointed. A guard
+    came to conduct him, and he crossed to his seat and sank down with
+    the look that could be made to mean whatever Amory meant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I expect to be served," murmured the journalist in him, "by
+    beautiful tame megatheriums, in sashes. And is that glyptodon
+    salad?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's eyes were upon the guests, so tranquilly seated, aware
+    of the hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I fancy," he said in half-voice, "that presently we shall see
+    little flames issuing from their hair, as there used from the hair
+    of the ladies in Werner's ballets."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then as Balator leaned toward him in his splendid leisure, fostering
+    his charm, there came an amazing interruption.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The low key of the room was electrically raised by a cry, loosed
+    from some other plight of being, like an odour of burning
+    encroaching upon a garden.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why have you not waited?" some one called, and the voice&mdash;clear,
+    equal, imperious&mdash;evened its way upon the air and reduced to itself
+    the soft speech of the others. Silence fell upon them all, and
+    their eyes were toward a figure standing in the open interval of the
+    room&mdash;a figure whose aspect thrilled St. George with sudden,
+    inexplicable emotion.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was an old man, incredibly old, so that one thought first of his
+    age. His beard and hair were not all grey, but he had grotesquely
+    brown and wrinkled flesh. His stuff robe hung in straight folds
+    about his singularly erect figure, and there was in his bearing the
+    dignity of one who has understood all fine and gentle things, all
+    things of quietude. But his look was vacant, as if the mind were
+    asleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Why have you not waited?" he repeated almost wonderingly. "Why have
+    you not sent for me?" and his eyes questioned one and another, and
+    rested on the face of the prince upon the dais, with Olivia by his
+    side. The guard, whom in some fashion the strange old man had
+    eluded, hurried from the borders of the room. But he broke from them
+    and was off up half the length of the hall toward the prince's seat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you not know?" he cried as he went, "I am Malakh. Read one
+    another's eyes and you will know. I am Malakh."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As the guards closed about him he tottered and would have fallen
+    save that they caught him roughly and pressed to a door, half
+    carrying him, and he did not resist. But as speech was renewed
+    another voice broke the murmur, and with great amazement St. George
+    knew that this was Olivia's voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she cried&mdash;but half as if she distrusted her own strange
+    impulse, "let him stay&mdash;let him stay."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George saw the prince's look question her. He himself was unable
+    to account for her unexpected intercession, and so, one would have
+    said, was Olivia. She looked up at the prince almost fearfully, and
+    down the length of the listening table, and back to the old man
+    whose eyes were upon her face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He is an old man, your Highness," St. George heard her saying, "let
+    him stay."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit, who gave a curious impression of doing everything
+    that he did in obedience to inertia rather than in its defiance,
+    indicated some command to the puzzled guards, and they led old
+    Malakh to a stone bench not far from the dais, and there he sank
+    down, looking about him without surprise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is well," he said simply, "Malakh has come."
+</p>
+<p>
+    While St. George was marveling&mdash;but not that the old man spoke the
+    English, for in Yaque it was not surprising to find the very madmen
+    speaking one's own tongue&mdash;Balator explained the man.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He is a poor mad creature," Balator said. "He walks the streets of
+    Med saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say, 'king,' and so he is
+    seeking the king. But he is mad, and they say that he always weeps,
+    and therefore they pretend to believe that he says 'Malakh,' which
+    is to say 'salt.' And they call him that for his tears. Doubtless
+    the princess does not understand. Her Highness has a tender heart."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. The incident was trivial, but Olivia had
+    never seemed so near.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Sometimes in the world of commonplace there comes an extreme hour
+    which one afterward remembers with "Could that have been I? But
+    could it have been I who did that?" And one finds it in one's heart
+    to be certain that it was not one's self, but some one else&mdash;some
+    one very near, some one who is always sharing one's own
+    consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's moments. "Perhaps,"
+    St. George would have said, "there is some such person who is
+    nearly, but not quite, I myself. And if there is, it was he and not
+    I who was at that banquet!" It was one of the hours which seem to
+    have been made with no echo. It was; and then passed into other
+    ways, and one remembered only a brightness. For example, St. George
+    listened to what Balator said, and he heard with utmost
+    understanding, and with the frequent pleasure of wonder, and was now
+    and then exquisitely amused as one is amused in dreams. But even as
+    he listened, if he tried to remember the last thing that was said,
+    and the next to the last thing, he found that these had escaped him;
+    and as he rose from the table he could not recall ten words that had
+    been spoken. It was as if the some one very near, who is always
+    sharing one's consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's
+    moments, had taken St. George's part at the banquet while he,
+    himself, sat there in the rôle of his own outer consciousness. But
+    neither he nor that hypothetical "some one else," who was also he,
+    lost for one instant the heavenly knowledge that Olivia was up there
+    at the head of the table.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, in spite of diplomatic effort, had not succeeded in imparting
+    to St. George anything of his talk with Jarvo. Balator was too near,
+    and the place was somehow too generally attentive to permit a secret
+    word. So, as they rose from the table, St. George was still in
+    ignorance of what was toward and knew nothing of either the Ilex
+    Tower or the possibilities of the morrow. He had only one thought,
+    and that was to speak with Olivia, to let her know that he was there
+    on the island, near her, ready to serve her&mdash;ah well, chiefly, he
+    did not disguise from himself, what he wanted was to look at her and
+    to hear her speak to him. But Amory had depended on the confusion of
+    the rising to communicate the great news, and to tell about Jarvo,
+    waiting in a motor out there in the palace courtyard, by the wall on
+    the side opposite the windows of the banquet room. In an auspicious
+    moment Amory looked warily about, thrilling with premonition of his
+    friend's enthusiasm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Before he could speak, St. George uttered a startled exclamation,
+    caught at Amory's arm, sprang forward, and was off up the long room,
+    dragging Amory with him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    About the dais there was suddenly an appalling confusion. Push of
+    feet, murmurs, a cry and, visible over the heads between, a
+    glistening of gold uniforms closing about the throne seats, flashing
+    back to the long, open windows, disappearing against the night...
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is it?" cried Amory as he ran. "What is it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Quick," said St. George only, "I don't know. They've gone with
+    her."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory did not understand, but he saw that Olivia's seat was empty;
+    and when he swept the heads for her white veil, it was not there.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who has?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George swerved to the side of the room toward the windows, and
+    old Malakh stood there, crying out and pointing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The guard, I think," St. George answered, and was over the low sill
+    of a window, running headlong across the courtyard, Amory behind
+    him. "There they go," St. George cried. "Good God, what are we to
+    do? There they go."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked. Down a side avenue&mdash;one of those tunnels of shadow
+    that taught the necessity of mystery&mdash;a great motor car was
+    speeding, and in the dimness the two men could see the white of
+    Olivia's floating veil.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this, Amory wheeled and searched the length of wall across the
+    yard. If only&mdash;if only&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    There on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+    banquet room stood the motor that was that night to go back to
+    Melita. Bolt upright on the seat was Jarvo, and climbing in the
+    tonneau, with his neck stretched toward the confusion of the palace,
+    was Rollo. Jarvo saw Amory, who beckoned; and in an instant the car
+    was beside them and the two men were over the back of the tonneau in
+    a flash.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That way," cried St. George, with no time to waste on the miracle
+    of Jarvo's appearance, "that way&mdash;there. Where you see the white."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At a touch the motor plunged away into the fragrant darkness. Amory
+    looked back. Figures crowded the windows of the palace, and streamed
+    from the banquet hall into the courtyard. Men hurried through the
+    hall, and there was clamour of voices, and in the honey-coloured air
+    the great bulk of the palace towered like a faithless sentinel, the
+    alien banners in nameless colours sending streamers into the
+    moon-lit upper spaces.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On before, down nebulous ways, went the whiteness of the floating
+    veil.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0012"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    BETWEEN-WORLDS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Down nebulous ways they went, the thin darkness flowing past them.
+    The sloping avenue ran all the width of the palace grounds, and here
+    among slim-trunked trees faint fringes of the light touched away the
+    dimness in the open spaces and expressed the borders of the dusk.
+    Always the way led down, dipping deeper in the conjecture of shadow,
+    and always before them glimmered the mist of Olivia's veil, an
+    eidolon of love, of love's eternal Vanishing Goal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And St. George was in pursuit. So were Amory and Jarvo, and Rollo of
+    the oil-skins, but these mattered very little, for it was St. George
+    whose eyes burned in his pale face and were striving to catch the
+    faintest motion in that fleeing car ahead.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Faster, Jarvo," he said, "we're not gaining on them. I think
+    they're gaining on us. Put ahead, can't you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory vexed the air with frantic questionings. "How did it happen?"
+    he said. "Who did it? Was it the guard? What did they do it for?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It looks to me," said St. George only, peering distractedly into
+    the gloom, "as if all those fellows had on uniforms. Can you see?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo spoke softly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is true, adôn," he said, "they are of the guard. This is what
+    they had planned," he added to Amory. "I feared the harm would be to
+    you. It is the same. Your turn would be the next."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean?" St. George demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, with some incoherence, told him what Jarvo had come to them
+    to propose, and heightened his own excitement by plunging into the
+    business of that night and the next, as he had had it from the
+    little brown man's lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Up the mountain to-morrow night," he concluded fervently, "what do
+    you think of that? Do you see us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Maniac, no," said St. George shortly, "what do we want to go up the
+    mountain for if Miss Holland is somewhere else? Faster, Jarvo, can't
+    you?" he urged. "Why, this thing is built to go sixty miles an hour.
+    We're creeping."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps it's better to start in gentle and work up a pace, sir,"
+    observed Rollo inspirationally, "like a man's legs, sir, beggin'
+    your pardon."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at him as if he had first seen him, so that Amory
+    once more explained his presence and pointed to the oil-skins. And
+    St. George said only:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now we're coming up a little&mdash;don't you think we're coming up a
+    little? Throw it wide open, Jarvo&mdash;now, go!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are you going to do when you catch them?" demanded Amory. "We
+    can't lunge into them, for fear of hurting Miss Holland. And who
+    knows what devilish contrivance they've got&mdash;dum-dum bullets with a
+    poison seal attachment," prophesied Amory darkly. "What are you
+    going to do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know what we're going to do," said St. George doggedly,
+    "but if we can overtake them it won't take us long to find out."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Never so slightly the pursuers were gaining. It was impossible to
+    tell whether those in the flying car knew that they were followed,
+    and if they did know, and if Olivia knew, St. George wondered
+    whether the pursuit were to her a new alarm, or whether she were
+    looking to them for deliverance. If she knew! His heart stood still
+    at the thought&mdash;oh, and if they had both known, that morning at
+    breakfast at the Boris, that <i>this</i> was the way the genie would come
+    out of the jar. But how, if he were unable to help her? And how
+    could he help her when these others might have Heaven knew what
+    resources of black art, art of all the colours of the Yaque
+    spectrum, if it came to that? The slim-trunked trees flew past them,
+    and the tender branches brushed their shoulders and hung out their
+    flowers like lamps. Warm wind was in their faces, sweet,
+    reverberant voices of the wood-things came chorusing, and ahead
+    there in the dimness, that misty will-o'-the-wisp was her veil,
+    Olivia's veil. St. George would have followed if it had led him
+    between-worlds.
+</p>
+<p>
+    In a manner it did lead him between-worlds. Emerging suddenly upon a
+    broader avenue their car followed the other aside and shot through a
+    great gateway of the palace wall&mdash;a wall built of such massive
+    blocks that the gateway formed a covered passageway. From there,
+    delicately lighted, greenly arched, and on this festal night, quite
+    deserted, went the road by which, the night before, they had entered
+    Med.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now," said St. George between set teeth, "now see what you can do,
+    Jarvo. Everything depends on you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Evidently Jarvo had been waiting for this stretch of open road and
+    expecting the other car to take it. He bent forward, his wiry
+    little frame like a quivering spring controlling the motion. The
+    motor leaped at his touch. Away down the road they tore with the
+    wind singing its challenge. Second by second they saw their
+    gain increase. The uniforms of the guards in the car became
+    distinguishable. The white of Olivia's veil merged in the
+    brightness of her gown&mdash;was it only the shining of the gold of the
+    uniforms or could St. George see the floating gold of her hair?
+    Ah, wonderful, past all speech it was wonderful to be fleeing
+    toward her through this pale light that was like a purer element
+    than light itself. With the phantom moving of the boughs in the
+    wood on either side light seemed to dance and drip from leaf to
+    leaf&mdash;the visible spirit of the haunted green. The unreality of it
+    all swept over him almost stiflingly. Olivia&mdash;was it indeed Olivia
+    whom he was following down lustrous ways of a land vague as a
+    star; or was his pursuit not for her, but for the exquisite,
+    incommunicable Idea, and was he following it through a world
+    forth-fashioned from his own desire?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly indistinguishable sounds were in his ears, words from
+    Amory, from Jarvo certain exultant gutturals. He felt the car
+    slacken speed, he looked ahead for the swift beckoning of the veil,
+    and then he saw that where, in the delicate distance, the other
+    motor had sped its way, it now stood inactive in the road before
+    them, and they were actually upon it. The four guards in the motor
+    were standing erect with uplifted faces, their gold uniforms shining
+    like armour. But this was not all. There, in the highway beside the
+    car, the mist of her veil like a halo about her, Olivia stood alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George did not reckon what they meant to do. He dropped over the
+    side of the tonneau and ran to her. He stood before her, and all the
+    joy that he had ever known was transcended as she turned toward
+    him. She threw out her hands with a little cry&mdash;was it gladness, or
+    relief, or beseeching? He could not be certain that there was even
+    recognition in her eyes before she tottered and swayed, and he
+    caught her unconscious form in his arms. As he lifted her he looked
+    with apprehension toward the car that held the guards. To his
+    bewilderment there was no car there. The pursued motor, like a
+    winged thing of the most innocent vagaries, had taken itself off
+    utterly. And on before, the causeway was utterly empty, dipping idly
+    between murmurous green. But at the moment St. George had no time to
+    spend on that wonder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He carried Olivia to the tonneau of Jarvo's car, jealous when Rollo
+    lifted her gown's hem from the dust of the road and when Amory threw
+    open the door. He held her in his arms, half kneeling beside her,
+    profoundly regardless where it should please the others to dispose
+    themselves. He had no recollection of hearing Jarvo point the way
+    through the trees to a path that led away, as far from them as a
+    voice would carry, to the Ilex Tower whose key burned in Amory's
+    pocket, promising radiant, intangible things to his imagination. St.
+    George understood with magnificent unconcern that Amory and Rollo
+    were gone off there to wait for the return of him and Jarvo; he took
+    it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken
+    back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he
+    knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving
+    across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate
+    destination in which he found himself believing with infinite faith.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For this was Olivia, in his arms. St. George looked down at her, at
+    the white, exquisite face with its shadow of lashes, and it seemed
+    to him that he must not breathe, or remember, or hope, lest the gods
+    should be jealous and claim the moment, and leave him once more
+    forlorn. That was the secret, he thought, not to touch away the
+    elusive moment by hope or memory, but just to live it, filled with
+    its ecstasies, borne on the crest of its consciousness. It seemed to
+    him in some intimately communicated fashion, that the moment, the
+    very world of the island, was become to him a more intense object
+    of consciousness than himself. And somehow Olivia was its
+    expression&mdash;Olivia, here in his arms, with the stir of her breath
+    and the light, light pressure of her body and the fall of her hair,
+    not only symbols of the sovereign hour, but the hour's realities.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On either side the phantom wood pressed close about them, and its
+    light seemed coined by goblin fingers. Dissolving wind, persuading
+    little voices musical beyond the domain of music that he knew,
+    quick, poignant vistas of glades where the light spent itself in
+    its longed-for liberty of colour, labyrinthine ways of shadow that
+    taught the necessity of mystery. There was something lyric about it
+    all. Here Nature moved on no formal lines, understood no frugality
+    of beauty, but was lavish with a divine and special errantry to a
+    divine and special understanding. And it had been given St. George
+    to move with her merely by living this hour, with Olivia in his
+    arms.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The sweet of life&mdash;the sweet of life and the world his own. The
+    words had never meant so much. He had often said them in exultation,
+    but he had never known their truth: the world was literally his own,
+    under the law. Nothing seemed impossible. His mind went back to the
+    unexplained disappearing of that other motor and, however it had
+    been, that did not seem impossible either. It seemed natural, and
+    only a new doorway to new points of contact. In this amazing land no
+    speculation was too far afield to be the food of every day. Here men
+    understood miracle as the rest of the world understands invention.
+    Already the mere existence of Yaque proved that the space of
+    experience is transcended&mdash;and with the thought a fancy, elusive and
+    profound, seized him and gripped at his heart with an emotion wider
+    than fear. What had become of the other car? Had it gone down some
+    road of the wood which the guards knew, or ... The words of Prince
+    Tabnit came back to him as they had been spoken in that wonderful
+    tour of the island. "The higher dimensions are being conquered.
+    Nearly all of us can pass into the fifth at will, 'disappearing,' as
+    you have the word." Was it possible that in the vanishing of the
+    pursued car this had been demonstrated before him? Into this space,
+    inclusive of the visible world and of Yaque as well, had the car
+    passed <i>without the pursuers being able to point</i> to the direction
+    which it had taken? St. George smiled in derision as this flashed
+    upon him, and it hardly held his thought for a moment, for his eyes
+    were upon Olivia's face, so near, so near his own ... Undoubtedly,
+    he thought vaguely, that other motor had simply swerved aside to
+    some private opening of the grove and, from being hard-pressed and
+    almost overtaken, was now well away in safety. Yet if this were so,
+    would they not have taken Olivia with them? But to that strange and
+    unapparent hyperspace they could not have taken her, because she did
+    not understand. "...just as one," Prince Tabnit had said, "who
+    understands how to die and come to life again would not be able to
+    take with him any one who himself did not understand how to
+    accompany him..."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Some terrifying and exalting sense swept him into a new intimacy of
+    understanding as he realized glimmeringly what heights and depths
+    lay about his ceasing to see that car of the guard. Yet, with
+    Olivia's head upon his arm, all that he theorized in that flash of
+    time hung hardly beyond the border of his understanding. Indeed, it
+    seemed to St. George as if almost&mdash;almost he could understand, as if
+    he could pierce the veil and know utterly all the secrets of spirit
+    and sense that confound. "We shall all know <i>when we are able to
+    bear it</i>," he had once heard another say, and it seemed to him now
+    that at last he was able to bear it, as if the sense of the
+    uninterrupted connection between the two worlds was almost a part of
+    his own consciousness. A moment's deeper thought, a quicker flowing
+    of the imagination, a little more poignant projecting of himself
+    above the abyss and he, too, would understand. It came to him that
+    he had almost understood every time that he had looked at Olivia.
+    Ah, he thought, and how exquisite, how matchless she was, and what
+    Heaven beyond Heaven the world would hold for him if only she were
+    to love him. St. George lifted the little hand that hung at her
+    side, and stooped momentarily to touch his cheek to the soft hair
+    that swept her shoulder. Here for him lay the sweet of life&mdash;the
+    sweet of the world, ay, and the sweet of all the world's mysteries.
+    This alien land was no nearer the truth than he. His love was the
+    expression of its mystery. They went back through the great
+    archway, and entered the palace park. Once more the slim-trunked
+    trees flew past them with the fringes of light expressing the
+    borders of the dusk. St. George crouched, half-kneeling, on the
+    floor of the tonneau, his free hand protecting Olivia's face from
+    the leaning branches of heavy-headed flowers. He had been so
+    passionately anxious that she should know that he was on the island,
+    near her, ready to serve her; but now, save for his alarm and
+    anxiety about her, he felt a shy, profound gratitude that the hour
+    had fallen as it had fallen. Whatever was to come, this nearness to
+    her would be his to remember and possess. It had been his supreme
+    hour. Whether she had recognized him in that moment on the road,
+    whether she ever knew what had happened made, he thought, no
+    difference. But if she was to open her eyes as they reached the
+    border of the park, and if she was to know that it was like this
+    that the genie had come out of the jar&mdash;the mere notion made him
+    giddy, and he saw that Heaven may have little inner Heaven-courts
+    which one is never too happy to penetrate.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But Olivia did not stir or unclose her eyes. The great strain of the
+    evening, the terror and shock of its ending, the very relief with
+    which she had, at all events, realized herself in the hands of
+    friends were more than even an island princess could pass through in
+    serenity. And when at last from the demesne of enchantment the car
+    emerged in the court of the palace, Olivia knew nothing of it and,
+    as nearly as he could recall afterward, neither did St. George. He
+    understood that the courtyard was filled with murmurs, and that as
+    Olivia was lifted from the car the voice of Mrs. Medora Hastings, in
+    all its excesses of tone and pitch, was tilted in a kind of
+    universal reproving. Then he was aware that Jarvo, beseeching him
+    not to leave the motor, had somehow got him away from all the tumult
+    and the questioning and the crush of the other motors setting
+    tardily off down the avenue in a kind cf majestic pursuit of the
+    princess. After that he remembered nothing but the grateful gloom of
+    the wood and the swift flight of the car down that nebulous way,
+    thin darkness flowing about him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was to go back to join Amory in some kind of tower, he knew; and
+    he was infinitely resigned, for he remembered that this was in some
+    way essential to his safety, and that it had to do with the ascent
+    of Mount Khalak to-morrow night. For the rest St. George was certain
+    of nothing save that he was floating once more in a sea of light,
+    with the sweet of the world flowing in his veins; and upon his arm
+    and against his shoulder he could still feel the thrill of the
+    pressure of Olivia's head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The genie had come out of the jar&mdash;and never, never would he go
+    back.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0013"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE LINES LEAD UP
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    In the late hours of the next afternoon Rollo, with a sigh, uncoiled
+    himself from the shadow of the altar to the god Melkarth, in the
+    Ilex Temple, and stiffly rose. Vicissitudes were not for Rollo, who
+    had not fathomed the joys of adaptability; and the savour of the
+    sweet herbs which, from Jarvo's wallet, he had that day served, was
+    forgotten in his longing for a drop of tarragan vinegar and a bulb
+    of garlic with which to dress the herbs. His lean and shadowed face
+    wore an expression of settled melancholy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sorrow's nothing," he sententiously observed. "It's trouble that
+    does for a man, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, who lay at full length on a mossy sill of the king's
+    chapel counting the hours of his inaction, continued to look out
+    over the glistening tops of the ilex trees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Speaking of trouble," he said, "what would you say, Rollo, to
+    getting back to the yacht to-night, instead of going up the mountain
+    with us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo dropped his eyes, but his face brightened under, as it were,
+    his never-lifted mask.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, sir," he said humbly, "a person is always willing to do
+    whatever makes him the most useful."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Little Cawthorne and Bennietod," went on St. George, "ten to one
+    will take to the trail to-night, if they haven't already. They'll be
+    coming to Med and reorganizing the police force, or raising a
+    standing army or starting a subway. You'd do well to drop down and
+    give them some idea of what's happened, and I fancy you'd better all
+    be somewhere about on the day after to-morrow, at noon. Not that
+    there will be any wedding at that time," explained St. George
+    carefully, "although there may be something to see, all the same.
+    But you might tell them, you know, that Miss Holland is due to marry
+    the prince then. Can you get back to the yacht alone?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo hadn't thought of that, and his mask fell once more into its
+    lines of misery.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I don't know, sir," he said doubtfully, "most men can go up a steep
+    place all right. It's comin' down that's hard on the knees. And if I
+    was to try it alone, sir&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo made a sign of reassurance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is not well," he said, "you would be dashed to pieces. Ulfin,
+    one of the six, will wait for us to-night on the edge of the grove.
+    He can conduct the way to the vessel."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, sir," said Rollo, not without a certain self-satisfaction,
+    "something is always sure to turn up, sir."
+</p>
+<p>
+    From a tour of the temple Amory came listlessly back to the king's
+    chapel. There, where the descendants of Abibaal had worshiped until
+    their idols had been refined by Time to a kind of decoration, the
+    Americans and Jarvo had spent the night. They had slept stretched on
+    benches of beveled stone. They had waked to trace the figures in a
+    length of tapestry representing the capture of Io on the coast of
+    Argolis, doubtless woven by an eye-witness. They had bathed in a
+    brook near the entrance where stood the altar for the sacrifice
+    round which the priests and <i>hierodouloi</i> had been wont to dance,
+    and where huge architraves, metopes and tryglyphs, massive as those
+    at Gebeil and Tortosa and hewn from living rock, rose from the
+    fragile green of the wood like a huge arm signaling its eternal
+    "Alas!" They had partaken of Jarvo's fruit and sweet herbs, and
+    Rollo had served them, standing with his back to the niche where
+    once had looked augustly down the image of the god. And now Amory,
+    with a smile, leaned against a wall where old vines, grown
+    miraculously in crannies, spread their tendrils upon the friendly
+    hieroglyphic scoring of the crenelated stone, and summed up his
+    reflections of the night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've got it," he announced, "I think it was up in the Adirondacks,
+    summer before last. I think I was in a canoe when she went by in a
+    launch, with the Chiswicks. Why, do you know, I think I dreamed
+    about Miss Frothingham for weeks."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George smiled suddenly and radiantly, and his smile was for the
+    sake of both Rollo and Amory&mdash;Rollo whose sense of the commonplace
+    nothing could overpower, Amory who talked about the Chiswicks in the
+    Adirondacks. Why not? St. George thought happily. Here in the temple
+    certain precious and delicate idols were believed to be hidden in
+    alcoves walled up by mighty stone; and here, Jarvo was telling them,
+    were secret exits to the road contrived by the priests of the temple
+    at the time of their oppression by the worshipers of another god;
+    but yet what special interest could he and Amory have in brooding
+    upon these, or the ancient Ph&oelig;nicians having "invited to traffic by
+    a signal fire," when they could sit still and remember?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "To-night," he said aloud, feeling a sudden fellowship for both
+    Amory and Rollo, "to-night, when the moon rises, we shall watch it
+    from the top of the mountain."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then he wondered, many hundred times, whether Olivia could possibly
+    have recognized him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the dark had fallen they set out. The ilex grove was very still
+    save for a fugitive wind that carried faint spices, and they took a
+    winding way among trunks and reached the edge of the wood without
+    adventure. There Ulfin and another of the six carriers were waiting,
+    as Jarvo had expected, and it was decided that they should both
+    accompany Rollo down to the yacht.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Rollo handed the oil-skins to St. George and Amory, and then stood
+    crushing his hat in his hands, doing his best to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look sharp, Rollo," St. George advised him, "don't step one foot
+    off a precipice. And tell the people on the yacht not to worry. We
+    shall expect to see them day after to-morrow, somewhere about. Take
+    care of yourself."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, sir," said Rollo with difficulty, "good-by, sir. I '<i>ope</i>
+    you'll be successful, sir. A person likes to succeed in what they
+    undertake."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then the three went on down the glimmering way where, last night,
+    they had pursued the floating pennon of the veil. There were few
+    upon the highway, and these hardly regarded them. It occurred to St.
+    George that they passed as figures in a dream will pass, in the
+    casual fashion of all unreality, taking all things for granted. Yet,
+    of course, to the passers-by upon the road to Med, there was nothing
+    remarkable in the aspect of the three companions. All that was
+    remarkable was the adventure upon which they were bound, and nobody
+    could possibly have guessed that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Almost a mile lay between them and the point where the ascent of
+    the mountain was to be begun. The road which they were taking
+    followed at the foot of the embankment which girt the island, and it
+    led them at last to a stretch of arbourescent heath, piled with
+    black basaltic rocks. Here, where the light was dim like the glow
+    from light reflected upon low clouds, they took their way among
+    great branching cacti and nameless plants that caught at their
+    ankles. A strange odour rose from the earth, mineral, metallic, and
+    the air was thick with particles stirred by their feet and more
+    resembling ashes than dust. This was a waste place of the island,
+    and if one were to lift a handful of the soil, St. George thought,
+    it was very likely that one might detect its elements; as, here the
+    dust of a temple, here of a book, here a tomb and here a sacrifice.
+    He felt himself near the earth, in its making. He looked away to the
+    sugar-loaf cone of the mountain risen against the star-lit sky.
+    Above its fortress-like bulk with circular ramparts burned the clear
+    beacon of the light on the king's palace. As he saw the light, St.
+    George knew himself not only near the earth but at one with the very
+    currents of the air, partaker of now a hope, now a task, now a
+    spell, and now a memory. It was as if love had made him one with the
+    dust of dead cities and with their eternal spiritual effluence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At length they crossed the broad avenue that led from the
+    Eurychôrus to Melita, and struck into the road that skirted the
+    mountain; and where a thicket of trees flung bold branches across
+    the way, three figures rose from the ground before them, and Akko
+    stepped forward and saluted, his white teeth gleaming. Immediately
+    Jarvo led the way through a strip of underbrush at the base of the
+    mountain, and they emerged in a glade where the light hardly
+    penetrated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here were distinguishable the palanquins in which the ascent was to
+    be made. These were like long baskets, upborne by a pole of great
+    flexibility broadening to a wider support beneath the body of the
+    basket and provided with rubber straps through which the arms were
+    passed. When St. George and Amory were seated, Jarvo spoke
+    hesitatingly:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We must bandage your eyes, adôn," he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh really, really," protested St. George, "we don't understand half
+    we do see. Do let us see what we can."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You must be blindfolded, adôn," repeated Jarvo firmly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory, passing his arms reflectively through the rubber straps which
+    Akko held for him, spoke cheerfully:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'll go up blindfold," he submitted, "if I can smoke."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Neither of us will," said St. George with determination. "See
+    here, Jarvo, we are both level-headed. We pledge you our word of
+    honour, in addition, not to dive overboard. Now&mdash;lead on."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It has never been done," said the little brown man with obstinacy,
+    "you will lose your reason, adôn."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now, if we do," said St. George, "pitch us over and leave
+    us. Besides, I think we have. Lead on, please."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Against the will of the others, he prevailed. The light oil-skins
+    were placed in the baskets, each of which was shouldered by two men,
+    Jarvo bearing the foremost pole of St. George's palanquin. All the
+    carriers had drawn on long, soft shoes which, perhaps from some
+    preparation in which they had been dipped, glowed with light,
+    illuminating the ground for a little distance at every step.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you ready, adôn?" asked Jarvo and Akko at the same moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ready!" cried St. George impatiently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ready," said Amory languidly, and added one thought more: "I hope
+    for Chillingworth's sake," he said, "that Frothingham is a notary
+    public. We'll have to have somebody's seal at the bottom of all this
+    copy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The baskets were lightly lifted. Jarvo gave a sharp command, and all
+    four of the men broke into a rhythmic chant. Jarvo, leading the way,
+    sprang immediately upon the first foothold, where none seemed to
+    be, and without pause to the next. So perfectly were the men trained
+    that it was as if but one set of muscles were inspiring the
+    movements made to the beat of that monotonous measure. In their
+    strong hands the flexible pole seemed to give as their bodies gave,
+    and so lightly did they leap upward that the jar of their alighting
+    was hardly perceptible, as if, as had occurred to St. George as they
+    ascended the lip of the island, gravity were here another matter.
+    So, without pause, save in the rhythm of that strange march music,
+    the remarkable progress was begun.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George threw one swift glance upward and looked down,
+    shudderingly. Beetling above them in the great starlight hung the
+    gigantic pile, wall upon wall of rock hewn with such secret foothold
+    that it was a miracle how any living thing could catch and cling to
+    its forbidding surface. Only lifelong practice of the men, who from
+    childhood had been required to make the ascent and whose fathers and
+    fathers' fathers before them had done the same, could have accounted
+    for that catlike ability to cling to the trail where was no trail.
+    The sensation of the long swinging upward movement was unutterably
+    alien to anything in life or in dreams, and the sheer height above
+    and the momently-deepening chasm below were presences contending for
+    possession.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Strange fragrance stole from gum and bark of the decreasing
+    vegetation. Dislodged stones rolled bounding from rock to rock into
+    the abyss. To right and left the way went. There was not even the
+    friendly beacon of the summit to beckon them. It seemed to St.
+    George that their whole safety lay in motion, that a moment's
+    cessation from the advance would hurl them all down the sides of the
+    declivity. Since the ascent began he had not ceased to look down;
+    and now as they rose free of the tree-tops that clothed the base of
+    the mountain he could see across the plain, and beyond the bounding
+    embankment of the island to the dark waste of the sea. Somewhere out
+    there <i>The Aloha</i> was rocking. Somewhere, away to the northwest, the
+    lights of New York harbour shone. <i>Did</i> they, St. George wondered
+    vaguely; and, when he went back, how would they look to him? It
+    seemed to him in some indeterminate fashion that when he saw them
+    again there would be new lines and sides of beauty which he had
+    never suspected, and as if all the world would be changed, included
+    in this new world that he had found.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Half-way up the ascent a resting-place was contrived for the
+    carriers. The projection upon which the baskets were lowered was
+    hardly three feet in width. Its edge dropped into darkness. Within
+    reach, leaves rustled from the summit of a tree rooted somewhere in
+    the chasm. The blackness below was vast and to be measured only by
+    the memory of that upward course. Gemmed by its lighted hamlets the
+    fair plain of the island lay, with Med and Melita glowing like lamps
+    to the huge dusk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St. George," said Amory soberly, "if it's all true&mdash;if these people
+    do understand what the world doesn't know anything about&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It makes a man feel&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes," said St. George, "it does."
+</p>
+<p>
+    This, they afterward remembered, was all that they said on the
+    ascent. One wonders if two, being met among the "strengthless tribes
+    of the dead," would find much more to say.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then they went on, scaling that invisible way, with the twinkling
+    feet of the carriers drawing upward like a thread of thin gold which
+    they were to climb. What, St. George thought as the way seemed to
+    lengthen before them, what if there were no end? What if this were
+    some gigantic trick of Destiny to keep him for the rest of his life
+    in mid-air, ceaselessly toiling up, a latter-day Sisyphus, in a
+    palanquin? He had dreamed of stairs in the darkness which men
+    mounted and found to have no summits, and suppose this were such a
+    stair? Suppose, among these marvels that were related to his dreams,
+    he had, as it were, tossed a ball of twine in the air and, like the
+    Indian jugglers, climbed it? Suppose he had built a castle in the
+    clouds and tenanted it with Olivia, and were now foolhardily
+    attempting to scale the air? Ah well, he settled it contentedly,
+    better so. For this divine jugglery comes once into every life, and
+    one must climb to the castle with madness and singing if he would
+    attain to the temples that lie on the castle-plain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Gradually, as they approached the summit, the ascent became less
+    precipitous. As they neared the cone their way lay over a kind of
+    natural fosse at the cone's base; and, although the mountain did not
+    reach the level of perpetual snow, yet an occasional cool breath
+    from the dark told where in some natural cavern snow had lain
+    undisturbed since the unremembered eruption of the sullen, volcanic
+    peak. Then came a breath of over-powering sweetness from some secret
+    thicket, and something was struck from the feet of the bearers that
+    was like white pumice gravel. St. George no longer looked downward;
+    the plain and the waste of the sea were in a forgotten limbo, and he
+    searched eagerly on high for the first rays of the light that marked
+    the goal of his longing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Yet he was unprepared when, swerving sharply and skirting an immense
+    shoulder of rock, Jarvo suddenly emerged upon a broad retaining wall
+    of stone bordering a smooth, moon-lit terrace extending by shallow
+    flights of steps to the white doors of the king's palace itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As St. George and Amory freed themselves and sprang to their feet
+    their eyes were drawn to a glory of light shining over the low
+    parapet which surrounded the terrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look," cried St. George victoriously, "the moon!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    From the sea the moon was momently growing, like a giant bubble, and
+    a bright path had issued to the mountain's foot. "See," she would
+    doubtless have said if she could, "I would have shown you the way
+    here all your life if only you had looked properly." But at all
+    events St. George's prophecy was fulfilled: From the top of Mount
+    Khalak they were watching the moon rise. St. George, however, was
+    not yet in the company whose image had pleasantly besieged him when
+    he had prophesied. He turned impatiently to the palace. Jarvo,
+    resting on the stones where he had sunk down, signaled them to go
+    on, and the two needed no second bidding. They set off briskly
+    across the plateau, Amory looking about him with eager curiosity,
+    St. George on the crest of his divine expectancy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The palace was set on the west of the gentle slope to which the
+    mountain-top had been artificially leveled. The terrace led up on
+    three sides from the marge of the height to the great portals. Over
+    everything hung that imponderable essence that was clearer and purer
+    than any light&mdash;"better than any light that ever shone." In its
+    glamourie, with that far ocean background, the palace of pale stone
+    looked unearthly, a sky thing, with ramparts of air. The principle
+    of the builders seemed not to have been the ancient dictum that
+    "mass alone is admirable," for the great pile was shaped, with
+    beauty of unknown line, in three enormous cylinders, one rising from
+    another, the last magnificently curved to a huge dome on whose
+    summit burned with inconceivable brilliance the light which had been
+    a beacon to the longing eyes turned toward it from the deck of <i>The
+    Aloha</i>. In the shadow of the palace rose two high towers,
+    obelisk-shaped from the pure white stone. Scattered about the slope
+    were detached buildings, consisting of marble monoliths resting upon
+    double bases and crowned with carved cornices, or of truncated
+    pyramids and pyramidions. These had plinths of delicately-coloured
+    stone over which the light diffused so that they looked luminous,
+    and the small blocks used to fill the apertures of the courses shone
+    like precious things. Adjacent to one of the porches were two
+    conical shrines, for images and little lamps; and, near-by, a fallen
+    pillar of immense proportions lay undisturbed upon the court of
+    sward across which it had some time shivered down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if the palace had been discovered to be the preserved and
+    transported Temple of Solomon it could not have stayed St. George
+    for one moment of admiration. He was off up the slope, seeing only
+    the great closed portals, and with Amory beside him he ran boldly up
+    the long steps. It was a part of the unreality of the place that
+    there seemed absolutely no sign of life about the King's palace. The
+    windows glowed with the soft light within, but there were no guards,
+    no servants, no sign of any presence. For the first time, when they
+    reached the top of the steps, the two men hesitated.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Personally," said Amory doubtfully, "I have never yet tapped at a
+    king's front door. What does one do?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at the long stone porches, uncovered and girt by a
+    parapet following the curve of the façade.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Would you mind waiting a minute?" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With that he was off along the balcony to the south&mdash;and afterward
+    he wondered why, and if it is true that Fate tempts us in the way
+    that she would have us walk by luring us with unseen roses budding
+    from the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Where the porch abruptly widened to a kind of upper terrace, like a
+    hanging garden set with flowering trees, three high archways opened
+    to an apartment whose bright lights streamed across the grass-plots.
+    St. George felt something tug at his heart, something that urged him
+    forward and caught him up in an ecstasy of triumph and hope
+    fulfilled. He looked back at Amory, and Amory was leaning on the
+    parapet, apparently sunk in reflections which concerned nobody. So
+    St. George stepped softly on until he reached the first archway, and
+    there he stopped, and the moment was to him almost past belief.
+    Within the open doorway, so near that if she had lifted her eyes
+    they must have met his own, was the woman whom he had come across
+    the sea to seek.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly knew that he spoke, for it was as if all the world
+    were singing her name.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" he said.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0014"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIV
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    THE ISLE OF HEARTS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    The room in which St. George was looking was long and lofty and hung
+    with pale tapestries. White pillars supporting the domed white
+    ceiling were wound with garlands. The smoke from a little brazen
+    tripod ascended pleasantly, and about the windows stirred in the
+    faint wind draperies of exceeding thinness, woven in looms stilled
+    centuries ago.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia was crossing before the windows. She wore a white gown strewn
+    with roses, and she seemed as much at home on this alien
+    mountain-top as she had been in her aunt's drawing-room at the
+    Boris. But her face was sad, and there was not a touch of the
+    piquancy which it had worn the night before in the throne-room, nor
+    of its delicious daring as she had sped past him in the big Yaque
+    touring car. Save for her, the room was deserted; it was as if the
+    prince had come to the castle and found the Sleeping Princess the
+    only one awake.
+</p>
+<p>
+    If in that supreme moment St. George had leaped forward and taken
+    her in his arms no one&mdash;no one, that is, in the fairy-tale of what
+    was happening&mdash;would greatly have censured him. But he stood without
+    for a moment, hardly daring to believe his happiness, hardly knowing
+    that her name was on his lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had spoken, however, and she turned quickly, her look uncertainly
+    seeking the doorway, and she saw him. For a moment she stood still,
+    her eyes upon his face; then with a little incredulous cry that
+    thrilled him with a sudden joyous hope that was like belief, she
+    came swiftly toward him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George loved to remember that she did that. There was no waiting
+    for assurance and no fear; only the impulse, gloriously obeyed, to
+    go toward him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stepped in the room, and took her hands in his and looked into
+    her eyes as if he would never turn away his own. In her face was a
+    dawning of glad certainty and welcome which he could not doubt.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You," she cried softly, "you. How is it possible? But how is it
+    possible?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her voice trembled a little with something so sweet that it raced
+    through his veins with magic.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you rub the lamp?" he said. "Because I couldn't help coming."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She looked at him breathlessly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Have you," he asked her gravely, "eaten of the potatoes of Yaque?
+    And are you going to say, 'Off with his head'? And can you tell me
+    what is the population of the island?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    At that they both laughed&mdash;the merry, irrepressible laugh of youth
+    which explains that the world is a very good place indeed and that
+    one is glad that one belongs there. And the memory of that breakfast
+    on the other side of the world, of their happy talk about what would
+    happen if they two were impossibly to meet in Yaque came back to
+    them both, and set his heart beating and flooded her face with
+    delicate colour. In her laugh was a little catching of the breath
+    that was enchanting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not yet," she said, "your head is safe till you tell me how you got
+    here, at all events. Now tell me&mdash;oh, tell me. I can't believe it
+    until you tell me."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She moved a little away from the door.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come in," she said shyly, "if you've come all the way from America
+    you must be very tired."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George shook his head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come out," he pleaded, "I want to stand on top of a high mountain
+    and show you the whole world."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She went quite simply and without hesitation&mdash;because, in Yaque, the
+    maddest things would be the truest&mdash;and when she had stepped from
+    the low doorway she looked up at him in the tender light of the
+    garden terrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If you are quite sure," she said, "that you will not disappear in
+    the dark?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed happily.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I shall not disappear," he promised, "though the world were to turn
+    round the other way."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They crossed the still terrace to the parapet and stood looking out
+    to sea with the risen moon shining across the waters. The light wind
+    stirred in the cedrine junipers, shaking out perfume; the great
+    fairy pile of the palace rose behind them; and before them lay the
+    monstrous moon-lit abyss than whose depths the very stars, warm and
+    friendly, seemed nearer to them. To the big young American in blue
+    serge beside the little new princess who had drawn him over seas the
+    dream that one is always having and never quite remembering was
+    suddenly come true. No wonder that at that moment the patient Amory
+    was far enough from his mind. To St. George, looking down upon
+    Olivia, there was only one truth and one joy in the universe, and
+    she was that truth and that joy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I can't believe it," he said boyishly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Believe&mdash;what?" she asked, for the delight of hearing him say so.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This&mdash;me&mdash;most of all, you!" he answered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you must believe it," she cried anxiously, "or maybe it will
+    stop being."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I will, I will, I am now!" promised St. George in alarm.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereat they both laughed again in sheer light-heartedness. Then,
+    resting his broad shoulders against a prism of the parapet, St.
+    George looked down at her in infinite content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You found the island," she said; "what is still more wonderful you
+    have come here&mdash;but <i>here</i>&mdash;to the top of the mountain. Oh, did you
+    bring news of my father?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George would have given everything save the sweet of the moment
+    to tell her that he did.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But now," he added cheerfully, and his smile disarmed this of its
+    over-confidence, "I've only been here two days or so. And, though it
+    may look easy, I've had my hands full climbing up this. I ought to
+    be allowed another day or two to locate your father."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Please tell me how you got here," Olivia demanded then.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George told her briefly, omitting the yacht's ownership,
+    explaining merely that the paper had sent him and that Jarvo and
+    Akko had pointed the way and, save for that journey down nebulous
+    ways in the wake of her veil the night before, sketching the
+    incidents which had followed his arrival upon the island.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And one of the most agreeable hours I've had in Yaque," he
+    finished, "was last night, when you were chairman of the meeting.
+    That was magnificent."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You <i>were</i> there!" cried Olivia, "I thought&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That you saw me?" St. George pressed eagerly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think that I thought so," she admitted.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But you never looked at me," said St. George dolefully, "and I had
+    on a forty-two gored dress, or something."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," Olivia confessed, "but I had thought so before when I knew it
+    couldn't be you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's heart gave a great bound.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When before?" he wanted to know ecstatically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, before," she explained, "and then afterward, too."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When afterward?" he urged.
+</p>
+<p>
+    (Smile if you like, but this is the way the happy talk goes in Yaque
+    as you remember very well, if you are honest.)
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yesterday, when I was motoring, I thought&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I was. You did," St. George assured her. "I was in the prince's
+    motor. The procession was temporarily tied up, you remember. Did you
+    really think it was I?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    But this the lady passed serenely over.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Last night," she said, "when that terrible thing happened, who was
+    it in the other motor? Who was it, there in the road when I&mdash;was it
+    you? Was it?" she demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you think it was I?" asked St. George simply.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Afterward&mdash;when I was back in the palace&mdash;I thought I must have
+    dreamed it," she answered, "and no one seemed to know, and <i>I</i>
+    didn't know. But I did fancy&mdash;you see, they think father has taken
+    the treasure," she said, "and they thought if they could hide me
+    somewhere and let it be known, that he would make some sign."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was monstrous," said St. George; "you are really not safe here
+    for one moment. Tell me," he asked eagerly, "the car you were
+    in&mdash;what became of that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I meant to ask you that," she said quickly. "I couldn't tell, I
+    didn't know whether it turned aside from the road, or whether they
+    dropped me out and went on. Really, it was all so quick that it was
+    almost as if the motor had stopped being, and left me there."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps it did stop being&mdash;in this dimension," St. George could not
+    help saying.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this she laughed in assent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Who knows," she said, "what may be true of us&mdash;<i>nous autres</i> in the
+    Fourth Dimension? In Yaque queer things are true. And of course you
+    never can tell&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this St. George turned toward her, and his eyes compelled hers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes, you can," he told her, "yes, you can."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then he folded his arms and leaned against the stone prisms again,
+    looking down at her. Evidently the magician, whoever he was, did not
+    mind his saying that, for the palace did not crumble or the moon
+    cease from shining on the white walls.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Still," she answered, looking toward the sea, "queer things <i>are</i>
+    true in Yaque. It is queer that you are here. Say that it is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Heaven knows that it is," assented St. George obediently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Presently, realizing that the terrace did not intend to turn into a
+    cloud out-of-hand, they set themselves to talk seriously, and St.
+    George had not known her so adorable, he was once more certain, as
+    when she tried to thank him for his pursuit the night before. He had
+    omitted to mention that he had brought her back alone to the Palace
+    of the Litany, for that was too exquisite a thing, he decided, to be
+    spoiled by leaving out the most exquisite part. Besides, there was
+    enough that was serious to be discussed, in all conscience, in spite
+    of the moon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me," said St. George instead, "what has happened to you since
+    that breakfast at the Boris. Remember, I have come all the way from
+    New York to interview you, Mademoiselle the Princess."
+</p>
+<p>
+    So Olivia told him the story of the passage in the submarine which
+    had arrived in Yaque two days earlier than <i>The Aloha</i>; of the first
+    trip up Mount Khalak in the imperial airship; of Mrs. Hastings'
+    frantic fear and her utter refusal ever to descend; and of what she
+    herself had done since her arrival. This included a most practical
+    account of effort that delighted and amazed St. George. No wonder
+    Mrs. Hastings had said that she always left everything "executive"
+    to Olivia. For Olivia had sent wireless messages all over the island
+    offering an immense reward for information about the king, her
+    father; she had assigned forty servants of the royal household to
+    engage in a personal search for such information and to report to
+    her each night; she had ordered every house in Yaque, not excepting
+    the House of the Litany and the king's palace itself, to be searched
+    from dungeon to tower; and, as St. George already knew, she had
+    brought about a special meeting of the High Council at noon that
+    day.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It was very little," said the American princess apologetically,
+    "but I did what I could."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What about the meeting of the High Council?" asked St. George
+    eagerly; "didn't anything come of that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothing," she answered, "they were like adamant. I thought of
+    offering to raise the Hereditary Treasure by incorporating the
+    island and selling the shares in America. Nobody could ever have
+    found what the shares stood for, but that happens every day. Half
+    the corporations must be capitalized chiefly in the Fourth
+    Dimension. That is all," she added wearily, "save that day after
+    to-morrow I am to be married."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That," St. George explained, "is as you like. For if your father
+    is on the island we shall have found him by day after to-morrow, at
+    noon, if we have to shake all Yaque inside out, like a paper sack.
+    And if he isn't here, we simply needn't stop."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia shook her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You don't know the prince," she said. "I have heard enough to
+    convince me that it is quite as he says. He holds events in the
+    hollow of his hand."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Amory proposed," said St. George, "that we sit up here and throw
+    pebbles at him for a time. And Amory is very practical."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia laughed&mdash;her laugh was delicious and alluring, and St. George
+    came dangerously near losing his head every time that he heard it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," she cried, "if only it weren't for the prince and if we had
+    news of father, what a heavenly, heavenly place this would be, would
+    it not?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It would, it would indeed," assented St. George, and in his heart
+    he said, "and so it is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's like being somewhere else," she said, looking into the abyss
+    of far waters, "and when you look down there&mdash;and when you look up,
+    you nearly <i>know</i>. I don't know what, but you nearly know. Perhaps
+    you know that 'here' is the same as 'there,' as all these people
+    say. But whatever it is, I think we might have come almost as near
+    knowing it in New York, if we had only known how to try."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps it isn't so much knowing," he said, "as it is being where
+    you can't help facing mystery and taking the time to be amazed.
+    Although," added St. George to himself, "there are things that one
+    finds out in New York. In a drawing-room, at the Boris, for
+    instance, over muffins and tea."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will be delightful to take all this back to New York," Olivia
+    vaguely added, as if she meant the fairy palace and the fairy sea.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will," agreed St. George fervently, and he couldn't possibly
+    have told whether he meant the mystery of the island or the mystery
+    of that hour there with her. There was so little difference.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Suppose," said Olivia whimsically, "that we open our eyes in a
+    minute, and find that we are in the prince's room in McDougle
+    Street, and that he has passed his hand before our faces and made us
+    dream all this. And father is safe after all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But it isn't all a dream," St. George said softly, "it can't
+    possibly all be a dream, you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She met his eyes for a moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not your coming away here," she said, "if the rest is true I
+    wouldn't want that to be a dream. You don't know what courage this
+    will give us all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She said "us all," but that had to mean merely "us," as well. St.
+    George turned and looked over the terrace. What an Arabian night it
+    was, he was saying to himself, and then stood in a sudden amazement,
+    with the uncertain idea that one of the Schererazade magicians had
+    answered that fancy of his by appearing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    A little shrine hung thick with vines, its ancient stone chipped and
+    defaced, stood on the terrace with its empty, sightless niche turned
+    toward the sea. Leaning upon its base was an old man watching them.
+    His eyes under their lowered brows were peculiarly intent, but his
+    look was perfectly serene and friendly. His stuff robe hung in
+    straight folds about his singularly erect figure, and his beard and
+    hair were not all grey. But he was very old, with incredibly brown
+    and wrinkled flesh, and his face was vacant, as if the mind were
+    asleep.
+</p>
+<p>
+    As he looked, St. George knew him. Here on the top of this mountain
+    was that amazing old man whom he had last seen in the banquet hall
+    at the Palace of the Litany&mdash;that old Malakh for whom Olivia had so
+    unexplainably interceded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What is that man doing here?" St. George asked in surprise.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0004"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image4.jpg" width="314" height="450"
+alt="uncaptioned, old Malakh">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+<p>
+    "He is a mad old man, they said," Olivia told him, "down there they
+    call him Malakh&mdash;that means 'salt'&mdash;because they said he always
+    weeps. We had stopped to look at a metallurgist yesterday&mdash;he had
+    some zinc and some metals cut out like flowers, and he was making
+    them show phosphorescent colours in his little dark alcove. The old
+    man was watching him and trying to tell him something, but the
+    metallurgist was rude to him and some boys came by and jostled him
+    and pushed him about and taunted him&mdash;and the metallurgist actually
+    explained to us that every one did that way to old Malakh. So I
+    thought he was better off up here," concluded Olivia tranquilly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was silent. He knew that Olivia was like this, but
+    everything that proved anew her loveliness of soul caught at his
+    heart.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me," he said impulsively, "what made you let him stay last
+    night, there in the banquet hall?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She flushed, and shook her head with a deprecatory gesture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I haven't an idea," she said gravely, "I think I must have done it
+    so the fairies wouldn't prick their feet on any new sorrow. One has
+    to be careful of the fairies' feet."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George nodded. It was a charming reason for the left hand to
+    give the right, and he was not deceived.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look at him," said St. George, almost reverently, "he looks like a
+    shade of a god that has come back from the other world and found his
+    shrine dishonoured."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Some echo of St. George's words reached the old man and he caught
+    at it, smiling. It was as if he had just been thinking what he
+    spoke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There are not enough shrines," he said gently, "but there are far
+    too many gods. You will find it so."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Something in his words stirred St. George strangely. There was about
+    the old creature an air of such gentleness, such supreme repose and
+    detachment that, even in that place of quiet, his presence made a
+    kind of hush. He was old and pallid and fragile, but there lingered
+    within him, while his spirit lingered, the perfume of all fine and
+    gentle things, all things of quietude. When he had spoken the old
+    man turned and moved slowly down the ways of strange light, between
+    the fallen temples builded to forgotten gods, and he seemed like the
+    very spirit of the ancient mountain, ignorant of itself and knowing
+    all truth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How strange," said St. George, looking after him, "how unutterably
+    strange and sad."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is good of you," said Olivia. "Aunt Dora and Antoinette
+    thought I'd gone quite off my head, and Mr. Frothingham wanted to
+    know why I didn't bring back some one who could have been called as
+    a witness."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Witness," St. George echoed; "but the whole place is made of
+    witnesses. Which reminds me: what is the sentence?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The sentence?" she wondered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The potatoes of Yaque," he reminded her, "and my head?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well," said Olivia gravely, "inasmuch as the moon came up in the
+    east to-night instead of the west, I shall be generous and give you
+    one day's reprieve."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you know, I <i>thought</i> the moon came up in the east to-night,"
+    cried St. George joyfully.
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+<p>
+    It was half an hour afterward that Amory's languid voice from
+    somewhere in the sky broke in upon their talk. As he came toward
+    them across the terrace St. George saw that he was miraculously not
+    alone.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Afterward Amory told him what had happened and what had made him
+    abide in patience and such wondrous self-effacement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When St. George had left him contemplating the far beauties of the
+    little blur of light that was Med, Mr. Toby Amory set a match to one
+    of his jealously expended store of Habanas and added one more aroma
+    to the spiced air. To be standing on the doorstep of a king's
+    palace, confidently expecting within the next few hours to assist in
+    locating the king himself was a situation warranting, Amory thought,
+    such fragrant celebration, and he waited in comparative content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The moon had climbed high enough to cast a great octagonal shadow on
+    the smooth court, and the Habana was two-thirds memory when,
+    immediately back of Amory, a long window opened outward, releasing
+    an apparition which converted the remainder of the Habana into a
+    fiery trail ending out on the terrace. It was a girl of rather more
+    than twenty, exquisitely petite and pretty, and wearing a ruffley
+    blue evening gown whose skirt was caught over her arm. She stopped
+    short when she saw Amory, but without a trace of fear. To tell the
+    truth, Antoinette Frothingham had got so desperately bored
+    withindoors that if Amory had worn a black mask or a cloak of flame
+    she would have welcomed either.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For the last two hours Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham had sat in a white marble room of the king's palace,
+    playing chess on Mr. Frothingham's pocket chess-board. Mr.
+    Frothingham, who loathed chess, played it when he was tired so that
+    he might rest and when he was rested he played it so that he might
+    exercise his mind&mdash;on the principle of a cool drink on a hot day and
+    a hot drink on a cool day. Mrs. Hastings, who knew nothing at all
+    about the game, had entered upon the hour with all the suave
+    complacency with which she would have attacked the making of a pie.
+    Mrs. Hastings had a secret belief that she possessed great aptitude.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette Frothingham, the lawyer's daughter, had leaned on the
+    high casement and looked over the sea. The window was narrow, and
+    deep in an embrasure of stone. To be twenty and to be leaning in
+    this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly
+    suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had
+    been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle
+    tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no
+    possibility of any knight within an altitude of many hundred feet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The dear little ponies' heads!" Mrs. Hastings had kept saying.
+    "What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don't you think?
+    That's what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings&mdash;at least,
+    that's what he always said to me: 'Most games are so <i>needless</i>, but
+    chess is really up and down poetic'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in
+    silence.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Um," he had responded liberally.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, "neither he nor
+    I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano
+    in the middle of the ocean. It's this awful feeling," Mrs. Hastings
+    had cried querulously, "of being neither on earth nor under the
+    water nor in Heaven that I object to. And nobody can get to us."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's just it, Mrs. Hastings," Antoinette had observed earnestly
+    at this juncture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Um," said Mr. Frothingham, then, "not at all, not at all. We have
+    all the advantages of the grave and none of its discomforts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereupon Antoinette, rising suddenly, had slipped out of the white
+    marble room altogether and had found the knight smoking in
+    loneliness on the very veranda.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory put his cap under his arm and bowed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I hope," he said, "that I haven't frightened you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was an American! Antoinette's little heart leaped.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am having to wait here for a bit," explained Amory, not without
+    vagueness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Miss Frothingham advanced to the veranda rail and contrived a shy
+    scrutiny of the intruder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she said, "you didn't frighten me in the least, of course.
+    But&mdash;do you usually do your waiting at this altitude?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, no," answered Amory with engaging candour, "I don't. But
+    I&mdash;happened up this way." Amory paused a little desperately. In that
+    soft light he could not tell positively whether this was Miss
+    Holland or that other figure of silver and rose which he had seen in
+    the throne room. The blue gown was not interpretative. If she was
+    Miss Holland it would be very shabby of him to herald the surprise.
+    Naturally, St. George would appreciate doing that himself. "I'm
+    looking about a bit," he neatly temporized.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette suddenly looked away over the terrace as her eyes met
+    his, smiling behind their pince-nez. Amory was good to look at, and
+    he had never been more so than as he towered above her on the steps
+    of the king's palace. Who was he&mdash;but who was he? Antoinette
+    wondered rapidly. Had a warship arrived? Was Yaque taken? Or
+    had&mdash;she turned eyes, round with sudden fear, upon Amory.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did Prince Tabnit send you?" she demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory laughed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, indeed," he said. Amory had once lived in the South, and he
+    accented the "no" very takingly. "I came myself," he volunteered.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I thought," explained Antoinette, "that maybe he opened a door in
+    the dark, and you walked out. It <i>is</i> rather funny that you should
+    be here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You are here, you know," suggested Amory doubtfully.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But I may be a cannibal princess," Antoinette demurely pointed out.
+    It was not that her astonishment was decreasing; but why&mdash;modernity
+    and the democracy spoke within her&mdash;waste the possibilities of a
+    situation merely because it chances to be astonishing? Moments of
+    mystery are rare enough, in all conscience; and when they do arrive
+    all the world misses them by trying to understand them. Which is
+    manifestly ungrateful and stupid. They do these things better in
+    Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You maybe," agreed Amory evenly, "though I don't know that I ever
+    met a desert island princess in a dinner frock. But then, I am a
+    beginner in desert islands."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Are you an American?" inquired Antoinette earnestly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked up at the frowning façade of the king's palace, and he
+    could have found it in his heart to believe his own answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm the ghost," he confessed, "of a poor beggar of a Ph&oelig;nician who
+    used to make water-jars in Sidon. I have been condemned to plow the
+    high seas and explore the tall mountains until I find the Pitiful
+    Princess. She must be up at the very peak, in distress, and I&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory stopped and looked desperately about him. Would St. George
+    never come? How was he, Amory, to be accountable for what he told if
+    he were left here alone in these extraordinary circumstances?
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Antoinette lightly clapped her hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A ghost!" she exclaimed with pleasure. "Miss Holland hoped the
+    place was haunted. A Ph&oelig;nician ghost with an Alabama accent."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She had said "Miss Holland hoped."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aren't you&mdash;aren't you Miss Holland?" demanded Amory promptly, a
+    joyful note of uncertainty in his voice.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette shook her head.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she said, "though I don't know why I should tell you that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    From Amory's soul rolled a burden that left him treading air on
+    Mount Khalak. She was not Miss Holland. What did he care how long
+    St. George stayed away?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am Tobias Amory," he said, "of New York. Most people don't know
+    about the Sidonian ghost part. But I've told you because I thought,
+    perhaps, you might be the Pitiful Princess."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette's heart was beating pleasantly. Of New York! How&mdash;oh, how
+    did he get here? Was there, then, a wishing-stone in that window
+    embrasure where she had been sitting, and had the knight come
+    because she had willed it? How much did he know? How much ought she
+    to tell? Nothing whatever, prudently decided the lawyer's daughter.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've had, I'm almost certain, the pleasure of seeing you before,"
+    imparted Amory pleasantly, adjusting his pince-nez and looking down
+    at her. She was so enchantingly tiny and he was such a giant.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In New York?" demanded Antoinette.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," said Amory, "no. Do desert island princesses get to New York
+    occasionally, then? No, I think I saw you in Yaque. Yesterday. In a
+    silver automobile. Did I?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Antoinette dimpled.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We frightened them all to death," she recalled. "Did we frighten
+    you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So much," admitted Amory, "that I took refuge up here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where were you?" Antoinette asked curiously. Really, he was very
+    amusing&mdash;this big courtly creature. How agreeable of Olivia to stay
+    away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, tell me how you got here," she impetuously begged. "Desert
+    island people don't see people from New York every day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Well then, O Pitiful Princess," said the Shade from Sidon, "it was
+    like this&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was easy enough to fleet the time carelessly, and assuredly that
+    high moon-lit world was meant to be no less merry than the golden.
+    Whoever has chanced to meet a delightful companion on some silver
+    veranda up in the welkin knows this perfectly well; and whoever has
+    not is a dull creature. But there are delightful folk who are wont
+    to suspect the dullest of harbouring some sweet secret, some sense
+    of "those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life
+    worth enduring," and this was akin to such a sight.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After a time, at Antoinette's conscientious suggestion, they
+    strolled the way that St. George had taken. And to Olivia and the
+    missing adventurer over by the parapet came Amory's soft query:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St George, may I express a friendly concern?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, come here, Toby," commanded St. George happily, "her Highness
+    and I have been discussing matters of state."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Antoinette!" cried Olivia in amazement. From time immemorial
+    royalty has perpetually been surprised by the behaviour of its
+    ladies-in-waiting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've been remembering a verse," said Amory when he had been
+    presented to Olivia, "may I say it? It goes:
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+          "'I'll speak a story to you,<br>
+           &nbsp; &nbsp; Now listen while I try:<br>
+            I met a Queen, and she kept house<br>
+           &nbsp; &nbsp; A-sitting in the sky.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come in and say it to my aunt," Olivia applauded. "Aunt Dora is
+    dying of ennui up here."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They crossed the terrace in the hush of the tropic night. Through
+    the fairy black and silver the four figures moved, and it was as if
+    the king's palace&mdash;that sky thing, with ramparts of air&mdash;had at
+    length found expression and knew a way to answer the ancient
+    glamourie of the moon.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0015"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XV
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    A VIGIL
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Upon Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, drowsing over the
+    pocket chess-board, the sound of footsteps and men's voices in the
+    corridor acted with electrical effect. Then the door was opened and
+    behind Olivia and Antoinette appeared the two visitors who seemed to
+    have fallen from the neighbouring heavens. The two chess-pretenders
+    looked up aghast. If there were a place in the world where
+    chaperonage might be relaxed the uninformed observer would say that
+    it would be the top of Mount Khalak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mercy around us!" cried Mrs. Medora Hastings, "if it isn't that
+    newspaper man! He's probably come over here to cable it all over the
+    front page of every paper in New York. Well," she added
+    complacently, as if she had brought it all about, "it seems good to
+    see some of your own race. How <i>did</i> you get here? Some trick, I
+    suppose?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear fellows," burst out Mr. Augustus Frothingham fervently,
+    "thank God! I'm not, ordinarily, unequal to my situations, but I
+    confess to you, as I would not to a client, that I don't object to
+    sharing this one. How did you come?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a house-party!" said Antoinette ecstatically.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Amory looked at her in her blue gown in the light of the white room,
+    and his spirits soared heavenward. Why should St. George have an
+    idea that he controlled the hour?
+</p>
+<p>
+    From a tumult of questioning, none of which was fully answered
+    before Mrs. Hastings put another query, the lawyer at length
+    elicited the substance of what had occurred.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You came up the side of the mountain, carried by four of those
+    frightful natives?" shrilled Mrs. Hastings. "Olivia, think. It's a
+    wonder they didn't murder you first and throw you over afterward,
+    isn't it, Olivia? Oh, and my poor dear brother. To think of his
+    lying somewhere all mangled and bl&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Emotion overcame Mrs. Hastings. Her tortoise-shell glasses fell to
+    her lap and both her side-combs tinkled melodiously to the tiled
+    floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "This reminds me," said Mr. Frothingham, settling back and finding a
+    pencil with which to emphasize his story, "this reminds me very much
+    of a case that I had on the June calendar&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In half an hour St. George and Amory saw that all serious
+    consideration of their situation must be accomplished alone with
+    Olivia; for in that time Mr. Frothingham had been reminded of two
+    more cases and Mrs. Hastings had twice been reduced to tears by the
+    picture of the possible fate of her brother. Moreover, there
+    presently appeared supper&mdash;a tray of the most savoury delicacies, to
+    produce which Olivia had slipped away and, St. George had no doubt,
+    said over some spell in the kitchens. Supper in the white marble
+    room of the king's palace was almost as wonderful as muffins and tea
+    at the Boris.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There were Olivia in her gown of roses on one side of the table and
+    Antoinette on the other and between them the hungry and happy
+    adventurers. Across the room under a tall silver vase that might
+    have been the one proposed by Achilles at the funeral games for
+    Patroclus ("that was the work of the 'skilful Sidonians'" St. George
+    recalled with a thrill), Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham were
+    conscientiously finishing their chess, since the lawyer believed in
+    completing whatever he undertook, if for nothing more than a warning
+    never to undertake it again. Manifestly the little ivory kings and
+    queens and castles were in league with all the other magic of the
+    night, for the game prolonged itself unconscionably, and the supper
+    party found it far from difficult to do the same. St. George looked
+    at Olivia in her gown of roses, and his eyes swept the high white
+    walls of the room with its frescoes and inscriptions, its broken
+    statues and defaced chests of stone and ancient armour, and so back
+    to Olivia in her gown of roses, with her little ringless hands
+    touching and lifting among the alien dishes as she ministered to
+    him. What a dear little gown of roses and what beautiful hands, St.
+    George thought; and as for the broken statues and the inscriptions
+    and the contents of the stone chests, nobody had paid any attention
+    to them for so long that they could hardly have missed his regard.
+    Nor Amory's. For Amory was in the midst of a reminiscent reference
+    to the Chiswicks, in the Adirondacks, and to Antionette Frothingham
+    in a launch.
+</p>
+<p>
+    At last they all were aware that the chess-board was being closed
+    and Mrs. Hastings had risen.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose," she was saying, "that they have an idea here, the poor
+    deluded creatures, that it is very late. But I tell Olivia that we
+    are so much farther east it <i>can't</i> be very late in New York at this
+    minute, and I intend to go to bed by my watch as I always do, and
+    that is New York time. If I were in New York I wouldn't be sleepy
+    now, and I'm no different here, am I? I don't think people are half
+    independent enough."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings stepped round a stone god, almost faceless, that stood
+    in a little circular depression in the floor.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia, where," she inquired, patting the bobbing, ticking jet on
+    her gown, "where do you think that frightful, mad, old man is?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I heard him cross the corridor a little while ago," Olivia
+    answered. "I think he went to his room."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I must say, Olivia," said Mrs. Hastings with a damp sigh, "that you
+    are very selfish where I am concerned&mdash;in <i>this</i> matter."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah," said Olivia, "please, Aunt Dora. He is far too feeble to harm
+    any one. And he's away there on the second floor."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm sure he's a murderer," protested Mrs. Hastings. "He has the
+    murderer's eye. Mr. Hastings would have said he has. We all sleep on
+    the ground floor here," she continued plaintively, "because we are
+    so high up anyway that I think the air must be just as pure as it
+    would be up stairs. I always leave my window up the width of my
+    handkerchief-box."
+</p>
+<p>
+    As they went out to the great corridor Olivia spoke softly to St.
+    George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Look up," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked, and saw that the vast circular chamber was of
+    incalculable height, extending up to the very dome of the palace,
+    and shaping itself to the lines of the topmost of the three huge
+    cones. It was a great well of light, playing over strange frescoes
+    of gods and daemons, of constellations and of beasts, and exquisite
+    with all the secret colours of some other way of vision. As high as
+    the eye could see, the precious metals upon the skeleton of the open
+    roof shone in the bright light that was set there&mdash;the light on the
+    summit of the king's palace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George turned from the glory of it and looked into her eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'A new Heaven and a new earth,'" he said; but he did not mean the
+    dome of light nor yet the splendour of the palace.
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+<p>
+    Manifestly, there is no use in being asleep when one can dream
+    rather better awake. St. George wandered aimlessly between his room
+    and Amory's and took the time to reflect that when a man looks the
+    way Amory did he might as well have Cupids painted on his coat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St. George," Amory said soberly, "is this the way you've been
+    feeling all the way here? Is this what you came for? Then, on my
+    soul, I forgive you everything. I would have climbed ten mountains
+    to meet Antoinette Frothingham."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I've been watching you, you son of Dixie," said St. George darkly;
+    "don't you lose your head just when you need it most."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I have a notion yours is gone," defended Amory critically, "and
+    mine is only going."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That's twice as dangerous," St. George wisely opined;
+    "besides&mdash;mine is different."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So is mine," said Amory, "so is everybody's."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace. Amory
+    didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and
+    St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the
+    south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood;
+    and there, because the night would have it no other way, he
+    stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe,
+    and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business
+    of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a
+    field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal
+    experiences where words themselves are born. Better and more
+    intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith
+    been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and
+    thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies,
+    breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of
+    what will be. He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman
+    mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to
+    the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told
+    himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His
+    mother and the bishop at Tübingen and on the Baltic! Curiously
+    enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the
+    bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
+    All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast
+    kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was
+    Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman
+    emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken
+    with him, when something&mdash;he was not sure whether it was a voice or
+    a touch&mdash;startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked
+    drowsily out at the glorified blackness&mdash;as if black were no longer
+    absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been
+    pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more
+    inclusive than white. The very dark seemed delicately vocal and to
+    "fill the waste with sound" no less than the wash of the waves. St.
+    George awoke deliciously confused by a returning sense of the sweet
+    and the joy of the night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "'This was the loneliest beach between two seas,'" there flitted
+    through his mind, "'and strange things had been done there in the
+    ancient ages.'" He turned among the vines, half listening. "And in
+    there is the king's daughter," he told himself, "and this is
+    certainly 'the strangest thing that ever befell between two seas.'
+    And I have a great mind to look up the old woman of that tale who
+    must certainly be hereabout, dancing 'widdershins.'"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then, like a bright blade unsheathed in a quiet chamber, a cry of
+    great and unmistakable fear rang out from the palace&mdash;a woman's
+    cry, uttered but once, and giving place to a silence that was even
+    more terrifying. In an instant St. George was on his feet, running
+    with all his might.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Coming!" he called, "where are you&mdash;where are you?" And his heart
+    pounded against his side with the certainty that the voice had been
+    Olivia's.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was unmistakably Olivia's voice that replied to him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here!" she cried clearly, and St. George followed the sound and
+    dashed through the long open window of the room next that in which
+    he had first seen her that night.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Here," she repeated, "but be careful. Some one is in this room."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't be afraid," he cried cheerily into the dark. "It's all
+    right," which is exactly what he would have said if there had been
+    about dragons and real shades from Sidon.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The room was now in darkness, and in the dim light cast by the high
+    moon he could at first discern nothing. He heard a silken rustling
+    and the tap of slippered feet. The next instant the apartment was
+    quick with light, and in the curtained entrance to an inner room,
+    Olivia, in a brown dressing-gown, her hair vaguely bright about her
+    flushed face, stood confronting him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Between them, his thin hand thrown up, palm outward, to protect his
+    eyes from the sudden light, was the old man whom St. George had last
+    seen by the shrine on the terrace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George was prepared for a mere procession of palace ghosts, but
+    at this strange visitor he stared for an uncomprehending moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What are you doing here?" he said wonderingly to him; "what in the
+    world are you doing here?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man looked uncertainly about him, one hand spread against
+    the pillar behind him, the other fumbling at his throat.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think," he answered almost indistinguishably, "I think that I
+    meant to sit here&mdash;to sit in the room beyond, where the mock stars
+    shine."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia uttered an exclamation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How could he possibly know that?" she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But what does he mean?" asked St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She crossed swiftly to a portiere hanging by slender rings from the
+    full height of the lofty room, and at her bidding St. George
+    followed her. She pushed aside the curtain, revealing a huge cave of
+    the dark, a room whose walls were sunk in shadow. But overhead the
+    ceiling was constellated in stars, so that it seemed to St. George
+    as if he were looking into a nearer heaven, homing the far lights
+    that he knew. The Pleiades, Orion, and the Southern Cross, blazing
+    down with inconceivable brilliance, were caught and held captive in
+    the cup of this nearer sky.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is like this at night," Olivia said, "but we see nothing in the
+    daytime, save the vague outlines of here and there a star. But how
+    could he have known? There is no other door save this."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man had followed them and stood, his eyes fixed on the
+    shining points.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is done well," he said softly, "it makes one feel the
+    firmament."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, thrilling with the strangeness of what he saw, and the
+    strangeness of being there with Olivia and this weird old man of the
+    mountain, turned toward him almost fearfully. How did he know,
+    indeed?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well," he said, striving to reassure her, "I've no doubt he has
+    wandered in here some evening, while you were at dinner. No doubt&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the old man's hand. For as he
+    lifted it St. George had thought that something glittered. Without
+    hesitation he caught the old man's arm about the wrist, and turned
+    his hand in his own palm. In the thin fingers he found a small
+    sealed tube, filled with something that looked like particles of
+    nickel.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mind telling me what that is?" asked St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Old Malakh's eyes, liquid and brown and very peaceful, met his own
+    without rebuke.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do you mean the gem?" he asked gently. "It is a very beautiful
+    ruby."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then St. George saw upon the hand that held the sealed tube a ring
+    of matchless workmanship, set with a great ruby that smouldered in
+    the shadow where they stood. Olivia looked at St. George with
+    startled eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He was not wearing this when we first saw him," she said. "I
+    haven't seen him wearing it at all."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George confronted the old man then and spoke with some
+    determination.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you please tell us," he said, "what there is in this tube, and
+    how you came by this ring?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Old Malakh looked down reflectively at his hand, and back to St.
+    George's face. It was wonderful, the air of courtliness and urbanity
+    and delicate breeding which persisted through age and infirmity and
+    the fallow mind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wish that I might tell you," he said humbly, "but I have only
+    little lights in my head, instead of words. And when I say them,
+    they do not mean&mdash;what they <i>shine</i>. Do you not see? That is why
+    every one laughs. But I know what the lights say."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at Olivia helplessly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you tell me where his room is?" he said, "and I'll go back
+    with him. I don't know what to make of this, quite, but don't be
+    frightened. It's all right. Didn't you say he is on the second
+    floor?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes, but don't go alone with him," begged Olivia suddenly, "let me
+    call some of the servants. We don't know what he may do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George shook his head, smiling a little in sheer boyish delight
+    at that "we." "We" is a very wonderful word, when it is not put to
+    unimportant uses by kings, editors and the like.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'd rather not, thank you," he said. "I'll have a talk with him, I
+    think."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "His room is at the top of the stair, on the left," said Olivia
+    reluctantly, "but I wish&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "We shall get on all right," St. George assured her, "and don't let
+    this worry you, will you? I was smoking on the terrace. I'll be
+    there for a while yet. Good night," he said from the doorway.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good night," said Olivia. "Good night&mdash;and, oh, I thank you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's expectation of having a talk with the old man was,
+    however, unfounded. Old Malakh led the way to his room&mdash;a great
+    place of carven seats and a frowning bed-canopy and high windows,
+    and doors set deep in stone; and he begged St. George to sit down
+    and permitted him to examine the sealed tube filled with little
+    particles that looked like nickel, and spoke with gentle irrelevance
+    the while. At the last St. George left him, feeling as if he were
+    committing not so much an indignity as a social solecism when he
+    locked the door upon the lonely creature, using for the purpose a
+    key-like implement chained to the lock without and having a ring
+    about the size of the iron crown of the Lombards.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Good night," old Malakh told him courteously, "good night. But yet
+    all nights are good&mdash;save the night of the heart."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George went back to the terrace. For hours he paced the paths of
+    that little upper garden or lay upon the wall among the pungent
+    vines. But now he forgot the iridescent dark and the companion-sea
+    and the high moon and the king's palace, for it was not these that
+    made the necromancy of the night. It was permitted him to watch
+    before the threshold while Olivia slept, as lovers had watched in
+    the youth of the world. Whatever the morrow held, to-night had been
+    added to yesternight. Not until the dawn of that morrow whitened the
+    sky and drew from the vapourous plain the first far towers of Med,
+    the King's City, did St. George say good night to her glimmering
+    windows.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0016"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    GLAMOURIE
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    There is a certain poster, all stars and poppies and deep grass; and
+    over these hangs a new moon which must surely have been cut by fairy
+    scissors, for it looks as much like a cake or a cowslip as it looks
+    like a moon. But withal it sheds a light so eery and strangely
+    silver that the poster seems, in spite of the poppies, to have been
+    painted in Spring-wind.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never," said some chance visitors vehemently, "have I seen such a
+    moon as that!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But ah, sir, and ah, madame," was the answer&mdash;it is not recorded
+    whether the poster spoke or whether some one spoke for it&mdash;"wouldn't
+    you like to?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now, therefore, concerning the sweet of those hours in the king's
+    palace the Vehement may be tempted to exclaim that in life things
+    never happen like that. Ah&mdash;do they not so? You have only to go back
+    to the days when young love and young life were yours to recall
+    distinctly that the most impossible things were every-day
+    occurrences. What about the time that you went down one street
+    instead of up another and <i>that</i> changed the entire course of your
+    days and brought you two together? What about the song, the June,
+    the letter that touched the world to gold before your eyes and
+    caught you up in a place of clouds? Remembering that magic, it is
+    quite impossible to assert that any charming thing whatever would
+    not have happened. Is there not some wonderland in every life? And
+    is not the ancient citadel of Love-upon-the-Heights that common
+    wonderland? One must believe in all the happiness that one can.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But if the Most Vehement&mdash;who are as thick as butterflies&mdash;still
+    remain unconvinced and persist that they never heard of things
+    fallen out thus, there is left this triumph:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, sir, or ah, madame, wouldn't you like to?"
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+<p>
+    A fugitive wind rollicking in from sea next morning swept through
+    the palace and went on around the world; and thereafter it had an
+    hundred odourous ways of attracting attention, which were merely its
+    own tale of what pleasant things it had seen and heard on high.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For example, that breakfast. A cloth had been laid at one end of the
+    long stone table whereat, since the days of Abibaal, brother to
+    Hiram, friend to David, kings had breakfasted and banqueted, and
+    this cloth had now been set with the ancient plate of the
+    palace&mdash;dishes that looked like helmets and urns and discs. Here
+    Olivia and Antoinette, in charming print frocks, made a kind of tea
+    in a kind of biblical samovar and served it in vessels that
+    resembled individual trophies of the course. And here St. George and
+    Amory praised the admirable English muffins which some one had
+    taught the dubious cook to make; and Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+    tip-fingered his way about his plate among alien fruits and
+    queer-shaped cakes. "Are they cookies or are they manna?" Amory
+    wondered, "for they remind me of coriander seeds." And here Mrs.
+    Hastings, who always awoke a thought impatient and became
+    ultra-complacent with no interval of real sanity, wistfully asked
+    for a soft-boiled egg and added plaintively:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Though I dare say the very hens in Yaque lay something besides
+    eggs&mdash;pineapples, very likely."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I suppose," speculated Amory, "that when we get perfectly
+    intuitionized we won't have to eat either one because we'll know
+    beforehand exactly how they both taste."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A <i>reductio ad absurdum</i>, my young friend," said the lawyer
+    sternly; "the real purpose of eating will remain for ever
+    unchanged."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on the
+    terrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss the
+    weather report so," complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young people
+    with Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace. For
+    St. George had risen from his two hours' sleep with some
+    clearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every niche
+    and corner of the great pile where one&mdash;say a king&mdash;might be hidden
+    with twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.
+</p>
+<p>
+    What a morning it was! When the rollicking wind got to that part of
+    the story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumes
+    that even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, "thinking
+    delicate thoughts." There never was a fairer temple of romance, a
+    very temple of Young Love's Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St.
+    George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries were
+    become homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yet
+    be well.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, all
+    octagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity and
+    amazement might increase with every step. How they had ever raised
+    those massive blocks of stone to that great height no one can
+    guess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palace
+    had originally been built upon level ground and had had its
+    surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain. At all events
+    there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked
+    stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the
+    planetary deities&mdash;Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white
+    bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in
+    the form of a rising flame&mdash;types taken from the heavens and from
+    the abyss. There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven
+    cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and little
+    circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of
+    Baal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth,
+    with the lion's skin.
+</p>
+<p>
+    From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step
+    of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing
+    size, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the painted
+    ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic
+    paws. Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled
+    with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most
+    luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort. The palace
+    was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two
+    thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance
+    of this moment's civilization of the world. The heart of that
+    elder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where they
+    came upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and tools
+    and empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallic
+    plate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in one
+    light, slightly fluorescent.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adôn," said Jarvo. "She was
+    the daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touched
+    in this room was left unmoved. But it was very many years ago&mdash;I
+    have forgotten. Every one has forgotten."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went down among the very roots of the palace, three full
+    storeys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lighting
+    the way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding passages,
+    and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones had
+    been hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber of
+    the tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, now
+    hollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hall
+    were lined with <i>loculi</i> or niches, each as deep as the length of a
+    man. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the long
+    flags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven on
+    the stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was a
+    lofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was the
+    resting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal of
+    Tyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when the
+    Ph&oelig;nicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first passed the Straits of
+    Gibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastings
+    when they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and the
+    Washingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they were
+    nothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wall
+    was a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, where
+    slept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king of
+    Persia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket of
+    love-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probably
+    at one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in the
+    very palace. And if this is true the story of his omission to
+    conquer the island may one day divert the world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored with
+    winged circles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnapped
+    Egyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Ph&oelig;nician
+    merchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Here
+    lie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holy
+    office."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Nothing was unbelievable&mdash;nothing had been unbelievable for so long
+    that these four had almost learned that everything is possible.
+    Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly you
+    learn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world of
+    possibilities. It is one of our two magics.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And this," Jarvo said softly, pausing before a vacant niche
+    opposite the tomb of King Abibaal, "this will be the receptacle for
+    the present king of Yaque, his Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of
+    God."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia suddenly looked up at St. George, her face pale in the
+    ghostly light. There it had been, waiting for them all the while,
+    the sense of the vivid personal against the vague eternal. But her
+    involuntary appeal to him, slight as it was, thrilled St. George
+    with tenderness as vivid as this tragic element itself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They went back to the sun and the sweet messengering air above, and
+    crossed a little vacant grassy court on the north side of the
+    mountain. Here they saw that the palace climbed down the northern
+    slope from the summit, and literally overhung the precipice where
+    the supports were made fast by gigantic girders run in the living
+    rock. A little observatory was built below the edge of the mountain,
+    and this box of a place had a glass floor, and one felt like a fly
+    on the sky as one stood there. It was said that a certain king of
+    Yaque, sometime in the course of the Punic Wars, had thrown himself
+    from this observatory in a rage because his court electrician had
+    died, but how true this may be it is impossible to say because so
+    little is known about electricity. Below the building lay quite the
+    most wonderful part of the king's palace.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Here in the long north rooms, hermetically quiet, was the heart of
+    the treasure of the ancient island. Here, saved inexplicably from
+    the wreck of the past, were a thousand testimonies to that lost and
+    but half-guessed art of the elder world. Beautiful things, made in
+    the days when King Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, lined the
+    walls, and filled the stone shelves, together with curios of that
+    later day when Ph&oelig;nicia stood first in knowledge of the plastic and
+    glyptic arts. Workers in gold and ivory, in gems and talismans, in
+    brass and fine linen and purple had done the marvels which those
+    courtier adventurers brought with them over the sea, and to these,
+    from year to year, had been added the treasure of private
+    chests&mdash;necklaces and coronals and hair-loops, bottles and vases of
+    glass coloured with metallic oxides, and patterned aggry-beads, now
+    sometimes found in ancient tombs on the Ashantee coasts. Beneath an
+    altar set with censers and basins of gold was a chest brought from
+    Amathus, its ogive lid carved with <i>bigæ</i> or two-horsed chariots,
+    and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the Hereditary
+    Treasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered with
+    bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the
+    Ph&oelig;nician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were
+    set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the
+    Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days
+    remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected
+    in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied
+    from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered&mdash;annals,
+    State documents, the Ph&oelig;nician originals of histories preserved
+    elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the
+    secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose
+    names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and
+    Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy
+    and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were
+    chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of
+    no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the
+    Past, watching lonely on the mountain.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to the
+    cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted to
+    go somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure and
+    you thought Clusium was the name of it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know," said Amory shamelessly, "and there are no end of names for
+    it. But it's always the same thing. <i>Excepting this</i>."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Excepting this," St. George repeated fervently as they turned to
+    go; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sang
+    that, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faint
+    voices from every shelf in the room,&mdash;voices that of old had
+    thrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Woke now to the eternal echo&mdash;an echo that touched delicately
+    through the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on all
+    that happened. Otherwise, if they four were not all a little
+    echo-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face of
+    danger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found time
+    for the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, because
+    they hold revelation. There were, too, some events; but an event is
+    a clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.
+    The delicious moments are when the intangibilities prevail and
+    pervade and possess. In the king's palace there must have been
+    shrines to intangibilities&mdash;as there should be everywhere&mdash;for they
+    seemed to come there, and belong.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The mere happenings included, for example, a talk that St. George
+    had with Mr. Augustus Frothingham on the terrace after luncheon,
+    in which St. George laid before the lawyer a plan which he had
+    virtually matured and of which he himself thought very well.
+    Thought so well, because of its possibilities, that his face was
+    betrayingly eager as he told about it. It was, briefly, that
+    inasmuch as four of the six men who could scale the mountain were
+    now on its summit, and inasmuch as all the airships were there
+    also, now, therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque,
+    were in a perfectly impregnable position&mdash;counting out Fifth
+    Dimension contingencies, which of course might include appearings
+    as well as disappearings&mdash;and why shouldn't they stay there, and
+    let the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked? And
+    when the lawyer said, "But, my dear fellow," as he was bound to
+    say, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, by
+    noon of the following day, two determined persons who, if Jarvo
+    would get word to them, would with perfect certainty find Mr. Otho
+    Holland, the king, if he were on the island. And when "Well, but
+    my dear fellow" occurred again, St. George replied with deference
+    that he knew it, but although he never had managed an airship he
+    fancied that perhaps he might help with one; and down there in the
+    harbour was a yacht waiting to sail for New York, and therefore no
+    one need even set foot on the island who didn't wish. And Mr.
+    Frothingham laid one long hand on each coat-lapel and threw back
+    his head until his hair rested on his collar, and he looked at the
+    palace&mdash;that Titan thing of the sky with ramparts of air&mdash;and
+    said, "Nothing in all my experience&mdash;" and St. George left him,
+    deep in thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    On the way back he chanced upon Mrs. Hastings, seated on a bench of
+    lapidescent wood in the portico&mdash;and a Titanic portico it looked by
+    day&mdash;and, having sent for the palace chef, she was attempting to
+    write down the recipe for the salad of that day's luncheon, although
+    it was composed chiefly of fowls now extinct everywhere excepting in
+    Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But my poultry man will get them for me," she urged with
+    determination; "I have only to tell him the name of what I want, and
+    he can always produce it in tins, nicely labeled."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Later, St. George came upon old Malakh, leaning on the terrace wall,
+    looking out to sea, and stood close beside him, marveling at the
+    pallor and the thousand wrinkles of the man's strange face. The face
+    was stranger by day than it had been by night&mdash;this St. George had
+    felt when he went that morning to release him, and the old man
+    leaned from the frowning bed-hangings to bid him a gentle good
+    morning. Could he be, St. George now wondered vaguely, a citizen of
+    the fifteenth or twentieth dimension, and, there, did they live to
+    his incredible age? Then he noticed that the old man was not wearing
+    the ruby ring.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakh
+    answered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and at
+    other things.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To everything that he asked him the old man returned only his
+    urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism.
+    When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would
+    consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George
+    himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I
+    would far rather talk with one madman with this madman's manners
+    than to sup with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murder
+    us, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Olivia
+    had no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could one
+    possibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle.
+</p>
+<p>
+    All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing as
+    only that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that went
+    before. St. George was saying to himself that at last the <i>Here</i> and
+    the <i>Now</i> were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for the
+    morrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noon
+    they all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leaves
+    above carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. They
+    leaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the glory
+    of the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings of
+    gulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did not
+    know they gave&mdash;ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind told
+    about that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their young
+    courage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility of
+    their understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. For
+    the wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, and
+    one has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth.
+    Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spite
+    of the little wing-like moments that hold not history but
+    revelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendent
+    sword of "To-morrow, at noon."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0017"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    BENEATH THE SURFACE
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Up came the dusk to the doors of the king's palace&mdash;a hurry of grey
+    banners flowing into the empty ways where the sun had been. Upon
+    this high dominion Night could not advance unheralded, and here the
+    Twilight messengered her coming long after the dark lay thick on the
+    lowland and on the toiling water.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, leaning from Amory's window, looked down on the shadows
+    rising in exquisite hesitation, as if they came curling from the
+    lighted censer of Med. There is no doubt at all, Olivia had said
+    gravely, that the dusk is patterned, if only one could see
+    it&mdash;figured in unearthly flowers, in wandering stars, in upper-air
+    sprites, grey-winged, grey-bodied, so that sometimes glimpsing them
+    one fancies them to be little living goblins. He smiled, remembering
+    her words, and glanced over his shoulder down the long room where
+    the other light was now beginning to creep about, first expressing,
+    then embracing the chamber dusk. It seemed precisely the moment
+    when something delicate should be caught passing from gloom to
+    radiance, to be thankfully remembered. But only many-winged colours
+    were visible, though he could hear a sound like little murmurous
+    speech in the dusky roof where the air had a recurrent fashion of
+    whispering knowingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Indeed, the air everywhere in the palace had a fashion of whispering
+    knowingly, for it was a place of ghostly draughts and blasts
+    creeping through chambers cleft by yawning courts and open corridors
+    and topped by that skeleton dome. And as St. George turned from the
+    window he saw that the door leading into the hall, urged by some
+    nimble gust, imaginative or prying, had swung ajar.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George mechanically crossed the room to close the door, noting
+    how the pale light warmed the stones of that cave-like corridor.
+    With his hand upon the latch his eyes fell on something crossing the
+    corridor, like a shadow dissolving from gloom to gloom. Well beyond
+    the open door, stealing from pillar to pillar in the dimness and
+    moving with that swiftness and slyness which proclaim a covert
+    purpose as effectually as would a bell, he saw old Malakh.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Now St. George was in felt-soled slippers and he was coatless,
+    because in the adjoining room Jarvo, with a heated, helmet-like
+    apparatus, was attempting to press his blue serge coat. In that
+    room too was Amory, catching glimpses of himself in a mirror of
+    polished steel, but within reach, on the divan where Jarvo had just
+    laid it, was Amory's coat; and St. George caught that up, slipped it
+    on, and was off down the corridor after the old man, moving as
+    swiftly and slyly as he. St. George had no great faith in him or in
+    what he might know, but the old man puzzled him, and mystification
+    is the smell of a pleasant powder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The palace was very still. Presumably, Mrs. Hastings and Mr.
+    Frothingham were already at chess in the drawing-room awaiting
+    dinner. St. George heard a snatch of distant laughter, in quick
+    little lilts like a song, and it occurred to him that its echo there
+    was as if one were to pin a ruffle of lace to the grim stones. Some
+    one answered the laugh, and he heard the murmurous touching of soft
+    skirts entering the corridor as he dived down the ancient dark of
+    one of the musty passages. There the silence was resumed. In the
+    palace it was as though the stillness were some living sleeper,
+    waking with protests, thankful for the death of any echo.
+</p>
+<p>
+    No one was in the gallery. St. George, stepping softly, followed as
+    near as he dared to that hurrying figure, flitting down the dark. A
+    still narrower hallway connected the main portion of the palace with
+    a shoulder of the south wing, and into this the old man turned and
+    skirted familiarly the narrow sunken pool that ran the length of
+    the floor, drawing the light to its glassy surface and revealing the
+    shadows sent clustering to the indistinguishable roof.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Midway the gallery sprang a narrow stairway, let in the wall and
+    once leading to the ancient armoury, but now disused and piled with
+    rubbish. Old Malakh went up two steps of this old stairway, turned
+    aside, and slipped away so swiftly that his amazed pursuer caught no
+    more than an after-flutter of his dun-coloured garments. St. George,
+    his softly-clad feet making no noise upon the stones, bounded
+    forward and saw, through a triangular aperture in the stones, and
+    set so low that a man must crouch upon the step to enter, a yawning
+    place of darkness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He might very well have been taking his life in his hands, for he
+    could have no idea whether the aperture led to the imperial dungeons
+    or to the imperial rain-water cistern; but St. George instantly bent
+    and slipped down into that darkness, thick with the dust of the
+    flight of the old man. With the distinctly pleasurable sensation of
+    being still alive he found himself standing upright upon an uneven
+    floor of masonry. He thrust out his arms and touched sides of mossy
+    rock. Then just before him a pale flame flickered. The old man had
+    kindled a little taper that hardly did more than make shallow
+    hollows in the darkness through which he moved.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was easy to follow now, and St. George went breathlessly on
+    past the rudely-hewn walls and giant pillars of that hidden way.
+    He might have been lost with ease in any of the lower processes of
+    the palace which they had that morning visited; but he could not
+    be deceived about the chambers which he had once seen, and this
+    subterranean course was new to him. Was it, he wondered, new to
+    Olivia, and to Jarvo? Else why had it been omitted in that
+    morning's search? And was this strange guide going on at random,
+    or did he know&mdash;something? A suspicion leaped to St. George's mind
+    that made his heart beat. The king&mdash;might he be down here
+    after all, and might this weird old man know where? His own
+    consciousness became chiefly conjecture, and every nerve was alert
+    in the pursuit; not the less because he realized that if he were
+    to lose this strange conductor who went on before, either in
+    secure knowledge or in utter madness, he himself might wander for
+    the rest of his life in that nether world.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Past grim latchless doors sealing, with appropriate gestures, their
+    forgotten secrets, past outlying passages winding into the heart of
+    the mountain, past niches filled with shapeless crumbling rubbish
+    they hurried&mdash;the mad old man and his bewildered pursuer. Twice the
+    way turned, gradually narrowing until two could hardly have passed
+    there, and at last apparently terminated in a short flight of
+    steps. Old Malakh mounted with difficulty and St. George, waiting,
+    saw him standing before a blank stone wall. Immediately and without
+    effort the old man's scanty strength served to displace one of the
+    wall's huge stones which hung upon a secret pivot and rolled
+    noiselessly within. He stepped through the aperture, and St. George
+    sprang behind him, watched his moment to cross the threshold,
+    crouched in the leaping shadow of the displaced stone and
+    looked&mdash;looked with the undistinguishing amazement that a man feels
+    in the panorama of his dreams.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The room was small and low and set with a circular bench, running
+    about a central pillar. On the table was a confusion of things
+    brilliantly phosphorescent, emitting soft light, and mingled with
+    bulbs, coils and crucibles lying in a litter of egg-shells,
+    feathers, ivory and paper. But it was not these that held St. George
+    incredulous; it was the fire that glowed in their midst&mdash;a fire that
+    leaped and trembled and blazed inextinguishable colour, smouldering,
+    sparkling, tossing up a spray of strange light, lambent with those
+    wizard hues of the pennons and streamers floating joyously from the
+    dome of the Palace of the Litany&mdash;the fire from the subject hearts
+    of a thousand jewels. There could be no doubting what he saw. There,
+    flung on the table from the mouth of a carven casket and harbouring
+    the captive light of ages gone, glittered what St. George knew
+    would be the gems of the Hereditary Treasure of the kings of Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But for old Malakh to know where the jewels were&mdash;that was as
+    amazing as was their discovery. St. George, breathing hard in his
+    corner, watched the long, fine hands of the old man trembling among
+    the delicate tubes and spindles, lingering lovingly among the
+    stones, touching among the necklaces and coronals of the dead queens
+    whose dust lay not far away. It was as if he were summoning and
+    discarding something shining and imponderable, like words. The
+    contents of the casket which all Yaque had mourned lay scattered in
+    this secret place of which only this strange, mad creature, a chance
+    pensioner at the palace, had knowledge.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Suddenly the memory of Balator's words smote St. George with new
+    perception. "He walks the streets of Med," Balator had told him at
+    the banquet, "saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say 'king,' and so
+    he is seeking the king. But he is mad, and he weeps; and therefore
+    they pretend to believe that he says, 'Malakh,' which is to say
+    'salt,' and they call him that, for his tears."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Could old Malakh possibly know something of the king? The hope
+    returned to St. George insistently, and he watched, spending his
+    thought in new and extravagant conjecture, his mental vision
+    blurring the details of that heaped-up, glistening confusion; and on
+    the opposite side of the table the old man lifted and laid down
+    that rainbow stuff of dreams, delighting in it, speaking softly
+    above it. Had he been the king's friend, St. George was asking&mdash;but
+    why did no one know anything of him? Or had he been an enemy who had
+    done the king violence&mdash;but how was that possible, in his age and
+    feebleness? Mystifying as the matter was, St. George exulted as much
+    as he marveled; for it would be his, at all events, to place the
+    jewels in Olivia's hands and clear her father's name; he longed to
+    step out of the dark and confront the old man and seize the casket
+    out of hand, and he would probably have done so and taken his
+    chances at getting back to the upper world, had he not been chained
+    to his corner by the irresistible hope that the old man knew
+    something more&mdash;something about the king. And while he wondered,
+    reflecting that at any cost he must prevent the replacing of the
+    pivotal stone, he saw old Malakh take up his taper, turn away from
+    the table, and open a door which the room's central pillar had cut
+    from his view.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He was around the table in an instant. The open door revealed three
+    stone steps which the old man was ascending, one at a time.
+    Following him cautiously St. George heard a door grate outward at
+    the head of the stair, saw the taper move forward in darkness, and
+    the next moment found himself standing in the room of the tombs of
+    the kings of Yaque. And he saw that the panel which had swung
+    inward to admit them was set low in the monolithic tomb of King
+    Abibaal himself.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Old Malakh had crossed swiftly to the wall opposite the tomb, and
+    stood before the vacant niche which was to be occupied, as Jarvo had
+    announced, by "His Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of God." There,
+    setting aside his taper, the old man stretched his arms upward to
+    the empty shelf and with a gesture of inconceivable weariness bowed
+    his head upon them and stood silent, the leaping candle-light
+    silvering his hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Upon my soul," thought St George with finality, "he's murdered him.
+    Old Malakh has murdered the king, and it's driven him crazy."
+</p>
+<p>
+    With that he did step out of the dark, and he laid his hand suddenly
+    upon the old man's shoulder.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Malakh," he said, "what have you done with the king?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The old man lifted his head and turned toward St. George a face of
+    singular calm. It was as if so many phantoms vexed his brain that a
+    strange reality was of little consequence. But as his eyes met those
+    of St. George a sudden dimness came over them, the lids fluttered
+    and dropped, and his lips barely formed his words:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "The king," he said. "I did not leave the king. It was the king who
+    somehow went away and left me here&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He threw out his hands blindly, tottered and swayed from the wall;
+    and St. George received him as he fell, measuring his length upon
+    the stones before King Otho's future tomb.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George caught down the light and knelt beside him. Death seemed
+    to have come "pressing within his face," and breathing hardly
+    disquieted his breast. St. George fumbled at the old man's robe, and
+    beneath his fingers the heart fluttered never so faintly. He
+    loosened the cloth at the withered throat, passed his hand over the
+    still forehead, and looked desperately about him.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The other inmates of the palace were, he reflected, about two good
+    city blocks from him; and he doubted if he could ever find his
+    unaided way back to them. Mechanically, though he knew that he
+    carried no flask, he felt conscientiously through his pockets&mdash;a
+    habit of the boy in perplexity which never deserts the man
+    in crises. In the inside pocket of the coat that he was
+    wearing&mdash;Amory's coat&mdash;his fingers suddenly closed about
+    something made of glass. He seized it and drew it forth.
+</p>
+<p>
+    It was a little vase of rock-crystal, ornamented with gold
+    medallions, covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+    beauty and variety of design&mdash;gryphons, serpents, winged discs, men
+    contending with lions. St. George stared at it uncomprehendingly. In
+    the press of events of the last eight-and-forty hours Amory had
+    quite forgotten to mention to him the prince's intended gift of
+    wine, almost three thousand years old, sealed in Ph&oelig;nicia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George drew the stopper. In an instant an odour, spicy,
+    penetrating, delicious, saluted him and gave life to the dead air of
+    the room. For a moment he hesitated. He knew that the flask had not
+    been among Amory's belongings and that he himself had never seen it
+    before. But the odour was, he thought, unmistakable, and so powerful
+    that already he felt as if the liquor were racing through his own
+    veins. He touched it to his lips; it was like a full draught of some
+    marvelous elixir. Sudden confidence sat upon St. George, and
+    thanking his guiding stars for the fortunate chance, he
+    unhesitatingly set the flask to the old man's lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was a long-drawn, shuddering breath, a fluttering of the
+    eyelids, a movement of the limbs, and after that old Malakh lay
+    quite still upon the stones. Once more St. George thrust his hand
+    within the bosom of the loose robe, and the heart was beating
+    rapidly and regularly and with amazing force. In a moment deep
+    breaths succeeded one another, filling the breast of the unconscious
+    man; but the eyelids did not unclose, and St. George took up the
+    taper and bent to scan the quiet face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked, and sank to his knees and looked again, holding
+    the light now here, now there, and peering in growing bewilderment.
+    What he saw he was wholly unable to define. It was as if a mask were
+    slowly to dissolve and yet to lie upon the features which it had
+    covered, revealing while it still made mock of concealing. Colour
+    was in the lips, colour was stealing into the changed face. The
+    <i>changed</i> face&mdash;changed, St. George could not tell how; and the
+    longer he looked, and though he rubbed his eyes and turned them
+    toward the dark and then looked again, moving the taper, he could
+    neither explain nor define what had happened.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He set the candle on the floor and sprang away from the quiet
+    figure, searching the dark. The great silent place, with its
+    shoulders of sarcophagi jutting from the gloom was black save for
+    the little ring of pallid light about that prostrate form. St.
+    George sent his hand to his forehead, and shook himself a bit, and
+    straightened his shoulders with a smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It must be the stuff you've tasted," he addressed himself solemnly.
+    "Heaven knows what it was. It's the stuff you've tasted."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Though he had barely touched his lips to the rock-crystal vase St.
+    George's blood was pounding through his veins, and a curious
+    exhilaration filled him. He looked about at the rims and corners of
+    the tombs caught by the light, and he laughed a little&mdash;though this
+    was not in the least what he intended&mdash;because it passed through
+    his mind that if King Abibaal and Queen Mitygen, for example, might
+    be treated with the contents of the mysterious vase they would no
+    doubt come forth, Abibaal with memories of the Queen of Sheba in his
+    eyes, and Queen Mitygen with her casket of Alexander's letters. Then
+    St. George went down on his knees again, and raised the old man's
+    head until it rested upon his own breast, and he passed the candle
+    before his face, his hand trembling so that the light flickered and
+    leaped up.
+</p>
+<p>
+    This time there was no mistaking. The tissues of old Malakh's ashen
+    face and throat and pallid hands were undergoing some subtle
+    transfiguration. It was as if new blood had come encroaching in
+    their veins. It was as if the muscles were become firm and full, as
+    if the wrinkled skin had been made smooth, the lips grown fresh, as
+    if&mdash;the word came to St. George as he stared, spell-stricken&mdash;as if
+    <i>youth</i> had returned.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George slipped down upon the stones and sat motionless. There
+    was a little blue, forked vein on the man's forehead, and upon this
+    he fastened his eyes, mechanically following it downward and back.
+    Lines had crossed it, and there had been a deep cleft between the
+    eyes, but these had disappeared, leaving the brow almost smooth. The
+    cheeks were now tinged with colour, and the throat, where he had
+    pulled aside the robe, showed firm and white. Mechanically St.
+    George passed his hand along the inert arm, and it was no more
+    withered than his own&mdash;the arm of no greybeard, but of a man in the
+    prime of life. What did it mean&mdash;what did it mean? St. George
+    waited, the blood throbbing in his temples, a mist before his eyes.
+    What did it mean?
+</p>
+<p>
+    The minutes dragged by and still the unconscious man did not stir or
+    unclose his eyes. From time to time St. George pressed his hand to
+    the heart, and found it beating on rhythmically, powerfully. When he
+    found himself sitting with averted head, as if he were afraid to
+    look back at that changing face, a fear seized him that he had lost
+    his reason and that what he imagined himself to see was a phase of
+    madness. So he left the old man's side and sturdily tramped away
+    into the huge dark of the room, resolutely explaining to himself
+    that this was all very natural; the old man had been ill, improperly
+    nourished, and the powerful stimulant of the wine had partly
+    restored him. But even while he went over it St. George knew in his
+    heart that what had happened was nothing that could be so explained,
+    nothing that could be explained at all by anything within his ken.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath
+    of the place smote his face as he moved. He stumbled on a displaced
+    tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and
+    reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness. The taper rays
+    struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet
+    of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock. St. George remembered
+    a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries,
+    coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air. It
+    seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far
+    slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this
+    ghost place. Back there, where the light glimmered beside the tomb
+    of King Abibaal, nobody could tell what awaited him. If the man
+    could change like this, might he not take on some shape too hideous
+    to bear in the silence? St. George stood still, suddenly
+    clenching his hands, trying to reach out through the dark and to
+    grasp&mdash;himself, the self that seemed slipping away from him. But was
+    he mad already, he wondered angrily, and hurried back to the far
+    flickering light, stumbling, panting, not daring to look at the
+    figure on the floor, not daring not to look.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He resolutely caught up the candle and peered once more at the face.
+    As steadily and swiftly as change in the aspect of the sky the face
+    had gone on changing. St. George had followed to the chamber an old
+    tottering man; the figure before him was a man of not more than
+    fifty years.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George let fall the candle, which flickered down, upright in its
+    socket; and he turned away, his hand across his eyes. Since this was
+    manifestly impossible he must be mad, something in the stuff that
+    he had tasted had driven him mad. He felt strong as a lion, strong
+    enough to lift that prostrate figure and to carry it through the
+    winding passages into the midst of those above stairs, and to beg
+    them in mercy to tell him how the man looked. What would <i>she</i> say?
+    He wondered what Olivia would say. Dinner would be over and they
+    would be in the drawing-room&mdash;Olivia and Amory and Antoinette
+    Frothingham; already the white room and the lights and Antoinette's
+    laughter seemed to him of another world, a world from which he had
+    irrevocably passed. Yet there they were above, the same roof
+    covering them, and they did not know that down here in this place of
+    the dead he, St. George, was beyond all question going mad.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With a cry he pulled off Amory's coat, flung it over the unconscious
+    man, and rushed out into the blackness of the corridor. He would not
+    take the light&mdash;the man must not die alone there in the dark&mdash;and
+    besides he had heard that the mad could see as well in the dark as
+    in the light. Or was it the blind who could see in the dark? No
+    doubt it was the blind. However, he could find his way, he thought
+    triumphantly, and ran on, dragging his hand along the slippery
+    stones of the wall&mdash;he could find his way. Only he must call out, to
+    tell them who it was that was lost. So he called himself by name,
+    aloud and sternly, and after that he kept on quietly enough, serene
+    in the conviction that he had regained his self-control, fighting to
+    keep his mind from returning to the face that changed before his
+    eyes, like the appearances in the puppet shows. But suddenly he
+    became conscious that it was his own name that he went shouting
+    through the passages; and that was openly absurd, he reasoned, since
+    if he wanted to be found he must call some one else's name. But he
+    must hurry&mdash;hurry&mdash;hurry; no one could tell what might be happening
+    back there to that face that changed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" he shouted, "Amory! Jarvo&mdash;oh, Jarvo! Rollo, you
+    scoundrel&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whereat the memory that Rollo was somewhere on a yacht assailed him,
+    and he pressed on, blindly and in silence, until glimmering before
+    him he saw a light shining from an open door. Then he rushed forward
+    and with a groan of relief threw himself into the room. Opposite the
+    door loomed the grim sarcophagus of King Abibaal, and beside it on
+    the floor lay the figure with the face that changed. He had gone a
+    circle in those tortuous passages, and this was the room of the
+    tombs of the kings.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He dragged himself across the chamber toward the still form. He must
+    look again; no one could tell what might have happened. He pulled
+    down the coat and looked. And there was surely nothing in the
+    delicate, handsome, English-looking face upturned to his to give
+    him new horror. It was only that he had come down here in the wake
+    of a tottering old creature, and that here in his place lay a man
+    who was not he. Which was manifestly impossible.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mechanically St. George's hand went to the man's heart. It was
+    beating regularly and powerfully, and deep breaths were coming from
+    the full, healthily-coloured lips. For a moment St. George knelt
+    there, his blood tingling and pricking in his veins and pulsing in
+    his temples. Then he swayed and fell upon the stones.
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+<p>
+    When St. George opened his eyes it was ten o'clock of the following
+    morning, though he felt no interest in that. There was before him a
+    great rectangle of light. He lifted his head and saw that the light
+    appeared to flow from the interior of the tomb of King Abibaal. The
+    next moment Amory's cheery voice, pitched high in consternation and
+    relief, made havoc among the echoes with a background of Jarvo's
+    smooth thanksgiving for the return of adôn.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George, coatless, stiff from the hours on the mouldy stones,
+    dragged himself up and turned his eyes in fear upon the figure
+    beside him. It flashed hopefully through his mind that perhaps it
+    had not changed, that perhaps he had dreamed it all, that perhaps
+    ...
+</p>
+<p>
+    By his first glance that hope was dispelled. From beneath Amory's
+    coat on the floor an arm came forth, pushing the coat aside, and a
+    man slenderly built, with a youthful, sensitive face and somewhat
+    critically-drooping lids, sat up leisurely and looked about him in
+    slow surprise, kindling to distinct amusement.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Upon my soul," he said softly, "what an admission&mdash;what an
+    admission! I can not have made such a night of it in years."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon which Jarvo dropped unhesitatingly to his knees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Melek! Melek!" he cried, prostrating himself again and again. "The
+    King! The King! The gods have permitted the possible."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0018"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XVIII
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    A MORNING VISIT
+</h3
+<br>
+
+<p>
+    In an upper room in the Palace of the Litany, fair with all the
+    burnished devices of the early light, Prince Tabnit paced on that
+    morning of mornings of his marriage day. Because of his great
+    happiness the whole world seemed to him like some exquisite intaglio
+    of which this day was the design.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The room, "walled with soft splendours of Damascus tiles," was laid
+    with skins of forgotten animals and was hung with historic
+    tapestries dyed by ancient fingers in the spiral veins of the Murex.
+    There were frescoes uniting the dream with its actuality, columns
+    carved with both lines and names of beauty, pilasters decorated with
+    chain and checker-work and golden nets. A stairway led to a high
+    shrine where hung the crucified Tyrian sphinx. The room was like a
+    singing voice summoning one to delights which it described. But
+    whatever way one looked all the lines neither pointed nor seemed to
+    have had beginning, but being divorced from source and direction
+    expressed merely beauty, like an altar "where none cometh to pray."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit, in his trailing robe of white embroidered by a
+    thousand needles, looked so akin to the room that one suspected it
+    of having produced him, Athena-wise, from, say, the great black
+    shrine. When he paused before the shrine he seemed like a child come
+    to beseech some last word concerning the Riddle, rather than a man
+    who believed himself to have mastered all wisdom and to have nailed
+    the world-sphinx to her cross.
+</p>
+<p class="poem">
+     "Surely there is a vein for the silver<br>
+      And a place for the gold where they fine it.<br>
+      Iron is taken out of the earth<br>
+      And brass is moulton out of the stone.<br>
+      Man setteth an end to darkness<br>
+      And searcheth out all perfection: <br>
+      The stones of darkness and of the shadow of death,"
+</p>
+<p class="noindent">
+    he was repeating softly. "So it is," he added, "'and searcheth to
+    the farthest bound.' Have I not done so? And do I not triumph?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then the youth who had once admitted St. George and his friends to
+    that far-away house in McDougle Street&mdash;with the hokey-pokey man
+    outside the door&mdash;entered with the poetry of deference; and if, as
+    he bent low, there was a lift and droop of his eyelids which tokened
+    utter bewilderment, not to say agitation, he was careful that the
+    prince should not see that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Her Highness, the Princess of Yaque, Mrs. Hastings, Mr. Augustus
+    Frothingham and Miss Frothingham ask audience, your Highness," he
+    announced clearly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit turned swiftly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whom do you say, Matten?" he questioned and when the boy had
+    repeated the names, meditated briefly. He was at a loss to fathom
+    what this strange visit might portend; beyond doubt, he reflected
+    (in a world which was an intaglio of his own designing) it portended
+    nothing at all. He hastened forward to wait upon them and paused
+    midway the room, for the highest tribute that a Prince of the Litany
+    could pay to another was to receive him in this chamber of the
+    Crucified Sphinx.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Conduct them here, Matten," he commanded, and took up his station
+    beside an hundred-branched candlestick made in Curium. There he
+    stood when, having been led down corridors of ivory and through
+    shining anterooms, Mrs. Hastings and Olivia and Antoinette appeared
+    on the threshold of the chamber, followed by Mr. Frothingham. As the
+    prince hastened forward to meet them with sweepings of his gown
+    embroidered by a thousand needles and bent above their hands
+    uttering gracious words, assuredly in all the history of Med and of
+    the Litany the room of the Crucified Sphinx had never presented a
+    more peculiar picture.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Into that tranquil atmosphere, dream-pervaded, Mrs. Medora Hastings
+    swept with all the certainty of an opinion bludgeoning the frail
+    security of a fact. She had refused to have her belongings sent to
+    the apartments in the House of the Litany placed that day at her
+    disposal, preferring to dress for the coronation before she
+    descended from Mount Khalak. She was therefore in a robe of black
+    samite, trimmed with the fur of a whole chapter of extinct animals,
+    and bangles and pendants of jewels bobbed and ticked all about her.
+    But on her head she wore the bonnet trimmed with a parrot, set, as
+    usual, frightfully awry. Beside her, with all the timidity of
+    charming reality in the presence of fantasy, came Olivia and
+    Antoinette&mdash;Olivia in a walking frock of white broadcloth, with an
+    auto coat of hunting pink, and a cap held down by yards of cloudy
+    veiling; Antoinette in a blue cloth gown, and about them both&mdash;stout
+    little boots and suede gloves and smart shirt-waists&mdash;such an air of
+    actuality as this chamber, prince and Sphinx and tradition and all,
+    could not approach. Mr. Augustus Frothingham had struck his usual
+    incontestable middle-ground by appearing in the blue velvet of a
+    robe of State, over which he had slipped his light covert top-coat,
+    and he carried his immaculate top-hat and a silver-headed stick.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit," said Mrs. Medora Hastings without ceremony, "what
+    have they done with that poor young man? Ask him, Olivia," she
+    besought, sinking down upon a chair of verd antique and extending a
+    limp, plump hand to the niece who always did everything executive.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia was very pale. She had hardly slept, night-long. Alarm at the
+    inexplicable disappearance of St. George at dinner-time the day
+    before and at the discovery that old Malakh was nowhere about had,
+    by morning, deepened to unreasoning fear among them all. And then
+    Olivia, knowing nothing of what had taken place in the room of the
+    tombs, had resolved upon a desperate expedient, had bundled into an
+    airship her almost prostrate aunt, Mr. Frothingham and his excited
+    little daughter, and had borne down upon the Palace of the Litany
+    two hours before noon. Amory, frantic with apprehension, had stayed
+    behind with Jarvo, certain that St. George could not have left the
+    mountain. But now that Olivia stood before the prince it required
+    but a moment to convince her that Prince Tabnit really knew nothing
+    of St. George's whereabouts. Indeed, since his gift of Ph&oelig;nician
+    wine, sealed three thousand years ago, and the immediate evanishment
+    of the two Americans, his Highness had no longer vexed his thought
+    with them, and he was genuinely amazed to know that (in a world
+    which was an intaglio of his own designing) these two had actually
+    spent yesterday at the king's palace on Mount Khalak. He perceived
+    that he must give them more definite attention than his half-idle
+    device of the wine&mdash;intended as that had been as a mere hyperspatial
+    practical joke, not in the least irreconcilable with his office of
+    host.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. St. George came to Yaque to help me find my father," Olivia was
+    concluding earnestly, "and if anything has happened to him, Prince
+    Tabnit, I alone am responsible."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince reflected for a moment, his eyes fixed upon the
+    hundred-branched candlestick. Then:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. St. George's disappearance," he said, "has prevented a still
+    more unpleasant catastrophe."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Catastrophe!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, quite without tucking in her
+    voice at the corners, "I have thought of no other word since I got
+    to be royalty."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "A world experience, a world experience, dear Madame," contributed
+    Mr. Frothingham, his hands laid trimly along his blue velvet lap.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But that doesn't make it any easier to bear, no matter what anybody
+    says," retorted the lady.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Inasmuch," pursued Prince Tabnit with infinite regret, "as these
+    Americans have, as you say, assisted in the search for your father,
+    the king, they have most unfortunately violated that ancient law
+    which provides that no State or satrapy shall receive aid, whether
+    of blood or of bond, from an alien. The Royal House alone is
+    exempt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And the penalty," demanded Olivia fearfully. "Is there a penalty?
+    What is that, Prince Tabnit?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The voice of the prince was never more mellow.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Do not be alarmed, I beg," he hastened his reassurance. "Upon the
+    return of Mr. St. George, he and his friend will simply be set
+    adrift in a rudderless airship, an offering to the great idea of
+    space."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings swayed toward the prince in her chair of verd antique,
+    and her voice seemed to become brittle in the air.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, is that what you call being ahead of the time," she demanded
+    shrilly, "getting behind science to behave like Nero? And for my
+    part I don't see anything whatever about the island that is ahead of
+    the times. You haven't even got silk shoe-laces. I actually had to
+    use a cloth-of-gold sandal strap to lace my oxfords, and when I lost
+    a cuff-link I was obliged to make shift with two sides of one of
+    Queen Agothonike's ear-rings that I found in the museum at the
+    palace. And that isn't all," went on the lady, wrong kindling wrong,
+    "what do you do for paper and envelopes? There is not a quire to be
+    found in Med. They offered me <i>wireless blanks</i>&mdash;an ultra form that
+    Mr. Hastings would never have considered in good taste. And how
+    about visiting cards? I tried to have a plate made, and they showed
+    me a wireless apparatus for flashing from the doorstep the name of
+    the visitor&mdash;an electrical entrance which Mr. Hastings would have
+    considered most inelegant. Ahead of the times, with your rudderless
+    airships! I have always said that the electric chair is a way to be
+    barbarous and good form at the same time, and that is what I think
+    about Yaque!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham's hands worked forward convulsively on his blue
+    velvet knees.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear Madame," he interposed earnestly, "the history of criminal
+    jurisprudence, not to mention the remarkable essay of the Marquis
+    Beccaria&mdash;proves beyond doubt that the extirpation of the offender
+    is the only possible safety for the State&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia rose and stood before the prince, her eyes meeting his.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You will permit this sentence?" she asked steadily. "As head of the
+    House of the Litany, you will execute it, Prince Tabnit?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Alas!" said the prince humbly, "it is customary on the day of the
+    coronation to set adrift all offenders. I am the servant of the
+    State."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then, Prince Tabnit, I can not marry you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this Mrs. Hastings looked blindly about for support, and Mr.
+    Frothingham and Antoinette flew to her side. In that moment the lady
+    had seen herself, prophetically, in black samite and her parrot
+    bonnet, set adrift in the penitential airship with her rebellious
+    niece.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For a moment Prince Tabnit hesitated: he looked at Olivia, who was
+    never more beautiful than as she defied him; then he walked slowly
+    toward her, with sweep and fall of his garments embroidered by a
+    thousand needles. Antoinette and her father, ministering to Mrs.
+    Hastings, heard only the new note that had crept into his voice, a
+    thrill, a tremour&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" he said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Her eyes met his in amazement but no fear.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In a land more alien to me than the sun," said the prince, "I saw
+    you, and in that moment I loved you. I love you more than the life
+    beyond life upon which I have laid hold. I brought you to this
+    island to make you my wife. Do you understand what it is that I
+    offer you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia was silent. She was trembling a little at the sheer enormity
+    of the moment. Suddenly, Prince Tabnit seemed to her like a name
+    that she did not know.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Will you not understand what I mean?" he besought with passionate
+    earnestness. "Can I make my words mean nothing to you? Do you not
+    see that it is indeed as I say&mdash;that I have grasped the secret of
+    life within life, beyond life, transcending life, as his
+    understanding transcends the man? The wonder of the island is but
+    the alphabet of wisdom. The secrets of life and death and being
+    itself are in my grasp. The hidden things that come near to you in
+    beauty, in dream, in inspiration are mine and my people's. All
+    these I can make yours&mdash;I offer you life of a fullness such as the
+    people of the world do not dream. I will love you as the gods love,
+    and as the gods we will live and love&mdash;it may be for ever. Nothing
+    of high wisdom shall be unrevealed to us. We shall be what the world
+    will be when it nears the close of time. Come to me&mdash;trust me&mdash;be
+    beside me in all the wonder that I know. But above all, love me, for
+    I love you more than life, and wisdom, and mystery!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia understood, and she believed. The mystery of life had always
+    been more real to her than its commonplaces, and all her years she
+    had gone half-expecting to meet some one, unheralded, to whom all
+    things would be clear, and who should make her know by some secret
+    sign that this was so, and should share with her. She had no doubt
+    whatever that Prince Tabnit spoke the truth&mdash;just as the daughter of
+    the river-god Inachus knew perfectly that she was being wooed by a
+    voice from the air. Indeed, the world over, lovers promise each
+    other infinite things, and are infinitely believed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do understand you, Prince Tabnit," Olivia said simply, "I do
+    understand something of what you offer me. I think that these things
+    were not meant to be hidden from men always, so I can even believe
+    that you have all that you say. But&mdash;there is something more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia paused&mdash;and swiftly, as if some little listening spirit had
+    released the picture from the air, came the memory of that night
+    when she had stood with St. George on that airy rampart beside the
+    wall of blossoming vines.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "There is something more," she repeated, "when two love each other
+    very much I think that they have everything that you have said, and
+    more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked at her in silence. The stained light from some high window
+    caught her veil in meshes of rose and violet&mdash;fairy colours,
+    witnessing the elusive, fairy, invincible truth of what she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You mean that you do not love me?" said the prince gently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I do not love you, your Highness," said Olivia, "and as for the
+    wisdom of which you speak, that is worse than useless to you if you
+    can do as you say with two quite innocent men." She hesitated,
+    searching his face. "Is there no way," she said, "that I, the
+    daughter of your king, can save them? I will appeal to the people!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince met her eyes steadily, adoringly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It would avail nothing," he said, "they are at one with the law.
+    Yet there is a way that I can help you. If Mr. St. George returns,
+    as he must, he and his friends shall be set adrift with due
+    ceremony&mdash;but in an imperial airship, with a man secretly in
+    control. By night they can escape to their yacht. This I will
+    do&mdash;upon one condition."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh&mdash;what is that?" she asked, and for all the reticence of her
+    eagerness, her voice was a betrayal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit turned to the window. Below, in the palace grounds,
+    and without, in the Eurychôrus, a thousand people awaited the
+    opening of the palace doors. They filled the majestic avenue, poured
+    up the shadowed alleys that taught the necessity of mystery, were
+    grouped beneath the honey-sweet trees; and above their heads, from
+    every dome and column in the fair city, flowed and streamed the
+    joyous, wizard, nameless colours of the pennons blown heavenward
+    against the blue. They were come, this strange, wise, elusive
+    people, to her marriage.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The prince was smiling as he met her eyes; for the world was always
+    the exquisite intaglio, and to-day was its design.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "They know," he said simply, "what was to have been at noon to-day.
+    Do you not understand my condition?"
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0019"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XIX
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    IN THE HALL OF KINGS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    Somewhat before noon the great doors of the Palace of the Litany and
+    of the Hall of Kings were thrown open, and the people streamed in
+    from the palace grounds and the Eurychôrus. Abroad among
+    them&mdash;elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs
+    to dawn, not dusk&mdash;was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of
+    expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself. Especially the youths
+    and maidens&mdash;who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells&mdash;waited
+    with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind
+    of god even to the immortals. But there were also those who weighed
+    the departures incident to the coming of the strange people from
+    over-seas; and there were not lacking conservatives of the old
+    régime to shake wise heads and declare that a barbarian is a
+    barbarian, the world over.
+</p>
+<p>
+    All that rainbow multitude, clad for festival, rose with the first
+    light music that stole, winged and silken, from hidden cedar
+    alcoves, and some minutes past the sounding of the hour of noon the
+    chamfered doors set high in the south wall of the Hall of Kings were
+    swung open, and at the head of the stair appeared Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She was alone, for the custom of Yaque required that the island
+    princesses should on the day of their recognition first appear alone
+    before their people in token of their mutual faith. From the
+    wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of
+    Queen Mitygen herself. It was of fine lace woven in a single piece,
+    and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of
+    shadow. On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in
+    the Ph&oelig;nician fashion, once taken from a king's casket and sent
+    secretly, upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy, to be bartered in
+    the marts of Coele-Syria. Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay
+    about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead
+    queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder
+    dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust. Girdling her
+    waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered
+    light. With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies&mdash;vivid,
+    graphic, delineated not by light but by line.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white,
+    and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate
+    few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the
+    stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia's women, led by
+    Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were
+    entering by an opposite door. In the raised seats near the High
+    Council, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham leaned to wave a
+    sustaining greeting. Until that high moment Mrs. Medora Hastings had
+    been by no means certain that Olivia would appear at all, though she
+    openly nourished the hope that "everything would go off smoothly."
+    ("I don't care much for foreigners and never have," she confided to
+    Mr. Frothingham, "still, I was thinking while I was at breakfast,
+    after all, to the prince <i>we are</i> the foreigners. There is something
+    in that, don't you think? And then the dear prince&mdash;he is so very
+    metaphysical!")
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon the beetling throne Olivia took her place, and her women sank
+    about her like tiers of sunset clouds. She was so little and so
+    beautiful and so unconsciously appealing that when Prince Tabnit and
+    Cassyrus and the rest of the court entered, it is doubtful if an eye
+    left Olivia, to homage them. But Prince Tabnit was the last to note
+    that, for he saw only Olivia; and the world&mdash;the world was an
+    intaglio of his own designing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With due magnificence the preliminary ceremonies of the coronation
+    proceeded&mdash;musty necessities, like oaths and historical truths,
+    being mingled with the most delicate observances, such as the
+    naming of the former princesses of the island, from Adija, daughter
+    of King Abibaal, to Olivia, daughter of King Otho; and such as
+    counting the clouds for the misfortunes of the régime. This last
+    duty fell to the office of the lord chief-chancellor, and from an
+    upper porch he returned quickening with the intelligence that there
+    was not a cloud in the sky, a state of the heavens known to no
+    coronation since Babylon was ruled by Assyrian viceroys. The lord
+    chief-chancellor and Cassyrus themselves brought forth the crown&mdash;a
+    beautiful crown, shining like dust-in-the-sun&mdash;and Cassyrus, in a
+    voice that trumpeted, rehearsed its history: how it had been made of
+    jewels brought from the coffers of Amasis and Apries, when King
+    Nebuchadnezzar wrested Ph&oelig;nicia from Egypt, and, too, of all manner
+    of precious stones sent by Queen Atossa, wife of Darius, when the
+    Crotoniat Democedes, with two triremes and a trading vessel, visited
+    Yaque before they went to survey Hellenic shores, with what
+    disastrous result. And Olivia, standing in the queen's gown,
+    listened without hearing one word, and turned to have her veil
+    lifted by Antoinette and the daughter of a peer of Yaque; and she
+    knelt before the people while the lord chief-chancellor set the
+    crown on her bright hair. It was a picture that thrilled the lord
+    chief-chancellor himself&mdash;who was a worshiper of beauty, and a man
+    given to angling in the lagoon and making metric translations of the
+    inscriptions.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then it was in the room as if a faint flame had been breathed upon
+    and had upleaped in a thousand ways of expectancy, and as if a
+    secret sign had been set in the lift and dip of the music&mdash;the music
+    that was so like the great chamber with its lift and dip of carven
+    line. The thrill with which one knows the glad news of an unopened
+    letter was upon them all, and they heard that swift breath of an
+    event that stirs before its coming. When Olivia's women fell back
+    from the dais with wonder and murmur, the murmur was caught up in
+    the great hall, and ran from tier to tier as amazement, as
+    incredulity, and as thanksgiving.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For there, beside the beetling throne, was standing a man, slenderly
+    built, with a youthful, sensitive face and critically-drooping lids,
+    and upon them all his eyes were turned in faint amusement warmed by
+    an idle approbation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Perfect&mdash;perfect. Quite perfect," he was saying below his breath.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia turned. The next moment she stood with outstretched arms
+    before her father; and King Otho, in his long, straight robe,
+    encrusted with purple amethysts, bent with exquisite courtesy above
+    his daughter's hands.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My dear child," he murmured, "the picture that you make entirely
+    justifies my existence, but hardly my absence. Shall we ask his
+    Highness to do that?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    It mattered little who was to do that so long as it was done. For to
+    that people, steeped in dream, risen from the crudity of mere events
+    to breathe in the rarer atmosphere of their significance, here was a
+    happening worthy their attention, for it had the dignity of mystery.
+    Even Mrs. Medora Hastings, billowing toward the throne with cries,
+    was less poignantly a challenge to be heard. Upon her the king laid
+    a tranquillizing hand and, with a droop of eyelids in recognition of
+    Mr. Frothingham, he murmured: "Ah, Medora&mdash;Medora! Delight in the
+    moment&mdash;but do not embrace it," while beside him, star-eyed, Olivia
+    stood waiting for Prince Tabnit to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    To Olivia, trembling a little as she leaned upon his arm, King Otho
+    bent with some word, at which she raised to his her startled face,
+    and turned from him uncertainly, and burned a heavenly colour from
+    brow to chin. Then, her father's words being insistent in her ear,
+    and her own heart being tumultuous with what he had told her, she
+    turned as he bade her, and, following his glance, slipped beneath a
+    shining curtain that cut from the audience chamber the still
+    seclusion of the King's Alcove, a chamber long sacred to the
+    sovereigns of Yaque.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Confused with her wonder and questioning, hardly daring to
+    understand the import of her father's words, Olivia went down a
+    passage set between two high white walls of the palace, open
+    to-day to the upper blue and to the floating pennons of the dome.
+    Here, prickly-leaved plants had shot to the cornices with
+    uncouth contorting of angled boughs, and in their inner green
+    ruffle-feathered birds looked down on her with the uncanny
+    interest of myriapods. She caught about her the lace of her skirts
+    and of her floating veil, and the way echoed musically to the
+    touch of her little sandals and was bright with the shining of her
+    diadem. And at the end of the passage she lifted a swaying curtain
+    of soft dyes and entered the King's Alcove.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The King's Alcove laid upon one the delicate demands of calm open
+    water&mdash;for its floor of white transparent tiles was cunningly traced
+    with the reflected course of the carven roof, and one seemed to look
+    into mirrored depths of disappearing line between spaces shaped like
+    petals and like chevrons. In the King's Alcove one stood in a world
+    of white and one's sight was exquisitely won, now by a niche open to
+    a blue well of sea and space, now by silver plants lucent in high
+    casements. And there one was spellbound with this mirroring of the
+    Near which thus became the Remote, until one questioned gravely
+    which was "there" and which was "here," for the real was extended
+    into vision, and vision was quickened to the real, and nothing lay
+    between. But to Olivia, entering, none of these things was clearly
+    evident, for as the curtain of many dyes fell behind her she was
+    aware of two figures&mdash;but the one, with a murmured word which she
+    managed somehow to answer without an idea what she said or what it
+    had said either, vanished down the way that she had come. And she
+    stood there face to face with St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He had risen from a low divan before a small table set with figs and
+    bread and a decanter of what would have been bordeaux if it had not
+    been distilled from the vineyards of Yaque. He was very pale and
+    haggard, and his eyes were darkly circled and still fever-bright.
+    But he came toward her as if he had quite forgotten that this is a
+    world of danger and that she was a princess and that, little more
+    than a week ago, her name was to him the unknown music. He came
+    toward her with a face of unutterable gladness, and he caught and
+    crushed her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he could
+    look to the distant soul of her. He led her to a great chair hewn
+    from quarries of things silver and unremembered, and he sat at her
+    feet upon a bench that might have been a stone of the altar of some
+    forgotten deity of dreams, at last worshiped as it should long have
+    been worshiped by all the host that had passed it by. He looked up
+    in her face, and the room was like a place of open water where
+    heaven is mirrored in earth, and earth reflects and answers heaven.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed a little for sheer, inextinguishable happiness.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Once," he said, "once I breakfasted with you, on tea and&mdash;if I
+    remember correctly&mdash;gold and silver muffins. Won't you breakfast
+    with me now?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia looked down at him, her heart still clamourous with its
+    anxiety of the night and of the morning.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Tell me where you can have been," she said only; "didn't you know
+    how distressed we would be? We imagined everything&mdash;in this dreadful
+    place. And we feared everything, and we&mdash;" but yet the "we" did not
+    deceive St. George; how could it with her eyes, for all their
+    avoidings, so divinely upon him?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Did you," he said, "ah&mdash;did you wonder? I wish I knew!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And my father&mdash;where did you find him?" she besought. "It was you?
+    You found him, did you not?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked down at a fold of her gown that was fallen across
+    his knee. How on earth was he ever to move, he wondered vaguely, if
+    the slightest motion meant the withdrawing of that fold. He looked
+    at her hand, resting so near, so near, upon the arm of the chair;
+    and last he looked again into her face; and it seemed wonderful and
+    before all things wonderful, not that she should be here, jeweled
+    and crowned, but that he should so unbelievably be here with her.
+    And yet it might be but a moment, as time is measured, until this
+    moment would be swept away. His eyes met hers and held them.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Would you mind," he said, "now&mdash;just for a little, while we wait
+    here&mdash;not asking me that? Not asking me anything? There will be time
+    enough in there&mdash;when <i>they</i> ask me. Just for now I only want to
+    think how wonderful this is."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She said: "Yes, it is wonderful&mdash;unbelievable," but he thought that
+    she might have meant the white room or her queen's robe or any one
+    of all the things which he did not mean.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "<i>Is</i> it wonderful to you?" he asked, and he said again: "I wish&mdash;I
+    wish I knew!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He looked at her, sitting in the moon of her laces and the stars of
+    her gems, and the sense of the immeasurableness of the hour came
+    upon him as it comes to few; the knowledge that the evanescent
+    moment is very potent, the world where the siren light of the Remote
+    may at any moment lie quenched in some ashen present. To him, held
+    momentarily in this place that was like shoreless, open water, the
+    present was inestimably precious and it lay upon St. George like the
+    delicate claim of his love itself. What the next hour held for them
+    neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him
+    crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand
+    lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her
+    fingers to his lips.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia&mdash;dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do&mdash;what
+    will happen&mdash;oh, may I tell you <i>now</i>?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not
+    withdrawn from his. And so he did tell her, told her all his heart
+    as he had known his heart to be that last night on <i>The Aloha</i>, and
+    in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those
+    hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the
+    vigil that followed, and always&mdash;always, ever since he could
+    remember, only that he hadn't known that he was waiting for her, and
+    now he knew&mdash;now he knew.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Must you not have known, up there in the palace," he besought her,
+    "the night that I got there? And yesterday, all day yesterday, you
+    must have known&mdash;didn't you know? I love you, Olivia. I couldn't
+    have told you, I couldn't have let you know, only now, when we can't
+    know what may come or what they may do&mdash;oh, say you forgive me.
+    Because I love you&mdash;I love you."
+</p>
+<p>
+    She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold
+    of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the
+    strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at
+    him in almost unearthly beauty. He stood before her, waiting for the
+    moment when she should lift her eyes. And the eyes were lifted, and
+    he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the
+    coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque.
+    He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine
+    moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that
+    world that was like the shoreless open sea where earth reflects
+    heaven, and heaven comes down.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St. George half knelt
+    beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and
+    there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear.
+    And because this fragment of the past since they had met was
+    incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before
+    them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that
+    future, clinging to each other's hands. The little chamber of
+    translucent white, where one looked down to a mirrored dome and up
+    to a kind of sky, became to them a place bounded by the touch and
+    the look and the voice of each other, as every place in the world is
+    bounded for every heart that beats.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sweetheart," said St. George presently, "do you remember that you
+    are a princess, and I'm merely a kind of man?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Was it not curious, he thought, that his lips did not speak a new
+    language of their own accord?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know," corrected Olivia adorably, "that I'm a kind of princess.
+    But what use is that when it only makes trouble for us?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Us"&mdash;"makes trouble for us." St. George wondered how he could ever
+    have thought that he even guessed what happiness might be when
+    "trouble for us" was like this. He tried to say so, and then:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But do you know what you are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you
+    see&mdash;dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world
+    that you can never, never get back?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It
+    seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his
+    forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it
+    back. To prove that <i>that</i> was not incredible, St. George turned
+    until his lips brushed her wrist.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very
+    possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the
+    rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming
+    they will sometime know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of
+    that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You'll never be sorry&mdash;never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely
+    denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he
+    whimsically remembered something else:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is
+    another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a
+    queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And
+    in New York&mdash;in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I <i>insist</i> upon a
+    flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the
+    altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour
+    dissolving to mirrored point and light&mdash;the mystic union of sight
+    with dream&mdash;and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine
+    resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different&mdash;a flat," she said
+    shyly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Wouldn't it&mdash;wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But it will be different, just different enough to like better,"
+    she admitted then. "You know that I think so," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "If only you knew how much I think so," he told her, "how I have
+    thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris.
+    Olivia, dear heart&mdash;when did you think so first&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She shook her head and laid her hands upon his and drew them to her
+    face.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Now, now&mdash;now!" she cried, "and there never was any time but now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But there will be&mdash;there will be," he said, his lips upon her hair.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After a time&mdash;for Time, that seems to have no boundaries in the
+    abstract, is a very fiend for bounding the divine concrete&mdash;after a
+    time Amory spoke hesitatingly on the other side of the curtain of
+    many dyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "St. George," he said, "I'm afraid they want you. Mr. Holland&mdash;the
+    king, he's got through playing them. He wants you to get up and give
+    'em the truth, I think."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Come in&mdash;come in, Amory," St. George said and lifted the curtain,
+    and "I beg your pardon," he added, as his eyes fell upon Antoinette
+    in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated. She had followed
+    Olivia from the hall, and had met Amory midway the avenue of prickly
+    trees, and they had helpfully been keeping guard. Now they went on
+    before to the Hall of Kings, and St. George, remembering what must
+    happen there, turned to Olivia for one crowning moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You know," she said fearfully, "before father came the prince
+    intended the most terrible things&mdash;to set you and Mr. Amory adrift
+    in a rudderless airship&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George laughed in amusement. The poor prince with his impossible
+    devices, thinking to harm him, St. George&mdash;<i>now</i>.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "He meant to marry you, he thought," he said, "but, thank Heaven, he
+    has your father to answer to&mdash;and me!" he ended jubilantly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And yet, after all, Heaven knew what possibilities hemmed them
+    round. And Heaven knew what she was going to think of him when she
+    heard his story. He turned and caught her to him, for the crowning
+    moment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "You love me&mdash;you love me," he said, "no matter what happens or what
+    they say&mdash;no matter what?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    She met his eyes and, of her own will, she drew his face down to
+    hers.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "No matter what," she answered. So they went together toward the
+    chamber which they had both forgotten.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When they reached the Hall of Kings they heard King Otho's
+    voice&mdash;suave, mellow, of perfect enunciation:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "&mdash;some one," the king was concluding, "who can tell this
+    considerably better than I. And it seems to me singularly fitting
+    that the recognition of the part eternally played by the 'possible'
+    be temporarily deferred while we listen to&mdash;I dislike to use the
+    word, but shall I say&mdash;the facts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    It seemed to St. George when he stood beside the dais, facing that
+    strange, eager multitude with his strange unbelievable story upon
+    his lips&mdash;the story of the finding of the king&mdash;as if his own voice
+    were suddenly a part of all the gigantic incredibility. Yet the
+    divinely real and the fantastic had been of late so fused in his
+    consciousness that he had come to look upon both as the
+    normal&mdash;which is perhaps the only sane view. But how could he tell
+    to others the monstrous story of last night, and hope to be
+    believed?
+</p>
+<p>
+    None the less, as simply as if he had been narrating to
+    Chillingworth the high moment of a political convention, St. George
+    told the people of Yaque what had happened in that night in the room
+    of the tombs with that mad old Malakh whom they all remembered. It
+    came to him as he spoke that it was quite like telling to a field of
+    flowers the real truth about the wind of which they might be
+    supposed to know far more than he; and yet, if any one were to tell
+    the truth about the wind who would know how to listen? He was not
+    amazed that, when he had done, the people of Yaque sat in a profound
+    silence which might have been the silence of innocent amazement or
+    of utter incredulity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But there was no mistaking the face of Prince Tabnit. Its cool
+    tolerant amusement suddenly sent the blood pricking to St. George's
+    heart and filled him with a kind of madness. What he did was the
+    last thing that he had intended. He turned upon the prince, and his
+    voice went cutting to the farthest corner of the hall:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Men and women of Yaque," he cried, "I accuse your prince of the
+    knowledge that can take from and add to the years of man at will. I
+    accuse him of the deliberate and criminal use of that knowledge to
+    take King Otho from his throne!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George hardly knew what effect his words had. He saw only
+    Olivia, her hands locked, her lips parted, looking in his face in
+    anguish; and he saw Prince Tabnit smile. Prince Tabnit sat upon the
+    king's left hand, and he leaned and whispered a smiling word in the
+    ear of his sovereign and turned a smiling face to Olivia upon her
+    father's right.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I know something of your American newspapers, your Majesty," the
+    prince said aloud, "and these men are doing their part excellently,
+    excellently."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "What do you mean, your Highness?" demanded St. George curtly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But is it not simple?" asked the prince, still smiling. "You have
+    contrived a sensation for the great American newspaper. No one can
+    doubt."
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho leaned back in the beetling throne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, yes," he said, "it is true. Something has been contrived.
+    But&mdash;is the sensation of <i>his</i> contriving, Prince?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia stood silent. It was not possible, it was not possible, she
+    said over mechanically. For St. George to have come with this story
+    of a potion&mdash;a drug that had restored youth to her father, had
+    transformed him from that mad old Malakh&mdash;
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Father!" she cried appealingly, "don't you remember&mdash;don't you
+    know?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho, watching the prince, shook his head, smiling.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "At dawn," he said, "there are few of us to be found remaining still
+    at table with Socrates. I seem not to have been of that number."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Olivia!" cried St. George suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She met his eyes for a moment, the eyes that had read her own, that
+    had given message for message, that had seen with her the glory of a
+    mystic morning willingly relinquished for a diviner dawn. Was she
+    not princess here in Yaque? She laid her hand upon her father's
+    hand; the crown that they had given her glittered as she turned
+    toward the multitude.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My people," she said ringingly, "I believe that that man speaks the
+    truth. Shall the prince not answer to this charge before the High
+    Council now&mdash;here&mdash;before you all?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this King Otho did something nearly perceptible with his
+    eyebrows. "Perfect. Perfect. Quite perfect," he said below his
+    breath. The next instant the eyelids of the sovereign drooped
+    considerably less than one would have supposed possible. For from
+    every part of the great chamber, as if a storm long-pent had forced
+    the walls of the wind, there came in a thousand murmurs&mdash;soft,
+    tremulous, definitive&mdash;the answering voice to Olivia's question:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Yes. Yes. Yes..."
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0020"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XX
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    In Prince Tabnit's face there was a curious change, as if one were
+    suddenly to see hieroglyphics upon a star where before there had
+    been only shining. But his calm and his magnificent way of authority
+    did not desert him, as so grotesque a star would still stand lonely
+    and high in the heavens. He spoke, and upon the multitude fell
+    instant silence, not the less absolute that it harboured foreboding.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whatever the people would say to me," said the prince simply, "I
+    will hear. My right hand rests in the hand of the people. In return
+    I decree allegiance to the law. Your princess stands before you,
+    crowned. This most fortunate return of his Majesty, the King, can
+    not set at naught the sacred oath which has just left her lips.
+    Henceforth, in council and in audience, her place shall be at his
+    Majesty's right hand, as was the place of that Princess Athalme,
+    daughter of King Kab, in the dynasty of the fall of Rome. Is it not,
+    therefore, but the more incumbent upon your princess to own her
+    allegiance to the law of the island by keeping her troth with
+    me&mdash;that troth witnessed and sanctioned by you yourselves? This
+    ceremony concluded I will answer the demands of the loyal subjects
+    whose interests alone I serve. For we obey that which is higher than
+    authority&mdash;the law, born in the Beginning&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit's voice might almost have taken his place in his
+    absence, it was so soft, so fine of texture, no more consciously
+    modulated than is the going of water or the way of a wing. It was
+    difficult to say whether his words or, so to say, their fine fabric
+    of voice, begot the silence that followed. But all eyes were turned
+    upon Olivia. And, Prince Tabnit noting this, before she might speak
+    he suddenly swept his flowing robes embroidered by a thousand
+    needles to a posture of humility before his sovereign.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Your Majesty," he besought, "I pray your consent to the bestowal
+    upon my most unworthy self of the hand of your daughter, the
+    Princess Olivia."
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho leaned upon the arm of his carven throne. Against its
+    strange metal his hand was cameo-clear.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "For the king," he was remembering softly, "'the Pyrenees, or so he
+    fancied, ceased to exist.' For another 'the mountains of Daphne are
+    everywhere.' Each of us has his impossible dream to prove that he
+    is an impossible creature. Why not I? To be normal is the cry of all
+    the hobgoblins ... And what does the princess say?" he asked aloud.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Her Highness has already given me the great happiness to plight me
+    her troth," said Prince Tabnit.
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho's eyebrows flickered from their parallel of repose.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "In Yaque or in America," he murmured, "the Americans do as the
+    Americans do. None of us is mentioned in Deuteronomy, but what is
+    the will of the princess?" the American Sovereign asked.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mrs. Hastings, seated near the dais, heard; and as she turned, a
+    rhinestone side-comb slipped from her hair, tinkled over the jewels
+    of her corsage and shot into the lap of a member of the High
+    Council. He, never having seen a side-comb, fancied that it might be
+    an infernal machine which he had never seen either, and,
+    palpitating, flashed it to the guardian hand of Mr. Frothingham. At
+    the same moment:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, why, Otho," said Mrs. Hastings audibly, "we had two ancestors
+    at Bannockburn!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bannockburn!" argued Mr. Augustus Frothingham, below the voice,
+    "Bannockburn. But what, my dear Mrs. Hastings, is Bannockburn beside
+    the Midianites and the Moabites and the Hittites and the Ammonites
+    and the Levites?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    In this genealogical moment the prince leaned toward Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Choose," he said significantly, but so softly that none might hear,
+    "oh, my beloved, choose!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The faces of the great assembly blurred and wavered before Olivia,
+    and the low hum of the talk in the room was relative, like the
+    voices of passers-by. She looked up at the prince and away from him
+    in mute appeal to something that ought to help her and would not.
+    For Olivia was of those who, never having seen the face of Destiny
+    very near, are accustomed to look upon nothing as wholly
+    irrevocable; and&mdash;for one of her graces&mdash;she had the feminine
+    expectation that, if only events can be sufficiently postponed,
+    something will intervene; which is perhaps a heritage of the
+    gentlest women descended from Homeric days. If the island was so
+    historic, little Olivia may have said, where was the interfering
+    goddess? She looked unseeingly toward St. George and toward her
+    father, and the sense of the bitter actuality of the choice suddenly
+    wounded her, as the Actual for ever wounds the woman and the dream.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then suddenly, above the stir of expectation of the people, and the
+    associate bustling of the High Council there came a vague confusion
+    and trampling from outside, and the far outer doors of the hall were
+    thrown open with a jar and a breath, vibrant as a murmur. There was
+    a cry, the determined resistance of some of the Golden Guard, and
+    shouts of expostulation and warning as they were flung aside by a
+    powerful arm. In the disorder that followed, a miraculously-familiar
+    figure&mdash;that familiarity and strangeness are both miracles ought to
+    explain certain mysteries&mdash;was beside St. George and a thankful
+    voice said in his ear:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. St. George, sir, for the mercy of Heaven, sir&mdash;come back to the
+    yacht. No person can tell what may happen ten minutes ahead, sir!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    The oracle of this universal truth was Rollo, palpitating, his
+    immaculate coat stained with earth, earth-stains on his cheeks, and
+    his breast labouring in an excitement which only anxiety for his
+    master could effect. But St. George hardly saw him. His eyes were
+    fixed on some one who stood towering before the dais, like the old
+    prints of the avenging goddesses. Clad in the hideous stripes which
+    boards of directors consider <i>de rigueur</i> for the soul that is to be
+    won back to the normal, stood the woman Elissa, who, by all counts
+    of Prince Tabnit, should have been singing a hymn with Mrs. Manners
+    and Miss Bella Bliss Utter in the Bitley Reformatory, in Westchester
+    County, New York.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Stop!" she cried in that perfect English which is not only a rare
+    experience but a pleasant adventure, "what new horror is this?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    To Prince Tabnit's face, as he looked at her, came once more that
+    indefinable change&mdash;only this time nearer and more intimately
+    explainable, as if something ethereal, trained to delicate lines,
+    like smoke, should suddenly shape itself to a menace. St. George saw
+    the woman step close to the dais, he saw Olivia's eyes questioning
+    him, and in the hurried rising of the peers and of the High Council
+    he heard Rollo's voice in his ear:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's a gr'it go, sir," observed Rollo respectfully, "the woman has
+    things to tell, sir, as people generally don't know. She's flew the
+    coop at the place she was in&mdash;it seems she's been shut up some'eres
+    in America, sir; an' she got 'old of the capting of a tramp boat o'
+    some kind&mdash;one o' them boats as smells intoxicating round the
+    'atches&mdash;an' she give 'im an' the mate a 'andful o' jewelry that
+    she'd on 'er when she was took in an' 'ad someways contrived to 'ang
+    on to, an' I'm blessed hif she wasn't able fer to steer fer the
+    island, sir&mdash;we took 'er aboard the yacht only this mornin' with 'er
+    'air down her back, an' we've brought 'er on here. An' she says&mdash;men
+    can be gr'it beasts, sir, an' no manner o' mistake," concluded Rollo
+    fervently.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And a little hoarse voice said in St. George's ear:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Mr. St. George, sir&mdash;we ain't late, are we? We been flirtin' de
+    ger-avel up dat ka-liff since de car-rack o' day."
+</p>
+<p>
+    And there was Bennietod, with an edge of an old horse pistol
+    showing beneath his cuff; and, round-eyed and alert as a bird newly
+    alighted on a stranger sill, Little Cawthorne stood; and the sight
+    put strength into St. George, and so did Little Cawthorne's words:
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I didn't know whether they'd let us in or not," he said, "unless we
+    had on a plaited décolletté, with biases down the back."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Clearly and confidently in the silent room rang the voice of the
+    woman confronting Prince Tabnit, and her eyes did not leave his
+    face. St. George was struck with the change in her since that day in
+    the Reformatory chapel. Then she had been like a wild, alien thing
+    in dumb distress; now she was unchained and native. Her first words
+    explained why, in the extreme dilemma in which St. George had last
+    seen her, she had yet remained mute.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I release myself," she cried, "from my oath of silence, though
+    until to-day I have spoken only to those who helped me to come back
+    to you&mdash;my master. Have you nothing to say to me? Has the time
+    seemed long? Is it a weary while since I left you to do your will
+    and murder the woman whom you were now about to make your wife?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    A cry of horror rose from the people, and then stillness came again.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Take the woman away," said Prince Tabnit only, "she is speaking
+    madness."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I am speaking the truth," said the woman clearly. "I was of
+    Melita&mdash;there are those here who will know my face. And it is not I
+    alone who have served the State. I challenge you, Tabnit&mdash;here,
+    before them all! Where are Gerya and Ibera, Cabulla and Taura? Have
+    not their people, weeping, besought news of them in vain? And what
+    answer have you given them?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Murmurs and sobs rose from the assembly, stilled by the tranquil
+    voice of the prince.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Where are they?" he repeated gently, his voice vibrant in its rise
+    and fall, its giving of delicate values. "But the people know where
+    they are. They have attained to the perfect life and died the
+    perfect death. For I have raised them to the supreme estate."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit, with uplifted face, sat motionless, looking out over
+    the throng from beneath lowered lids; then his eyes, confident and a
+    little mocking, returned to the woman. But they had for her no
+    terror. She turned from him, confronting the pale, eager faces of
+    the people; and in her beauty and distinction she was like Olivia's
+    women, crowded beside the dais.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Men and women of Yaque," cried Elissa, "I will tell you to what
+    'supreme estate' these friends whom you seek have long been raised.
+    For here in Med and in Melita you will find many of those whom you
+    have mourned as dead&mdash;you will find them as you yourselves have met
+    and passed them, it may have been countless times, on your streets
+    of Yaque&mdash;not young and beautiful as when they left you, but men and
+    women of incredible age. Withered, shaken by palsy, infirm, they
+    creep upon their lonely ways or go at will to drag themselves
+    unrecognized along your highways, as helpless as the dead
+    themselves. They number scores, and they are those who have
+    displeased your prince by some little word, some little wrong, or,
+    more than these, by some thwarting of the way of his ambition: Oblo,
+    who disappeared from his place as keeper at the door; Ithobal,
+    satrap of Melita; young Prince Kaal&mdash;ay, and how many more? You do
+    not understand my words? I say that your prince has knowledge of
+    some secret, accursed drug that can call back youth or make actual
+    age&mdash;<i>age</i>, do you understand&mdash;just as we of Yaque bring both
+    flowers and fruit to swift maturity!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia uttered a little cry, not at the grotesque horror of what the
+    woman had said but at the miracle of its unconscious support of the
+    story and theory of St. George. And St. George heard; and suddenly,
+    because another had voiced his own fantastic message, its
+    incredibility and unreality became appalling, and yet he felt
+    infinitely reconciled to both because he interpreted aright that
+    little muffled exclamation from Olivia. What did it matter&mdash;oh, what
+    did it matter whether or not the reality were grotesque? What seems
+    to be happening is always the reality, if only one understands it
+    sufficiently. And at all events there had been that hour in the
+    King's Alcove. At last, as he weighed that hour against the fantasy
+    of all the rest, St. George understood and lived the divine madness
+    of all great moments, the madness that realizes one star and is
+    content that all the heavens shall march unintelligibly past so long
+    as that single shining is not dimmed.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But King Otho was riding no such griffin with sun-gold wings. King
+    Otho was genuinely and personally interested in the woman's words.
+    He turned to Prince Tabnit with animation.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Really, Prince," he said, "is it so? Pray do not deny it unless
+    there is no other way, for I am before all things interested. It is
+    far more important to me that you tell me as much as you can tell,
+    than that you deny or even disprove it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit smiled in the eagerly interested face of his
+    sovereign, and rose and came to the edge of the dais, his garments
+    embroidered by a thousand needles touching and floating about him;
+    and it was as if he reached those before him by a kind of spiritual
+    magnetism, not without sublimity.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "My people," he said&mdash;and his voice had all the tenderness that they
+    knew so well&mdash;"this is some conspiracy of those to whom we have
+    shown the utmost hospitality. I would have shielded your king, for
+    he was also my sovereign and I owed him allegiance. But now that is
+    no longer possible, and the time is come. Know then, oh my people of
+    Yaque, that which my loyalty has led me wrongfully to conceal: that
+    in the strange disappearance and return of your sovereign, King
+    Otho, he who will may trace the loss of that which the island has
+    mourned without ceasing. I accuse your king&mdash;he is no longer
+    mine&mdash;of being now in possession of the Hereditary Treasure of
+    Yaque."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then St. George came back with a thrill to actuality. In the press
+    of the events of this morning, after his awakening in the room of
+    the tombs, he had completely forgotten the soft fire of gems that
+    had burned beneath the hands of old Malakh in that dark chamber
+    under King Abibaal's tomb. He and Amory and Jarvo had, with the
+    king, left the chamber by the upper passages, and Amory and Jarvo
+    knew nothing of the jewels. Yet St. George was certain that he could
+    not have been mistaken, and he listened breathlessly for what the
+    king would say.
+</p>
+<p>
+    King Otho, with a smile, nodded in perfect imperturbability.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "That is true," he said, "I had forgotten all about it."
+</p>
+<p>
+    They waited for him to speak, the people in amazed silence, Mrs.
+    Medora Hastings saying unintelligible things in whispers, for which
+    she had a genius.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It is true," said King Otho, "that I am responsible for the
+    disappearance of the Hereditary Treasure. You will find it at this
+    moment in a basement dungeon of the palace on Mount Khalak. On the
+    very day, three months ago, that I dined with your prince I had made
+    a discovery of considerable importance to me, namely, that the
+    little island of Yaque is richer in most of the radio-active
+    substances than all the rest of the world. The discovery gave me
+    keener pleasure than I had known in years&mdash;I had suspected it for
+    some time after I found the noctilucous stars on the ceiling of my
+    sitting-room at the palace. And in the work-shop of the Princess
+    Simyra I came upon a quantity of metallic uranium, and a great many
+    other things which I question the taste of taking the time to
+    describe. But my experiments there with the very perfect gems of
+    your admirable collection had evidently been antedated by some of
+    your own people, for the apparatus was intact. I shall be glad to
+    show some charming effects to any one who cares to see them. I have
+    succeeded in causing the diamonds of Darius to phosphoresce most
+    wonderfully."
+</p>
+<p>
+    The phosphorescence of the diamonds of Darius was to the people far
+    less important than the joyous fact which they were not slow to
+    grasp, that the Hereditary Treasure was, if they might believe the
+    king's words, restored to them, and the burden of the tax averted.
+    They did not understand, nor did they seek to understand; because
+    they knew the inefficiency of details and they also knew the value
+    of mere import.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But the king, child of a social order that wreaks itself on
+    particularizations, returned to his quest for a certain recounting.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Prince Tabnit," he said, "the High Council and the people of Yaque
+    are impatient for your answer to this woman's words."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I rejoice with them and with your Majesty," replied Prince Tabnit
+    softly, "that the treasure is safe. My own explanation is far less
+    simple. If what this woman says is true, yet it is true in such wise
+    as, strive as I may, I can not speak; nor, strive as you may, can
+    you fathom. Therefore I say that the claim which she has made is
+    idle, and not within my power to answer."
+</p>
+<p>
+    At this St. George bounded to his feet. Amory looked up at him in
+    terror, and Little Cawthorne and Bennietod went a step or two after
+    him as he sprang forward, and Rollo's lean shadowed face, obvious as
+    his way of speech, was wrinkled in terrified appeal.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "An idle claim!" St. George thundered as he strode before the dais.
+    "Is this woman's story and mine an idle claim, and one not within
+    your power to answer? Then I will tell you how to answer, Prince
+    Tabnit. I challenge you now, in the presence of your people&mdash;taste
+    this!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    Upon the carven arm of Prince Tabnit's throne St. George set
+    something that he had taken from his pocket. It was the vase of
+    rock-crystal from which, the night before in the room of the tombs,
+    the king had drunk.
+</p>
+<p>
+    What followed was the last thing that St. George had expected. It
+    was as if his defiance had unlocked flood-gates. In an instant the
+    vast assembly was in motion. With a sound of garments that was like
+    far wind they were upon their feet and pressing toward the throne.
+    With all the passion of their "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in response to
+    Olivia's appeal they came, resistlessly demanding the answer to some
+    dreadful question long shrouded in their hearts. Their armour was
+    their silence; they made no sound save that ominous sweep of their
+    robes and the conspiracy of their sandaled feet upon the tiles.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George did not turn. Indeed, it did not once cross his mind that
+    their hostility could possibly be toward him. Besides, his look was
+    fixed upon the prince's face, and what he read there was enough. The
+    peers, the High Council and those nearest the throne wavered and
+    swerved from the man, leaving him to face what was to come.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Whatever was to come he would have met nobly. He was of those
+    infrequent folk of some upper air who exhibit a certain purity even
+    in error, or in worse. He stood with his exquisite pale face
+    uplifted, his white hair in a glory about it, his white gown
+    embroidered by a thousand needles falling in virginal lines against
+    the warm, pure colour of that room with its wraiths of hue and
+    light. And he opened the heart of the green jewel that burned upon
+    his breast.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Not for me the wine of youth," he said slowly, "but the poison of
+    age. The poison which, without me to unlock the secret, all mankind
+    must drink alone. May you drink it late, my friends!" he cried. "I,
+    who hold in my soul the secret of the passing of time and youth,
+    drink now to those among you and among all men who have won and kept
+    the one thing dearer than these."
+</p>
+<p>
+    He touched the green gem to his lips, and let it fall upon the
+    embroidered laces on his breast. Then quietly and in another voice
+    he began to speak.
+</p>
+<p>
+    With the first words there came to St. George the thrill of
+    something that had possessed him&mdash;when? In that ecstatic moment on
+    <i>The Aloha</i> when he had seen the light in the king's palace; in the
+    instant when the Isle of Yaque had first lain subject before him, "a
+    land which no one can define or remember&mdash;only desire;" in the
+    divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the
+    palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour
+    of his joy in the King's Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes
+    and touched his lips. Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies
+    barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own&mdash;a shell, a duty, a
+    vista&mdash;he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying. He
+    listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched
+    hands with the elemental and saw the ancient kindliness of all those
+    people naked in their faces and knew himself for what he was.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He listened, and yet there was no making captive the words of the
+    prince in understanding. Prince Tabnit was speaking the English, and
+    every word was clearly audible and, moreover, was probably daily
+    upon St. George's lips. But if it had been to ransom the rest of the
+    world from its night he could not have understood what the prince
+    was saying. Every word was a word that belonged as much to St.
+    George as to the prince; but in some unfathomable fashion the inner
+    sense of what he said for ever eluded, dissolving in the air of
+    which it was a part. And yet, past all doubting, St. George knew
+    that he was hearing the essence of that strange knowledge which the
+    Isle of Yaque had won while all the rest of mankind struggled for
+    it&mdash;he knew with the certainty with which we recognize strange
+    forces in a dozen of the every-day things of life, in electricity,
+    in telepathy, in dreams. With the same certainty he realized that
+    what the prince was saying would, if he could understand, lift a
+    certain veil. Here, put in words at last, was manifestly the secret,
+    that catch of understanding without which men are groping in the
+    dark, perhaps that mere pointing of relations which would make
+    clear, without blasphemy, time and the future, rebirth and old
+    existence, it might be; and certainly the accident of personality.
+    Here, crystallized, were the things that men almost know, the dream
+    that has just escaped every one, the whisper in sleep that would
+    have explained if one could remember when one woke, the word that
+    has been thrillingly flashed to one in moments of absorption and has
+    fled before one might catch the sound, the far hope of science, the
+    glimpse that comes to dying eyes and is voiced in fragments by dying
+    lips. Here without penetrating the great reserve or tracing any
+    principle to its beginning, was the truth about both. And St. George
+    was powerless to receive it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    He turned fearfully to Olivia. Ah&mdash;what if she did not guess
+    anything of the meaning of what she was hearing? For one instant he
+    knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star. But
+    when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and
+    her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she
+    might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near,
+    how near they Stood; and to be with her on this side was
+    dearer&mdash;nay, was nearer the Secret&mdash;than without her to pass the
+    veil that they touched. Then he looked at Amory; wouldn't old Amory
+    know, he wondered. Wouldn't his mere understanding of news teach him
+    what was happening? But old Amory, the light flashing on his
+    pince-nez, was keeping one eye on the prince and wondering if the
+    chair that he had just placed for Antoinette was not in the draught
+    of the dome; and little Antoinette was looking about her like a
+    rosebud, new to the butterflies of June; and King Otho was
+    listening, languid, heavy-lidded, sensitive to little values,
+    sophisticating the moment; and Little Cawthorne stood with eyes
+    raised in simple, tolerant wonder; and the others, Bennietod, Mrs.
+    Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, showed faces like the pools
+    in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples&mdash;one must
+    suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly such
+    faces. St. George saw how it was. Here, spoken casually by the
+    prince, just as the Banal would speak of the visible and invisible
+    worlds, here was the Sesame of understanding toward which the
+    centuries had striven, the secret of the link between two worlds;
+    and here, of all mankind, were only they two to hear&mdash;they two and
+    that motionless company who knew what the prince knew and who kept
+    it sealed within their eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at the multitude in swift understanding. They
+    were like a Greek chorus, signifying what is. They knew what the
+    prince was saying, they had the secret and yet&mdash;they were <i>no
+    nearer, no nearer</i> than he. With their ancient kindliness naked in
+    their faces, St. George knew that through his love he was as near to
+    the Source as were they. And it was suddenly as it had been that
+    first night when he had stridden buoyantly through the island; for
+    he could not tell which was the secret of the prince and of these
+    people and which was the blessedness of his love.
+</p>
+<p>
+    None the less he clung desperately to the last words of Prince
+    Tabnit in a vain effort to hold, to make clear, to sophisticate one
+    single phrase, as one waking in the night says over, in a vain
+    effort to fix it, some phantom sentence cried to him in dreams by a
+    shadowy band destined to be dissolved when, in bright day, he would
+    reclaim it. He even managed frantically to write down a jumble of
+    words of which he could make nothing, save here and there a phrase
+    like a touch of hands from the silence: "...the infinite moment that
+    is pending" ... "all is become a window where had been a wall" ...
+    "the wintry vision" ... they were all words that beckon without
+    replying. And all the time it was curiously as if the Something
+    Silent within St. George himself, that so long had striven to speak,
+    were crying out at last in the prince's words&mdash;and he could not
+    understand. Yet in spite of it all, in spite of this imminent
+    satisfying of the strange, dreadful curiosity which possesses all
+    mankind, St. George, even now, was far less keen to comprehend than
+    he was to burst through the throng with Olivia in his arms, gain the
+    waiting <i>Aloha</i> and sail into the New York harbour with the prize
+    that he had won. "I drink now to those among you and among all men
+    who have won and kept that which is greater than these," the prince
+    had said, and St. George perfectly understood. He had but to look at
+    Olivia to be triumphantly willing that the gods should keep their
+    secrets about time and the link between the two worlds so long as
+    they had given him love. What should he care about time? He had this
+    hour.
+</p>
+<p>
+    When the prince ceased speaking the hall was hushed; but because of
+    the tempest in the hearts of them all the silence was as if a strong
+    wind, sweeping powerfully through a forest, were to sway no boughs
+    and lift no leaves, only to strive noiselessly round one who walked
+    there.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Prince Tabnit wrapped his white mantle about him and sat upon his
+    throne. Spell-stricken, they watched him, that great multitude, and
+    might not turn away their eyes. Slowly, imperceptibly, as Time
+    touches the familiar, the face of the prince took on its change&mdash;and
+    one could not have told wherein the change lay, but subtly as the
+    encroachment of the dark, or the alchemy of the leaves, or the
+    betrayal of certain modes of death, the finger was upon him. While
+    they watched he became an effigy, the hideous face of a fantasy of
+    smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among
+    the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death&mdash;the horror was
+    that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying and withering
+    at the bones.
+</p>
+<a name="image-0005"><!--IMG--></a>
+<center>
+<img src="images/image5.jpg" width="317" height="450"
+alt="uncaptioned, people around withering Prince">
+</center>
+<!--IMAGE END-->
+
+<p>
+    A long, whining cry came from Cassyrus, who covered his face with
+    his mantle and fled. The spell being broken, by common consent the
+    great hall was once more in motion&mdash;St. George would never forget
+    that tide toward all the great portals and the shuddering backward
+    glances at the white heap upon the beetling throne. They fled away
+    into the reassuring sunlight, leaving the echoless hall deserted,
+    save for that breathing one upon the throne.
+</p>
+<p>
+    There was one other. From somewhere beside the dais the woman Elissa
+    crept and knelt, clasping the knees of the man.
+</p>
+<a name="2HCH0021"><!-- H2 anchor --></a>
+
+<div style="height: 4em;"><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+<h2>
+    CHAPTER XXI
+</h2>
+<h3>
+    OPEN SECRETS
+</h3>
+<br>
+<p>
+    "Will you have tea?" asked Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George brought a deck cushion and tucked it in the willow
+    steamer chair and said adoringly that he would have tea. Tea. In a
+    world where the essentials and the inessentials are so deliciously
+    confused, to think that tea, with some one else, can be a kind of
+    Heaven.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Two lumps?" pursued Olivia.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Three, please," St. George directed, for the pure joy of watching
+    her hands. There were no tongs.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aren't the rest going to have some?" Olivia absently shared her
+    attention, tinkling delicately about among the tea things. "Doesn't
+    every one want a cup of tea?" she inquired loud enough for nobody to
+    hear. St. George, shifting his shoulder from the rail, looked
+    vaguely over the deck of <i>The Aloha</i>, sighed contentedly, and smiled
+    back at her. No one else, it appeared, would have tea; and there was
+    none to regret it.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George's cursory inspection had revealed the others variously
+    absorbed, though they were now all agreed in breathing easily since
+    Barnay, interlarding rational speech with Irishisms of thanksgiving,
+    had announced five minutes before that the fires were up and that in
+    half an hour <i>The Aloha</i> might weigh anchor. The only thing now left
+    to desire was to slip clear of the shadow of the black reaches of
+    Yaque, shouldering the blue.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Meanwhile, Antoinette and Amory sat in the comparative seclusion of
+    the bow with their backs to the forward deck, and it was definitely
+    manifest to every one how it would be with them, but every one was
+    simply glad and dismissed the matter with that. Mr. Frothingham, in
+    his steamer chair, looked like a soft collapsible tube of something;
+    Bennietod, at ease upon the uncovered boards of the deck, was
+    circumspectly having cheese sandwiches and wastefully shooting the
+    ship's rockets into the red sunset, in general celebration; and
+    Rollo, having taken occasion respectfully to submit to whomsoever it
+    concerned that fact is ever stranger than fiction, had gone below.
+    Mr. Otho Holland and Little Cawthorne&mdash;but their smiles were like
+    different names for the same thing&mdash;were toasting each other in
+    something light and dry and having a bouquet which Mr. Holland, who
+    ought to know, compared favourably with certain vintages of 1000
+    B.C. In a hammock near them reclined Mrs. Medora Hastings, holding
+    two kinds of smelling salts which invariably revived her simply by
+    inducing the mental effort of deciding which was the better. Her
+    hair, which was exceedingly pretty, now rippled becomingly about her
+    flushed face and was guiltless of side-combs&mdash;she had lost them both
+    down a chasm in that headlong flight from the cliff's summit, and
+    they irrecoverably reposed in the bed of some brook of the Miocene
+    period. And Mrs. Hastings, her hand in that of her brother, lay in
+    utter silence, smiling up at him in serene content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    For King Otho of Yaque was turning his back upon his island domain
+    for ever. In that hurried flight across the Eurychôrus among his
+    distracted subjects, his resolution had been taken. Jarvo and Akko,
+    the adieux to whom had been every one's sole regret in leaving the
+    island, had miraculously found their way to the king and his party
+    in their flight, and were despatched to Mount Khalak for such of
+    their belongings as they could collect, and the island sovereign was
+    well content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah well now," he had just observed, languidly surveying the
+    tropical horizon through a cool glass of winking amber bubbles, "one
+    must learn that to touch is far more delicate than to lift. It is
+    more wonderful to have been the king of one moment than the ruler of
+    many. It is better to have stood for an instant upon a rainbow than
+    to have taken a morning walk through a field of clouds. The
+    principle has long been understood, but few have had&mdash;shall I
+    say the courage?&mdash;to practise it. Yet 'courage' is a term
+    from-the-shoulder, and what I require is a word of finger-tips,
+    over-tones, ultra-rays&mdash;a word for the few who understand that to
+    leave a thing is more exquisite than to outwear it. It is by its
+    very fineness circumscribed&mdash;a feminine virtue. Women understand it
+    and keep it secret. I flatter myself that I have possessed the high
+    moment, vanished against the noon. Ah, my dear fellow&mdash;" he added,
+    lifting his glass to St. George's smile.
+</p>
+<p>
+    But little Cawthorne&mdash;all reality in his heliotrope outing and duck
+    and grey curls&mdash;raised a characteristic plaint.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh, but I've done it," he mournfully reviewed. "When'll I ever be
+    in another island, in front of another vacated throne? Why didn't I
+    move into the palace, and set up a natty, up-to-date little
+    republic? I could have worn a crown as a matter of taste&mdash;what's the
+    use of a democracy if you aren't free to wear a crown? And what kind
+    of American am I, anyway, with this undeveloped taste for acquiring
+    islands? If they ever find this out at the polls my vote'll be
+    challenged. What?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Aw whee!" said Bennietod, intent upon a Roman candle, "wha' do you
+    care, Mr. Cawt'orne? You don't hev to go back fer to be a
+    child-slave to Chillingwort'. Me, I've gotta good call to jump
+    overboard now an' be de sonny of a sea-horse, dead to rights!"
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked at them all affectionately, unconscious that
+    already the experience of the last three days was slipping back into
+    the sheathing past, like a blade used. But he was dawningly aware,
+    as he sat there at Olivia's feet in glorious content, that he was
+    looking at them all with new eyes. It was as if he had found new
+    names for them all; and until long afterward one does not know that
+    these moments of bestowing new names mark the near breathing of the
+    god.
+</p>
+<p>
+    The silence of Mrs. Hastings and her quiet devotion to her brother
+    somehow gave St. George a new respect for her. Over by the
+    wheel-house something made a strange noise of crying, and St. George
+    saw that Mr. Frothingham sat holding a weird little animal, like a
+    squirrel but for its stumpy tail and great human eyes, which he had
+    unwittingly stepped on among the rocks. The little thing was licking
+    his hand, and the old lawyer's face was softened and glowing as he
+    nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. As he looked, St. George warmed
+    to them all in new fellowship and, too, in swift self-reproach; for
+    in what had seemed to him but "broad lines and comic masks" he
+    suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts. The better
+    and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his
+    grasp were more important than Yaque itself. He remembered, with a
+    thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must
+    walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of
+    the heart, before he can put much in or take much from the
+    market-place. And lo! this fairy-land of his finding had
+    proved&mdash;must it not always prove?&mdash;the essence of all Reality.
+</p>
+<p>
+    His eyes went to Olivia's face in a flash of understanding and
+    belief.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Don't you see?" he said, quite as if they two had been talking what
+    he had thought.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She waited, smiling a little, thrilled by his certainty of her
+    sympathy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "None of this happened really," triumphantly explained St. George,
+    "I met you at the Boris, did I not? Therefore, I think that since
+    then you have graciously let me see you for the proper length of
+    time, and at last we've fallen in love just as every one else does.
+    And true lovers always do have trouble, do they not? So then, Yaque
+    has been the usual trouble and happiness, and here we are&mdash;engaged."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I'm not engaged," Olivia protested serenely, "but I see what you
+    mean. No, none of it happened," she gravely agreed. "It couldn't,
+    you know. Anybody will tell you that."
+</p>
+<p>
+    In her eyes was the sparkle of understanding which made St. George
+    love her more every time that it appeared. He noted, the white cloth
+    frock, and the coat of hunting pink thrown across her chair, and he
+    remembered that in the infinitesimal time that he had waited for her
+    outside the Palace of the Litany, she must have exchanged for these
+    the coronation robe and jewels of Queen Mitygen. St. George liked
+    that swift practicality in the race of faery, though he was
+    completely indifferent to Mrs. Hastings' and Antoinette's claims to
+    it; and he wondered if he were to love Olivia more for everything
+    that she did, how he could possibly live long enough to tell her.
+    When one has been to Yaque the simplest gifts and graces resolve
+    themselves into this question.
+</p>
+<p>
+    <i>The Aloha</i> gently freed herself from the shallow green pocket where
+    she had lain through three eventful days, and slipped out toward the
+    waste of water bound by the flaunting autumn of the west. An island
+    wind, fragrant of bark and secret berries, blew in puffs from the
+    steep. A gull swooped to her nest in a cranny of the basalt. From
+    below a servant came on deck, his broad American face smiling over a
+    tray of glasses and decanters and tinkling ice. It was all very
+    tranquil and public and almost commonplace&mdash;just the high tropic
+    seas at the moment of their unrestrained sundown, and the odour of
+    tea-cakes about the pleasantly-littered deck. And for the moment,
+    held by a common thought, every one kept silent. Now that <i>The
+    Aloha</i> was really moving toward home, the affair seemed suddenly
+    such a gigantic impossibility that every one resented every one
+    else's knowing what a trick had been played. It was as if the
+    curtain had just fallen and the lights of the auditorium had flashed
+    up after the third act, and they had all caught one another
+    breathless or in tears, pretending that the tragedy had really
+    happened.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Promise me something," begged St. George softly, in sudden alarm,
+    born of this inevitable aspect; "promise me that when we get to New
+    York you are not going to forget all about Yaque&mdash;and me&mdash;and
+    believe that none of us ever happened."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia looked toward the serene mystery of the distance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "New York," she said only, "think of seeing you in New York&mdash;now."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Was I of more account in Yaque?" demanded St. George anxiously.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Sometimes," said Olivia adorably, "I shall tell you that you were.
+    But that will be only because I shall have an idea that in Yaque you
+    loved me more."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Ah, very well then. And sometimes," said St. George contentedly,
+    "when we are at dinner I shall look down the table at you sitting
+    beside some one who is expounding some baneful literary theory, and
+    I shall think: What do I care? He doesn't know that she is really
+    the Princess of Far-Away. But I do."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And he won't know anything about our motor ride, alone, the night
+    that I was kidnapped, either&mdash;the literary-theory person," Olivia
+    tranquilly took away his breath by observing.
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George looked up at her quickly and, secretly, Olivia thought
+    that if he had been attractive when he was courageous he was doubly
+    so with the present adorably abashed look in his eyes.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "When&mdash;alone?" St. George asked unconvincingly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    She laughed a little, looking down at him in a reproof that was all
+    approbation, and to be reproved like that is the divinest praise.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "How did you know?" protested St. George in fine indignation.
+    "Besides," he explained, "I haven't an idea what you mean."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I guessed about that ride," she went on, "the night before last,
+    when you were walking up and down outside my window. I don't know
+    what made me&mdash;and I think it was very forward of me. Do you want to
+    know something?" she demanded, looking away.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "More than anything," declared St. George. "What?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "I think&mdash;" Olivia said slowly, "that it began&mdash;then&mdash;just when I
+    first thought how wonderful that ride would have been. Except&mdash;that
+    it had begun a great while before," she ended suddenly.
+</p>
+<p>
+    And at these enigmatic words St. George sent a quick look over the
+    forward deck. It was of no use. Mr. Frothingham was well within
+    range.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Heavens, good heavens, how happy I am," said St. George instead.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And then," Olivia went on presently, "sometimes when there are a
+    lot of people about&mdash;literary-theory persons and all&mdash;I shall look
+    across at you, differently, and that will mean that you are to
+    remember the exact minute when you looked in the window up at the
+    palace, on the mountain, and I saw you. Won't it?"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It will," said St. George fervently. "Don't try to persuade me that
+    there wasn't any such mountain," he challenged her. "I suppose," he
+    added in wonder, "that lovers have been having these secret signs
+    time out of mind&mdash;and we never knew."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia drew a little breath of content.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Bless everybody," she said.
+</p>
+<p>
+    So they made invasion of that pure, dim world before them; and the
+    serene mystery of the distance came like a thought, drawn from a
+    state remote and immortal, to clasp the hand of There in the hand of
+    Here.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "And then sometimes," St. George went on, his exultation proving
+    greater than his discretion, "we'll take the yacht and pretend
+    we're going back&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    He stopped abruptly with a quick indrawn breath and the hope that
+    she had not noticed. He was, by several seconds, too late.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Whose yacht is it?" Olivia asked promptly. "I wondered."
+</p>
+<p>
+    St. George had dreaded the question. Someway, now that it was all
+    over and the prize was his, he was ashamed that he had not won it
+    more fairly and humiliated that he was not what she believed him, a
+    pillar of the <i>Evening Sentinel</i>. But Amory had miraculously heard
+    and turned himself about.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "It's his," he said briefly, "I may as well confess to you, Miss
+    Holland," he enlarged somewhat, "he's a great cheat. <i>The Aloha</i> is
+    his, and so am I, busy body and idle soul, for using up his yacht
+    and his time on a newspaper story. You were the 'story,' you know."
+</p>
+<p>
+    "But," said Olivia in bewilderment, "I don't understand. Surely&mdash;"
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Nothing whatever is sure, Miss Holland," Amory sadly assured her,
+    but his eyes were smiling behind his pince-nez. "You would think one
+    might be sure of him. But it isn't so. Me, you may depend upon me,"
+    he impressed it lightly. "I'm what I say I am&mdash;a poor beggar of a
+    newspaper man, about to be held to account by one Chillingworth for
+    this whole millenial occurrence, and sent off to a political
+    convention to steady me, unless I'm fired. But St. George, he's a
+    gay dilettante."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Then Amory resumed a better topic of his own; and Olivia, when she
+    understood, looked down at her lover as miserably as one is able
+    when one is perfectly happy.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Oh," she said, "and up there&mdash;in the palace to-day&mdash;I did think for
+    a minute that perhaps you wanted me to marry the prince so
+    that&mdash;they could&mdash;."
+</p>
+<p>
+    One could smile now at the enormity of that.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "So that I could put it in the paper?" he said. "But, you see, I
+    never could put it in any paper, even if I didn't love you. Who
+    would believe me? A thousand years from now&mdash;maybe less&mdash;the
+    <i>Evening Sentinel</i>, if it is still in existence, can publish the
+    story, perhaps. Until then I'm afraid they'll have to confine
+    themselves to the doings of the precincts."
+</p>
+<p>
+    Olivia waived the whole matter for one of vaster importance.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Then why did you come to Yaque?" she demanded.
+</p>
+<p>
+    Mr. Frothingham had left his place by the wheel-house and wandered
+    forward. The steamer chair had a back that was both broad and high,
+    and one sitting in its shadow was hermetically veiled from the rest
+    of the deck. So St. George bent forward, and told her.
+</p>
+<p>
+    After that they sat in silence, and together they looked back
+    toward the island with its black rocks smitten to momentary gold by
+    a last javelin of light. There it lay&mdash;the land locking away as
+    realities all the fairy-land of speculation, the land of the
+    miracles of natural law. They had walked there, and had glimpsed the
+    shadowy threshold of the Morning. Suppose, St. George thought, that
+    instead of King Otho, with his delicate sense of the merely visible,
+    a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque? And instead
+    of Mr. Frothingham, slave to the contestable, and Little Cawthorne
+    in bondage to humour, and Amory and himself swept off their feet by
+    a heavenly romance, suppose a party of savants and economists had
+    arrived in Yaque, with a poet or two to bring away the fire&mdash;what
+    then? St. George lost the doubt in the noon of his own certainty.
+    There could be no greater good, he chanted to the god who had
+    breathed upon him, than this that he and Amory shared now with the
+    wise and simple world, the world of the resonant new names. He even
+    doubted that, save in degree, there could be a purer talisman than
+    the spirit that inextinguishably shone in the face of the childlike
+    old lawyer as the strange little animal nestled in his coat and
+    licked his hand. And these were open secrets. Open secrets of the
+    ultimate attainment.
+</p>
+<p>
+    They watched the land dissolving in the darkness like a pearl in
+    wine of night. But at last, when momentarily they had turned happy
+    eyes to each other's faces, they looked again and found that the
+    dusk, taking ancient citadels with soundless tread, had received the
+    island. And where on the brow of the mountain had sprung the white
+    pillars of the king's palace glittered only the early stars.
+</p>
+<p>
+    "Crown jewels," said Olivia softly, "for everybody's head."
+</p>
+<hr class="short">
+
+
+<div style="height: 6em;"><br><br><br><br><br><br></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Romance Island, by Zona Gale
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+</body>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Romance Island, by Zona Gale
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Romance Island
+
+Author: Zona Gale
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2004 [EBook #13731]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROMANCE ISLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Janet Kegg and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: frontispiece]
+
+
+ROMANCE ISLAND
+
+
+By
+
+ZONA GALE
+
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+HERMANN C. WALL
+
+
+
+INDIANAPOLIS
+THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
+1906
+
+
+
+
+
+  "Who that remembers the first kind glance of her
+   whom he loves can fail to believe in magic?"
+                                     --NOVALIS
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+CHAPTER
+      I DINNER TIME
+     II A SCRAP OF PAPER
+    III ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
+     IV THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
+      V OLIVIA PROPOSES
+     VI TWO LITTLE MEN
+    VII DUSK, AND SO ON
+   VIII THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
+     IX THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
+      X TYRIAN PURPLE
+     XI THE END OF THE EVENING
+    XII BETWEEN-WORLDS
+   XIII THE LINES LEAD UP
+    XIV THE ISLE OF HEARTS
+     XV A VIGIL
+    XVI GLAMOURIE
+   XVII BENEATH THE SURFACE
+  XVIII A MORNING VISIT
+    XIX IN THE HALL OF KINGS
+     XX OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
+    XXI OPEN SECRETS
+
+
+
+
+ROMANCE ISLAND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+DINNER TIME
+
+
+As _The Aloha_ rode gently to her buoy among the crafts in the
+harbour, St. George longed to proclaim in the megaphone's monstrous
+parody upon capital letters:
+
+"Cat-boats and house-boats and yawls, look here. You're bound to
+observe that this is my steam yacht. I own her--do you see? She
+belongs to me, St. George, who never before owned so much as a piece
+of rope."
+
+Instead--mindful, perhaps, that "a man should not communicate his
+own glorie"--he stepped sedately down to the trim green skiff and
+was rowed ashore by a boy who, for aught that either knew, might
+three months before have jostled him at some ill-favoured lunch
+counter. For in America, dreams of gold--not, alas, golden
+dreams--do prevalently come true; and of all the butterfly
+happenings in this pleasant land of larvae, few are so spectacular as
+the process by which, without warning, a man is converted from a
+toiler and bearer of loads to a taker of his _bien_. However, to
+none, one must believe, is the changeling such gazing-stock as to
+himself.
+
+Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
+humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do
+if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
+marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
+among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen
+his mother--an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
+mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune--set
+off for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop
+Arthur Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look
+upon whose portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain
+of his charities seen St. George through college; and it made the
+million worth while to his nephew merely to send him to Tuebingen to
+set his soul at rest concerning the date of one of the canonical
+gospels. Next to the rich delight of planning that voyage, St.
+George placed the buying of his yacht.
+
+In the dusty, inky office of the _New York Evening Sentinel_ he had
+been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting
+words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his
+typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone
+bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought
+and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes
+remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked
+toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass
+slipping to the river's mouth; whereupon he had been seized by such
+a passion to work hard and earn a white-and-brass craft of his own
+that the story which he was hurrying for the first edition was quite
+ruined.
+
+"Good heavens, St. George," Chillingworth, the city editor, had
+gnarled, "we don't carry wooden type. And nothing else would set up
+this wooden stuff of yours. Where's some snap? Your first paragraph
+reads like a recipe. Now put your soul into it, and you've got less
+than fifteen minutes to do it in."
+
+St. George recalled that his friend Amory, as "one hackneyed in the
+ways of life," had gravely lifted an eyebrow at him, and the new men
+had turned different colours at the thought of being addressed like
+that before the staff; and St. George had recast the story and had
+received for his diligence a New Jersey assignment which had kept
+him until midnight. Haunting the homes of the club-women and the
+common council of that little Jersey town, the trim white-and-brass
+craft slipping down to the river's mouth had not ceased to lure him.
+He had found himself estimating the value--in money--of the
+bric-a-brac of every house, and the self-importance of every
+alderman, and reflecting that these people, if they liked, might own
+yachts of white and brass; yet they preferred to crouch among the
+bric-a-brac and to discourse to him of one another's violations and
+interferences. By the time that he had reached home that dripping
+night and had put captions upon the backs of the unexpectant-looking
+photographs which were his trophies, he was in that state of
+comparative anarchy to be effected only by imaginative youth and a
+disagreeable task.
+
+Next day, suddenly as its sun, had come the news which had
+transformed him from a discontented grappler with social problems to
+the owner of stocks and bonds and shares in a busy mine and other
+things soothing to enumerate. The first thing which he had added
+unto these, after the departure of his mother and the bishop, had
+been _The Aloha_, which only that day had slipped to the river's
+mouth in the view from his old window at the _Sentinel_ office. St.
+George had the grace to be ashamed to remember how smoothly the
+social ills had adjusted themselves.
+
+Now they were past, those days of feverish work and unexpected
+triumph and unaccountable failure; and in the dreariest of them St.
+George, dreaming wildly, had not dreamed all the unobvious joys
+which his fortune had brought to him. For although he had accurately
+painted, for example, the delight of a cruise in a sea-going yacht
+of his own, yet to step into his dory in the sunset, to watch _The
+Aloha's_ sides shine in the late light as he was rowed ashore past
+the lesser crafts in the harbour; to see the man touch his cap and
+put back to make the yacht trim for the night, and then to turn his
+own face to his apartment where virtually the entire day-staff of
+the _Evening Sentinel_ was that night to dine--these were among the
+pastimes of the lesser angels which his fancy had never compassed.
+
+A glow of firelight greeted St. George as he entered his apartment,
+and the rooms wore a pleasant air of festivity. A table, with covers
+for twelve, was spread in the living-room, a fire of cones was
+tossing on the hearth, the curtains were drawn, and the sideboard
+was a thing of intimation. Rollo, his man--St. George had easily
+fallen in all the habits which he had longed to assume--was just
+closing the little ice-box sunk behind a panel of the wall, and he
+came forward with dignified deference.
+
+"Everything is ready, Rollo?" St. George asked. "No one has
+telephoned to beg off?"
+
+"Yes, sir," answered Rollo, "and no, sir."
+
+St. George had sometimes told himself that the man looked like an
+oval grey stone with a face cut upon it.
+
+"Is the claret warmed?" St. George demanded, handing his hat. "Did
+the big glasses come for the liqueur--and the little ones will set
+inside without tipping? Then take the cigars to the den--you'll have
+to get some cigarettes for Mr. Provin. Keep up the fire. Light the
+candles in ten minutes. I say, how jolly the table looks."
+
+"Yes, sir," returned Rollo, "an' the candles 'll make a great
+difference, sir. Candles do give out an air, sir."
+
+One month of service had accustomed St. George to his valet's gift
+of the Articulate Simplicity. Rollo's thoughts were doubtless
+contrived in the cuticle and knew no deeper operance; but he always
+uttered his impressions with, under his mask, an air of keen and
+seasoned personal observation. In his first interview with St.
+George, Rollo had said: "I always enjoy being kep' busy, sir. _To
+me_, the busy man is a grand sight," and St. George had at once
+appreciated his possibilities. Rollo was like the fine print in an
+almanac.
+
+When the candles were burning and the lights had been turned on in
+the little ochre den where the billiard-table stood, St. George
+emerged--a well-made figure, his buoyant, clear-cut face accurately
+bespeaking both health and cleverness. Of a family represented by
+the gentle old bishop and his own exquisite mother, himself
+university-bred and fresh from two years' hard, hand-to-hand
+fighting to earn an honourable livelihood, St. George, of sound body
+and fine intelligence, had that temper of stability within vast
+range which goes pleasantly into the mind that meets it. A symbol of
+this was his prodigious popularity with those who had been his
+fellow-workers--a test beside which old-world traditions of the
+urban touchstones are of secondary advantage. It was deeply
+significant that in spite of the gulf which Chance had digged the
+day-staff of the _Sentinel_, all save two or three of which were not
+of his estate, had with flattering alacrity obeyed his summons to
+dine. But, as he heard in the hall the voice of Chillingworth, the
+difficulty of his task for the first time swept over him. It was
+Chillingworth who had advocated to him the need of wooden type to
+suit his literary style and who had long ordered and bullied him
+about; and how was he to play the host to Chillingworth, not to
+speak of the others, with the news between them of that million?
+
+When the bell rang, St. George somewhat gruffly superseded Rollo.
+
+"I'll go," he said briefly, "and keep out of sight for a few
+minutes. Get in the bath-room or somewhere, will you?" he added
+nervously, and opened the door.
+
+At one stroke Chillingworth settled his own position by dominating
+the situation as he dominated the city room. He chose the best chair
+and told a good story and found fault with the way the fire burned,
+all with immediate ease and abandon. Chillingworth's men loved to
+remember that he had once carried copy. They also understood all the
+legitimate devices by which he persuaded from them their best
+effort, yet these devices never failed, and the city room agreed
+that Chillingworth's fashion of giving an assignment to a new man
+would force him to write a readable account of his own entertainment
+in the dark meadows. Largely by personal magnetism he had fought his
+way upward, and this quality was not less a social gift.
+
+Mr. Toby Amory, who had been on the Eleven with St. George at
+Harvard, looked along his pipe at his host and smiled, with
+flattering content, his slow smile. Amory's father had lately had a
+conspicuous quarter of an hour in Wall Street, as a result of which
+Amory, instead of taking St. George to the cemetery at Clusium as he
+had talked, himself drifted to Park Row; and although he now knew
+considerably less than he had hoped about certain inscriptions, he
+was supporting himself and two sisters by really brilliant work, so
+that the balance of his power was creditably maintained. Surely the
+inscriptions did not suffer, and what then was Amory that he should
+object? Presently Holt, the middle-aged marine man, and Harding
+who, since he had lost a lightweight sparring championship, was
+sporting editor, solemnly entered together and sat down with the
+social caution of their class. So did Provin, the "elder giant," who
+gathered news as he breathed and could not intelligibly put six
+words together. Horace, who would listen to four lines over the
+telephone and therefrom make a half-column of American newspaper
+humour or American newspaper tears, came in roaring pacifically and
+marshaling little Bud, that day in the seventh heaven of his first
+"beat." Then followed Crass, the feature man, whose interviews were
+known to the new men as literature, although he was not above
+publicly admitting that he was not a reporter, but a special writer.
+Mr. Crass read nothing in the paper that he had not written, and St.
+George had once prophesied that in old age he would use his
+scrap-book for a manual of devotions, as Klopstock used his
+_Messiah_. With him arrived Carbury, the telegraph editor, and later
+Benfy, who had a carpet in his office and wrote editorials and who
+came in evening clothes, thus moving Harding and Holt to instant
+private conversation. The last to appear was Little Cawthorne who
+wrote the fiction page and made enchanting limericks about every one
+on the staff and went about singing one song and behaving, the
+dramatic man flattered him, like a motif. Little Cawthorne entered
+backward, wrestling with some wiry matter which, when he had
+executed a manoeuvre and banged the door, was thrust through the
+passage in the form of Bennie Todd, the head office boy,
+affectionately known as Bennietod. Bennietod was in every one's
+secret, clipped every one's space and knew every one's salary, and
+he had lately covered a baseball game when the man whose copy he was
+to carry had, outside the fence, become implicated in allurements.
+He was greeted with noise, and St. George told him heartily that he
+was glad he had come.
+
+"He made me," defensively claimed Bennietod; frowning deferentially
+at Little Cawthorne.
+
+"Hello, St. George," said the latter, "come on back to the office.
+Crass sits in your place and he wears cravats the colour of goblin's
+blood. Come back."
+
+"Not he," said Chillingworth, smoking; "the Dead-and-Done-with
+editor is too keen for that; I won't give him a job. He's ruined.
+Egg sandwiches will never stimulate him now."
+
+St. George joined in the relieved laugh that followed. They were
+remembering his young Sing Sing convict who had completed his
+sentence in time to step in a cab and follow his mother to the
+grave, where his stepfather refused to have her coffin opened. And
+St. George, fresh from his Alma Mater, had weighted the winged words
+of his story with allusions to the tears celestial of Thetis, shed
+for Achilles, and Creon's grief for Haemon, and the Unnatural Combat
+of Massinger's father and son; so that Chillingworth had said things
+in languages that are not dead (albeit a bit Elizabethan) and the
+composing room had shaken mailed fists.
+
+"Hi, you!" said Little Cawthorne, who was born in the South, "this
+is a mellow minute. I could wish they came often. This shall be a
+weekly occurrence--not so, St. George?"
+
+"Cawthorne," Chillingworth warned, "mind your manners, or they'll
+make you city editor."
+
+A momentary shadow was cast by the appearance of Rollo, who was
+manifestly a symbol of the world Philistine about which these guests
+knew more and in which they played a smaller part than any other
+class of men. But the tray which Rollo bore was his passport.
+Thereafter, they all trooped to the table, and Chillingworth sat at
+the head, and from the foot St. George watched the city editor break
+bread with the familiar nervous gesture with which he was wont to
+strip off yards of copy-paper and eat it. There was a tacit
+assumption that he be the conversational sun of the hour, and in
+fostering this understanding the host took grateful refuge.
+
+"This is shameful," Chillingworth began contentedly. "Every one of
+you ought to be out on the Boris story."
+
+"What is the Boris story?" asked St. George with interest. But in
+all talk St. George had a restful, host-like way of playing the role
+of opposite to every one who preferred being heard.
+
+"I'll wager the boy hasn't been reading the papers these three
+months," Amory opined in his pleasant drawl.
+
+"No," St. George confessed; "no, I haven't. They make me homesick."
+
+"Don't maunder," said Chillingworth in polite criticism. "This is
+Amory's story, and only about a quarter of the facts yet," he added
+in a resentful growl. "It's up at the Boris, in West Fifty-ninth
+Street--you know the apartment house? A Miss Holland, an heiress,
+living there with her aunt, was attacked and nearly murdered by a
+mulatto woman. The woman followed her to the elevator and came
+uncomfortably near stabbing her from the back. The elevator boy was
+too quick for her. And at the station they couldn't get the woman to
+say a word; she pretends not to understand or to speak anything
+they've tried. She's got Amory hypnotized too--he thinks she can't.
+And when they searched her," went on Chillingworth with enjoyment,
+"they found her dressed in silk and cloth of gold, and loaded down
+with all sorts of barbarous ornaments, with almost priceless jewels.
+Miss Holland claims that she never saw or heard of the woman before.
+Now, what do you make of it?" he demanded, unconcernedly draining
+his glass.
+
+"Splendid," cried St. George in unfeigned interest. "I say,
+splendid. Did you see the woman?" he asked Amory.
+
+Amory nodded.
+
+"Yes," he said, "Andy fixed that for me. But she never said a word.
+I _parlez-voused_ her, and _verstehen-Sied_ her, and she sighed and
+turned her head."
+
+"Did you see the heiress?" St. George asked.
+
+"Not I," mourned Amory, "not to talk with, that is. I happened to be
+hanging up in the hall there the afternoon it occurred;" he modestly
+explained.
+
+"What luck," St. George commented with genuine envy. "It's a
+stunning story. Who is Miss Holland?"
+
+"She's lived there for a year or more with her aunt," said
+Chillingworth. "She is a New Yorker and an heiress and a great
+beauty--oh, all the properties are there, but they're all we've got.
+What do you make of it?" he repeated.
+
+St. George did not answer, and every one else did.
+
+"Mistaken identity," said Little Cawthorne. "Do you remember
+Provin's story of the woman whose maid shot a masseuse whom she took
+to be her mistress; and the woman forgave the shooting and seemed to
+have her arrested chiefly because she had mistaken her for a
+masseuse?"
+
+"Too easy, Cawthorne," said Chillingworth.
+
+"The woman is probably an Italian," said the telegraph editor,
+"doing one of her Mafia stunts. It's time they left the politicians
+alone and threw bombs at the bonds that back them."
+
+"Hey, Carbury. Stop writing heads," said Chillingworth.
+
+"Has Miss Holland lived abroad?" asked Crass, the feature man.
+"Maybe this woman was her nurse or ayah or something who got fond of
+her charge, and when they took it away years ago, she devoted her
+life to trying to find it in America. And when she got here she
+wasn't able to make herself known to her, and rather than let any
+one else--"
+
+"No more space-grabbing, Crass," warned Chillingworth.
+
+"Maybe," ventured Horace, "the young lady did settlement work and
+read to the woman's kid, and the kid died, and the woman thought
+she'd said a charm over it."
+
+Chillingworth grinned affectionately.
+
+"Hold up," he commanded, "or you'll recall the very words of the
+charm."
+
+Bennietod gasped and stared.
+
+"Now, Bennietod?" Amory encouraged him.
+
+"I t'ink," said the lad, "if she's a heiress, dis yere
+dagger-plunger is her mudder dat's been shut up in a mad-house to a
+fare-you-well."
+
+Chillingworth nodded approvingly.
+
+"Your imagination is toning down wonderfully," he flattered him. "A
+month ago you would have guessed that the mulatto lady was an
+Egyptian princess' messenger sent over here to get the heart from an
+American heiress as an ingredient for a complexion lotion. You're
+coming on famously, Todd."
+
+"The German poet Wieland," began Benfy, clearing his throat, "has,
+in his epic of the _Oberon_ made admirable use of much the same
+idea, Mr. Chillingworth--"
+
+Yells interrupted him. Mr. Benfy was too "well-read" to be wholly
+popular with the staff.
+
+"Oh, well, the woman was crazy. That's about all," suggested
+Harding, and blushed to the line of his hair.
+
+"Yes, I guess so," assented Holt, who lifted and lowered one
+shoulder as he talked, "or doped."
+
+Chillingworth sighed and looked at them both with pursed lips.
+
+"You two," he commented, "would get out a paper that everybody would
+know to be full of reliable facts, and that nobody would buy. To be
+born with a riotous imagination and then hardly ever to let it riot
+is to be a born newspaper man. Provin?"
+
+The elder giant leaned back, his eyes partly closed.
+
+"Is she engaged to be married?" he asked. "Is Miss Holland engaged?"
+
+Chillingworth shook his head.
+
+"No," he said, "not engaged. We knew that by tea-time the same day,
+Provin. Well, St. George?"
+
+St. George drew a long breath.
+
+"By Jove, I don't know," he said, "it's a stunning story. It's the
+best story I ever remember, excepting those two or three that have
+hung fire for so long. Next to knowing just why old Ennis
+disinherited his son at his marriage, I would like to ferret out
+this."
+
+"Now, tut, St. George," Amory put in tolerantly, "next to doing
+exactly what you will be doing all this week you'd rather ferret out
+this."
+
+"On my honour, no," St. George protested eagerly, "I mean quite what
+I say. I might go on fearfully about it. Lord knows I'm going to see
+the day when I'll do it, too, and cut my troubles for the luck of
+chasing down a bully thing like this."
+
+If there was anything to forgive, every one forgave him.
+
+"But give up ten minutes on _The Aloha_," Amory skeptically put it,
+adjusting his pince-nez, "for anything less than ten minutes on _The
+Aloha_?"
+
+"I'll do it now--now!" cried St. George. "If Mr. Chillingworth will
+put me on this story in your place and will give you a week off on
+_The Aloha_, you may have her and welcome."
+
+Little Cawthorne pounded on the table.
+
+"Where do I come in?" he wailed. "But no, all I get is another wad
+o' woe."
+
+"What do you say, Mr. Chillingworth?" St. George asked eagerly.
+
+"I don't know," said Chillingworth, meditatively turning his glass.
+"St. George is rested and fresh, and he feels the story. And
+Amory--here, touch glasses with me."
+
+Amory obeyed. His chief's hand was steady, but the two glasses
+jingled together until, with a smile, Amory dropped his arm.
+
+"I _am_ about all in, I fancy," he admitted apologetically.
+
+"A week's rest on the water," said Chillingworth, "would set you on
+your feet for the convention. All right, St. George," he nodded.
+
+St. George leaped to his feet.
+
+"Hooray!" he shouted like a boy. "Jove, won't it be good to get
+back?"
+
+He smiled as he set down his glass, remembering the day at his desk
+when he had seen the white-and-brass craft slip to the river's
+mouth.
+
+Rollo, discreet and without wonder, footed softly about the table,
+keeping the glasses filled and betraying no other sign of life. For
+more than four hours he was in attendance, until, last of the
+guests, Little Cawthorne and Bennietod departed together, trying to
+remember the dates of the English kings. Finally Chillingworth and
+Amory, having turned outdoors the dramatic critic who had arrived
+at midnight and was disposed to stay, stood for a moment by the fire
+and talked it over.
+
+"Remember, St. George," Chillingworth said, "I'll have no
+monkey-work. You'll report to me at the old hour, you won't be late;
+and you'll take orders--"
+
+"As usual, sir," St. George rejoined quietly.
+
+"I beg your pardon," Chillingworth said quickly, "but you see this
+is such a deuced unnatural arrangement."
+
+"I understand," St. George assented, "and I'll do my best not to get
+thrown down. Amory has told me all he knows about it--by the way,
+where is the mulatto woman now?"
+
+"Why," said Chillingworth, "some physician got interested in the
+case, and he's managed to hurry her up to the Bitley Reformatory in
+Westchester for the present. She's there; and that means, we need
+not disguise, that nobody can see her. Those Bitley people are like
+a rabble of wild eagles."
+
+"Right," said St. George. "I'll report at eight o'clock. Amory can
+board _The Aloha_ when he gets ready and take down whom he likes."
+
+"On my life, old chap, it's a private view of Kedar's tents to me,"
+said Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez. "I'll probably
+win wide disrespect by my inability to tell a mainsail from a
+cockpit, but I'm a grateful dog, in spite of that."
+
+When they were gone St. George sat by the fire. He read Amory's
+story of the Boris affair in the paper, which somewhere in the
+apartment Rollo had unearthed, and the man took off his master's
+shoes and brought his slippers and made ready his bath. St. George
+glanced over his shoulder at the attractively-dismantled table, with
+its dying candles and slanted shades.
+
+"Gad!" he said in sheer enjoyment as he clipped the story and saw
+Rollo pass with the towels.
+
+It was so absurdly like a city room's dream of Arcady.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+A SCRAP OF PAPER
+
+
+To be awakened by Rollo, to be served in bed with an appetizing
+breakfast and to catch a hansom to the nearest elevated station were
+novel preparations for work in the _Sentinel_ office. The
+impossibility of it all delighted St. George rather more than the
+reality, for there is no pastime, as all the world knows, quite like
+that of practising the impossible. The days when, "like a man
+unfree," he had fared forth from his unlovely lodgings clandestinely
+to partake of an evil omelette, seemed enchantingly far away. It
+was, St. George reflected, the experience of having been released
+from prison, minus the disgrace.
+
+Yet when he opened the door of the city room the odour of the
+printers' ink somehow fused his elation in his liberty with the
+elation of the return. This was like wearing fetters for bracelets.
+When he had been obliged to breathe this air he had scoffed at its
+fascination, but now he understood. "A newspaper office," so a
+revered American of letters who had begun his life there had once
+imparted to St. George, "is a place where a man with the
+temperament of a savant and a recluse may bring his American vice of
+commercialism and worship of the uncommon, and let them have it out.
+Newspapers have no other use--except the one I began on." When St.
+George entered the city room, Crass, of the goblin's blood cravats,
+had vacated his old place, and Provin was just uncovering his
+typewriter and banging the tin cover upon everything within reach,
+and Bennietod was writhing over a rewrite, and Chillingworth was
+discharging an office boy in a fashion that warmed St. George's
+heart.
+
+But Chillingworth, the city editor, was an italicized form of
+Chillingworth, the guest. He waved both arms at the foreman who
+ventured to tell him of a head that had one letter too many, and he
+frowned a greeting at St. George.
+
+"Get right out on the Boris story," he said. "I depend on you. The
+chief is interested in this too--telephoned to know whom I had on
+it."
+
+St. George knew perfectly that "the chief" was playing golf at Lenox
+and no doubt had read no more than the head-lines of the Holland
+story, for he was a close friend of the bishop's, and St. George
+knew his ways; but Chillingworth's methods always told, and St.
+George turned away with all the old glow of his first assignment.
+
+St. George, calling up the Bitley Reformatory, knew that the Chances
+and the Fates were all allied against his seeing the mulatto woman;
+but he had learned that it is the one unexpected Fate and the one
+apostate Chance who open great good luck of any sort. So, though the
+journey to Westchester County was almost certain to result in
+refusal, he meant to be confronted by that certainty before he
+assumed it. To the warden on the wire St. George put his inquiry.
+
+"What are your visitors' days up there, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+
+"Thursdays," came the reply, and the warden's voice suggested
+handcuffs by way of hospitality.
+
+"This is St. George of the _Sentinel_. I want very much to see one
+of your people--a mulatto woman. Can you fix it for me?"
+
+"Certainly not," returned the warden promptly. "The _Sentinel_ knows
+perfectly that newspaper men can not be admitted here."
+
+"Ah, well now, of course," St. George conceded, "but if you have a
+mysterious boarder who talks Patagonian or something, and we think
+that perhaps we can talk with her, why then--"
+
+"It doesn't matter whether you can talk every language in South
+America," said the warden bruskly. "I'm very busy now, and--"
+
+"See here, Mr. Jeffrey," said St. George, "is no one allowed there
+but relatives of the guests?"
+
+"Nobody,"--crisply.
+
+"I beg your pardon, that is literal?"
+
+"Relatives, with a permit," divulged the warden, who, if he had had
+a sceptre would have used it at table, he was so fond of his little
+power, "and the Readers' Guild."
+
+"Ah--the Readers' Guild," said St. George. "What days, Mr. Jeffrey?"
+
+"To-day and Saturdays, ten o'clock. I'm sorry, Mr. St. George, but
+I'm a very busy man and now--"
+
+"Good-by," St. George cried triumphantly.
+
+In half an hour he was at the Grand Central station, boarding a
+train for the Reformatory town. It was a little after ten o'clock
+when he rang the bell at the house presided over by Chillingworth's
+"rabble of wild eagles."
+
+The Reformatory, a boastful, brick building set in grounds that
+seemed freshly starched and ironed, had a discoloured door that
+would have frowned and threatened of its own accord, even without
+the printed warnings pasted to its panels stating that no
+application for admission, with or without permits, would be
+honoured upon any day save Thursday. This was Tuesday.
+
+Presently, the chains having fallen within after a feudal rattling,
+an old man who looked born to the business of snapping up a
+drawbridge in lieu of a taste for any other exclusiveness peered at
+St. George through absurd smoked glasses, cracked quite across so
+that his eyes resembled buckles.
+
+"Good morning," said St. George; "has the Readers' Guild arrived
+yet?"
+
+The old man grated out an assent and swung open the door, which
+creaked in the pitch of his voice. The bare hall was cut by a wall
+of steel bars whose gate was padlocked, and outside this wall the
+door to the warden's office stood open. St. George saw that a
+meeting was in progress there, and the sight disturbed him. Then the
+click of a key caught his attention, and he turned to find the old
+man quietly and surprisingly swinging open the door of steel bars.
+
+"This way, sir," he said hoarsely, fixing St. George with his buckle
+eyes, and shambled through the door after him locking it behind
+them.
+
+If St. George had found awaiting him a gold throne encircled by
+kneeling elephants he could have been no more amazed. Not a word had
+been said about the purpose of his visit, and not a word to the
+warden; there was simply this miraculous opening of the barred door.
+St. George breathlessly footed across the rotunda and down the dim
+opposite hall. There was a mistake, that was evident; but for the
+moment St. George was going to propose no reform. Their steps echoed
+in the empty corridor that extended the entire length of the great
+building in an odour of unspeakable soap and superior disinfectants;
+and it was not until they reached a stair at the far end that the
+old man halted.
+
+"Top o' the steps," he hoarsely volunteered, blinking his little
+buckle eyes, "first door to the left. My back's bad. I won't go up."
+
+St. George, inhumanely blessing the circumstance, slipped something
+in the old man's hand and sprang up the stairs.
+
+The first door at the left stood ajar. St. George looked in and saw
+a circle of bonnets and white curls clouded around the edge of the
+room, like witnesses. The Readers' Guild was about leaving; almost
+in the same instant, with that soft lift and touch which makes a
+woman's gown seem sewed with vowels and sibilants, they all arose
+and came tapping across the bare floor. At their head marched a
+woman with such a bright bonnet, and such a tinkle of ornaments on
+her gown that at first sight she quite looked like a lamp. It was
+she whom St. George approached.
+
+"I beg your pardon, madame," he said, "is this the Readers' Guild?"
+
+There was nothing in St. George's grave face and deferential
+stooping of shoulders to betray how his heart was beating or what a
+bound it gave at her amazing reply.
+
+"Ah," she said, "how do you do?"--and her manner had that violent
+absent-mindedness which almost always proves that its possessor has
+trained a large family of children--"I am so glad that you can be
+with us to-day. I am Mrs. Manners--forgive me," she besought with
+perfectly self-possessed distractedness, "I'm afraid that I've
+forgotten your name."
+
+"My name is St. George," he answered as well as he could for virtual
+speechlessness.
+
+The other members of the Guild were issuing from the room, and Mrs.
+Manners turned. She had a fashion of smiling enchantingly, as if to
+compensate her total lack of attention.
+
+"Ladies," she said, "this is Mr. St. George, at last."
+
+Then she went through their names to him, and St. George bowed and
+caught at the flying end of the name of the woman nearest him, and
+muttered to them all. The one nearest was a Miss Bella Bliss Utter,
+a little brown nut of a woman with bead eyes.
+
+"Ah, Mr. St. George," said Miss Utter rapidly, "it has been a
+wonderful meeting. I wish you might have been with us. Fortunately
+for us you are just in time for our third floor council."
+
+It had been said of St. George that when he was writing on space and
+was in need, buildings fell down before him to give him two columns
+on the first page; but any architectural manoeuvre could not have
+amazed him as did this. And too, though there had been occasions
+when silence or an evasion would have meant bread to him, the
+temptation to both was never so strong as at that moment. It cost
+St. George an effort, which he was afterward glad to remember having
+made, to turn to Mrs. Manners, who had that air of appointing
+committees and announcing the programme by which we always recognize
+a leader, and try to explain.
+
+"I am afraid," St. George said as they reached the stairs, "that you
+have mistaken me, Mrs. Manners. I am not--"
+
+"Pray, pray do not mention it," cried Mrs. Manners, shaking her
+little lamp-shade of a hat at him, "we make every allowance, and I
+am sure that none will be necessary."
+
+"But I am with the _Evening Sentinel_," St. George persisted, "I am
+afraid that--"
+
+"As if one's profession made any difference!" cried Mrs. Manners
+warmly. "No, indeed, I perfectly understand. We all understand," she
+assured him, going over some papers in one hand and preparing to
+mount the stairs. "Indeed, we appreciate it," she murmured, "do we
+not, Miss Utter?"
+
+The little brown nut seemed to crack in a capacious smile.
+
+"Indeed, indeed!" she said fervently, accenting her emphasis by
+briefly-closed eyes.
+
+"Hymn books. Now, have we hymn books enough?" plaintively broke in
+Mrs. Manners. "I declare, those new hymn books don't seem to have
+the spirit of the old ones, no matter what _any one_ says," she
+informed St. George earnestly as they reached an open door. In the
+next moment he stood aside and the Readers' Guild filed past him. He
+followed them. This was pleasantly like magic.
+
+They entered a large chamber carpeted and walled in the garish
+flowers which many boards of directors suppose will joy the
+cheerless breast. There were present a dozen women inmates,--sullen,
+weary-looking beings who seemed to have made abject resignation
+their latest vice. They turned their lustreless eyes upon the
+visitors, and a portly woman in a red waist with a little American
+flag in a buttonhole issued to them a nasal command to rise. They
+got to their feet with a starched noise, like dead leaves blowing,
+and St. George eagerly scanned their faces. There were women of
+several nationalities, though they all looked raceless in the ugly
+uniforms which those same boards of directors consider _de rigueur_
+for the soul that is to be won back to the normal. A little negress,
+with a spirit that soared free of boards of directors, had tried to
+tie her closely-clipped wool with bits of coloured string; an
+Italian woman had a geranium over her ear; and at the end of the
+last row of chairs, towering above the others, was a creature of a
+kind of challenging, unforgetable beauty whom, with a thrill of
+certainty, St. George realized to be her whom he had come to see.
+So strong was his conviction that, as he afterward recalled, he even
+asked no question concerning her. She looked as manifestly not one
+of the canaille of incorrigibles as, in her place, Lucrezia Borgia
+would have looked.
+
+The woman was powerfully built with astonishing breadth of shoulder
+and length of limb, but perfectly proportioned. She was young,
+hardly more than twenty, St. George fancied, and of the peculiar
+litheness which needs no motion to be manifest. Her clear skin was
+of wonderful brown; and her eyes, large and dark, with something of
+the oriental watchfulness, were like opaque gems and not more
+penetrable. Her look was immovably fixed upon St. George as if she
+divined that in some way his coming affected her.
+
+"We will have our hymn first." Mrs. Manners' words were buzzing and
+pecking in the air. "What can I have done with that list of numbers?
+We have to select our pieces most carefully," she confided to St.
+George, "so to be sure that _Soul's Prison_ or _Hands Red as
+Crimson_, or, _Do You See the Hebrew Captive Kneeling?_ or anything
+personal like that doesn't occur. Now what can I have done with that
+list?"
+
+Her words reached St. George but vaguely. He was in a fever of
+anticipation and enthusiasm. He turned quickly to Mrs. Manners.
+
+"During the hymn," he said simply, "I would like to speak with one
+of the women. Have I your permission?"
+
+Mrs. Manners looked momentarily perplexed; but her eyes at that
+instant chancing upon her lost list of hymns, she let fall an
+abstracted assent and hurried to the waiting organist. Immediately
+St. George stepped quietly down among the women already fluttering
+the leaves of their hymn books, and sat beside the mulatto woman.
+
+Her eyes met his in eager questioning, but she had that temper of
+unsurprise of many of the eastern peoples and of some animals. Yet
+she was under some strong excitement, for her hands, large but
+faultlessly modeled, were pressed tensely together. And St. George
+saw that she was by no means a mulatto, or of any race that he was
+able to name. Her features were classic and of exceeding fineness,
+and her face was sensitive and highly-bred and filled with repose,
+like the surprising repose of breathing arrested in marble. There
+was that about her, however, which would have made one, constituted
+to perceive only the arbitrary balance of things, feel almost
+afraid; while one of high organization would inevitably have been
+smitten by some sense of the incalculably higher organization of her
+nature, a nature which breathed forth an influence, laid a
+spell--did something indefinable. Sometimes one stands too closely
+to a statue and is frightened by the nearness, as by the nearness
+of one of an alien region. St. George felt this directly he spoke to
+her. He shook off the impression and set himself practically to the
+matter in hand. He had never had greater need of his faculty for
+directness. His low tone was quite matter-of-fact, his manner
+deferentially reassuring.
+
+"I think," he said softly and without preface, "that I can help you.
+Will you let me help you? Will you tell me quickly your name?"
+
+The woman's beautiful eyes were filled with distress, but she shook
+her head.
+
+"Your name--name--name?" St. George repeated earnestly, but she had
+only the same answer. "Can you not tell me where you live?" St.
+George persisted, and she made no other sign.
+
+"New York?" went on St. George patiently. "New York? Do you live in
+New York?"
+
+There was a sudden gleam in the woman's eyes. She extended her hands
+quickly in unmistakable appeal. Then swiftly she caught up a hymn
+book, tore at its fly-leaf, and made the movement of writing. In an
+instant St. George had thrust a pencil in her hand and she was
+tracing something.
+
+He waited feverishly. The organ had droned through the hymn and the
+women broke into song, with loose lips and without restraint, as
+street boys sing. He saw them casting curious, sullen glances, and
+the Readers' Guild whispering among themselves. Miss Bella Bliss
+Utter, looking as distressed as a nut can look, nodded, and Mrs.
+Manners shook her head and they meant the same thing. Then St.
+George saw the attendant in the red waist descend from the platform
+and make her way toward him, the little American flag rising and
+falling on her breast. He unhesitatingly stepped in the aisle to
+meet her, determined to prevent, if possible, her suspicion of the
+message. "Is it the barbarism of a gentleman," Amory had once
+propounded, "or is it the gentleman-like manners of a barbarian
+which makes both enjoy over-stepping a prohibition?"
+
+"I compliment you," St. George said gravely, with his deferential
+stooping of the shoulders. "The women are perfectly trained. This,
+of course, is due to you."
+
+The hard face of the woman softened, but St. George thought that one
+might call her very facial expression nasal; she smiled with evident
+pleasure, though her purpose remained unshaken.
+
+"They do pretty good," she admitted, "but visitors ain't best for
+'em. I'll have to request you"--St. George vaguely wished that she
+would say "ask"--"not to talk to any of 'em."
+
+St. George bowed.
+
+"It is a great privilege," he said warmly if a bit incoherently,
+and held her in talk about an institution of the sort in Canada
+where the women inmates wore white, the managers claiming that the
+effect upon their conduct was perceptible, that they were far more
+self-respecting, and so on in a labyrinth of defensive detail. "What
+do you think of the idea?" he concluded anxiously, manfully holding
+his ground in the aisle.
+
+"I think it's mostly nonsense," returned the woman tartly, "a big
+expense and a sight of work for nothing. And now permit me to say--"
+
+St. George vaguely wished that she would say "let."
+
+"I agree with you," he said earnestly, "nothing could be simpler and
+neater than these calico gowns."
+
+The attendant looked curiously at him.
+
+"They are gingham," she rejoined, "and you'll excuse me, I hope, but
+visitors ain't supposed to converse with the inmates."
+
+St. George was vanquished by "converse."
+
+"I beg your pardon," he said, "pray forgive me. I will say good-by
+to my friend."
+
+He turned swiftly and extended his hand to the strange woman behind
+him. With the cunning upon which he had counted she gave her own
+hand, slipping in his the folded paper. Her eyes, with their
+haunting watchfulness, held his for a moment as she mutely bent
+forward when he left her.
+
+The hymn was done and the women were seating themselves, as St.
+George with beating heart took his way up the aisle. What the paper
+contained he could not even conjecture; but there _was_ a paper and
+it _did_ contain something which he had a pleasant premonition would
+be invaluable to him. Yet he was still utterly at loss to account
+for his own presence there, and this he coolly meant to do.
+
+He was spared the necessity. On the platform Mrs. Manners had risen
+to make an announcement; and St. George fancied that she must
+preside at her tea-urn and try on her bonnets with just that same
+formal little "announcement" air.
+
+"My friends," she said, "I have now an unexpected pleasure for you
+and for us all. We have with us to-day Mr. St. George, of New York.
+Mr. St. George is going to sing for us."
+
+St. George stood still for a moment, looking into the expectant
+faces of Mrs. Manners and the other women of the Readers' Guild, a
+spark of understanding kindling the mirth in his eyes. This then
+accounted both for his admittance to the home and for his welcome by
+the women upon their errand of mercy. He had simply been very
+naturally mistaken for a stranger from New York who had not arrived.
+But since he had accomplished something, though he did not know
+what, inasmuch as the slip of paper lay crushed in his hand unread,
+he must, he decided, pay for it. Without ado he stepped to the
+platform.
+
+"I have explained to Mrs. Manners and to these ladies," he said
+gravely, "that I am not the gentleman who was to sing for you.
+However, since he is detained, I will do what I can."
+
+This, mistaken for a merely perfunctory speech of self-depreciation,
+was received in polite, contradicting silence by the Guild. St.
+George, who had a rich, true barytone, quickly ran over his little
+list of possible songs, none of which he had ever sung to an
+audience that a canoe would not hold, or to other accompaniment than
+that of a mandolin. Partly in memory of those old canoe-evenings St.
+George broke into a low, crooning plantation melody. The song, like
+much of the Southern music, had in it a semi-barbaric chord that the
+college men had loved, something--or so one might have said who took
+the canoe-music seriously--of the wildness and fierceness of old
+tribal loves and plaints and unremembered wooings with a desert
+background: a gallop of hoof-beats, a quiver of noon light above
+saffron sand--these had been, more or less, in the music when St.
+George had been wont to lie in a boat and pick at the strings while
+Amory paddled; and these he must have reechoed before the crowd of
+curious and sullen and commonplace, lighted by that one wild,
+strange face. When he had finished the dark woman sat with bowed
+head, and St. George himself was more moved by his own effort than
+was strictly professional.
+
+"Dear Mr. St. George," said Mrs. Manners, going distractedly through
+her hand-bag for something unknown, "our secretary will thank you
+formally. It was she who sent you our request, was it not? She
+_will_ so regret being absent to-day."
+
+"She did not send me a request, Mrs. Manners," persisted St. George
+pleasantly, "but I've been uncommonly glad to do what I could. I am
+here simply on a mission for the _Evening Sentinel_."
+
+Mrs. Manners drew something indefinite from her bag and put it back
+again, and looked vaguely at St. George.
+
+"Your voice reminds me so much of my brother, younger," she
+observed, her eyes already straying to the literature for
+distribution.
+
+With soft exclamatory twitters the Readers' Guild thanked St.
+George, and Miss Bella Bliss Utter, who was of womankind who clasp
+their hands when they praise, stood thus beside him until he took
+his leave. The woman in the red waist summoned an attendant to show
+him back down the long corridor.
+
+At the grated door within the entrance St. George found the warden
+in stormy conference with a pale blond youth in spectacles.
+
+"Impossible," the warden was saying bluntly, "I know you. I know
+your voice. You called me up this morning from the _New York
+Sentinel_ office, and I told you then--"
+
+"But, my dear sir," expostulated the pale blond youth, waving a
+music roll, "I do assure you--"
+
+"What he says is quite true, Warden," St. George interposed
+courteously, "I will vouch for him. I have just been singing for the
+Readers' Guild myself."
+
+The warden dropped back with a grudging apology and brows of tardy
+suspicion, and the old man blinked his buckle eyes.
+
+"Gentlemen," said St. George, "good morning."
+
+Outside the door, with its panels decorated in positive
+prohibitions, he eagerly unfolded the precious paper. It bore a
+single name and address: Tabnit, 19 McDougle Street, New York.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ST. GEORGE AND THE LADY
+
+
+St. George lunched leisurely at his hotel. Upon his return from
+Westchester he had gone directly to McDougle Street to be assured
+that there was a house numbered 19. Without difficulty he had found
+the place; it was in the row of old iron-balconied apartment houses
+a few blocks south of Washington Square, and No. 19 differed in no
+way from its neighbours even to the noisy children, without toys,
+tumbling about the sunken steps and dark basement door. St. George
+contented himself with walking past the house, for the mere
+assurance that the place existed dictated his next step.
+
+This was to write a note to Mrs. Medora Hastings, Miss Holland's
+aunt. The note set forth that for reasons which he would, if he
+might, explain later, he was interested in the woman who had
+recently made an attempt upon her niece's life; that he had seen the
+woman and had obtained an address which he was confident would lead
+to further information about her. This address, he added, he
+preferred not to disclose to the police, but to Mrs. Hastings or
+Miss Holland herself, and he begged leave to call upon them if
+possible that day. He despatched the note by Rollo, whom he
+instructed to deliver it, not at the desk, but at the door of Mrs.
+Hastings' apartment, and to wait for an answer. He watched with
+pleasure Rollo's soft departure, recalling the days when he had sent
+a messenger boy to some inaccessible threshold, himself stamping up
+and down in the cold a block or so away to await the boy's return.
+
+Rollo was back almost immediately. Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland
+were not at home. St. George eyed his servant severely.
+
+"Rollo," he said, "did you go to the door of their apartment?"
+
+"No, sir," said Rollo stiffly, "the elevator boy told me they was
+out, sir."
+
+"Showing," thought St. George, "that a valet and a gentleman is a
+very poor newspaper man."
+
+"Now go back," he said pleasantly, "go up in the elevator to their
+door. If they are not in, wait in the lower hallway until they
+return. Do you get that? Until they return."
+
+"You'll want me back by tea-time, sir?" ventured Rollo.
+
+"Wait," St. George repeated, "until they return. At three. Or six.
+Or nine o'clock. Or midnight."
+
+"Very good, sir," said Rollo impassively, "it ain't always wise,
+sir, for a man to trust to his own judgment, sir, asking your
+pardon. His judgment," he added, "may be a bit of the ape left in
+him, sir."
+
+St. George smiled at this evolutionary pearl and settled himself
+comfortably by the open fire to await Rollo's return. It was after
+three o'clock when he reappeared. He brought a note and St. George
+feverishly tore it open.
+
+"Whom did you see? Were they civil to you?" he demanded.
+
+"I saw a old lady, sir," said Rollo irreverently. "She didn't say a
+word to me, sir, but what she didn't say was civiler than many
+people's language. There's a great deal in manner, sir," declaimed
+Rollo, brushing his hat with his sleeve, and his sleeve with his
+handkerchief, and shaking the handkerchief meditatively over the
+coals.
+
+St. George read the note at a glance and with unspeakable relief.
+They would see him. A refusal would have delayed and annoyed him
+just then, in the flood-tide of his hope.
+
+     "My Dear Mr. St. George," the note ran. "My niece is not at
+     home, and I can not tell how your suggestion will be received
+     by her, though it is most kind. I may, however, answer for
+     myself that I shall be glad to see you at four o'clock this
+     afternoon.
+                   "Very truly yours,
+                               "MEDORA HASTINGS."
+
+Grateful for her evident intention to waste no time, St. George
+dressed and drove to the Boris, punctually sending up his card at
+four o'clock. At once he was ushered to Mrs. Hastings' apartment.
+
+St. George entered her drawing-room incuriously. Three years of
+entering drawing-rooms which he never thereafter was to see had
+robbed him of that sensation of indefinable charm which for many a
+strange room never ceases to yield. He had found far too many tables
+upholding nothing which one could remember, far too many pictures
+that returned his look, and rugs that seemed to have been selected
+arbitrarily and because there was none in stock that the owner
+really liked. He was therefore pleasantly surprised and puzzled by
+the room which welcomed him. The floor was tiled in curious blocks,
+strangely hieroglyphed, as if they had been taken from old tombs.
+Over the fireplace was set a panel of the same stone, which, by the
+thickness of the tiles, formed a low shelf. On this shelf and on
+tables and in a high window was the strangest array of objects that
+St. George had ever seen. There were small busts of soft rose stone,
+like blocks of coral. There was a statue or two of some indefinable
+white material, glistening like marble and yet so soft that it had
+been indented in several places by accidental pressure. There were
+fans of strangely-woven silk, with sticks of carven rock-crystal,
+and hand mirrors of polished copper set in frames of gems that he
+did not recognize. Upon the wall were mended bits of purple
+tapestry, embroidered or painted or woven in singular patterns of
+flora and birds that St. George could not name. There were rolls of
+parchment, and vases of rock-crystal, and a little apparatus, most
+delicately poised, for weighing unknown, delicate things; and jars
+and cups without handles, all baked of a soft pottery having a nap
+like the down of a peach. Over the windows hung curtains of lace,
+woven by hands which St. George could not guess, in patterns of such
+freedom and beauty as western looms never may know. On the floor and
+on the divans were spread strange skins, some marked like peacocks,
+some patterned like feathers and like seaweed, all in a soft fur
+that was like silk.
+
+Mingled with these curios were the ordinary articles of a cultivated
+household. There were many books, good pictures, furniture with
+simple lines, a tea-table that almost ministered of itself, a
+work-basket filled with "violet-weaving" needle-work, and a gossipy
+clock with well-bred chimes. St. George was enormously attracted by
+the room which could harbour so many pagan delights without itself
+falling their victim. The air was fresh and cool and smelled of the
+window primroses.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In a few moments Mrs. Hastings entered, and if St. George had been
+bewildered by the room he was still more amazed by the appearance
+of his hostess. She was utterly unlike the atmosphere of her
+drawing-room. She was a bustling, commonplace little creature, with
+an expressionless face, indented rather than molded in features. Her
+plump hands were covered with jewels, but for all the richness of
+her gown she gave the impression of being very badly dressed; things
+of jet and metal bobbed and ticked upon her, and her side-combs were
+continually falling about. She sat on the sofa and looked at the
+seat which St. George was to have and began to talk--all without
+taking the slightest heed of him or permitting him to mention the
+_Evening Sentinel_ or his errand. If St. George had been painted
+purple he felt sure that she would have acted quite the same.
+Personality meant nothing to her.
+
+"Now this distressing matter, Mr. St. George," began Mrs. Hastings,
+"of this frightful mulatto woman. I didn't see her myself--no, I had
+stopped in on the first floor to visit my lawyer's wife who was ill
+with neuralgia, and I didn't see the creature. If I had been with my
+niece I dare say it wouldn't have occurred. That's what I always say
+to my niece. I always say, 'Olivia, nothing _need_ occur to vex one.
+It always happens because of pure heedlessness.' Not that I accuse
+my own niece of heedlessness in this particular. It was the elevator
+boy who was heedless. That is the trouble with life in a great
+city. Every breath you draw is always dependent on somebody else's
+doing his duty, and when you consider how many people habitually
+neglect their duty it is a wonder--I always say that to Olivia--it
+is a wonder that anybody is alive to _do_ a duty when it presents
+itself. 'Olivia,' I always say, 'nobody needs to die.' And I really
+believe that they nearly all do die out of pure heedlessness. Well,
+and so this frightful mulatto creature: you know her, I understand?"
+
+Mrs. Hastings leaned back and consulted St. George through her
+tortoise-shell glasses, tilting her head high to keep them on her
+nose and perpetually putting their gold chain over her ear, which
+perpetually pulled out her side-combs.
+
+"I saw her this morning," St. George said. "I went up to the
+Reformatory in Westchester, and I spoke with her."
+
+"Mercy!" ejaculated Mrs. Hastings, "I wonder she didn't tear your
+eyes out. Did they have her in a cage or in a cell? What was the
+creature about?"
+
+"She was in a missionary meeting at the moment," St. George
+explained, smiling.
+
+"Mercy!" said Mrs. Hastings in exactly the same tone. "Some trick, I
+expect. That's what I warn Olivia: 'So few things nowadays are done
+through necessity or design.' Nearly everything is a trick. Every
+invention is a trick--a cultured trick, one might say. Murder is a
+trick, I suppose, to a murderer. That's why civilization is bad for
+morals, don't you think? Well, and so she talked with you?"
+
+"No, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "she did not say one word. But
+she wrote something, and that is what I have come to bring you."
+
+"What was it--some charm?" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Oh, nobody knows
+what that kind of people may do. I'll meet any one face to face, but
+these juggling, incantation individuals appal me. I have a brother
+who travels in the Orient, and he tells me about hideous things they
+do--raising wheat and things," she vaguely concluded.
+
+"Ah!" said St. George quickly, "you have a brother--in the Orient?"
+
+"Oh, yes. My brother Otho has traveled abroad I don't know how many
+years. We have a great many stamps. I can't begin to pronounce all
+the names," the lady assured him.
+
+"And this brother--is he your niece, Miss Holland's father?" St.
+George asked eagerly.
+
+"Certainly," said Mrs. Hastings severely; "I have only one brother,
+and it has been three years since I have seen him."
+
+"Pardon me, Mrs. Hastings," said St. George, "this may be most
+important. Will you tell me when you last heard from him and where
+he was?"
+
+"I should have to look up the place," she answered, "I couldn't
+begin to pronounce the name, I dare say. It was somewhere in the
+South Atlantic, ten months or more ago."
+
+"Ah," St. George quietly commented.
+
+"Well, and now this frightful creature," resumed Mrs. Hastings, "do,
+pray, tell me what it was she wrote."
+
+St. George produced the paper.
+
+"That is it," he said. "I fancy you will not know the street. It is
+19 McDougle Street, and the name is simply Tabnit."
+
+"Yes. And is it a letter?" his hostess demanded, "and whatever does
+it say?"
+
+"It is not a letter," St. George explained patiently, "and this is
+all that it says. The name is, I suppose, the name of a person. I
+have made sure that there is such a number in the street. I have
+seen the house. But I have waited to consult you before going
+there."
+
+"Why, what is it you think?" Mrs. Hastings besought him. "Do you
+think this person, whoever it is, can do something? And whatever can
+he do? Oh dear," she ended, "I do want to act the way poor dear Mr.
+Hastings would have acted. Only I know that he would have gone
+straight to Bitley, or wherever she is, and held a revolver at that
+mulatto creature's head, and _commanded_ her to talk English. Mr.
+Hastings was a very determined character. If you could have seen the
+poor dear man's chin! But of course I can't do that, can I? And
+that's what I say to Olivia. 'Olivia, one doesn't _need_ a man's
+judgment if one will only use judgment oneself.' What is it you
+think, Mr. St. George?"
+
+Before St. George could reply there entered the room, behind a low
+announcement of his name, a man of sixty-odd years, nervous,
+slightly stooped, his smooth pale face unlighted by little deep-set
+eyes.
+
+"Ah, Mr. Frothingham!" said Mrs. Hastings in evident relief, "you
+are just in time. Mr. St. John was just telling me horrible things
+about this frightful mulatto creature. This is Mr. St. John. Mr.
+Frothingham is my lawyer and my brother Otho's lawyer. And so I
+telephoned him to come in and hear all about this. And now do go on,
+Mr. St. John, about this hideous woman. What is it you think?"
+
+"How do you do, Mr. St. John?" said the lawyer portentously. His
+greeting was almost a warning, and reminded St. George of the way in
+which certain brakemen call out stations. St. George responded as
+blithely to this name as to his own and did not correct it. "And
+what," went on the lawyer, sitting down with long unclosed hands
+laid trimly along his knees, "have you to contribute to this most
+remarkable occurrence, Mr. St. John?"
+
+St. George briefly narrated the events of the morning and placed the
+slip of paper in the lawyer's hands.
+
+"Ah! We have here a communication in the nature of a confession,"
+the lawyer observed, adjusting his gold pince-nez, head thrown back,
+eyebrows lifted.
+
+"Only the address, sir," said St. George, "and I was just saying to
+Mrs. Hastings that some one ought to go to this address at once and
+find out whatever is to be got there. Whoever goes I will very
+gladly accompany."
+
+Mr. Frothingham had a fashion of making ready to speak and
+soliciting attention by the act, and then collapsing suddenly with
+no explosion, like a bad Roman candle. He did this now, and whatever
+he meant to say was lost to the race; but he looked very wise the
+while. It was rather as if he discarded you as a fit listener, than
+that he discarded his own comment.
+
+"I don't know but I ought to go myself," rambled Mrs. Hastings,
+"perhaps Mr. Hastings would think I ought. Suppose, Mr. Frothingham,
+that we both go. Dear, dear! Olivia always sees to my shopping and
+flowers and everything executive, but I can't let her go into these
+frightful places, can I?"
+
+There was a rustling at the far end of the room, and some one
+entered. St. George did not turn, but as her soft skirts touched and
+lifted along the floor he was tinglingly aware of her presence. Even
+before Mrs. Hastings heard her light footfall, even before the clear
+voice spoke, St. George knew that he was at last in the presence of
+the arbiter of his enterprise, and of how much else he did not know.
+He was silent, breathlessly waiting for her to speak.
+
+"May I come in, Aunt Dora?" she said. "I want to know to what place
+it is impossible for me to go?"
+
+She came from the long room's boundary shadow. There was about her a
+sense of white and gray with a knot of pale colour in her hat and an
+orchid on her white coat. Mrs. Hastings, taking no more account of
+her presence than she had of St. George's, tilted back her head and
+looked at the primroses in the window as closely as at anything, and
+absently presented him.
+
+"Olivia," she said, "this is Mr. St. John, who knows about that
+frightful mulatto creature. Mr. St. George," she went on, correcting
+the name entirely unintentionally, "my niece, Miss Holland. And I'm
+sure I wish I knew what the necessary thing to be done _is_. That is
+what I always tell you, you know, Olivia. 'Find out the necessary
+thing and do it, and let the rest go.'"
+
+"It reminds me very much," said the lawyer, clearing his throat, "of
+a case that I had on the April calendar--"
+
+Miss Holland had turned swiftly to St. George:
+
+"You know the mulatto woman?" she asked, and the lawyer passed by
+the April calendar and listened.
+
+"I went to the Bitley Reformatory this morning to see her," St.
+George replied. "She gave me this name and address. We have been
+saying that some one ought to go there to learn what is to be
+learned."
+
+Mr. Frothingham in a silence of pursed lips offered the paper. Miss
+Holland glanced at it and returned it.
+
+"Will you tell us what your interest is in this woman?" she asked
+evenly. "Why you went to see her?"
+
+"Yes, Miss Holland," St. George replied, "you know of course that
+the police have done their best to run this matter down. You know it
+because you have courteously given them every assistance in your
+power. But the police have also been very ably assisted by every
+newspaper in town. I am fortunate to be acting in the interests of
+one of these--the _Sentinel_. This clue was put in my hands. I came
+to you confident of your cooeperation."
+
+Mrs. Hastings threw up her hands with a gesture that caught away the
+chain of her eye-glass and sent it dangling in her lap, and her
+side-combs tinkling to the tiled floor.
+
+"Mercy!" she said, "a reporter!"
+
+St. George bowed.
+
+"But I never receive reporters!" she cried, "Olivia--don't you
+know? A newspaper reporter like that fearful man at Palm Beach, who
+put me in the Courtney's ball list in a blue silk when I never wear
+colours."
+
+"Now really, really, this intrusion--" began Mr. Frothingham, his
+long, unclosed hands working forward on his knees in undulations, as
+a worm travels.
+
+Miss Holland turned to St. George, the colour dyeing her face and
+throat, her manner a bewildering mingling of graciousness and
+hauteur.
+
+"My aunt is right," she said tranquilly, "we never have received any
+newspaper representative. Therefore, we are unfortunate never to
+have met one. You were saying that we should send some one to
+McDougle Street?"
+
+St. George was aware of his heart-beats. It was all so unexpected
+and so dangerous, and she was so perfectly equal to the
+circumstance.
+
+"I was asking to be allowed to go myself, Miss Holland," he said
+simply, "with whoever makes the investigation."
+
+Mrs. Hastings was looking mutely from one to another, her forehead
+in horizons of wrinkles.
+
+"I'm sure, Olivia, I think you ought to be careful what you say,"
+she plaintively began. "Mr. Hastings never allowed his name to go in
+any printed lists even, he was so particular. Our telephone had a
+private number, and all the papers had instructions never to mention
+him, even if he was murdered, unless he took down the notice
+himself. Then if anything important did happen, he often did take it
+down, nicely typewritten, and sometimes even then they didn't use
+it, because they knew how very particular he was. And of course we
+don't know how--"
+
+St. George's eyes blazed, but he did not lift them. The affront was
+unstudied and, indeed, unconscious. But Miss Holland understood how
+grave it was, for there are women whose intuition would tell them
+the etiquette due upon meeting the First Syndic of Andorra or a
+noble from Gambodia.
+
+"We want the truth about this as much as Mr. St. George does," she
+said quickly, smiling for the first time. St. George liked her
+smile. It was as if she were amused, not absent-minded nor yet a
+prey to the feminine immorality of ingratiation. "Besides," she
+continued, "I wish to know a great many things. How did the mulatto
+woman impress you, Mr. St. George?"
+
+Miss Holland loosened her coat, revealing a little flowery waist,
+and leaned forward with parted lips. She was very beautiful, with
+the beauty of perfect, blooming, colourful youth, without line or
+shadow. She was in the very noon of youth, but her eyes did not
+wander after the habit of youth; they were direct and steady and a
+bit critical, and she spoke slowly and with graceful sanity in a
+voice that was without nationality. She might have been the
+cultivated English-speaking daughter of almost any land of high
+civilization, or she might have been its princess. Her face showed
+her imaginative; her serene manner reassured one that she had not,
+in consequence, to pay the usury of lack of judgment; she seemed
+reflective, tender, and of a fine independence, tempered, however,
+by tradition and unerring taste. Above all, she seemed alive,
+receptive, like a woman with ten senses. And--above all again--she
+had charm. Finally, St. George could talk with her; he did not
+analyze why; he only knew that this woman understood what he said in
+precisely the way that he said it, which is, perhaps, the fifth
+essence in nature.
+
+"May I tell you?" asked St. George eagerly. "She seemed to me a very
+wonderful woman, Miss Holland; almost a woman of another world. She
+is not mulatto--her features are quite classic; and she is not a
+fanatic or a mad-woman. She is, of her race, a strangely superior
+creature, and I fancy, of high cultivation; and I am convinced that
+at the foundation of her attempt to take your life there is some
+tremendous secret. I think we must find out what that is, first, for
+your own sake; next, because this is the sort of thing that is worth
+while."
+
+"Ah," cried Miss Holland, "delightful. I begin to be glad that it
+happened. The police said that she was a great brutal negress, and I
+thought she must be insane. The cloth-of-gold and the jewels did
+make me wonder, but I hardly believed that."
+
+"The newspapers," Mr. Frothingham said acidly, "became very much
+involved in their statements concerning this matter."
+
+"This 'Tabnit,'" said Miss Holland, and flashed a smile of pretty
+deference at the lawyer to console him for her total neglect of his
+comment, "in McDougle Street. Who can he be?--he _is_ a man, I
+suppose. And where is McDougle Street?"
+
+St. George explained the location, and Mrs. Hastings fretfully
+commented.
+
+"I'm sure, Olivia," she said, "I think it is frightfully unwomanly
+in you--"
+
+"To take so much interest in my own murder?" Miss Holland asked in
+amusement. "Aunt Dora, I'm going to do more: I suggest that you and
+Mr. Frothingham and I go with Mr. St. George to this address in
+McDougle Street--"
+
+"My dear Olivia!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, "it's in the very heart of
+the Bowery--isn't it, Mr. St. John? And only think--"
+
+It was as if Mrs. Hastings' frustrate words emerged in the fantastic
+guise of her facial changes.
+
+"No, it isn't quite the Bowery, Mrs. Hastings," St. George
+explained, "though it won't look unlike."
+
+"I wish I knew what Mr. Hastings would have done," his widow
+mourned, "he always said to me: 'Medora, do only the necessary
+thing.' Do you think this _is_ the necessary thing--with all the
+frightful smells?"
+
+"It is perfectly safe," ventured St. George, "is it not, Mr.
+Frothingham?"
+
+Mr. Frothingham bowed and tried to make non-partisanship seem a
+tasteful resignation of his own will.
+
+"I am at Mrs. Hastings' command," he said, waving both hands, once,
+from the wrist.
+
+"You know the place is really only a few blocks from Washington
+Square," St. George submitted.
+
+Mrs. Hastings brightened.
+
+"Well, I have some friends in Washington Square," she said, "people
+whom I think a great deal of, and always have. If you really feel,
+Olivia--"
+
+"I do," said Miss Holland simply, "and let us go now, Aunt Dora. The
+brougham has been at the door since I came in. We may as well drive
+there as anywhere, if Mr. St. George is willing."
+
+"I shall be happy," said St. George sedately, longing to cry:
+"Willing! Willing! Oh, Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland--_willing_!"
+
+Miss Holland and St. George and the lawyer were alone for a few
+minutes while Mrs. Hastings rustled away for her bonnet. Miss
+Holland sat where the afternoon light, falling through the corner
+window, smote her hair to a glory of pale colour, and St. George's
+eyes wandered to the glass through which the sun fell. It was a thin
+pane of irregular pieces set in a design of quaint, meaningless
+characters, in the centre of which was the figure of a sphinx,
+crucified upon an upright cross and surrounded by a border of coiled
+asps with winged heads. The window glittered like a sheet of gems.
+
+"What wonderful glass," involuntarily said St. George.
+
+"Is it not?" Miss Holland said enthusiastically. "My father sent it.
+He sent nearly all these things from abroad."
+
+"I wonder where such glass is made," observed St. George; "it is
+like lace and precious stones--hardly more painted than carved."
+
+She bent upon him such a sudden, searching look that St. George felt
+his eyes held by her own.
+
+"Do you know anything of my father?" she demanded suddenly.
+
+"Only that Mrs. Hastings has just told me that he is abroad--in the
+South Atlantic," St. George wonderingly replied.
+
+"Why, I am very foolish," said Miss Holland quickly, "we have not
+heard from him in ten months now, and I am frightfully worried. Ah
+yes, the glass is beautiful. It was made in one of the South
+Atlantic islands, I believe--so were all these things," she added;
+"the same figure of the crucified sphinx is on many of them."
+
+"Do you know what it means?" he asked.
+
+"It is the symbol used by the people in one of the islands, my
+father said," she answered.
+
+"These symbols usually, I believe," volunteered Mr. Frothingham,
+frowning at the glass, "have little significance, standing merely
+for the loose barbaric ideas of a loose barbaric nation."
+
+St. George thought of the ladies of Doctor Johnson's Amicable
+Society who walked from the town hall to the Cathedral in Lichfield,
+"in linen gowns, and each has a stick with an acorn; but for the
+acorn they could give no reason."
+
+He looked long at the glass.
+
+"She," he said finally, "our false mulatto, ought to stand before
+just such glass."
+
+Miss Holland laughed. She nodded her head a little, once, every time
+she laughed, and St. George was learning to watch for that.
+
+"The glass would suit any style of beauty better than steel bars,"
+she said lightly as Mrs. Hastings came fluttering back. Mrs.
+Hastings fluttered ponderously, as humblebees fly. Indeed, when one
+considered, there was really a "blunt-faced bee" look about the
+woman.
+
+The brougham had on the box two men in smart livery; the footman,
+closing the door, received St. George's reply to Mrs. Hastings'
+appeal to "tell the man the number of this frightful place."
+
+"I dare say I haven't been careful," Mrs. Hastings kept anxiously
+observing, "I have been heedless, I dare say. And I always think
+that what one must avoid is heedlessness, don't you think? Didn't
+Napoleon say that if only Caesar had been first in killing the men
+who wanted to kill him--something about Pompey's statue being kept
+clean. What was it--why should they blame Caesar for the condition of
+the public statues?"
+
+"My dear Mrs. Hastings," Mr. Frothingham reminded her, his long
+gloved hands laid trimly along his knees as before, "you are in my
+care."
+
+The statue problem faded from the lady's eyes.
+
+"Poor, dear Mr. Hastings always said you were so admirable at
+cross-questioning," she recalled, partly reassured.
+
+"Ah," cried Miss Holland protestingly, "Aunt Dora, this is an
+adventure. We are going to see 'Tabnit.'"
+
+St. George was silent, ecstatically reviewing the events of the last
+six hours and thinking unenviously of Amory, rocking somewhere with
+_The Aloha_ on a mere stretch of green water:
+
+"If Chillingworth could see me now," he thought victoriously, as the
+carriage turned smartly into McDougle Street.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE PRINCE OF FAR-AWAY
+
+
+No. 19 McDougle Street had been chosen as a likely market by a
+"hokey-pokey" man, who had wheeled his cart to the curb before the
+entrance. There, despite Mrs. Hastings' coach-man's peremptory
+appeal, he continued to dispense stained ice-cream to the little
+denizens of No. 19 and the other houses in the row. The brougham,
+however, at once proved a counter-attraction and immediately an
+opposition group formed about the carriage step and exchanged
+penetrating comments upon the livery.
+
+"Mrs. Hastings, you and Miss Holland would better sit here,
+perhaps," suggested St. George, alighting hurriedly, "until I see if
+this man is to be found."
+
+"Please," said Miss Holland, "I've always been longing to go into
+one of these houses, and now I'm going. Aren't we, Aunt Dora?"
+
+"If you think--" ventured Mr. Frothingham in perplexity; but Mr.
+Frothingham's perplexity always impressed one as duty-born rather
+than judicious, and Miss Holland had already risen.
+
+"Olivia!" protested Mrs. Hastings faintly, accepting St. George's
+hand, "do look at those children's aprons. I'm afraid we'll all
+contract fever after fever, just coming this far."
+
+Unkempt women were occupying the doorstep of No. 19. St. George
+accosted them and asked the way to the rooms of a Mr. Tabnit. They
+smiled, displaying their wonderful teeth, consulted together, and
+finally with many labials and uncouth pointings of shapely hands
+they indicated the door of the "first floor front," whose wooden
+shutters were closely barred. St. George led the way and entered the
+bare, unclean passage where discordant voices and the odours of
+cooking wrought together to poison the air. He tapped smartly at the
+door.
+
+Immediately it was opened by a graceful boy, dressed in a long,
+belted coat of dun-colour. He had straight black hair, and eyes
+which one saw before one saw his face, and he gravely bowed to each
+of the party in turn before answering St. George's question.
+
+"Assuredly," said the youth in perfect English, "enter."
+
+They found themselves in an ample room extending the full depth of
+the house; and partly because the light was dim and partly in sheer
+amazement they involuntarily paused as the door clicked behind them.
+The room's contrast to the squalid neighbourhood was complete. The
+apartment was carpeted in soft rugs laid one upon another so that
+footfalls were silenced. The walls and ceiling were smoothly covered
+with a neutral-tinted silk, patterned in dim figures; and from a
+fluted pillar of exceeding lightness an enormous candelabrum shed
+clear radiance upon the objects in the room. The couches and divans
+were woven of some light reed, made with high fantastic backs, in
+perfect purity of line however, and laid with white mattresses. A
+little reed table showed slender pipes above its surface and these,
+at a touch from the boy, sent to a great height tiny columns of
+water that tinkled back to the square of metal upon which the table
+was set. A huge fan of blanched grasses automatically swayed from
+above. On a side-table were decanters and cups and platters of a
+material frail and transparent. Before the shuttered window stood an
+observable plant with coloured leaves. On a great table in the
+room's centre were scattered objects which confused the eye. A light
+curtain stirring in the fan's faint breeze hung at the far end of
+the room.
+
+In a career which had held many surprises, some of which St. George
+would never be at liberty to reveal to the paper in whose service he
+had come upon them, this was one of the most alluring. The mere
+existence of this strange and luxurious habitation in the heart of
+such a neighbourhood would, past expression, delight Mr. Crass, the
+feature man, and no doubt move even Chillingworth to approval.
+Chillingworth and Crass! Already they seemed strangers. St. George
+glanced at Miss Holland; she was looking from side to side, like a
+bird alighted among strange flowers; she met his eyes and dimpled
+in frank delight. Mrs. Hastings sat erectly beside her, her
+tortoise-rimmed glasses expressing bland approval. The improbability
+of her surroundings had quite escaped her in her satisfied discovery
+that the place was habitable. The lawyer, his thin lips parted, his
+head thrown back so that his hair rested upon his coat collar,
+remained standing, one long hand upon a coat lapel.
+
+"Ah," said Miss Holland softly, "it _is_ an adventure, Aunt Dora."
+
+St. George liked that. It irritated him, he had once admitted, to
+see a woman live as if living were a matter of life and death. He
+wished her to be alive to everything, but without suspiciously
+scrutinizing details, like a census-taker. To appreciate did not
+seem to him properly to mean to assess. Miss Holland, he would have
+said, seemed to live by the beats of her heart and not by the waves
+of her hair--but another proof, perhaps, of "if thou likest her
+opinions thou wilt praise her virtues."
+
+It was but a moment before the curtain was lifted, and there
+approached a youth, apparently in the twenties, slender and
+delicately formed as a woman, his dark face surmounted by a great
+deal of snow-white hair. He was wearing garments of grey, cut in
+unusual and graceful lines, and his throat was closely wound in
+folds of soft white, fastened by a rectangular green jewel of
+notable size and brilliance. His eyes, large and of exceeding beauty
+and gentleness, were fixed upon St. George.
+
+"Sir," said St. George, "we have been given this address as one
+where we may be assisted in some inquiries of the utmost importance.
+The name which we have is simply 'Tabnit.' Have I the honour--"
+
+Their host bowed.
+
+"I am Prince Tabnit," he said quietly.
+
+St. George, filled with fresh amazement, gravely named himself and,
+making presentation of the others, purposely omitted the name of
+Miss Holland. However, hardly had he finished before their host
+bowed before Miss Holland herself.
+
+"And you," he said, "you to whom I owe an expiation which I can
+never make,--do you know it is my servant who would have taken your
+life?"
+
+In the brief interval following this naive assertion, his guests
+were not unnaturally speechless. Miss Holland, bending slightly
+forward, looked at the prince breathlessly.
+
+"I have suffered," he went on, "I have suffered indescribably since
+that terrible morning when I missed her and understood her mission.
+I followed quickly--I was without when you entered, but I came too
+late. Since then I have waited, unwilling to go to you, certain that
+the gods would permit the possible. And now--what shall I say?"
+
+He hesitated, his eyes meeting Miss Holland's. And in that moment
+Mrs. Hastings found her voice. She curved the chain of her
+eye-glasses over her ear, threw back her head until the
+tortoise-rims included her host, and spoke her mind.
+
+"Well, Prince Tabnit," she said sharply--quite as if, St. George
+thought, she had been nursery governess to princes all her life--"I
+must say that I think your regret comes somewhat late in the day.
+It's all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has
+tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a
+servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous
+and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?"
+
+Her voice, never modulated in her excitements, was so full that no
+one heard at that instant a quick, indrawn breath from St. George,
+having something of triumph and something of terror. Even as he
+listened he had been running swiftly over the objects in the room to
+fasten every one in his memory, and his eyes had rested upon the
+table at his side. A disc of bronze, supported upon a carven tripod,
+caught the light and challenged attention to its delicate traceries;
+and within its border of asps and goat's horns he saw cut in the
+dull metal a sphinx crucified upon an upright cross--an exact
+facsimile of the device upon that strange opalized glass from some
+far-away island which he had lately noted in the window in Mrs.
+Hastings' drawing-room. Instantly his mind was besieged by a volley
+of suppositions and imaginings, but even in his intense excitement
+as to what this simple discovery might bode, he heard the prince's
+soft reply to Mrs. Hastings:
+
+"Madame," said the prince, "she is a loyal creature. Whatever she
+does, she believes herself to be doing in my service. I trusted her.
+I believed that such error was impossible to her."
+
+"Error!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, looking about her for support and
+finding little in the aspect of Mr. Augustus Frothingham, who
+appeared to be regarding the whole proceeding as one from which he
+was to extract data to be thought out at some future infinitely
+removed.
+
+As for St. George, he had never had great traffic with a future
+infinitely removed; he had a youthful and somewhat imaginative
+fashion of striking before the iron was well in the fire.
+
+"Your servant believed, then, your Highness," he said clearly,
+"that in taking Miss Holland's life she was serving you?"
+
+"I must regretfully conclude so."
+
+St. George rose, holding the little brazen disc which he had taken
+from the table, and confronted his host, compelling his eyes.
+
+"Perhaps you will tell us, Prince Tabnit," he said coolly, "what it
+is that the people who use this device find against Miss Holland's
+father?"
+
+St. George heard Olivia's little broken cry.
+
+"It is the same!" she exclaimed. "Aunt Dora--Mr. Frothingham--it is
+the crucified sphinx that was on so many of the things that father
+sent. Oh," she cried to the prince, "can it be possible that you
+know him--that you know anything of my father?"
+
+To St. George's amazement the face of the prince softened and glowed
+as if with peculiar delight, and he looked at St. George with
+admiration.
+
+"Is it possible," he murmured, half to himself, "that your race has
+already developed intuition? Are you indeed so near to the Unknown?"
+
+He took quick steps away and back, and turned again to St. George, a
+strange joy dawning in his face.
+
+"If there be some who are ready to know!" he said. "Ah," he recalled
+himself penitently to Miss Holland, "your father--Otho Holland, I
+have seen him many times."
+
+"_Seen Otho_!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, as pink and trembling and
+expressionless as a disturbed mold of jelly. "Oh, poor, dear Otho!
+Did he live where there are people like your frightful servant?
+Olivia, think! Maybe he is lying at the bottom of a gorge, all
+wounded and bloody, with a dagger in his back! Oh, my poor, dear
+Otho, who used to wheel me about!"
+
+Mrs. Hastings collapsed softly on the divan, her glasses fallen in
+her lap, her side-combs slipping silently to the rug. Olivia had
+risen and was standing before Prince Tabnit.
+
+"Tell me," she said trembling, "when have you seen him? Is he well?"
+
+Prince Tabnit swept the faces of the others and his eyes returned to
+Miss Holland and dropped to the floor.
+
+"The last time that I saw him, Miss Holland," he answered, "was
+three months ago. He was then alive and well."
+
+Something in his tone chilled St. George and sent a sudden thrill of
+fear to his heart.
+
+"He was then alive and well?" St. George repeated slowly. "Will you
+tell us more, your Highness? Will you tell us why the death of his
+daughter should be considered a service to the prince of a country
+which he had visited?"
+
+"You are very wonderful," observed the prince, smiling meditatively
+at St. George, "and your penetration gives me good news--news that
+I had not hoped for, yet. I can not tell you all that you ask, but I
+can tell you much. Will you sit down?"
+
+He turned and glanced at the curtain at the far end of the room.
+Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were
+placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties
+not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and
+Finnish and all but Icelandic cafes in every block.
+
+"Pray do me the honour," the prince besought, taking the dishes from
+the hands of the boy. "It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell
+you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before
+him."
+
+Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the
+smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business
+toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He
+impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from
+the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer
+atmosphere. The lawyer's face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of
+affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.
+
+There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a
+tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that
+had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and
+with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white
+berries, such as the Japanese call "pinedews"; there was a tea
+distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury
+and fantastic. So potent was the spell of the prince's hospitality,
+and so gracious the insistence with which he set before them the
+strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia, eager almost to tears
+for news of her father, and Mrs. Hastings, as critical and
+suspicious as some beetle with long antennae, might not refuse them.
+As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might be Cagliostro's
+spagiric food, or "extract of Saturn," for aught that his previous
+experience equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and was
+constrained to nibble again.
+
+When they had been served, Prince Tabnit abruptly began speaking,
+the while turning the fine stem of his glass in his delicate
+fingers.
+
+"You do not know," he said simply, "where the island of Yaque lies?"
+
+Mrs. Hastings sat erect.
+
+"Yaque!" she exclaimed. "That was the name of the place where your
+father was, Olivia. I know I remembered it because it wasn't like
+the man What's-his-name in _As You Like It_, and because it didn't
+begin with a J."
+
+"The island is my home," Prince Tabnit continued, "and now, for the
+first time, I find myself absent from it. I have come a long
+journey. It is many miles to that little land in the eastern seas,
+that exquisite bit of the world, as yet unknown to any save the
+island-men. We have guarded its existence, but I have no fear to
+tell you, for no mariner, unaided by an islander, could steer a
+course to its coasts. And I can tell you little about the island for
+reasons which, if you will forgive me, you would hardly understand.
+I must tell you something of it, however, that you may know the
+remarkable conditions which led to the introduction of Mr. Holland
+to Yaque.
+
+"The island of Yaque," continued the prince, "or Arqua, as the name
+was written by the ancient Phoenicians, has been ruled by hereditary
+monarchs since 1050 B.C., when it was settled."
+
+"What date did I understand you to say, sir?" demanded Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham.
+
+The prince smiled faintly.
+
+"I am well aware," he said, "that to the western mind--indeed, to
+any modern mind save our own--I shall seem to be speaking in
+mockery. None the less, what I am saying is exact. It is believed
+that the enterprises of the Phoenicians in the early ages took them
+but a short distance, if at all, beyond the confines of the
+Mediterranean. It is merely known that, in the period of which I
+speak, a more adventurous spirit began to be manifested, and the
+Straits of Gibraltar were passed and settlements were made in
+Iberia. But how far these adventurers actually penetrated has been
+recorded only in those documents that are in the hands of my
+people--descendants of the boldest of these mariners who pushed
+their galleys out into the Atlantic. At this time the king of Tyre
+was Abibaal, soon to be succeeded by his son Hiram, the friend, you
+will remember, of King David,--"
+
+Mr. Frothingham, who did not go to the theatre for fear of exciting
+his imagination, uttered the soft non-explosion which should have
+been speech.
+
+"King Abibaal," continued the prince, "who maintained his court in
+great pomp, had a younger and favourite son who bore his own name.
+He was a wild youth of great daring, and upon the accession of
+Hiram to the throne he left Tyre and took command of a galley of
+adventuresome spirits, who were among the first to pass the
+straits and gain the open sea. The story of their wild voyage I
+need not detail; it is enough to say that their trireme was
+wrecked upon the coast of Yaque; and Abibaal and those who joined
+him--among them many members of the court circle and even of the
+royal family--settled and developed the island. And there the race
+has remained without taint of admixture, down to the present day.
+Of what was wrought on the island I can tell you little, though
+the time will come when the eyes of the whole world will be
+turned upon Yaque as the forerunner of mighty things. Ruled over
+by the descendants of Abibaal, the islanders have dwelt in peace
+and plenty for nearly three thousand years--until, in fact, less
+than a year ago. Then the line thus traceable to King Hiram
+himself abruptly terminated with the death of King Chelbes,
+without issue."
+
+Again Mr. Frothingham attempted to speak, and again he collapsed
+softly, without expression, according to his custom. As for St.
+George, he was remembering how, when he first went to the paper, he
+had invariably been sent to the anteroom to listen to the daily
+tales of invention, oppression and projects for which a continual
+procession of the more or less mentally deficient wished the
+_Sentinel_ to stand sponsor. St. George remembered in particular one
+young student who soberly claimed to have invented wireless
+telegraphy and who molested the staff for months. Was this olive
+prince, he wondered, going to prove himself worth only a half-column
+on a back page, after all?
+
+"I understand you to say," said St. George, with the weary
+self-restraint of one who deals with lunatics, "that the line of
+King Hiram, the friend of King David of Israel, became extinct less
+than a year ago?"
+
+The prince smiled.
+
+"Do not conceal your incredulity," he said liberally, "for I
+forgive it. You see, then," he went on serenely, "how in Yaque the
+question of the succession became engrossing. The matter was not
+merely one of ascendancy, for the Yaquians are singularly free from
+ambition. But their pride in their island is boundless. They see in
+her the advance guard of civilization, the peculiar people to whom
+have come to be intrusted many of the secrets of being. For I should
+tell you that my people live a life that is utterly beyond the ken
+of all, save a few rare minds in each generation. My people live
+what others dream about, what scientists struggle to fathom, what
+the keenest philosophers and economists among you can not formulate.
+We are," said Prince Tabnit serenely, "what the world will be a
+thousand years from now."
+
+"Well, I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings broke in plaintively, "that I hope
+your servant, for instance, is not a sample of what the world is
+coming to!"
+
+The prince smiled indulgently, as if a child had laid a little,
+detaining hand upon his sleeve.
+
+"Be that as it may," he said evenly, "the throne of Yaque was still
+empty. Many stood near to the crown, but there seemed no reason for
+choosing one more than another. One party wished to name the head of
+the House of the Litany, in Med, the King's city, who was the chief
+administrator of justice. Another, more democratic than these,
+wished to elevate to the throne a man from whose family we had won
+knowledge of both perpetual motion and the Fourth Dimension--"
+
+St. George smiled angelically, as one who resignedly sees the last
+fragments of a shining hope float away. This quite settled it. The
+olive prince was crazy. Did not St. George remember the old man in
+the frayed neckerchief and bagging pockets who had brought to the
+office of the _Sentinel_ chart after chart about perpetual motion,
+until St. George and Amory had one day told him gravely that they
+had a machine inside the office then that could make more things go
+for ever than he had ever dreamed of, though they had _not_ said
+that the machine was named Chillingworth.
+
+"You have knowledge of both these things?" asked St. George
+indulgently.
+
+"Yaque understood both those laws," said the prince quietly, "when
+William the Conqueror came to England."
+
+He hesitated for a moment and then, regardless of another soft
+explosion from Mr. Frothingham's lips, he added:
+
+"Do you not see? Will you not understand? It is our knowledge of the
+Fourth Dimension which has enabled us to keep our island a secret."
+
+St. George suddenly thrilled from head to foot. What if he were
+speaking the truth? What if this man were speaking the truth?
+
+"Moreover," resumed the prince, "there were those among us who had
+long believed that new strength would come to my people by the
+introduction of an inhabitant of one of the continents. His coming
+would, however, necessitate his sovereignty among us, in fulfilment
+of an ancient Phoenician law, providing that the state, and every
+satrapy therein, shall receive no service, either of blood or of
+bond, nor enter into the marriage contract with an alien; from which
+law only the royal house is exempt. Thus were the two needs of our
+land to be served by the means to which we had recourse. For there
+being no way to settle the difficulty, we vowed to leave the matter
+to Chance, that great patient arbiter of destinies of which your
+civilization takes no account, save to reduce it to slavery.
+Accordingly each inhabitant of the island took a solemn oath to
+await, with an open mind free from choice or prejudice, the
+settlement of the event, certain that the gods would permit the
+possible. Five days after this decision our watchers upon the hills
+sighted a South African transport bound for the Azores to coal. A
+hundred miles from our coast she was wrecked, and it was thought
+that all on board had been lost. A submarine was ordered to the
+spot--"
+
+"Do you mean," interrupted St. George, "that you were able to see
+the wreck at that distance?"
+
+"Certainly," said the prince. "Pray forgive me," he added winningly,
+"if I seem to boast. It is difficult for me to believe that your
+appliances are so immature. We were using steamship navigation and
+limiting our vision at the time of Pericles, but the futility of
+these was among our first discoveries."
+
+Involuntarily St. George turned to Miss Holland. What would she
+think, he found himself wondering. Her eyes were luminous and her
+breath was coming quickly; he was relieved to find that she had not
+the infectious vulgarity to doubt the possibility of what seemed
+impossible. This was one of the qualities of Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham, who had assumed an air of polite interest and an
+accurately cynical smile, and the manner of generously lending his
+professional attention to any of the vagaries of the client. Mrs.
+Hastings stirred uneasily.
+
+"I'm sure," she said fretfully, "that I must be very stupid, but I
+simply can _not_ follow you. Why, you talk about things that don't
+exist! My husband, who was a very practical and advanced man, would
+have shown you at once that what you say is impossible."
+
+Here was the attitude of the Commonplace the world over, thought St.
+George: to believe in wireless telegraphy simply because it has
+been found out, and to disbelieve in the Fourth Dimension because it
+has not been.
+
+"I can not explain these things," admitted the prince gravely, "and
+I dare say that you could prove that they do not exist, just as a
+man from another planet could show us to his own satisfaction that
+there are no such things as music or colour."
+
+"Go on, please," said Olivia eagerly.
+
+"Olivia, I'm sure," protested Mrs. Hastings, "I think it's very
+unwomanly of you to show such an interest in these things."
+
+"Will you bear with me for one moment, Mrs. Hastings?" begged the
+prince, "and perhaps I shall be able to interest you. The submarine
+returned, bringing the sole survivor of the wreck of the African
+transport."
+
+"Ah, now," Mrs. Hastings assured him blandly, "you are dealing with
+things that can happen. My brother Otho, my niece's father, was just
+this last year the sole survivor of the wreck of a very important
+vessel."
+
+"I have the honour, Mrs. Hastings, to be narrating to you the
+circumstances attending the discovery of your brother and Miss
+Holland's father, after the wreck of that vessel."
+
+"My father?" cried Olivia.
+
+The prince bowed.
+
+"After this manner, Chance had rewarded us. We crowned your father
+King of Yaque."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+OLIVIA PROPOSES
+
+
+Prince Tabnit's announcement was received by his guests in the
+silence of amazement. If they had been told that Miss Holland's
+father was secretly acting as King of England they could have been
+no more profoundly startled than to hear stated soberly that he had
+been for nearly a year the king of a cannibal island. For the
+cannibal phase of his experience seemed a foregone conclusion. To
+St. George, profoundly startled and most incredulous, the possible
+humour of the situation made first appeal. The picture of an
+American gentleman seated upon a gold throne in a leopard-skin coat,
+ordering "oysters and foes" for breakfast, was irresistible.
+
+          "But he shaved with a shell when he chose,
+          'Twas the manner of Primitive Man"
+
+floated through his mind, and he brought himself up sharply.
+Clearly, somebody was out of his head, but it must not be he.
+
+"What?" cried Mrs. Hastings in two inelegant syllables, on the
+second of which her uncontrollable voice rose. "My brother Otho, a
+vestry-man at St. Mark's--"
+
+"Aunt Dora!" pleaded Olivia. "Tell us," she besought the prince.
+
+"King Otho I of Yaque," the prince was begining, but the title was
+not to be calmly received by Mrs. Hastings.
+
+"_King_ Otho!" she articulated. "Then--am I royalty?"
+
+"All who may possibly succeed to the throne Blackstone holds to be
+royalty," said the lawyer in an edictal voice, and St. George looked
+away from Olivia.
+
+_The Princess Olivia_!
+
+"King Otho," continued the prince, "ruled wisely and well for seven
+months, and it was at the beginning of that time that the imperial
+submarine was sent to the Azores with letters and a packet to you.
+The enterprise, however, was attended by so great danger of
+discovery that it was never repeated. This is why, for so long, you
+have had no word from the king. And now I come," said the prince
+with hesitation, "to the difficult part of my narrative."
+
+He paused and Mr. Frothingham rushed to his assistance.
+
+"As the family solicitor," said the lawyer, pursing his lips, and
+waving his hands, once, from the wrists, "would you not better
+divulge to my ear alone, the--a--"
+
+"No--no!" flashed Olivia. "No, Mr. Frothingham--please."
+
+The prince inclined his head.
+
+"Will it surprise you, Miss Holland," he said, "to learn that I made
+my voyage to this country expressly to seek you out?"
+
+"To seek me?" exclaimed Olivia. "But--has anything happened to my
+father?"
+
+"We hope not," replied the prince, "but what I have to tell will
+none the less occasion you anxiety. Briefly, Miss Holland, it is
+more than three months since your father suddenly and mysteriously
+disappeared from Yaque, leaving absolutely no clue to his
+whereabouts."
+
+A little cry broke from Olivia's lips that went to St. George's
+heart. Mrs. Hastings, with a gesture that was quite wild and sent
+her bonnet hopelessly to one side, burst into a volley of
+exclamations and demands.
+
+"Who did it?" she wailed. "Who did it? Otho is a gentleman. He
+would never have the bad taste to disappear, like all those
+dreadful people's wives, if somebody hadn't--"
+
+"My dear Madame," interposed Mr. Frothingham, "calm--calm
+yourself. There are families of undisputed position which
+record disappearances in several generations."
+
+"Please," pleaded Olivia. "Ah, tell us," she begged the prince
+again.
+
+"There is, unfortunately, but little to tell, Miss Holland," said
+the prince with sympathetic regret. "I had the honour, three months
+ago, to entertain the king, your father, at dinner. We parted at
+midnight. His Majesty seemed--"
+
+"His Majesty!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, smiling up at the opposite
+wall as if her thought saw glories.
+
+"--in the best of health and spirits," continued the prince. "A
+meeting of the High Council was to be held at noon on the following
+day. The king did not appear. From that moment no eye in Yaque has
+fallen upon him."
+
+"One moment, your Highness," said St. George quickly; "in the
+absence of the king, who presides over the High Council?"
+
+"As the head of the House of the Litany, the chief administrator of
+justice, it is I," said the prince with humility.
+
+"Ah, yes," St. George said evenly.
+
+"But what have you done?" cried Olivia. "Have you had search made?
+Have you--"
+
+"Everything," the prince assured her. "The island is not large. Not
+a corner of it remains unvisited. The people, who were devoted to
+the king, your father, have sought night and day. There is, it is
+hardly right to conceal from you," the prince hesitated, "a
+circumstance which makes the disappearance the more alarming."
+
+"Tell us. Keep nothing from us, I beg, Prince Tabnit," besought
+Olivia.
+
+"For centuries," said the prince slowly, "there has been in the
+keeping of the High Council of the island a casket, containing what
+is known as the Hereditary Treasure. This casket, with some of the
+finest of its jewels, was left by King Abibaal himself. Since his
+time every king of the island has upon his death bequeathed to the
+casket the finest jewel in his possession; and its contents are now
+therefore of inestimable value. The circumstance to which I refer is
+that two days after the disappearance of the king, your father,
+which spread grief and alarm through all Yaque, it was discovered
+that the Hereditary Treasure was gone."
+
+"Gone!" burst from the lips of the prince's auditors.
+
+"As utterly as if the Fifth Dimension had received it," the prince
+gravely assured them. "The loss, as you may imagine, is a grievous
+one. The High Council immediately issued a proclamation that if the
+treasure be not restored by a certain date--now barely two weeks
+away--a heavy tax will be levied upon the people to make good, in
+the coin of the realm, this incalculable loss. Against this the
+people, though they are a people of peace, are murmurous."
+
+"Indeed!" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Great loyalty it is that sets up the
+loss of their trumpery treasure over and above the loss of their
+king, my brother Otho! If," she shrilled indignantly, "we are not
+unwise to listen to this at all. What is it you think? What is it
+your people think?"
+
+She raised her head until she had framed the prince in
+tortoise-shell. Mrs. Hastings never held her head quite still. It
+continually waved about a little, so that usually, even in peace, it
+intimated indignation; and when actual indignation set in, the jet
+on her bonnet tinkled and ticked like so many angry sparrows.
+
+"Madame," said the prince, "there are those among his Majesty's
+subjects who would willingly lay down their lives for him. But he is
+a stranger to us--come of an alien race; and the double
+disappearance is a most tragic occurrence, which the burden of the
+tax has emphasized. To be frank, were his Majesty to reappear in
+Yaque without the treasure having been found--"
+
+"Oh!" breathed Mrs. Hastings, "they would kill him!"
+
+The prince shuddered and set his white teeth in his nether lip.
+
+"The gods forbid," he said. "Such primeval punishment is as unknown
+among us as is war itself. How little you know my people; how
+pitifully your instincts have become--forgive me--corrupted by
+living in this barbarous age of yours, fumbling as you do at
+civilization. With us death is a sacred rite, the highest tribute
+and the last sacrifice to the Absolute. Our dying are carried to the
+Temple of the Worshipers of Distance, and are there consecrated.
+The limit of our punishment would be aerial exposure--"
+
+"You mean?" cried St. George.
+
+"I mean that in extreme cases we have, with due rite and ceremonial,
+given a victim to an airship, without ballast or rudder, and
+abundantly provisioned. Then with solemn ritual we have set him
+adrift--an offering to the great spirits of space--so that he may
+come to know. This," the prince paused in emotion, "this is the
+worst that could befall your father."
+
+"How horrible!" cried Olivia. "Oh, how horrible."
+
+"Oh," Mrs. Hastings moaned, "he was born to it. He was born to it.
+When he was six he tied kites to his arms and jumped out the window
+of the cupola and broke his collar bone--oh, Otho,--oh Heaven,--and
+I made him eat oatmeal gruel three times a day when he was getting
+well."
+
+"Prince Tabnit," said St. George, "I beg you not to jest with us.
+Have consideration for the two to whom this man is dear."
+
+"I am speaking truth to you," said the prince earnestly. "I do not
+wish to alarm these ladies, but I am bound in honour to tell you
+what I know."
+
+"Ah then," said St. George, his narrowed eyes meeting those of the
+prince, "since the taking of life is unknown to you in Yaque, will
+you explain how it was that your servant adopted such unerring
+means to take the life of Miss Holland? And why?"
+
+"My servant," said the prince readily, "belongs to the lahnas or
+former serfs of the island. Upon her people, now the owners of rich
+lands, the tax will fall heavily. Crazed by what she considers her
+people's wrongs following upon the coming of the stranger sovereign,
+the poor creature must have developed the primitive instincts of
+your race. Before coming to this country my servant had never heard
+of murder save as a superseded custom of antiquity, like the
+crucifying of lions. Her discovery of your daily practice of murder,
+and of murder practised as a cure for crime--"
+
+"Sir," began the lawyer imposingly.
+
+"--wakened in her the primitive instincts of humanity, and her
+instinct took the deplorable and fanatic form of your own courts,"
+finished the prince. "Her bitterness toward his Majesty she sought
+to visit upon his daughter."
+
+Olivia sprang to her feet.
+
+"I must go to my father. I must go to Yaque," she cried ringingly.
+"Prince Tabnit, will you take me to him?"
+
+Into the prince's face leaped a fire of admiration for her beauty
+and her daring. He bowed before her, his lowered lashes making thick
+shadows on his dark cheeks.
+
+"I insist upon this," cried little Olivia firmly, "and if you do not
+permit it, Prince Tabnit, we must publish what you have told us
+from one end of the city to the other."
+
+"Yes, by Jove," thought St. George, "and one's country will have a
+Yaque exhibit in its own department at the next world's fair."
+
+"Olivia! My child! Miss Holland--," began the lawyer.
+
+The prince spoke tranquilly.
+
+"It is precisely this errand," he said, "that has brought me to
+America. Do you not see that, in the event of your father's failure
+to return to his people, you will eventually be Queen of Yaque?"
+
+St. George found himself looking fixedly at Mrs. Hastings' false
+front as the only reality in the room. If in a minute Rollo was
+going to waken him by bringing in his coffee, he was going to
+throttle Rollo--that was all. Olivia Holland, an American heiress,
+the hereditary princess of a cannibal island! St. George still
+insisted upon the cannibal; it somehow gave him a foothold among the
+actualities.
+
+"I!" cried Olivia.
+
+Mrs. Hastings, brows lifted, lips parted, winked with lightning
+rapidity in an effort to understand.
+
+St. George pulled himself together.
+
+"Your Highness," he said sternly, "there are several things upon
+which I must ask you to enlighten us. And the first, which I hope
+you will forgive, is whether you have any direct proof that what
+you tell us of Miss Holland's father is true."
+
+"That's it! That's it!" Mr. Frothingham joined him with all the
+importance of having made the suggestion. "We can hardly proceed in
+due order without proofs, sir."
+
+The prince turned toward the curtain at the room's end and the youth
+appeared once more, this time bearing a light oval casket of
+delicate workmanship. It was of a substance resembling both glass
+and metal of changing, rainbow tints, and it passed through St.
+George's mind as he observed it that there must be, to give such a
+dazzling and unreal effect, more than seven colours in the spectrum.
+
+"A spectrum of seven colours," said the prince at the same moment,
+"could not, of course, produce this surface. I confess that until I
+came to this country I did not know that you had so few colours. Our
+spectrum already consists of twelve colours visible to the naked
+eye, and at least five more are distinguishable through our powerful
+magnifying glasses."
+
+St. George was silent. It was as if he had suddenly been permitted
+to look past the door that bars and threatens all knowledge.
+
+The prince unlocked the casket. He drew out first a quantity of
+paper of extreme thinness and lightness on which, embossed and
+emblazoned, was the coat of arms of the Hollands--a sheaf of wheat
+and an unicorn's head--and this was surmounted by a crown.
+
+"This," said the prince, "is now the device upon the signet ring of
+the King of Yaque, the arms of your own family. And here chances to
+be a letter from your father containing some instructions to me. It
+is true that writing has with us been superseded by wireless
+communication, excepting where there is need of great secrecy. Then
+we employ the alphabet of any language we choose, these being almost
+disused, as are the Cuneiform and Coptic to you."
+
+"And how is it," St. George could not resist asking, "that you know
+and speak the English?"
+
+The prince smiled swiftly.
+
+"To you," he said, "who delve for knowledge and who do not know that
+it is absolute and to be possessed at will, this can not now be made
+clear. Perhaps some day..."
+
+Olivia had taken the paper from the prince and pressed it to her
+lips, her eyes filling with tears. There was no mistaking that
+evidence, for this was her father's familiar hand.
+
+"Otho always did write a fearful scrawl," Mrs. Hastings commented,
+"his l's and his t's and his vowels were all the same height. I used
+to tell him that I didn't know whatever people would think."
+
+"I may, moreover," continued the prince, "call to mind several
+articles which were included in the packet sent from the Azores by
+his Majesty. You have, for example, a tapestry representing an ibis
+hunt; you have an image in pink sutro, or soft marble, of an ancient
+Phoenician god--Melkarth. And you have a length of stained glass
+bearing the figure of the Tyrian sphinx, crucified, and surrounded
+by coiled asps."
+
+"Yes, it is true," said Olivia, "we have all these things."
+
+"Why, the trash must be quite expensive," observed Mrs. Hastings. "I
+don't care much for so many colours myself, perhaps because I always
+wear black; though I did wear light colours a good deal when I was a
+girl."
+
+"What else, Mr. St. George?" inquired the prince pleasantly.
+
+"Nothing else," cried Olivia passionately. "I am satisfied. My
+father is in danger, and I believe that he is in Yaque, for he would
+never of his own will desert a place of trust. I must go to him.
+And, Aunt Dora, you and Mr. Frothingham must go with me."
+
+"Oh, Olivia!" wailed Mrs. Hastings, a different key for every
+syllable, "think--consider! Is it the necessary thing to do? And
+what would your poor dear uncle have done? And is there a better way
+than his way? For I always say that it is not really necessary to do
+as my poor dear husband would have done, providing only that we can
+find a better way. Oh," she mourned, lifting her hands, "that this
+frightful thing should come to me at my age. Otho may be married to
+a cannibal princess, with his sons catching wild goats by the hair
+like Tennyson and the whistling parrots--"
+
+"Madame," said the prince coldly, "forgets what I have been saying
+of my country."
+
+"I do not forget," declared Mrs. Hastings sharply, "but being behind
+civilization and being ahead of civilization comes to the same thing
+more than once. In morals it does."
+
+St. George was silent. Olivia's splendid daring in her passionate
+decision to go to her father stirred him powerfully; moreover, her
+words outlined a possible course of his own whose magnitude startled
+him, and at the same time filled him with a sudden, dazzling hope.
+
+"But where is your island, Prince Tabnit?" he asked. "You've
+naturally no consul there and no cable, since you are not even on
+the map."
+
+"Yaque," said the prince readily, "lies almost due southwest from
+the Azores."
+
+Mr. Frothingham stirred skeptically.
+
+"But such an island," he said pompously, "so rich in material for
+the archaeologist, the anthropologist, the explorer in all fields of
+antiquity--ah, it is out of the question, out of the question!"
+
+"It is difficult," said the prince patiently, "most difficult for me
+to make myself intelligible to you--as difficult, if you will
+forgive me, as if you were to try to explain calculus to one of the
+street boys outside. But directly your phase of civilization has
+opened to you the secrets of the Fourth Dimension, much will be
+discovered to you which you do not now discern or dream, and among
+these, Yaque. I do not jest," he added wearily, "neither do I expect
+you to believe me. But I have told you the truth. And it would be
+impossible for you to reach Yaque save in the company of one of the
+islanders to whom the secret is known. I can not explain to you, any
+more than I can explain harmony or colour."
+
+"Well, I'm sure," cried Mrs. Hastings fretfully, "I don't know why
+you all keep wandering from the subject so. Now, my brother Otho--"
+
+"Prince Tabnit,"--Olivia's voice never seemed to interrupt, but
+rather to "divide evidence finely" at the proper moment--"how long
+will it take us to reach Yaque?"
+
+St. George thrilled at that "us."
+
+"My submarine," replied the prince, "is plying about outside the
+harbour. I arrived in four days."
+
+"By the way," St. George submitted, "since your wireless system is
+perfected, why can not we have news of your island from here?"
+
+"The curve of the earth," explained the prince readily, "prevents.
+We have conquered only those problems with which we have had to
+deal. The curve of the earth has of course never entered our
+calculation. We have approached the problem from another
+standpoint."
+
+"We have much to do, Prince Tabnit," said Olivia; "when may we
+leave?"
+
+"Command me," said Prince Tabnit, bowing.
+
+"To-morrow!" cried Olivia, "to-morrow, at noon."
+
+"Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings' voice broke over the name like ice upon a
+warm promontory. Mrs. Hastings' voice was suited to say "Keziah" or
+"Katinka," not Olivia.
+
+"Can you go, Mr. Frothingham?" demanded Olivia.
+
+Mr. Frothingham's long hands hung down and he looked as if she had
+proposed a jaunt to Mars.
+
+"My physician has ordered a sea-change," he mumbled doubtfully, "my
+daughter Antoinette--I--really--there is nothing in all my
+experience--"
+
+"Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings in tears was superintending the search for
+both side-combs.
+
+"Aunt Dora," said Olivia, "you're not going to fail me now. Prince
+Tabnit--at noon to-morrow. Where shall we meet?"
+
+St. George listened, glowing.
+
+"May I have the honour," suggested the prince, "of waiting upon you
+at noon to conduct you? And I need hardly say that we undertake the
+journey under oath of secrecy?"
+
+"Anything--anything!" cried Olivia.
+
+"Oh, my dear Olivia," breathed Mrs. Hastings weakly, "taking me, at
+my age, into this awful place of Four Dimentias--or whatever it was
+you said."
+
+"We will be ready to go with you at noon," said Olivia steadily.
+
+St. George held his peace as they made their adieux. A great many
+things remained to be thought out, but one was clear enough.
+
+The boy servant ran before them to the door. They made their way to
+the street in the early dusk. A hurdy-gurdy on the curb was bubbling
+over with merry discords, and was flanked by garrulous Italians with
+push-carts, lighted by flaring torches. Men were returning from
+work, children were quarreling, women were in doorways, and a
+policeman was gossiping with the footman in a knot of watching
+idlers. With a sigh that was like a groan, Mrs. Hastings sank back
+on the cushions of the brougham.
+
+"I feel," she said, eyes closed, "as if I had been in a pagan temple
+where they worship oracles and what's-his-names. What time is it? I
+haven't an idea. Dear, dear, I want to get home and feel as if my
+feet were on land and water again. I want some strong sleep and a
+good sound cup of coffee, and then I shall know what's actually
+what."
+
+To St. George the slow drive up town was no less unreal than their
+visit. His head was whirling, a hundred plans and speculations
+filled his mind, and through these Mrs Hastings' chatter of
+forebodings and the lawyer's patterned utterance hardly found their
+way. At his own street he was set down, with Mrs. Hastings'
+permission to call next day.
+
+Miss Holland gave him her hand.
+
+"I can not thank you," she said, "I can not thank you. But try to
+know, won't you, what this has been to me. Until to-morrow."
+
+Until to-morrow. St. George stood in the brightness of the street
+looking after the vanishing carriage, his hand tingling from her
+touch. Then he went up to his apartment and met Rollo--sleek,
+deferential, the acme of the polite barbarism in which the prince
+had made St. George feel that he and his world were living. Ah, he
+thought, as Rollo took his hat, this was no way to live, with the
+whole world singing to be discovered anew.
+
+He sat down before the trim little white table with its pretty china
+and silver and its one rose-shaded candle, but the doubtful content
+of comfort was suddenly not enough. The spirit of the road and of
+the chase was in his veins, and he was aglow with "the taste for
+pilgriming." He looked about on the simple luxury with which he had
+surrounded himself, and he welcomed his farewell to it. And when
+Rollo had gone up stairs to complain in person of the shad-roe, St.
+George spoke aloud:
+
+"If Miss Holland sails for Yaque to-morrow on the prince's
+submarine," he said, "_The Aloha_ and I will follow her."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+TWO LITTLE MEN
+
+
+Next morning St. George was early astir. He had slept little and his
+dreams had been grotesques. He threw up his blind and looked across
+buildings to the grey park. The sky was marked with rose, the still
+reservoir gave back colour upon its breast, and the tower upon its
+margin might have been some guttural-christened castle on the Rhine.
+St. George drew a deep breath of good, new air and smiled for the
+sake of the things that the day was to bring him. He was in the
+golden age when the youthful expectation of enjoyment is just
+beginning to be savoured by the inevitable longing for more light,
+and he seemed to himself to be alluringly near the verge of both.
+
+His first care the evening before had been to hunt out
+Chillingworth. He had found him in a theatre and had got him out to
+the foyer and kept him through the third act, pouring in his ears as
+much as he felt that it was well for him to know. Chillingworth had
+drawn his square, brown hands through his hair and, in lieu of
+copy-paper, had nibbled away his programme and paced the corner by
+the cloak-room.
+
+"It looks like a great big thing," said the city editor; "don't you
+think it looks like a great big thing?"
+
+"Extraordinarily so," assented St. George, watching him.
+
+"Can you handle it alone, do you think?" Chillingworth demanded.
+
+"Ah, well now, that depends," replied St. George. "I'll see it
+through, if it takes me to Yaque. But I'd like you to promise, Mr.
+Chillingworth, that you won't turn Crass loose at it while I'm gone,
+with his feverish head-lines. Mrs. Hastings and her niece must be
+spared that, at all events."
+
+"Don't you be a sentimental idiot," snapped Chillingworth, "and
+spoil the biggest city story the paper ever had. Why, this may draw
+the whole United States into a row, and mean war and a new
+possession and maybe consulates and governorships and one thing or
+another for the whole staff. St. George, don't spoil the sport.
+Remember, I'm dropsical and nobody can tell what may happen. By the
+way, where did you say this prince man is?"
+
+"Ah, I didn't say," St. George had answered quietly. "If you'll
+forgive me, I don't think I shall say."
+
+"Oh, you don't," ejaculated Chillingworth. "Well, you please be
+around at eight o'clock in the morning."
+
+St. George watched him walking sidewise down the aisle as he always
+walked when he was excited. Chillingworth was a good sort at heart,
+too; but given, as the bishop had once said of some one else, to
+spending right royally a deal of sagacity under the obvious
+impression that this is the only wisdom.
+
+At his desk next morning Chillingworth gave to St. George a note
+from Amory, who had been at Long Branch with _The Aloha_ when the
+letter was posted and was coming up that noon to put ashore
+Bennietod.
+
+"May Cawthorne have his day off to-morrow and go with me?" the
+letter ended. "I'll call up at noon to find out."
+
+"Yah!" growled Chillingworth, "it's breaking up the whole staff,
+that's what it's doin'. You'll all want cut-glass typewriters next."
+
+"If I should sail to-day," observed St. George, quite as if he were
+boarding a Sound steamer, "I'd like to take on at least two men. And
+I'd like Amory and Cawthorne. You could hardly go yourself, could
+you, Mr. Chillingworth?"
+
+"No, I couldn't," growled Chillingworth, "I've got to keep my tastes
+down. And I've got to save up to buy kid gloves for the staff. Look
+here--" he added, and hesitated.
+
+"Yes?" St. George complied in some surprise.
+
+"Bennietod's half sick anyway," said Chillingworth, "he's thin as
+water, and if you would care--"
+
+"By all means then," St. George assented heartily, "I would care
+immensely. Bennietod sick is like somebody else healthy. Will you
+mind getting Amory on the wire when he calls up, and tell him to
+show up without fail at my place at noon to-day? And to wait there
+for me."
+
+Little Cawthorne, with a pair of shears quite a yard long, was
+sitting at his desk clipping jokes for the fiction page. He was
+humming a weary little tune to the effect that "Billy Enny took a
+penny but now he hadn't many--Lookie They!" with which he whiled
+away the hours of his gravest toil, coming out strongly on the
+"Lookie They!" until Benfy on the floor above pounded for quiet
+which he never got.
+
+"Cawthorne," said St. George, "it may be that I'm leaving to-night
+on the yacht for an island out in the southeast. And the chief says
+that you and Amory are to go along. Can you go?"
+
+Little Cawthorne's blue eyes met St. George's steadily for a moment,
+and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.
+
+"I can get the page done in an hour," he promised, "and I can pack
+my thirty cents in ten minutes. Will that do?"
+
+St. George laughed.
+
+"Ah, well now, this goes," he said. "Ask Chillingworth. Don't tell
+any one else."
+
+"'Billy Enny took a penny,'" hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect
+tranquillity.
+
+St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand
+doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to
+face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away.
+Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world
+which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present
+knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced
+his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk
+more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.
+
+The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early
+morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand
+Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only
+avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out
+incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For
+only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to
+be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid
+wonderment at crepe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed
+woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in
+McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive
+comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour
+gone astray.
+
+St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted
+him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons
+brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the
+latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of
+furniture remained.
+
+He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find
+the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and
+he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could
+have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls,
+to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so
+emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured
+a title. But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted
+and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable
+characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the
+prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and
+questioned a group of boys in the passage.
+
+"Yup," shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation
+distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement
+as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, "he means de
+bloke wid de black block. Aw, he lef' early dis mornin' wid 's junk
+follerin.' Dey's two of 'em. Wot's he t'ink? Dis ain't no Nigger's
+Rest. Dis yere's all Eyetalian."
+
+St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street. It was not yet ten
+o'clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and
+for his life he could not have waited longer. Perhaps it was not
+true at all; perhaps none of it had happened. The McDougle Street
+part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth? But as he
+sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better.
+The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time,
+and she had said "Until to-morrow."
+
+On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to
+her apartment. He found the drawing-room in confusion--the furniture
+covered with linen, the bric-a-brac gone, and three steamer trunks
+strapped and standing outside the door. All of which mattered to him
+less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.
+
+She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and
+very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had
+been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober
+little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he
+could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough.
+She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To
+complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before
+the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.
+
+"This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and
+a muffin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."
+
+For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.
+
+"You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the
+little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.
+
+"Really leaving," she assented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham
+sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great
+comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added
+naively, "but he must take her."
+
+St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he
+reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the
+daughter of its sovereign.
+
+"Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.
+
+He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place
+below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince,
+it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to assure them
+that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no
+impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt
+withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St.
+George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a
+world of uncertainty.
+
+"I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided
+between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear
+lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.
+
+Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.
+
+"Have a muffin--do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in
+America for a time--let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St.
+George, I want--oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate--"
+
+"Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you
+see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now
+to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."
+
+"No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was
+a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through
+the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds
+without packing a bag and feeding the peacocks and leaving, pinned
+to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.
+
+"Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought.
+"Forgive me--what are you going to do all alone there in that
+strange land, and such a land?"
+
+He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he
+was lost in anticipative admiration; when she was neither he admired
+more than ever.
+
+"I don't know," said Olivia gravely, "I only know that I must go.
+You see that, do you not--that I must go?"
+
+"Ah, yes," St. George assured her, "I do indeed, believe me. Don't
+you think," he said, "that I might give you a lamp to rub if you
+need help? And then I'll appear."
+
+"In Yaque?"
+
+He nodded gravely.
+
+"Yes, in Yaque. I shall rise out of a jar like the Evil Genie; and
+though I shall be quite helpless you will still have the lamp. And I
+shall be no end glad to have appeared."
+
+"But suppose," said Olivia merrily, "that when I have eaten a
+pomegranate or a potato or something in Yaque I forget all about
+America? And when you step out of the jar I say 'Off with his head,'
+by mistake. How shall I know it is you when the jar is opened?"
+
+"I shall ask you what the population of Yaque is," he assured her,
+"and how the island compares with Manhattan, and if this is your
+first visit, and how you are enjoying your stay; and then you will
+recognize the talk of civilization and spare me."
+
+"No," she protested, "I've longed to say 'Off with his head' to too
+many people who have said all that to me. And you mustn't say that a
+holiday always seems like Sunday, either."
+
+Whereat they both laughed, and it seemed an uncommonly pleasant
+world, and even the sad errand that was taking Olivia to Yaque
+looked like a hope.
+
+Then the talk ran on pleasantly, and things went very briskly
+forward, and there was no dearth of fleet little smiles at this and
+that. What was she to bring him from Yaque--a pet ibis? No, he had
+no taste for ibises--unless indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension
+ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a
+magic field-glass, with which one might see what is happening at an
+infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he
+wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her
+errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the
+puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor
+children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of
+science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with
+mere tricks of jars of genii instead of applied electricity and its
+daring. What an Arabian Nights' Entertainment we might have had if
+only Scheherazade had ever heard of the Present! As for the
+thousand-and-one-nights, they would not have contained all her
+invention. No wonder that the time went trippingly for the two who
+were concerned in such bewildering speculation as the prince had
+made possible and who were furthering acquaintanceship besides.
+
+"Ah, well now, at all events," begged St. George at length, "will
+you remember something while you are away?"
+
+"Your kindness, always," she returned.
+
+"But will you remember," said St. George with his boy's eagerness,
+"that there is some one who hopes no less than you for your success,
+and who will be infinitely proud of any command at all from you? And
+will you remember that, though I may not be successful, I shall at
+least be doing something to try to help you?"
+
+"You are very good," she said gently, "I shall remember. For already
+you have not only helped me--you have made the whole matter
+possible."
+
+"And what of that," propounded St. George gloomily, "if I can't help
+you just when the danger begins? I insist, Miss Holland, that it
+takes far more good nature to see some one else set off at adventure
+than it takes to go one's self. Won't you let me come back here at
+twelve o'clock and go down with you to the boat?"
+
+"By all means," Olivia assented, "my aunt and I shall both be glad,
+Mr. St. George. Then you can wish us well. What is a submarine
+like," she wanted to know; "were you ever on one?"
+
+"Never, excepting a number of times," replied St. George, supremely
+unconscious of any vagueness. He was rapidly losing count of all
+events up to the present. He was concerned only with these things:
+that she was here with him, that the time might be measured by
+minutes until she would be caught away to undergo neither knew what
+perils, and that at any minute Mrs. Hastings might escape from the
+chemist's.
+
+Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was
+quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did
+make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her
+drawing-room had been untenanted. And in the meantime no one knows
+what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so
+perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon
+the shore for a word of farewell. But, indeed, if it were not for
+the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would
+become very tame affairs. When the first man and maid said even the
+most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the
+right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion. Very likely
+the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination.
+Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the
+preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it. And, enchantment
+being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been
+that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat
+staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and
+Olivia was taking her tea. Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very
+literal interfering goddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so
+that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent
+and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness. But it
+must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore
+were "_les antipodes des graces_." She was followed by a footman,
+his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan
+and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hastings
+had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and
+whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug. She sat
+down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another
+sort of energy and became fragments of talk. Mrs. Hastings was like
+the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the goddess of silence, but
+could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. St. George," she said. "I'm sure I've quite
+forgotten everything. Olivia dear, I've had all the prescriptions
+made up that I've ever taken to Rutledge's, because no one can tell
+what the climate will be like, it's so low on the map. I've looked
+up the Azores--that's where we get some of our choicest cheese. And
+camphor--I've got a pound of camphor. And I must say positively that
+I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the
+camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now
+it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound. And then the flaxseed,
+Olivia dear. I've got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell--"
+
+St. George doubted if she knew when he said good morning, although
+she named him Mr. St. John, gave him permission to go to the boat,
+hoped in one breath that he would come again to see them, and in the
+next that he would send them a copy of whatever the _Sentinel_ might
+publish about them, in serene oblivion of the state of the
+post-office department in Yaque. Mrs. Hastings, in short, was one of
+the women who are thrown into violent mental convulsions by the
+prospect of a journey; this was not at all because she was setting
+sail specifically for Yaque, for the moment that she saw a porter or
+a pier, though she was bound only for the Bronx or Staten Island,
+she was affected in the same way.
+
+As Olivia gave St. George her hand he came perilously near telling
+her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he
+were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the
+submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator
+bell for so long that the boy deliberately stopped on the floor
+below and waited, with the diabolical independence of the American
+lords of the lift, "for to teach 'im a lessing," this one explained
+to a passing chamber-maid.
+
+St. George hurried to his apartment to leave a note for Amory who
+was directed upon his arrival to bide there and await his host's
+return. Then he paced the floor until it was time to go back to the
+Boris, deaf to Rollo's solemn information that the dust comes up out
+of the varnish of furniture during the night, like cream out of
+milk. By the time he had boarded a down-town car, St. George had
+tortured himself to distraction, and his own responsibility in this
+submarine voyage loomed large and threatening. Therefore, it
+suddenly assumed the proportion of mountains yet unseen when, though
+it wanted ten minutes to twelve when he reached the Boris, his card
+was returned by a faint polite clerk with the information that Mrs.
+Hastings and Miss Holland had been gone from the hotel for half an
+hour. There was a note for him in their box the clerk believed, and
+presently produced it--a brief, regretful word from Olivia telling
+him that the prince had found that they must leave fully an hour
+earlier than he had planned.
+
+Sick with apprehension, cursing himself for the ease and dexterity
+with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St.
+George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of
+chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had
+bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod
+would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of
+anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer
+hallway and saw that which caused that confidence to balloon
+smilingly back to support him.
+
+In the vestibule of the Boris, deaf to the hovering attention of a
+door-boy more curious than dutiful, stood two men of the stature and
+complexion of Prince Tabnit of Yaque. They were dressed like the
+youth who had answered the door of the prince's apartment, and they
+were speaking softly with many gestures and evidently in some
+perplexity. The drooping spirits of St. George soared to Heaven as
+he hastened to them.
+
+"You are asking for Miss Holland, the daughter of King Otho of
+Yaque," he said, with no time to smile at the pranks of the
+democracy with hereditary titles.
+
+The men stared and spoke almost together.
+
+"We are," they said promptly.
+
+"She is not here," explained St. George, "but I have attended to
+some affairs for her. Will you come with me to my apartment where we
+may be alone?"
+
+The men, who somehow made St. George think of tan-coloured
+greyhounds with very gentle eyes, consulted each other, not with the
+suspicion of the vulgar but with the caution of the thorough-bred.
+
+"Pardon," said one, "if we may be quite assured that this is Miss
+Holland's friend to whom we speak--"
+
+St. George hesitated. The hall-boy listened with an air of polite
+concern, and there were curious over-shoulder glances from the
+passers-by. Suddenly St. George's face lighted and he went swiftly
+through his pockets and produced a scrap of paper--the fragment that
+had lain that morning on the floor of the prince's deserted
+apartment, and that bore the arms of the King of Yaque. It was the
+strangers' turn to regard him with amazement. Immediately, to St.
+George's utmost embarrassment, they both bowed very low and
+pronounced together:
+
+"Pardon, adon!"
+
+"My name is St. George," he assured them, "and let's get into a
+cab."
+
+They followed him without demur.
+
+St. George leaned back on the cushions and looked at them--lean
+lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great
+repose. They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had
+felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley
+Reformatory--as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way
+rhymed with a word which he did not know.
+
+"What is it," St. George asked as they rolled away, "what is it that
+you have come to tell Miss Holland?"
+
+Only one of the men spoke, the other appearing content to show two
+rows of exceptionally white teeth.
+
+"May we not know, adon," asked the man respectfully, "whether the
+prince has given her his news? And if the prince is still in your
+land?"
+
+"The prince's servant, Elissa, has tried to stab Miss Holland and
+has got herself locked up," St. George imparted without hesitation.
+
+An exclamation of horror broke from both men.
+
+"To stab--to _kill_!" they cried.
+
+"Quite so," said St. George, "and the prince, upon being discovered,
+disclosed some very important news to Miss Holland, and she and her
+friends started an hour ago for Yaque."
+
+"That is well, that is well!" cried the little man, nodding, and
+momentarily hesitated; "but yet his news--what news, adon, has he
+told her?"
+
+For a moment St. George regarded them both in silence.
+
+"Ah, well now, what news had he?" he asked briefly.
+
+The men answered readily.
+
+"Prince Tabnit was commissioned by the Yaquians to acquaint the
+princess with the news of the strange disappearance of her father,
+the king, and to supplicate her in his place to accept the
+hereditary throne of Yaque."
+
+"Jupiter!" said St. George under breath.
+
+In a flash the whole matter was clear to him. Prince Tabnit had
+delivered no such message from the people of Yaque, but had
+contented himself with the mere intimation that in some vanishing
+future she would be expected to ascend the throne. And he had done
+this only when Olivia herself had sought him out after an attempt
+had been made upon her life by his servant. It seemed to St. George
+far from improbable that the woman had been acting under the
+prince's instructions and, that failing, he himself had appeared and
+obligingly placed the daughter of King Otho precisely within the
+prince's power. Now she was gone with him, in the hope of aiding her
+father, to meet Heaven knew what peril in this pagan island; and he,
+St. George, was wholly to blame from first to last.
+
+"Good Heavens," he groaned, "are you sure--but are you sure?"
+
+"It is simple, adon," said the man, "we came with this message from
+the people of Yaque. A day before we were to land, Akko and I--I am
+Jarvo--overheard the prince plan with the others to tell her
+nothing--nothing that the people desire. When they knew that we had
+heard they locked us up and we have only this morning escaped from
+the submarine. If the prince has told her this message everything is
+well. But as for us, I do not know. The prince has gone."
+
+"He told her nothing--nothing," said St. George, "but that her
+father and the Hereditary Treasure have disappeared. And he has
+taken her with him. She has gone with him."
+
+Deaf alike to their exclamations and their questions St. George sat
+staring unseeingly through the window, his mind an abyss of fear.
+Then the cab drew up at the door of his hotel and he turned upon the
+two men precipitantly.
+
+"See," he cried, "in a boat on the open sea, would you two be at all
+able to direct a course to Yaque?"
+
+Both men smiled suddenly and brilliantly.
+
+"But we have stolen a chart," announced Jarvo with great simplicity,
+"not knowing what thing might befall."
+
+St. George wrenched at the handle of the cab door. He had a glimpse
+of Amory within, just ringing the elevator bell, and he bundled the
+two little men into the lobby and dashed up to him.
+
+"Come on, old Amory," he told him exultingly. "Heaven on earth, put
+out that pipe and pack. We leave for Yaque to-night!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+DUSK, AND SO ON
+
+
+Dusk on the tropic seas is a ceremony performed with reverence, as
+if the rising moon were a priestess come among her silver vessels.
+Shadows like phantom sails dip through the dark and lie idle where
+unseen crafts with unexplained cargoes weigh anchor in mid-air. One
+almost hears the water cunningly lap upon their invisible sides.
+
+To Little Cawthorne, lying luxuriously in a hammock on the deck of
+_The Aloha_, fancies like these crowded pleasantly, and slipped away
+or were merged in snatches of remembered songs. His hands were
+clasped behind his head, one foot was tapping the deck to keep the
+hammock in motion while strange compounds of tune and time broke
+aimlessly from his lips.
+
+          "Meet me by moonlight alone,
+           And then I will tell you a tale.
+           Must be told in the moonlight alone
+           In the grove at the end of the vale"
+
+he caroled contentedly.
+
+Amory, the light of his pipe cheerfully glowing, lay at full length
+in a steamer chair. _The Aloha_ was bounding briskly forward, a
+solitary speck on the bosom of darkening purple, and the men sitting
+in the companionship of silence, which all the world praises and
+seldom attains, had been engaging in that most entertaining of
+pastimes, the comparison of present comfort with past toil. Little
+Cawthorne's satisfaction flowered in speech.
+
+"Two weeks ago to-night," he said, running his hands through his
+grey curls, "I took the night desk when Ellis was knocked out. And
+two weeks ago to-morrow morning we were the only paper to be beaten
+on the Fownes will story. Hi--you."
+
+"Happy, Cawthorne?" Amory removed his pipe to inquire with idle
+indulgence.
+
+"Am I happy?" affirmed Little Cawthorne ecstatically in four tones,
+and went on with his song:
+
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,
+           But there's something about the moon's ray
+           That is sweeter to you and to me."
+
+"Did you make that up?" inquired Amory with polite interest.
+
+"I did if I want to," responded Little Cawthorne. "Everything's true
+out here--go on, tell everything you like. I'll believe you."
+
+St. George came out of the dark and leaned on the rail without
+speaking. Sometimes he wondered if he were he at all, and he liked
+the doubt. He felt pleasantly as if he had been cut loose from all
+old conditions and were sailing between skies to some unknown
+planet. This was not only because of the strange waters rushing
+underfoot but because of the flowering and singing of something
+within him that made the world into which he was sailing an alien
+place, heavenly desirable. A week ago that day _The Aloha_ had
+weighed anchor, and these seven days, in fairly fortunate weather,
+her white nose had been cleaving seas to traverse which had so long
+been her owner's dream; and yet her owner, in pleasant apostasy, had
+turned his back upon the whole matter of what he had been used to
+dream, and now ungratefully spent his time in trying to count the
+hours to his journey's end.
+
+Somewhere out yonder, he reflected, as he leaned on the rail, this
+southern moonlight was flooding whatever scene _she_ looked on; the
+lapping of the same sea was in her ears; and his future and hers
+might be dependent upon those two perplexed tan-coloured greyhounds
+below. By which one would have said that matters had been going
+briskly forward with St. George since the morning that he had
+breakfasted with Olivia Holland.
+
+Exactly when the end of the journey would be was not evident either
+to him or to the two strange creatures who proposed to be his
+guides. Or rather to Jarvo, who was still the spokesman; lean
+little Akko, although his intelligence was unrivaled, being content
+with monosyllables for stepping-stones while the stream of Jarvo's
+soft speech flowed about him. Barnay, the captain, frankly
+distrusted them both, and confided to St. George that "them two
+little jool-eyed scuts was limbs av the old gint himself, and they
+reminded him, Barnay, of a pair of haythen naygurs," than which he
+could say no more. But then, Barnay's wholesale skepticism was his
+only recreation, save talking about his pretty daughter "of school
+age," and he liked to stand tucking his beard inside his collar and
+indulging in both. In truth, Barnay, who knew the waters of the
+Atlantic fairly well, was sorely tried to take orders from the two
+little brown strangers who, he averred, consulted a "haythen
+apparaytus" which they would cheerfully let him see but of which he
+could "make no more than av the spach av a fish," and then directed
+him to take courses which lay far outside the beaten tracks of the
+high seas.
+
+St. George, who had had several talks with them, was puzzled and
+doubtful, and more than once confided to himself that the lives of
+the passenger list of _The Aloha_ might be worth no more than coral
+headstones at the bottom of the South Atlantic. But he always
+consoled himself with the cheering reflection that he had had to
+come--there was no other way half so good. So _The Aloha_ continued
+to plow her way as serenely as if she were heading toward the white
+cliffs of Dover and trim villas and a custom-house. And the sea lay
+a blue, uninhabited glory save as land that Barnay knew about marked
+low blades of smoke on the horizon and slipped back into blue
+sheaths.
+
+This was the evening of the seventh day, and that noon Jarvo had
+looked despondent, and Barnay had sworn strange oaths, and St.
+George had been disquieted. He stood up now, going vaguely down into
+his coat pockets for his pipe, his erect figure thrown in relief
+against the hurrying purple. St. George was good to look at, and
+Amory, with the moonlight catching the glass of his pince-nez,
+smoked and watched him, shrewdly pondering upon exactly how much
+anxiety for the success of the enterprise was occupying the breast
+of his friend and how much of an emotion a good bit stronger. Amory
+himself was not in love, but there existed between him and all who
+were a special kinship, like that between a lover of music and a
+musician.
+
+Little Cawthorne rose and shuffled his feet lazily across deck.
+
+"Where is that island, anyway?" he wanted to know, gazing
+meditatively out to sea.
+
+St. George turned as if the interruption was grateful.
+
+"The island. I don't see any island," complained Little Cawthorne.
+"I tell you," he confided, "I guess it's just Chillingworth's little
+way of fixing up a nice long vacation for us."
+
+They smiled at memory of Chillingworth's grudging and snarling
+assents to even an hour off duty.
+
+From below came Bennietod, walking slowly. The seaman's life was not
+for Bennietod, and he yearned to reach land as fervently as did St.
+George, though with other anxiety. He sat down on the moon-lit deck
+and his face was like that of a little old man with uncanny
+shrewdness. His week among them had wrought changes in the head
+office boy. For Bennietod was ambitious to be a gentleman. His
+covert imitations had always amused St. George and Amory. Now in the
+comparative freedom of _The Aloha_ his fancy had rein and he had
+adopted all the habits and the phrases which he had long reserved
+and liked best, mixing them with scraps of allusions to things which
+Benfy had encouraged him to read, and presenting the whole in his
+native lower East-side dialect. Bennietod was Bowery-born and
+office-bred, and this sad metropolitanism almost made of him a good
+philosopher.
+
+"I'd like immensely to say something," observed St. George abruptly,
+when his pipe was lighted.
+
+"Oh, yes. All right," shrilled Little Cawthorne with resignation, "I
+suppose you all feel I'm the Jonah and you thirst to scatter me to
+the whales."
+
+"I want to know," St. George went on slowly, "what you think. On my
+life, I doubt if I thought at all when we set out. This all promised
+good sport, and I took it at that. Lately, I've been wondering, now
+and then, whether any of you wish yourselves well out of it."
+
+For a moment no one spoke. To shrink from expression is a
+characteristic in which the extremes of cultivation and mediocrity
+meet; the reserve of delicacy in St. George and Amory would have
+been a reserve of false shame in Bennietod, and of an exaggerated
+sense of humour in Little Cawthorne. It was not remarkable that from
+the moment the enterprise had been entered upon, its perils and its
+doubtful outcome had not once been discussed. St. George vaguely
+reckoned with this as he waited, while Amory smoked on and blew
+meditative clouds and regarded the bowl of his pipe, and Little
+Cawthorne ceased the motion of his hammock, and Bennietod hugged his
+knees and looked shrewdly at the moon, as if he knew more about the
+moon than he would care to tell. St. George felt his heart sink a
+little. Then Little Cawthorne rose and squared valiantly up to him.
+
+"What," inquired the little man indignantly, "are you trying to do?
+Pick a fight?"
+
+St. George looked at him in surprise.
+
+"Because if you are," continued little Cawthorne without preamble,
+"we're three to one. And three of us are going to Yaque. We'll put
+you ashore if you say so."
+
+St. George smiled at him gratefully.
+
+"No--Bennietod?" inquired Little Cawthorne.
+
+Bennietod, pale and manifestly weak, grinned cheerfully and fumbled
+in sudden abashment at an amazing checked Ascot which he had derived
+from unknown sources.
+
+"Bes' t'ing t'ever I met up wid," he assented, "ef de deck'd lay
+down levil. I'm de sonny of a sea-horse if it ain't."
+
+"Amory?" demanded the little man.
+
+Amory looked along his pipe and took it briefly from his lips and
+shook his head.
+
+"Don't say these things," he pleaded in his pleasant drawl, "or I'll
+swear something horrid."
+
+St. George merely held his pipe by the bowl and nodded a little, but
+the hearts of all of them glowed.
+
+After dinner they sat long on deck. Rollo, at his master's
+invitation, joined them with a mandolin, which he had been
+discovered to play considerably better than any one else on board.
+Rollo sat bolt upright in a reclining chair to prove that he did not
+forget his station and strummed softly, and acknowledged approval
+with:
+
+"Yes, sir. A little music adds an air to any occasion, _I_ always
+think, sir."
+
+The moon was not yet full, but its light in that warm world was
+brilliant. The air was drowsy and scented with something that might
+have been its own honey or that might have come from the strange
+blooms, water-sealed below. Now and then St. George went aside for a
+space and walked up and down the deck or sent below for Jarvo. Once,
+as Jarvo left St. George's side, Little Cawthorne awoke and sat
+upright and inquiring, in his hammock.
+
+"What _is_ the matter with his feet?" he inquired peevishly. "I
+shall certainly ask him directly."
+
+"It's the seventh day out," Amory observed, "and still nobody
+knows."
+
+For Jarvo and Akko had another distinction besides their diminutive
+stature and greyhound build. Their feet, clad in soft soleless
+shoes, made of skins, were long and pointed and of almost uncanny
+flexibility. It had become impossible for any one to look at either
+of the little men without letting his eyes wander to their curiously
+expressive feet, which, like "courtier speech," were expressive
+without revealing anything.
+
+"I t'ink," Bennietod gave out, "dat dey're lost Eyetalian
+organ-grinder monkeys, wid huming intelligence, like Bertran's
+Bimi."
+
+"What a suspicious child it is," yawned Little Cawthorne, and went
+to sleep again. Toward midnight he awoke, refreshed and happy, and
+broke into instant song:
+
+          "The daylight may do for the gay,
+           The thoughtless, the heartless, the free,
+           But there's something about the moon's ray--"
+
+he was chanting in perfect tonelessness, when St. George cried out.
+The others sprang to their feet.
+
+"Lights!" said St. George, and gave the glass to Amory, his hand
+trembling, and very nearly snatched it back again.
+
+Far to the southeast, faint as the lost Pleiad, a single golden
+point pricked the haze, danced, glimmered, was lost, and reappeared
+to their eager eyes. The impossibility of it all, the impossibility
+of believing that they could have sighted the lights of an island
+hanging there in the waste and hitherto known to nobody simply
+because nobody knew the truth about the Fourth Dimension did not
+assail them. So absorbed had St. George become in the undertaking,
+so convincing had been the events that led up to it, and so ready
+for anything in any dimension were his companions, that their
+excitement was simply the ancient excitement of lights to the
+mariner and nothing more; save indeed that to St. George they spoke
+a certain language sweeter than the language of any island lying in
+the heart of mere science or mere magic either.
+
+When it became evident that the lights were no will-o'-the-wisps,
+born of the moon and the void, but the veritable lights that shine
+upon harbours, Bennietod tumbled below for Jarvo, who came on deck
+and gazed and doubted and well-nigh wept for joy and poured forth
+strange words and called aloud for Akko. Akko came and nodded and
+showed white teeth.
+
+"To-morrow," he said only.
+
+Barnay came.
+
+"Fwhat matther?" He put it cynically, scowling critically at Jarvo
+and Akko. "All in the way av fair fight, that'll be about Mor-rocco,
+if I've the full av my wits about me, an' music to my eyes, by the
+same token."
+
+Jarvo fixed him with his impenetrable look.
+
+"It is the light of the king's palace on the summit of Mount
+Khalak," he announced simply.
+
+The light of the king's palace. St. George heard and thrilled with
+thanksgiving. It would be then the light at her very threshold,
+provided the impossible is possible, as scientists and devotees have
+every reason to think. But was she there--was she there? If there
+was an oracle for the answer, it was not St. George. The little
+white stars danced and signaled faintly on the far horizon. Whatever
+they had to reveal was for nearer eyes than his.
+
+The glass passed from hand to hand, and in turn they all swept the
+low sky where the faint points burned; but when some one had cried
+that the lights were no longer visible, and the others had verified
+the cry by looking blankly into a sudden waste of milky black--black
+water, pale light--and turned baffled eyes to Jarvo, the little man
+spoke smoothly, not even reaching a lean, brown hand for the glass.
+
+"But have no fear, adon," he reassured them, "the chart is not
+exact--it is that which has delayed us. It will adjust itself. The
+light may long disappear, but it will come again. The gods will
+permit the possible."
+
+They looked at one another doubtfully when the two little brown men
+had gone below, where Barnay had immediately retired, tucking his
+beard in his collar and muttering sedition. If the two strange
+creatures were twin Robin Goodfellows perpetrating a monstrous
+twentieth century prank, if they were gigantic evolutions of Puck
+whose imagination never went far beyond threshing corn with shadowy
+flails, at least this very modern caper demanded respect for so
+perfectly catching the spirit of the times. At all events it was
+immensely clever of them to have put their finger upon the public
+pulse and to have realized that the public imagination is ready to
+believe anything because it has seen so much proved. Still, "science
+was faith once"; and besides, to St. George, charts and compasses of
+all known and unknown systems of seamanship were suddenly become
+but the dead letter of the law. The spirit of the whole matter was
+that Olivia might be there, under the lights that his own eyes would
+presently see again. "Who, remembering the first kind glance of her
+whom he loves, can fail to believe in magic?" It is very likely that
+having met Olivia at all seemed at that moment so wonderful to St.
+George that any of the "frolic things" of science were to be
+accepted with equanimity.
+
+For an hour or more the moon, flooding the edge of the deck of _The
+Aloha_, cast four shadows sharply upon the smooth boards. Lined up
+at the rail stood the four adventurers, and the glass passed from
+one to another like the eye of the three Grey Sisters. The far
+beacon appeared and disappeared, but its actuality might not be
+doubted. If Jarvo and Akko were to be trusted, there in the velvet
+distance lay Yaque, and Med, the King's City, and the light upon the
+very palace of its American sovereign.
+
+St. George's pulses leaped and trembled. Amory lifted lazy lids and
+watched him with growing understanding and finally, upon a pretext
+of sleep, led the others below. And St. George, with a sense of
+joyful companionship in the little light, paced the deck until dawn.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+THE PORCH OF THE MORNING
+
+
+By afternoon the island of Yaque was an accomplished fact of
+distinguishable parts. There it lay, a thing of rock and green, like
+the islands of its sister latitudes before which the passing ships
+of all the world are wont to cast anchor. But having once cast
+anchor before Yaque the ships of all the world would have had great
+difficulty in landing anybody.
+
+Sheer and almost smoothly hewn from the utmost coast of the island
+rose to a height of several hundred feet one scarcely deviating wall
+of rock; and this apparently impregnable wall extended in either
+direction as far as the sight could reach. Above the natural rampart
+the land sloped upward still in steep declivities, but cut by
+tortuous gorges, and afar inland rose the mountain upon whose summit
+the light had been descried. There the glass revealed white towers
+and columns rising from a mass of brilliant tropical green, and now
+smitten by the late sun; but save these towers and columns not a
+sign of life or habitation was discernible. No smoke arose, no
+wharf or dock broke the serene outline of the black wall lapped by
+the warm sea; and there was no sound save that of strong torrents
+afar off. Lonely, inscrutable, the great mass stood, slightly
+shelved here and there to harbour rank and blossomy growths of green
+and presenting a rugged beauty of outline, but apparently as
+uninhabitable as the land of the North Silences.
+
+Consternation and amazement sat upon the faces of the owner of _The
+Aloha_ and his guests as they realized the character of the
+remarkable island. St. George and Amory had counted upon an
+adventure calling for all diplomacy, but neither had expected the
+delight of hazard that this strange, fairy-like place seemed about
+to present. Each felt his blood stirring and singing in his veins at
+the joy of the possibilities that lay folded before them.
+
+"We shall be obliged to land upon the east coast then, Jarvo?"
+observed St. George; "but how long will it take us to sail round the
+island?"
+
+"Very long," Jarvo responded, "but no, adon, we land on this coast."
+
+"How is that possible?" St. George asked.
+
+"Well, hi--you," said Little Cawthorne, "I'm a goat, but I'm no
+mountain goat. See the little Swiss kid skipping from peak to peak
+and from crag to crag--"
+
+"Do we scale the wall?" inquired St. George, "or is there a passage
+in the rock?"
+
+Bennietod hugged himself in uncontrollable ecstasy.
+
+"Hully Gee, a submarine passage, in under de sea, like Jules Werne,"
+he said in a delight that was almost awe.
+
+"There is a way over the rock," said Jarvo, "partly hewn, partly
+natural, and this is known to the islanders alone. That way we must
+take. It is marked by a White Blade blazoned on the rock over the
+entrance of the submarines. The way is cunningly concealed--hardly
+will the glass reveal it, adon."
+
+Barnay shook his head.
+
+"You've a bad time comin' with the home-sickness," he prophesied,
+tucking his beard far down in his collar until he looked, for
+Barnay, smooth-shaven. "I've sailed the sou' Atlantic up an' down
+fer a matther av four hundhred years, more or less, an' I niver as
+much as seed hide _nor_ hair av the place before this prisint. There
+ain't map or chart that iver dhrawed breath that shows ut, new or
+old. Ut's been lifted out o' ground to be afther swallowin' us in--a
+sweet dose will be the lot av us, mesilf with as foine a gir-rl av
+school age as iver you'll see in anny counthry."
+
+"Ah yes, Barnay," said St. George soothingly--but he would have
+tried now to soothe a man in the embrace of a sea-serpent in just
+the same absent-minded way, Amory thought indulgently.
+
+The sun was lowering and birds of evening were beginning to brood
+over the painted water when _The Aloha_ cast anchor. In the late
+light the rugged sides of the island had an air of almost sinister
+expectancy. There was a great silence in their windless shelter
+broken only by the boom and charge of the breakers and the gulls and
+choughs circling overhead, winging and dipping along the water and
+returning with discordant cries to their crannies in the black rock.
+Before the yacht, blazoned on a dark, water-polished stratum of the
+volcanic stone, was the White Blade which Jarvo told them marked the
+subterranean entrance to the mysterious island.
+
+St. George and his companions and Barnay, Jarvo and Akko were on
+deck. Rollo, whose soul did not disdain to be valet to a steam
+yacht, was tranquilly mending a canvas cushion.
+
+"The adon will wait until sunrise to go ashore?" asked Jarvo.
+
+"_Sunrise_!" cried St. George. "Heaven on earth, no. We'll go now."
+
+There was no need to ask the others. Whatever might be toward, they
+were eager to be about, though Rollo ventured to St. George a
+deprecatory: "You know, sir, one can't be too careful, sir."
+
+"Will you prefer to stay aboard?" St. George put it quietly.
+
+"Oh, no, sir," said Rollo with a grieved face, "one should meet
+danger with a light heart, sir," and went below to pack the
+oil-skins.
+
+"Hear me now," said Barnay in extreme disfavour. "It's I that am to
+lay hereabouts and wait for you, sorr? Lord be good to me, an' fwhat
+if she lays here tin year', and you somewheres fillin' the eyes av
+the aygles with your brains blowed out, neat?" he demanded
+misanthropically. "Fwhat if she lays here on that gin'ral theory
+till she's rotted up, sorr?"
+
+"Ah well now, Barnay," said St. George grimly, "you couldn't have an
+easier career."
+
+Little Cawthorne, from leaning on the rail staring out at the
+island, suddenly pulled himself up and addressed St. George.
+
+"Here we are," he complained, "here has been me coming through the
+watery deep all the way from Broadway, with an octopus clinging to
+each arm and a dolphin on my back, and you don't even ask how I
+stood the trip. And do you realize that it's sheer madness for the
+five of us to land on that island together?"
+
+"What do you mean?" asked St. George.
+
+The little man shook his grey curls.
+
+"What if it's as Barnay says?" he put it. "What if they should bag
+us all--who'll take back the glad news to the harbour? Lord, you
+can't tell what you're about walking into. You don't even know the
+specific gravity of the island," he suggested earnestly. "How do
+you know but your own weight will flatten you out the minute you
+step ashore?"
+
+St. George laughed. "He thinks he is reading the fiction page," he
+observed indulgently. "Still, I fancy there is good sense on the
+page, for once. We don't know anything about anything. I suppose we
+really ought not to put all five eggs in one basket. But, by Jove--"
+
+He looked over at Amory with troubled eyes.
+
+"As host of this picnic," he said, "I dare say I ought to stay
+aboard and let you fellows--but I'm hanged if I will."
+
+Little Cawthorne reflected, frowning; and you could as well have
+expected a bird to frown as Little Cawthorne. It was rather the name
+of his expression than a description of it.
+
+"Suppose," he said, "that Bennietod and I sit rocking here in this
+bay--if it is a bay--while you two rest your chins on the top of
+that ledge of rock up there, and look over. And about to-morrow or
+day after we two will venture up behind you, or you could send one
+of the men back--"
+
+"My thunder," said Bennietod wistfully, "ain't I goin' to get to
+climb in de pantry window at de palace--nor fire out of a
+loophole--"
+
+"Bennietod an' I couldn't talk to a prince anyway," said Little
+Cawthorne; "we'd get our language twisted something dizzy, and
+probably tell him 'yes, ma'am.'"
+
+St. George's eyes softened as he looked at the little man. He knew
+well enough what it cost him to make the suggestion, which the good
+sense of them all must approve. Not only did Little Cawthorne always
+sacrifice himself, which is merely good breeding, but he made
+opportunities to do so, which is both well-bred and virtuous. When
+Rollo came up with the oil-skins they told him what had been
+decided, and Rollo, the faithful, the expressionless, dropped his
+eyelids, but he could not banish from his voice the wistfulness that
+he might have been one to stay behind.
+
+"Sometimes it _is_ best for a person to change his mind, sir," was
+his sole comment.
+
+Presently the little green dory drew away from _The Aloha_, and they
+left her lying as much at her ease as if the phantom island before
+her were in every school-boy's geography, with a scale of miles and
+a list of the principal exports attached.
+
+"If we had diving dresses, adon," Jarvo suggested, "we might have
+gone down through the sluice and entered by the lagoon where the
+submarines pass."
+
+"Jove," said Amory, trying to row and adjust his pince-nez at the
+same time, "Chillingworth will never forgive us for missing that."
+
+"You couldn't have done it," shouted Little Cawthorne derisively,
+from the deck of the yacht, "you didn't wear your rubbers. If
+anybody sticks a knife in you send up a r-r-r-ocket!"
+
+The landing, effected with the utmost caution, was upon a flat
+stone already a few inches submerged by the rising tide. Looking up
+at the jagged, beetling world above them their task appeared
+hopeless enough. But Jarvo found footing in an instant, and St.
+George and Amory pressed closely behind him, Rollo and little Akko
+silently bringing up the rear and carrying the oil-skins. Slowly and
+cautiously as they made their way it was but a few minutes until the
+three standing on the deck, and Barnay open-mouthed in the dory, saw
+the sinuous line of the five bodies twist up the tortuous course
+considerably above the blazoned emblem of the White Blade.
+
+In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever
+before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble
+and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent,
+perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from
+below it had appeared. But it seemed interminable. Even when the sea
+lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of
+_The Aloha_ were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued
+to stretch upward, melting into the sky's late blue.
+
+The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk
+came swiftly out of the east. At snail's pace, now with heads bent
+to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up by the arms or to
+leap a wicked-looking crevice, the four took their way up the black
+side of the rock. Birds of the cliffs, disturbed from long rest,
+wheeled and screamed about them, almost brushing their faces with
+long, fearless wings. There was an occasional shelf where, with
+backs against the wall spotted with crystals of feldspar, they
+waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge. Great
+slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of
+calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava
+covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp
+shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray. Gradually rock-slides
+and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches,
+but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral crevasses
+made the vague trail slippery and the occasional earth sodden and
+treacherous. For a quarter of a mile their way lay over a kind of
+porous gravel into which their feet sank, and beyond at the summit
+of a ridge Jarvo halted and threw back to them a summary warning to
+prepare for "a long leap." A sharp angle of rock, jutting out, had
+been split down the middle by some ancient force--very likely a
+Paleozoic butterfly had brushed it with its wing--and the edges had
+been worn away in a treacherous slope to the very lip of the
+crumbling promontory. From this edge to the edge of the opposite
+abutment there was a gap of wicked width, and between was a sheer
+drop into space wherefrom rose the sound of tumbling waters. When
+Jarvo had taken the leap, easily and gracefully, alighting on the
+other side like the greyhound that he resembled, and the others,
+following, had cleared the edge by as safe a margin as if the abyss
+were a minor field-day event, St. George and Amory looked back with
+sudden wonder over the path by which they had come.
+
+"I feel as if I weighed about ninety pounds," said St. George; "am I
+fading away or anything?"
+
+Amory stood still.
+
+"I was thinking the same thing," he said. "By Jove--do you
+suppose--what if Little Cawthorne hit the other end of the
+nail, as usual? Suppose the specific gravity--suppose there is
+something--suppose it doesn't hold good in this dimension that
+a body--by Jove," said Amory, "wouldn't that be the deuce?"
+
+St. George looked at Jarvo, bounding up the stony way as easily as
+if he were bounding down.
+
+"Ah well now," he said, "you know on the moon an ordinary man would
+weigh only twenty-six or seven pounds. Why not here? We aren't held
+down by any map!"
+
+They laughed at the pleasant enormity of the idea and were hurrying
+on when Akko, behind them, broke his settled silence.
+
+"In America," he said, "a man feels like a mountain. Here he feels
+like a man."
+
+"What do you mean by that?" demanded St. George uneasily. But Akko
+said no more, and St. George and Amory, with a disquieting idea that
+each was laughing at the other, let the matter drop.
+
+From there on the way was easier, leveling occasionally, frequently
+swelling to gentle ridges, and at last winding up a steep trail that
+was not difficult to keep in spite of the fast falling night. And at
+length Jarvo, rounding a huge hummock where converging ridges met,
+scrambled over the last of these and threw himself on the ground.
+
+"Now," he said simply.
+
+The two men stood beside him and looked down. It seemed to St.
+George that they looked not at all upon a prospect but upon the
+sudden memory of a place about which he might have dreamed often and
+often and, waking, had not been able to remember, though its
+familiarity had continued insistently to beat at his heart; or that
+in what was spread before him lay the satisfaction of Burne-Jones'
+wistful definition of a picture: "... a beautiful, romantic dream of
+something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any
+light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only
+desire..." yet it was to St. George as if he had reached no strange
+land, no alien conditions; but rather that he had come home. It was
+like a home-coming in which nothing is changed, none of the little
+improvements has been made which we resent because no one has
+thought to tell us of them; but where everything is even more as one
+remembers than one knew that one remembered.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+At his feet lay a pleasant valley filled with the purple of deep
+twilight. Far below a lagoon caught the late light and spread it in
+a pattern among hidden green. In the midst of the valley towered the
+mountain whose summit, royally crowned by shining towers, had been
+visible from the open sea. At its feet, glittering in the abundant
+light shed upon its white wall and dome and pinnacle, stood Med, the
+King's City--but its light was not the light of the day, for that
+was gone; nor of the moon, not risen; and no false lights vexed the
+dark. Yet he was looking into a cup of light, as clear as the light
+in a gazing-crystal and of a quality as wholly at variance with
+reality. The rocky coast of Yaque was literally a massive, natural
+wall; and girt by it lay the heart of the island, fertile and
+populous and clothed in mystery. This new face which Nature turned
+to him was a glorified face, and some way _it meant what he meant_.
+
+St. George was off for a few steps, trampling impatiently over the
+coarse grass of the bank. Somewhere in that dim valley--was she
+there, was she there? Was she in trouble, did she need him, did she
+think of him? St. George went through the ancient, delicious list
+as conscientiously as if he were the first lover, and she were the
+first princess, and this were the first ascent of Yaque that the
+world had ever known. For by some way of miracle, the mystery of the
+island was suddenly to him the very mystery of his love, and the two
+so filled his heart that he could not have told of which he was
+thinking. That which had lain, shadowy and delicious, in his soul
+these many days--not so very many, either, if one counts the
+suns--was become not only a thing of his soul but a thing of the
+outside world, almost of the visible world, something that had
+existed for ever and which he had just found out; and here, wrapped
+in nameless light, lay its perfect expression. When a shaft of
+silver smote the long grass at his feet, and the edge of the moon
+rose above the mountain, St. George turned with a poignant
+exultation--did a mere victory over half a continent ever make a man
+feel like that?--and strode back to the others.
+
+"Come on," he called ringingly in a voice that did everything but
+confess in words that something heavenly sweet was in the man's
+mind, "let's be off!"
+
+Amory was carefully lighting his pipe.
+
+"I feel sort of tense," he explained, "as if the whole place would
+explode if I threw down my match. What do you think of it?"
+
+St. George did not answer.
+
+"It's a place where all the lines lead up," he was saying to
+himself, "as they do in a cathedral."
+
+The four went the fragrant way that led to the heart of the island.
+First the path followed the high bank the branches of whose tropical
+undergrowth brushed their faces with brief gift of perfume. On the
+other side was a wood of slim trunks, all depths of shadow and
+delicacies of borrowed light in little pools. Everywhere, everywhere
+was a chorus of slight voices, from bark and air and secret moss,
+singing no forced notes of monotone, but piping a true song of the
+gladness of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It
+came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would
+always sound if, somehow, one were able to hear the sweetness that
+poured itself out. Even that familiar sense in the night-woods that
+something is about to happen was deliciously present with him; and
+though Amory went on quietly enough, St. George swam down that green
+way, much as one dreams of floating along a street, above-heads.
+
+The path curved, and went hesitatingly down many terraces. Here,
+from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged
+into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering
+upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to
+meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than
+any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a
+veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the
+censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and
+curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see
+about them. Yet it did not occur to either to distrust the
+phenomenon, or to regard it as unnatural or the fruit of any
+unnatural law. It was somehow quite as convincing to them as is his
+first sight of electric light to the boy of the countryside, and no
+more to be regarded as witchcraft.
+
+St. George was silent. It was as if he were on the threshold of
+Far-Away, within the Porch of the Morning of some day divine. The
+place was so poignantly like the garden of a picture that one has
+seen as a child, and remembered as a place past all speech
+beautiful, and yet failed ever to realize in after years, or to make
+any one remember, or, save fleetingly in dreams to see once more,
+since the picture-book is never, never chanced upon again. Sometimes
+he had dreamed of a great sunny plain, with armies marching;
+sometimes he had awakened at hearing the chimes, and fancied
+sleepily that it was infinite music; sometimes, in the country in
+the early morning, he had had an unreasonable, unaccountable moment
+of perfect happiness: and now the fugitive element of them all
+seemed to have been crystallized and made his own in that floating
+walk down the wooded terraces of this unknown world. And yet he
+could not have told whether the element was contained in that
+beauty, or in his thought of Olivia.
+
+At last they emerged upon a narrow, grassy terrace where white steps
+mounted to a wide parapet. Jarvo ran up the steps and turned:
+
+"Behold Med, adon," he said modestly, as if he had at that moment
+stirred it up in a sauce-pan and baked it before their astonished
+eyes.
+
+They were standing at the top of an immense flight of steps
+extending as far to right and left as they could see, and leading
+down by easy stages and wide landings to the white-paved city
+itself. The clear light flooded the scene--lucid, vivid,
+many-peopled. Far as the eye could see, broad streets extended,
+lined with structures rivaling in splendour and beauty those
+unforgotten "topless towers." Temples, palaces, and public buildings
+rose, storey upon storey, built of hewn stones of great size; and
+noble arches faced an open square before a temple of colossal
+masonry crowning an eminence in the centre of the city. Directly in
+line with this eminence rose the mountain upon whose summit stood
+the far-seen pillars where burned the solitary light.
+
+If an enchanted city had risen from the waves because some one had
+chanced to speak the right word, it could have been no more
+bewildering; and yet the look of this city was so substantial, so
+adapted to all commonplace needs, so essentially the scene of
+every-day activity and purpose, that dozens of towns of petty
+European principalities seem far less actual and practicable homes
+of men. Busy citizens hurrying, the bark of a dog, the mere tone of
+a temple bell spoke the ordinary occupations of all the world; and
+upon the chief street the moon looked down as tranquilly as if the
+causeway were a continuation of Fifth Avenue.
+
+But it was as if the spirit of adventure in St. George had suddenly
+turned and questioned him, saying:
+
+"What of Olivia?"
+
+For Olivia gone to a far-away island to find her father was subject
+of sufficient anxiety; but Olivia in the power of a pretender who
+might have at command such undreamed resources was more than cool
+reason could comprehend. That was the principal impression that Med,
+the King's City, made upon St. George.
+
+"To the right, adon," Jarvo was saying, "where the walls are
+highest--that is the palace of the prince, the Palace of the
+Litany."
+
+"And the king's palace?" St. George asked eagerly.
+
+Jarvo lifted his face to the solitary summit light upon the
+mountain.
+
+"But how does one ascend?" cried St. George.
+
+"By permission of Prince Tabnit," replied Jarvo, "one is borne up
+by six imperial carriers, trained in the service from birth. One
+attempting the ascent alone would be dashed in pieces."
+
+"No municipal line of airships?" ventured Amory in slow
+astonishment.
+
+Jarvo did not quite get this.
+
+"The airships, adon," he said, "belong to the imperial household and
+are kept at the summit of Mount Khalak."
+
+"A trust," comprehended Amory; "an absolute monarchy is a bit of a
+trust, anyhow. Of course, it's sometimes an outraged trust..." he
+murmured on.
+
+"The adon," said Jarvo humbly, "will understand that we, I and Akko,
+have borne great risk. It is necessary that we make our peace with
+all speed, if that may be. The very walls are the ears of Prince
+Tabnit, and it is better to be behind those walls. May the gods
+permit the possible."
+
+"Do you mean to say," asked St. George, "that we too would better
+look out the prince at once?"
+
+"The adon is wise," said Jarvo simply, "but nothing is hid from
+Prince Tabnit."
+
+St. George considered. In this mysterious place, whose ways were as
+unknown to him and to his companions as was the etiquette of the
+court of the moon, clearly diplomacy was the better part of valour.
+It was wiser to seek out Prince Tabnit, if he had really arrived on
+the island, than to be upon the defensive.
+
+"Ah, very well," he said briefly, "we will visit the prince."
+
+"Farewell, adon," said Jarvo, bowing low, "may the gods permit the
+possible."
+
+"Of course you will communicate with us to-morrow," suggested St.
+George, "so that if we wish to send Rollo down to the yacht--"
+
+"The gods will permit the possible, adon," Jarvo repeated gently.
+
+There was a flash of Akko's white teeth and the two little men were
+gone.
+
+St. George and Amory turned to the descending of the wide white
+steps. Such immense, impossible white steps and such a curious place
+for these two to find themselves, alone, with a valet. Struck by the
+same thought they looked at each other and nodded, laughing a
+little.
+
+"Alone in the distance," said Amory, emptying his pipe, "and not a
+cab to be seen."
+
+Rollo thrust forward his lean, shadowed face.
+
+"Shall I look about for a 'ansom, sir?" he inquired with perfect
+gravity.
+
+St. George hardly heard.
+
+"It's like cutting into a great, smooth sheet of white paper," he
+said whimsically, "and making any figure you want to make."
+
+Before they reached the bottom of the steps they divined, issuing
+from an isolated, temple-seeming building below, a train of
+sober-liveried attendants, all at first glance resembling Jarvo and
+Akko. These defiled leisurely toward the strangers and lined up
+irregularly at the foot of the steps.
+
+"Enter Trouble," said Amory happily.
+
+They found themselves confronting, in the midst of the attendants,
+an olive man with no angles, whose face, in spite of its health and
+even wealth of contour, was ridiculously grave, as if the
+_papier-mache_ man in the down-town window should have had a sudden
+serious thought just before his _papier-mache_ incarnation.
+
+"Permit me," said the man in perfect English and without bowing, "to
+bring to you the greeting of his Highness, Prince Tabnit, and his
+welcome to Yaque. I am Cassyrus, an officer of the government. At
+the command of his Highness I am come to conduct you to the palace."
+
+"The prince is most kind," said St. George, and added eagerly: "He
+is returned, then?"
+
+"Assuredly. Three days ago," was the reply.
+
+"And the king--is he returned?" asked St. George.
+
+The man shook his head, and his very anxiety seemed important.
+
+"His Majesty, the King," he affirmed, "is still most lamentably
+absent from his throne and his people."
+
+"And his daughter?" demanded St. George then, who could not
+possibly have waited an instant longer to put that question.
+
+"The daughter of his Majesty, the King," said Cassyrus, looking
+still more as if he were having his portrait painted, "will in three
+days be recognized publicly as Princess of Yaque."
+
+St. George's heart gave a great bound. Thank Heaven, she was here,
+and safe. His hope and confidence soared heavenward. And by some
+miracle she was to take her place as the people of Yaque had
+petitioned. But what was the meaning of that news of the prince's
+treachery which Jarvo and Akko had come bearing? The prince had
+faithfully fulfilled his mission and had conducted the daughter of
+the King of Yaque safely to her father's country. What did it all
+mean?
+
+St. George hardly noted the majestic square through which they
+were passing. Impressions of great buildings, dim white and misty
+grey and bathed in light, bewilderingly succeeded one another;
+but, as in the days which followed the news of his inheritance, he
+found himself now in a temper of unsurprise, in that mental
+atmosphere--properly the normal--which regards all miracle as
+natural law. He even omitted to note what was of passing
+strangeness: that neither the retinue of the minister nor the
+others upon the streets cast more than casual glances at their
+unusual visitors. But when the great gates of the palace were
+readied his attention was challenged and held, for though mere
+marvels may become the air one breathes, beauty will never cease
+to amaze, and the vista revealed was of almost disconcerting
+beauty.
+
+Avenues of brightness, arches of green, glimpses of airy columns, of
+boundless lawns set with high, pyramidal shrines, great places of
+quiet and straight line, alleys whose shadow taught the necessity of
+mystery, the sound of water--the pure, positive element of it
+all--and everywhere, above, below and far, that delicate, labyrinth
+light, diffused from no visible source. It was as if some strange
+compound had changed the character of the dark itself, transmuting
+it to a subtle essence more exquisite than light, inhabiting it with
+wonders. And high above their heads where this translucence seemed
+to mix with the upper air and to fuse with moonbeams, sprang almost
+joyously the pale domes and cornices of the palace, sending out
+floating streamers and pennons of colours nameless and unknown.
+
+"Jupiter," said the human Amory in awe, "what a picture for the
+first page of the supplement."
+
+St. George hardly heard him. The picture held so perfectly the
+elusive charm of the Question--the Question which profoundly
+underlies all things. It was like a triumphant burst of music which
+yet ends on a high note, with imperfect close, hinting passionately
+at some triumph still loftier.
+
+From either side of the wall of the palace yard came glittering a
+detachment of the Royal Golden Guard, clad in uniforms of unrelieved
+cloth-of-gold. These halted, saluted, wheeled, and between their
+shining ranks St. George and Amory footed quietly on, followed by
+Rollo carrying the yellow oil-skins. To St. George there was relief
+in the motion, relief in the vastness, and almost a boy's delight in
+the pastime of living the hour.
+
+Yet Royal Golden Guard, majestic avenues, and towered palace with
+its strange banners floating in strange light, held for him but one
+reality. And when they had mounted the steps of the mighty entrance,
+and the sound of unrecognized music reached him--a very myth of
+music, elusive, vagrant, fugued--and the palace doors swung open to
+receive them, he could have shouted aloud on the brilliant
+threshold:
+
+"He says she is here in Yaque."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+THE LADY OF KINGDOMS
+
+
+So there were St. George and Amory presently domiciled in a prince's
+palace such as Asia and Europe have forgotten, as by and by they
+will forget the Taj Mahal and the Bon Marche. And at nine o'clock
+the next morning in a certain Tyrian purple room in the west wing of
+the Palace of the Litany the two sat breakfasting.
+
+"One always breakfasts," observed St. George. "The first day that
+the first men spend on Mars I wonder whether the first thing they do
+will be to breakfast."
+
+"Poor old Mars has got to step down now," said Amory. "We are one
+farther on. I don't know how it will be, but if I felt on Mars the
+way I do now, I should assent to breakfast. Shouldn't you?"
+
+"On my life, Toby," said St. George, "as an idealist you are
+disgusting. Yes, I should."
+
+The table had been spread before an open window, and the window
+looked down upon the palace garden, steeped in the gold of the sunny
+morning, and formal with aisles of mighty, flowering trees. Within,
+the apartment was lofty, its walls fashioned to lift the eye to
+light arches, light capitals, airy traceries, and spaces of the hue
+of old ivory, held in heavenly quiet. The sense of colour, colour
+both captive and atmospheric, was a new and persistent delight, for
+it was colour purified, specialized, and infinitely extended in
+either direction from the crudity of the seven-winged spectrum. The
+room was like an alcove of outdoors, not divorced from the open air
+and set in contra-distinction, but made a continuation of its space
+and order and ancient repose--a kind of exquisite porch of light.
+
+Across this porch of light Rollo stepped, bearing a covered dish.
+The little breakfast-table and the laden side-table were set with
+vessels of rock-crystal and drinking-cups of silver gilt, and
+breakfast consisted of delicately-prepared sea-food, a pulpy fruit,
+thin wine and a paste of delicious powdered gums. These things Rollo
+served quite as if he were managing oatmeal and eggs and china. One
+would have said that he had been brought up between the covers of an
+ancient history, nothing in consequence being so old or so new as to
+amaze him. Upon their late arrival the evening before he had
+instantly moved about his duties in all the quiet decorum with which
+he officiated in three rooms and a bath, emptying the oil-skins,
+disposing of their contents in great cedar chests, and, from
+certain rich and alien garments laid out for the guests, pretending
+as unconcernedly to fleck lint as if they had been broadcloth from
+Fifth Avenue. He stood bending above the breakfast-table, his lean,
+shadowed hands perfectly at home, his lean, shadowed face all
+automatic attention.
+
+"Rollo," said St. George, "go and look out the window and see if
+Sodom is smoking."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo, and moved to the nearest casement and bent
+his look submissively below.
+
+"Everything quiet, sir," he reported literally; "a very warm day,
+sir. But it's easy to sleep, sir, no matter how warm the days are if
+only the nights are cool. Begging your pardon, sir."
+
+St. George nodded.
+
+"You don't see Jezebel down there in the trees," he pressed him, "or
+Elissa setting off to found Carthage? Chaldea and Egypt all calm?"
+he anxiously put it.
+
+Rollo stirred uneasily.
+
+"There's a couple o' blue-tailed birds scrappin' in a palm tree,
+sir," he submitted hopefully.
+
+"Ah," said St. George, "yes. There would be. Now, if you like," he
+gave his servant permission, "you may go to the festivals or the
+funeral games or wherever you choose to-day. Or perhaps," he
+remembered with solicitude, "you would prefer to be present at the
+wedding-of-the-land-water-with-the-sea-water, providing, as I
+suspect, Tyre is handy?"
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Rollo doubtfully.
+
+"Mind you put your money on the crack disc-thrower, though," warned
+St. George, "and you might put up a couple of darics for me."
+
+"No," languidly begged Amory, "pray no. You are getting your periods
+mixed something horrid."
+
+"A person's recreation is as good for him as his food, sir,"
+proclaimed Rollo, sententious, anxious to agree.
+
+"Food," said Amory languidly, "this isn't food--it's molten history,
+that's what it is. Think--this is what they had to eat at the cafes
+boulevardes of Gomorrah. And to think we've been at Tony's, before
+now. Do you remember," he asked raptly, "those brief and savoury
+banquets around one o'clock, at Tony's? From where Little Cawthorne
+once went away wearing two omelettes instead of his overshoes? Don't
+tell me that Tonycana and all this belong to the same system in
+space. Don't tell me--"
+
+He stopped abruptly and his eyes sought those of St. George. It was
+all so incredible, and yet it was all so real and so essentially,
+distractingly natural.
+
+"I feel as if we had stepped through something, to somewhere else.
+And yet, somehow, there is so little difference. Do you suppose when
+people die _they_ don't notice any difference, either?"
+
+"What I want to know," said Amory, filling his pipe, "is how it's
+going to look in print. Think of Crass--digging for head-lines."
+
+St. George rose abruptly. Amory was delicious, especially his drawl;
+but there were times--
+
+"Print it," he exclaimed, "you might as well try to print the
+absolute."
+
+Amory nodded.
+
+"Oh, if you're going to be Neoplatonic," he said, "I'm off to hum an
+Orphic hymn. Isn't it about time for the prince? I want to get out
+with the camera, while the light is good."
+
+The lateness of the hour of their arrival at the palace the evening
+before had prevented the prince from receiving them, but he had sent
+a most courteous message announcing that he himself would wait upon
+them at a time which he appointed. While they were abiding his
+coming, Rollo setting aside the dishes, Amory smoking, strolling up
+and down, and examining the faint symbolic devices upon the walls'
+tiling, St. George stood before one of the casements, and looked
+over the aisles of flowering tree-tops to the grim, grey sides of
+Mount Khalak, inscrutable, inaccessible, now not even hinting at the
+walls and towers upon its secret summit. He was thinking how
+heavenly curious it was that the most wonderful thing in his
+commonplace world of New York--that is, his meeting with
+Olivia--should, out here in this world of things wonderful beyond
+all dream, still hold supreme its place as the sovereign wonder, the
+sovereign delight.
+
+"I dare say that means something," he said vaguely to himself, "and
+I dare say all the people who are--in love--know what it does mean,"
+and at this his spirit of adventure must have nodded at him, as if
+it understood, too.
+
+When, in a little time, Prince Tabnit appeared at the open door of
+the "porch of light," it was as if he had parted from St. George in
+McDougle Street but the night before. He greeted him with exquisite
+cordiality and his welcome to Amory was like a welcome unfeigned. He
+was clad in white of no remembered fashion, with the green gem
+burning on his breast, but his manner was that of one perfectly
+tailored and about the most cosmopolitan offices of modernity. One
+might have told him one's most subtly humourous story and rested
+certain of his smile.
+
+"I wonder," he asked with engaging hesitation when he was seated,
+"whether I may have a--cigarette? That is the name? Yes, a
+cigarette. Tobacco is unknown in Yaque. We have invented no colonies
+useful for the luxury. How can it be--forgive me--that your people,
+who seem remote from poetry, should be the devisers and popularizers
+of this so poetic pastime? To breathe in the green of earth and the
+light of the dead sun! The poetry of your American smoke delights
+me."
+
+St. George smiled as he offered the prince his case.
+
+"In America," he said, "we devised it as a vice, your Highness. We
+are obliged to do the same with poetry, if we popularize it."
+
+And St. George was thinking:
+
+"Miss Holland. He has seen Miss Holland--perhaps yesterday. Perhaps
+he will see her to-day. And how in this world am I ever to mention
+her name?"
+
+But the prince was in the idlest and most genial of humours. He
+spoke at once of the matters uppermost in the minds of his guests,
+gave them news of the party from New York, told how they were in
+comfort in the palace on the summit of Mount Khalak, struck a
+momentary tragic note in mention of the mystery still mantling the
+absence of the king and repeated the announcement already made by
+Cassyrus, the premier, that in two days' time, failing the return of
+the sovereign, the king's daughter would be publicly recognized,
+with solemn ceremonial, as Princess of Yaque. Then he turned to St.
+George, his eyes searching him through the haze of smoke.
+
+"Your own coming to Yaque," he said abruptly, "was the result of a
+sudden decision?"
+
+"Quite so, your Highness," replied St. George. "It was wholly
+unexpected."
+
+"Then we must try to make it also an unexpected pleasure," suggested
+the prince lightly. "I am come to ask you to spend the day with me
+in looking about Med, the King's City."
+
+He dropped the monogrammed stub of his cigarette in a little jar of
+smaragdos, brought, he mentioned in passing, from a despoiled temple
+of one of the Chthonian deities of Tyre, and turned toward his
+guests with a winning smile.
+
+"Come," he said, "I can no longer postpone my own pleasure in
+showing you that our nation is the Lady of Kingdoms as once were
+Babylon and Chaldea."
+
+It was as if the strange panorama of the night before had once more
+opened its frame, and they were to step within. As the prince left
+them St. George turned to Rollo for the novelty of addressing a
+reality.
+
+"How do you wish to spend the day, Rollo?" he asked him.
+
+Rollo looked pensive.
+
+"Could I stroll about a bit, sir?" he asked.
+
+"Stroll!" commanded St. George cheerfully.
+
+"Thank you, sir," said Rollo. "I always think a man can best learn
+by observation, sir."
+
+"Observe!" supplemented his master pleasantly, as a detachment of
+the guard appeared to conduct Amory and him below.
+
+"Don't black up the sandals," Amory warned Rollo as he left him,
+"and be back early. We may want you to get us ready for a mastodon
+hunt."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo with simplicity, "I'll be back quite some
+time before tea-time, sir."
+
+St. George was smiling as they went down the corridor. He had been
+vain of his love that, in Yaque as in America, remained the thing it
+was, supreme and vital. But had not the simplicity of Rollo taken
+the leap in experience, and likewise without changing? For a moment,
+as he went down the silent corridors, lofty as the woods, vocal with
+faint inscriptions on the uncovered stone, the old human doubt
+assailed him. The very age of the walls was a protest against the
+assumption that there is a touchstone that is ageless. Even if there
+is, even if love is unchanging, the very temper of unconcern of his
+valet might be quite as persistent as love itself. But the gallery
+emptying itself into a great court open to the blue among graven
+rafters, St. George promptly threw his doubt to the fresh,
+heaven-kissing wind that smote their faces, and against mystery and
+argument and age alike he matched only the happy clamour of his
+blood. Olivia Holland was on the island, and all the age was gold.
+In Yaque or on the continents there can be no manner of doubt that
+this is love, as Love itself loves to be.
+
+They emerged in the appeasing air of that perfect morning, and the
+sweetness of the flowering trees was everywhere, and wide roads
+pointed invitingly to undiscovered bournes, and overhead in the
+curving wind floated the flags and streamers of those joyous, wizard
+colours.
+
+They went out into the rejoicing world, and it was like penetrating
+at last into the heart of that "land a great way off" which holds
+captive the wistful thought of the children of earth, and reveals
+itself as elusively as ecstasy. If one can remember some journey
+that he has taken long ago--Long Ago and Far Away are the great
+touchstones--and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget
+the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and forget
+the fabric, then he will understand the spirit that informed that
+first morning in Yaque. It was a morning all compact of wonder and
+delight--wonder at that which half-revealed itself, delight in the
+ever-present possibility that here, there, at any moment, Olivia
+Holland might be met. As for the wonder, that had taken some three
+thousand years to accumulate, as nearly as one could compute; and as
+for the delight, that had taken less than ten days to make possible;
+and yet there is no manner of doubt which held high place in the
+mind of St. George as the smooth miles fled away from hurrying
+wheels.
+
+Such wheels! Motors? St. George asked himself the question as he
+took his place beside the prince in the exquisitely light vehicle,
+Amory following with Cassyrus, and the suites coming after, like the
+path from a lanthorn. For the vehicles were a kind of electric
+motor, but constructed exquisitely in a fashion which, far from
+affronting taste, delighted the eye by leading it to lines of
+unguessed beauty. They were motors as the ancients would have built
+them if they had understood the trick of science, motors in which
+the lines of utility were veiled and taught to be subordinate. The
+speed attained was by no means great, and the motion was gentle and
+sacrificed to silence. And when St. George ventured to ask how they
+had imported the first motors, the prince answered that as Columbus
+was sailing on the waters of the Atlantic at adventure, the people
+of Yaque were touring the island in electric motors of much the same
+description, though hardly the clumsiness, of those which he had
+noticed in New York.
+
+This was the first astonishment, and other astonishments were to
+follow. For as they went about the island it was revealed that the
+remainder of the world is asleep with science for a pillow and the
+night-lamp of philosophy casting shadows. Yet as the prince
+exhibited wonders, one after another, St. George, dimly conscious
+that these are the things that men die to discover, would have given
+them all for one moment's meeting with Olivia on that high-road of
+Med. If you come to think of it, this may be why science always has
+moved so slowly, creeping on from point to point.
+
+Thus it came about that when Prince Tabnit indicated a low,
+pillared, temple-like building as the home of perpetual motion,
+which gave the power operating the manufactures and water supply of
+the entire island, St. George looked and understood and resolved to
+go over the temple before he left Yaque, and then fell a-wondering
+whether, when he did so, Olivia would be with him. When the prince
+explained that it is ridiculous to suppose that combustion is the
+chief means of obtaining light and heat, or that Heaven provided
+divinely-beautiful forests for the express purpose of their being
+burned up; and when he told him that artificial light and heat were
+effected in a certain reservoir (built with a classic regard for the
+dignity of its use as a link with unspoken forces) St. George
+listened, and said over with attention the name of the substance
+acted upon by emanations--and wondered if Olivia were not afraid of
+it. So it was all through the exhibition of more wonders scientific
+and economic than any one has dreamed since every one became a
+victim of the world's habit of being afraid to dream. Although it is
+true that when St. George chanced to observe that there were about
+Med few farms of tilled ground, the prince's reply did startle him
+into absorbed attention:
+
+"You are referring to agriculture?" Prince Tabnit said after a
+moment's thought. "I know the word from old parchments brought from
+Phoenicia by our ancestors. But I did not know that the art is in
+practice anywhere in the world. Do you mean to assure me," cried the
+prince suddenly, "that the vegetables which I ate in America were
+raised by what is known as 'tilling the soil'?"
+
+"How else, your Highness?" doubted St. George, wondering if he were
+responsible for the fading mentality of the prince.
+
+Prince Tabnit looked away toward the splendour of some new thought.
+
+"How beautiful," he said, "to subsist on the sun and the dust.
+Beautiful and lost, like the dreams of Mitylene. But I feel as if I
+were reading in Genesis," he declared. "Is it possible that in this
+'age of science' of yours it has not occurred to your people that if
+plants grow by slowly extracting their own elements from the soil,
+those elements artificially extracted and applied to the seed will
+render growth and fruitage almost instantaneous?"
+
+"At all events we've speculated about it," St. George hastened to
+impart with pride, "just as we do about telephones that will let
+people see one another when they talk. But nearly every one smiles
+at both."
+
+"Don't smile," the prince warned him. "Yaque has perfected both
+those inventions only since she ceased to smile at their
+probability. Nothing can be simpler than instantaneous vegetation.
+Any Egyptian juggler can produce it by using certain acids. We have
+improved the process until our fruits and vegetables are produced as
+they are needed, from hour to hour. This was one of the so-called
+secrets of the ancient Phoenicians--has it never occurred to you as
+important that the Phoenician name for Dionysos, the god of
+wine-growers, was lost?"
+
+Mentally St. George added another barrel to the cargo of _The
+Aloha_, and wondered if the _Sentinel_ would start botanical gardens
+and a lighting plant and turn them to the account of advertisers.
+
+All the time, mile upon mile, was unrolling before them the
+unforgetable beauty of the island. So perfectly were its features
+marshaled and so exact were its proportions that, as in many great
+experiences and as in all great poems, one might not, without
+familiarity, recall its detail, but must instead remain wrapped in
+the glory of the whole. The avenues, wide as a river, swept between
+white banks of majestic buildings combining with the magic of great
+mass the pure beauty of virginal line. Line, the joy of line, the
+glory of line, almost, St. George thought, the divinity of line, was
+everywhere manifest; and everywhere too the divinity of colour, no
+longer a quality extraneous, laid on as insecure fancy dictates,
+but, by some law long unrevealed, now actually identified with the
+object which it not so much decorated as purified. The most
+interesting of the thoroughfares led from the Eurychorus, or public
+square, along the lagoon. This fair water, extending from Med to
+Melita, was greenly shored and dotted with strange little pleasure
+crafts with exquisite sweeping prows and silken canopies. Before a
+white temple, knee-deep in whose flowered ponds the ibises dozed
+and contemplated, was anchored the imperial trireme, with
+delicately-embroidered sails and prow and poop of forgotten metals.
+From within, temple music sounded softly and was never permitted to
+be silenced, as the flame of the Vestals might never be
+extinguished. Here on the shores had begun the morning traffic of
+itinerant merchants of Med and Melita, compelled by law to carry on
+their exchange in the morning only, when the light is least lovely.
+Upon canopied wagons drawn by strange animals, with shining horns,
+were displayed for sale all the pleasantest excuses for
+commerce--ostrich feathers, gums, gems, quicksilver, papyrus, bales
+of fair cloth, pottery, wine and oranges. The sellers of salt and
+fish and wool and skins were forced down under the wharfs of the
+lagoon, and there endeavoured to attract attention by displaying
+fanciful and lovely banners and by liberating faint perfumes of the
+native orris and algum. Street musicians, playing tunefully upon the
+zither and upon the crowd, wandered, wearing wreaths of fir, and
+clustered about stalls where were offered tenuous blades, and
+statues, and temple vessels filled with wine and flowers.
+
+At the head of the street leading to the temple of Baaltis (My
+Lady--Aphrodite) the prince's motor was checked while a procession
+of pilgrims, white-robed and carrying votive offerings, passed
+before them, the votive tablet to the Lady Tanith and the Face of
+Baal being borne at the head of the line by a dignitary in a smart
+electric victoria. This was one of the frequent Festival Embassies
+to Melita, to combine religious rites with mourning games and the
+dedication of the tablet, and there was considerable delay incident
+to the delivery of a wireless message to the dignitary with the
+tablet of the Semitic inscription. St. George wondered vaguely why,
+in a world of marvels, progress should not already have outstripped
+the need of any communication at all. This reminded him of something
+at which the prince had hinted away off in another aeon, in another
+world, when St. George had first seen him, and there followed ten
+minutes of talk not to be forgotten.
+
+"Would it be possible for you to tell me, your Highness," St. George
+asked,--and thereafter even a lover must have forgiven the brief
+apostasy of his thought--"how it can be that you know the English?
+How you are able to speak it here in Yaque?"
+
+The motor moved forward as the procession passed, and struck into a
+magnificent country avenue bordered by trees, tall as elms and
+fragrant as acacias.
+
+"I can tell you, yes," said the prince, "but I warn you that you
+will not in the least understand me. I dare say, however, that I may
+illustrate by something of which you know. Do there chance to be,
+for example, any children in America who are regarded as prodigies
+of certain understanding?"
+
+"You mean," St. George asked, "children who can play on a musical
+instrument without knowing how they do it, and so on?"
+
+"Quite so," said the prince with interest.
+
+"Many, your Highness," affirmed St. George. "I myself know a child
+of seven who can play most difficult piano compositions without ever
+having been taught, or knowing in the least how he does it."
+
+"Do you think of any one else?" asked the prince.
+
+"Yes," said St. George, "I know a little lad of about five, I should
+say, who can add enormous numbers and instantly give the accurate
+result. And he has no idea how he does that, and no one has ever
+taught him to count above twelve. Oh--every one knows those cases, I
+fancy."
+
+"Has any one ever explained them, Mr. St. George?" asked the prince.
+
+"How should they?" asked St. George simply. "They are prodigies."
+
+"Quite so," said the prince again. "It is almost incredible that
+these instances seem to suggest to no one that there must be other
+ways to 'learn' music and mathematics--and, therefore, everything
+else--than those known to your civilization. Let me assure you that
+such cases as these, far from being miracles and prodigies, are
+perfectly normal when once the principle is understood, as we of
+Yaque understand it. It is the average intelligence among your
+people which is abnormal, inasmuch as it is unable to perform these
+functions which it was so clearly intended to exercise."
+
+"Do you mean," asked St. George, "that we need not learn--as we
+understand 'learn'?"
+
+"Precisely," said the prince simply. "You are accustomed, I was told
+in New York, to say that there is 'no royal road to learning.' On
+the contrary, I say to you that the possibilities of these children
+are in every one. But to my intense surprise I find that we of Yaque
+are the only ones in the world who understand how to use these
+possibilities. Our system of education consists simply in mastering
+this principle. After that, all knowledge--all languages, for
+instance--everything--belongs to us."
+
+St. George looked away to the rugged sides of Mount Khalak, lying in
+its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima
+Thule. It was all right--what he had just been hearing was a part of
+this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet _he_
+was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic,
+perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the
+prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that
+he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might
+have been his of his own accord if only he had understood how to
+call them in!
+
+"That would make a very jolly thing of college," he pensively
+conceded. "You could not show me how it is managed, your Highness?"
+he besought. "That will hardly come in bulk, too--"
+
+The prince shook his head, smiling.
+
+"I could not 'show you,' as you say," he answered, "any more than I
+could, at present, send a wireless communication without the
+apparatus--though it will be only a matter of time until that is
+accomplished, too."
+
+St. George pulled himself up sharply. He glanced over his shoulder
+and saw Amory polishing his pince-nez and looking quite as if he
+were leaning over hansom-doors in the park, and he turned quickly to
+the prince, half convinced that he had been mocked.
+
+"Suppose, your Highness," he said, "that I were to print what you
+have just told me on the front page of a New York morning paper,
+for people to glance over with their coffee? Do you think that even
+the most open-minded among them would believe that there is such a
+place as Yaque?"
+
+The prince smiled curiously, and his long-fringed lids drooped in
+momentary contemplation. The auto turned into that majestic avenue
+which terminates in the Eurychorus before the Palace of the Litany.
+St. George's eye eagerly swept the long white way. At its far end
+stood Mount Khalak. _She_ must have passed over this very ground.
+
+"There is," the prince's smooth voice broke in upon his dream, "no
+such place as Yaque--as you understand 'place.'"
+
+"I beg your pardon, your Highness?" St. George doubted blankly. Good
+Heavens. Maybe there had arrived in Yaque no Olivia, as he
+understood Olivia.
+
+"You showed some surprise, I remember," continued the prince, "when
+I told you, in McDougle Street, that we of Yaque understand the
+Fourth Dimension."
+
+McDougle Street. The sound smote the ear of St. George much as would
+the clang of the fire patrol in the midst of light opera.
+
+"Yes, yes," he said, his attention now completely chained. Yet even
+then it was not that he cared so absorbingly about the Fourth
+Dimension. But what if this were all some trick and if, in this
+strange land, Olivia had simply been flashed before his eyes by the
+aid of mirrors?
+
+"I find," said the prince with deliberation, "that in America you
+are familiar with the argument that, if your people understood
+only length and breadth and did _not_ understand the Third
+Dimension--thickness--you could not then conceive of lifting, say,
+a square or a triangle and laying it down upon another square or
+triangle. In other words, you would not know anything of _up_ and
+_down_."
+
+St. George nodded. This was the familiar talk of college
+class-rooms.
+
+"As it is," pursued the prince, "your people do perfectly understand
+lifting a square and placing it upon a square, or a triangle upon a
+triangle. But you do not know anything about placing a cube upon a
+cube, or a pyramid upon a pyramid _so that both occupy the same
+space at the same time_. We of Yaque have mastered that principle
+also," the prince tranquilly concluded, "and all that of which this
+is the alphabet. That is why we are able to keep our island unknown
+to the world--not to say 'invisible.'"
+
+For a moment St. George looked at him speechlessly; then, in spite
+of himself, a slow smile overspread his face.
+
+"But," he said, "your Highness, there is not a mathematician in the
+civilized world who has not considered that problem and cast it
+aside, with the word that if fourth-dimensional space does exist it
+can not possibly be inhabited."
+
+"Quite so," said the prince, "and yet here we are."
+
+And, if you come to think of it--as St. George did--that is the only
+answer to a world of impossibilities already proved possible. But
+the vista which all this opened smote him with irresistible humour.
+
+"Ah well now, I suppose, your Highness," he said, "that our ocean
+liners sail clean through the island of Yaque, then, and never even
+have their smoke pushed sidewise?"
+
+The prince laughed pleasantly.
+
+"Have you ever," he asked, "had occasion to explain the principles
+of hydraulics, or chess, or philosophical idealism to a
+three-year-old child, or a charwoman? You must forgive me, but
+really I can think of no better comparison. I am quite as powerless
+now as you have been if you have ever attempted it. I can only
+assure you that such things _are_. Without Jarvo or Akko or some one
+who understood, you might have sailed the high seas all your life
+and never have come any nearer to Yaque."
+
+St. George reflected.
+
+"Is Yaque the only example of this kind of thing," he asked, "that
+the Fourth Dimension would reveal?"
+
+"By no means," said the prince in surprise, "the world is
+literally teeming with like revelations, once the key is in your
+hands. The Fourth Dimension is only the beginning. We utilize that
+to isolate our island. But the higher dimensions are gradually
+being conquered, too. Nearly all of us can pass into the Fifth at
+will, 'disappearing,' as you have the word, from the lower
+dimensions. It is well-known to you that in a land whose people
+knew length and breadth, but no _up_ and _down_, an object might
+be pushed, but never lifted _up_ or put _down_. If it were to be
+lifted, such a people would believe it to have 'disappeared.' So,
+from you who know only three dimensions, Yaque has 'disappeared,'
+until one of us guides you here. Also we pass at will into the
+Fifth Dimension and even higher, and seem to 'disappear'; the only
+difference is that, there, we should not be able yet to guide one
+who did not himself understand how to pass there. Just as one who
+understands how to die and to come to life, as you have the
+phrase, would not be able to take with him any one who did not
+understand how to take himself there..."
+
+St. George listened, grasping at straws of comprehension,
+remembering how he had heard all this theorized about and smiled at;
+but most of all he was beset by a practical consideration.
+
+"Then," he said suddenly, the question leaping to his lips almost
+against his will, "if you hold this key to all knowledge, how is it
+that the king--Mr. Holland--could get away from you, and the
+Hereditary Treasure be lost?"
+
+The prince sighed profoundly.
+
+"We have by no means," he said, "perfected our knowledge. We are at
+one with the absolute in knowledge--true. But the affairs of every
+day most frequently elude us. Not even the most advanced among us
+are perfect intuitionists. We have by no means reached that
+desirable and inevitable day when our minds shall flow together,
+without need of communication, without possibility of secret. We
+still suffer the disadvantage of a slight barrier of personality."
+
+"And it is into one of these lapses," thought St. George
+irreverently, "that the king has disappeared." Aloud he asked
+curiously concerning a matter which was every moment becoming more
+incomprehensible.
+
+"But how, your Highness," he said simply, "did your people ever
+consent to have an American for your king?"
+
+Before the prince could reply there occurred a phenomenon that sent
+all thought of such insubstantialities as the secrets of the Fourth
+Dimension far in the background.
+
+The prince's motor, closely followed by the others of the train, had
+reached a little eminence from which the island unrolled in fair
+patterns. Before them the smooth road unwound in varied light. At
+their left lay a still grove from whose depths was glimpsed a slim
+needle of a tower, rising, arrow-like, from the green. In the
+distance lay Med, with shining domes. The water of the lagoon gave
+brightness here and there among the hills. And as St. George and the
+prince looked over the prospect they saw, far down the avenue toward
+Med, a little, moving speck--a speck moving with a rapidity which
+neither the prince's motor nor any known motor of Yaque had ever
+before permitted itself.
+
+In an instant the six members of the Royal Golden Guard, who upon
+beautiful, spirited horses rode in advance of the train of the
+prince, wheeled and thundered back, lifting glittering hands of
+warning. "Aside! Aside!" shrieked the main Golden Guard, "a motor is
+without control!"
+
+Immediately there was confusion. At a touch the prince's car was
+drawn to the road's extreme edge, and the Golden Guards rode
+furiously back along the train, hailing the peaceful, slow-going
+machines into orderly retreat. They were all sufficiently amenable,
+for at sight of the alarming and unprecedented onrush of the growing
+speck that was bearing full down upon them, anxiety sat upon every
+face.
+
+St. George watched. And as the car drew nearer the thought which, at
+first sight of its speed, had vaguely flashed into being, took
+definite shape, and his blood leaped to its music. Whose hand would
+be upon that lever, whose daring would be directing its flight,
+whose but one in all Yaque--and that Olivia's?
+
+It was Olivia. That was plain even in the mere instant that it took
+the great, beautiful motor, at thirty miles an hour, to flash past
+them. St. George saw her--coat of hunting pink and fluttering veil
+and shining eyes; he was dimly conscious of another little figure
+beside her, and of the unmistakable and agonized Mrs. Hastings in
+the tonneau; but it was only Olivia's glance that he caught as it
+swept the prince. There was the faintest possible smile, and she was
+gone; and St. George, his heart pounding, sat staring stupidly after
+that shining cloud of dust, frantically wondering whether she could
+just possibly have seen him. For this was no trick of the
+imagination, his galloping heart told him that. And whether or not
+Yaque was a place, the world, the world was within his grasp,
+instinct with possibilities heavenly sweet. His eyes met Amory's in
+the minute when Cassyrus, prime minister of Yaque, had it borne in
+upon him that this was no runaway machine, but the ordinary and
+preferred pace of the daughter of their king; and while Cassyrus, at
+the enormity of the conception, breathed out expostulations in
+several languages--some of them known to us only by means of
+inscriptions on tombs--Amory spoke to St. George:
+
+"Who was the other girl?" he asked comprehensively.
+
+"What other girl?" St. George blankly murmured.
+
+And at this, Amory turned away with a look that could be made to
+mean whatever Amory meant.
+
+On went the imperial train faring back to Med over the road lately
+stirred to shining dust by the wheels of Olivia's auto. Olivia's
+auto. St. George was secretly saying over the words with a kind of
+ecstatic non-comprehension, when the prince spoke:
+
+"That," he said, "may explain why an American has been able to
+govern us. Chance crowned him, but he made himself king."
+
+Prince Tabnit hesitated and his eyes wandered--and those of St.
+George followed--to a far winding dot in that opal valley, a mere
+speck of silver with a prick of pink, fleeing in a cloud of sunny
+dust.
+
+"I do not know if you will know what I mean," said the prince, "but
+hers is the spirit, and the spirit of her father, the king, which
+Yaque had never known. It is the spirit which we of Phoenicia seem
+to have lost since the wealth of the world accumulated at her ports
+and she gave her trust to the hands of mariners and mercenaries, and
+later bowed to the conqueror. It is the spirit that not all the
+continental races, I fancy, have for endowment, but yours possesses
+in rich measure. For this we would exchange half that we have
+achieved."
+
+St. George nodded, glowing.
+
+"It is a great tribute, your Highness," he said simply, and in his
+heart he laid it at Olivia's feet.
+
+Thereafter, in the long ride to Melita, during luncheon upon a high
+white terrace overlooking the sailless sea, and in the hours on the
+unforgetable roads of the islands, St. George, while incommunicable
+marvels revealed themselves linked with incommunicable beauty, sat
+in the prince's motor, his eyes searching the horizon for that
+fleeing speck of silver and pink. It did not appear again. And when
+the train of the prince rolled into the yard of the Palace of the
+Litany it trembled upon St. George's lips to ask whether the
+formalities of the court would permit him that day to scale the
+skies and call upon the royal household.
+
+"For whatever he says, I've got to do," thought St. George, "but no
+matter what he says, I shall go. Doesn't Amory realize that we've
+been more than twelve hours on this island, and that nothing has
+been done?"
+
+And then as they crossed the grassy court in the delicate hush of
+the merging light--the nameless radiance already penetrating the
+dusk--the prince spoke smoothly, as if his words bore no import
+deeper than his smile:
+
+"You are come," he said courteously, "in time for one of the
+ceremonies of our regime most important--to me. You will, I hope, do
+honour to the occasion by your presence. This evening, in the Hall
+of Kings in the Palace of the Litany, will occur the ceremony of my
+betrothal."
+
+"Your betrothal, your Highness?" repeated St. George uncertainly.
+
+"You will be attended by an escort," the prince continued, "and
+Balator, the commander of the guard, will receive you in the hall.
+May the gods permit the possible."
+
+He swept through the portico before them, and they followed dumbly.
+
+The betrothal of the prince.
+
+St. George heard, and his eager hope went down in foreboding. He
+turned, hardly daring to read his own dread in the eyes of Amory.
+
+Amory, as St. George had said, was delicious, especially his drawl;
+but there were times--now, for example, when all that the eyes of
+Amory expressed was what his lips framed, _sotto-voce_:
+
+"An American heiress, betrothed to the prince of a cannibal island!
+Wouldn't Chillingworth turn in his grave at his desk?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+TYRIAN PURPLE
+
+
+The "porch of light" proved to be an especially fascinating place at
+evening. Evening, which makes most places resemble their souls
+instead of their bodies, had a grateful task in the beautiful room
+whose spirit was always uppermost, and Evening moved softly in its
+ivory depths, preluding for Sleep. Here, his lean, shadowed face all
+anxiety, Rollo stood, holding at arm's length a parti-coloured robe
+with floating scarfs.
+
+"It seems to me, sir," he said doubtfully, "that this one would 'ave
+done better. Beggin' your pardon, sir."
+
+St. George shook his head distastefully.
+
+"It doesn't matter," he said, and broke into a slow smile as he
+looked at Amory. The robes which the prince had provided for the
+evening were rather harder to become accustomed to than the notion
+of intuitive knowledge.
+
+"There's an air about this one though, sir," opined Rollo firmly,
+"there's a cut--a sort of _way_ with the seams, so to speak, sir,
+that the other can't touch. And cut is what counts, sir, cut counts
+every time."
+
+"Ah, yes, I dare say, Rollo," said St. George, "and as a judge of
+'cut' I don't say you can be equaled. But I do say that in the
+styles of Deuteronomy you aren't necessarily what you might call
+up."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Rollo, dropping his eyes, "but a well-dressed man
+was a well-dressed man, sir, then _as_ now."
+
+As a matter of fact the well-knit, athletic young figures looked
+uncommonly well in the garments _a la mode_ in Yaque. One would have
+said that if the garments followed Deuteronomy fashions they had at
+all events been cut by the scissors of a court tailor to Louis XV.
+The result was beautiful and bizarre, but it did not suggest
+stageland because the colours were so good.
+
+"I dare say," said St. George, examining the exquisitely fine cloth
+whose shades were of curious depth and richness, "that this may be
+regular Tyrian purple."
+
+Amory waved his long sleeves.
+
+"Stop," he languidly begged, "you make me feel like a golden text."
+
+St. George went back to the row of open casements and resumed his
+walk up and down before the windows that looked away to the huge
+threatening bulk of Mount Khalak. Since the prince's announcement
+that afternoon St. George had done little besides continuing that
+walk. Now it wanted hardly half an hour to the momentous ceremony of
+the evening, big with at least one of the dozen portents of which he
+accused it.
+
+"Amory," he burst out as he walked, "if you didn't know anything
+about it, would you say that the prince could possibly have made her
+consent to marry him?"
+
+Amory, left in the middle of the great room, stood polishing his
+pince-nez exactly as if he had been waiting at the end of
+Chillingworth's desk of a bright, American morning.
+
+"If I didn't know anything about it," he said cheerfully, "I should
+say that he had. As it is, having this afternoon watched a certain
+motor wear its way past me, I should say that nothing in Yaque is
+more unlikely. And that's about as strong as you could put it."
+
+"We don't know what the man may have threatened," said St. George
+morosely, "he may have played upon her devotion to her father to
+some ridiculous extent. He may have refused to land the submarine at
+Yaque at all otherwise--"
+
+St. George broke off suddenly.
+
+"Toby!" he said.
+
+Amory looked over and nodded. He had seen that look before on St.
+George's face.
+
+"She's not going to marry the prince," said St. George, "and if her
+father is alive and in a hole, he's going to be pulled out. And
+she's _not_ going to marry the prince."
+
+"Why, no," assented Amory, "no."
+
+He had guessed a good deal of the truth since he had been watching
+St. George flee over seas upon a yacht, shod, so to speak, with
+fire, and he had arrived at the suspicion that _The Aloha_ was
+winged by little Loves and guided under water by plenty of blue and
+green dragons. But he had not, until now, been thoroughly certain
+that St. George's spirit of adventure had another name; and though
+theoretically his sympathies leaped to the look in his friend's
+eyes, yet he found himself wondering practically what effect romance
+would be having upon their enterprise. After all, from a newspaper
+point of view, to relinquish any part of the adventure was a kind of
+tragedy, and it cost Amory something to emphasize his assent.
+
+"Of course she won't," he said, "and now let's toddle down and see
+about it."
+
+When the tread of the feet of a detachment of the Royal Golden Guard
+was heard without, Rollo advanced to the door with a dignity which
+amounted to melancholy. The setting of a palace and the proximity of
+a prince had raised his office to the majesty of skilled labour. He
+always threw open the door now as who should say, "Enter. But mind
+you have a reason."
+
+At sight of the long liberty of the corridor where the light lay
+mysteriously touching tiles and tapestries to festal colours,
+Amory's spirits rose contagiously, and his eyes shone behind his
+pince-nez.
+
+"Me," he said, looking ahead with enjoyment at the glittering
+escort, "me--done in a fabric of about the eleventh shade of the
+Yaque spectrum--made loose and floppy, after a modish Canaanitish
+model. I'll wager that when the first-born of Canaan was in the
+flood-tide of glory, this very gown was worn by one of the most
+beautiful women in the pentapolis of Philistia. I'm going to
+photograph the model for the Sunday supplement, and name it _The
+Nebuchadnezzar_."
+
+Amory murmured on, and St. George hardly heard him. He could almost
+count by minutes now the time until he should see her. Would she see
+him, and might he just possibly speak with her, and what would the
+evening hold for her? As he went forth where she would be, the spell
+of the place was once more laid upon him, as it had been laid in the
+hour of his coming. Once more, as in the hour when he had first
+looked down upon the valley brimming with a light "better than any
+light that ever shone" he was at one with the imponderable things
+which, always before, had just eluded him. Now, as then, the thought
+of Olivia was the symbol for them all. So the two went on through
+the winding galleries--silent, haunted--to the great staircase, and
+below into the crowded court. And when they reached the threshold
+of the audience-chamber they involuntarily stood still.
+
+The hall was like a temple in its sense of space and height and
+clear air, but its proportions did not impress one, and indeed one
+could not remember its boundaries as one does not consider the
+boundaries of a grove. It was amphitheatre-shaped, and about it ran
+a splendid colonnade, in the niches of whose cornices were beautiful
+grotesques--but Yaque seemed to be a land whose very grotesques had
+all the dignity of the ultimate instead of crying for the indulgence
+due a phase. The roof was inlaid with prisms of clear stone, and on
+high were pilasters carved with the Tyrian sphinxes crucified upon
+upright crosses, surmounted by parhelions of burnished metal. All
+the seats faced a great dais at the chamber's far end where three
+thrones were set.
+
+But it was the men and women in the great chamber who filled St.
+George with wonder. The women--they were beautiful women,
+slow-moving, slow-eyed, of soft laughter and sudden melancholy, and
+clear, serene profiles and abundant hair. And they were all _alive_,
+fully and mysteriously alive, alive to their finger-tips. It was as
+if in comparison all other women acted and moved in a kind of
+half-consciousness. It was as if, St. George thought vaguely, one
+were to step through the frame of a pre-Raphaelite tapestry and
+suddenly find its strange women rejoicing in fulfillment instead of
+yearning, in noon instead of dusk. As he stood looking down the vast
+chamber, all springing columns and light lines lifting through the
+honey-coloured air, it smote St. George that these people, instead
+of being far away, were all near, surprisingly, unbelievably near to
+him,--in a way, nearer to his own elusive personality than he was
+himself. They were all obviously of his own class; he could
+perfectly imagine his mother, with her old lace and Roman mosaics,
+moving at home among them, and the bishop, with his wise, kindly
+smile. Yet he was irresistibly reminded of a certain haunting dream
+of his childhood in which he had seemed to himself to walk the world
+alone, with every one else allied against him because they all knew
+something that he did not know. That was it, he thought suddenly,
+and felt his pulse quickening at the intimation: _They all knew
+something that he did not know_, that he could not know. But, as
+they swept him with their clear-eyed, impersonal look, a look
+that seemed in some exquisite fashion to take no account of
+individuality, he was gratefully aware of a curious impression
+that they would like to have had him know, too.
+
+"They wish I knew--they'd rather I did know," St. George found
+himself thinking in a strange excitement, "if only I could know--if
+only I could know."
+
+He looked about him, smiling a little at his folly. He saw the
+light flash on Amory's glasses as they turned inquisitively on this
+and that, and somehow the sight steadied him.
+
+"Ah well," he assured himself, "I'll look them up in a thousand
+years or so, and we'll dine together, and then we'll say: 'Don't you
+remember how I didn't know?'"
+
+Immediately there presented himself to them a little man who proved
+to be Balator, lord-chief-commander of the Royal Golden Guard, and
+now especially directed by the prince, he pleasantly told them, to
+be responsible for their entertainment and comfort during the
+ceremony to follow. They were, in fact, his guests for the evening,
+but St. George and Amory were uncertain whether, considering his
+office, this was a high honour or a kind of exalted durance.
+However, as the man was charming the doubt was not important. He had
+an attenuated face, so conveniently brown by race as to suggest the
+most soldierly exposure, and he had great, peaceable, slow-lidded
+eyes. He was, they subsequently learned, an authority upon insect
+life in Yaque, for he had never had the smallest opportunity to go
+to war.
+
+As Balator led his guests to their seats near the throne every one
+looked on them, as they passed, with the serenest fellowship, and no
+regard persisted longer than a glance, friendly and fugitive.
+Balator himself not only refrained from stoning the barbarians with
+commonplaces, but he did not so much as mention America to them or
+treat them otherwise than as companions, as if his was not only the
+cosmopolitanism that knows no municipal or continental aliens of its
+own class, but a kind of inter-dimensional cosmopolitanism as well.
+
+"Which," said Amory afterward, "was enviable. The next man from
+Trebizond or Saturn or Fez whom I meet I'm going to greet and treat
+as if he lived the proverbial 'twenty minutes out.'"
+
+A great clock boomed and throbbed through the palace, striking an
+hour that was no more intelligible than the jargon of a ship's clock
+to a landsman. Somewhere an orchestra thrilled into haunting sound,
+poignant with disclosures barely missed. Overhead, through the
+mighty rafters of the conical roof, the moon looked down.
+
+"That'll be the same old moon," said Amory. "By Jove! Won't it?"
+
+"It will, please Heaven," said St. George restlessly; "I don't know.
+Will it?"
+
+Near the throne was seated a company of dignitaries who wore upon
+their breasts great stars and were soberly dressed in a kind of
+scholar's gown. Some whispered together and nodded and looked as
+solemn as tithing men; and others were feverishly restless and
+continually took papers from their graceful sleeves. By
+developments these were revealed to be the High Council of Yaque,
+conservative and radical, even in dimensional isolation. Farther
+back rose tier upon tier of seats sacred to the wives and daughters
+of the ministry, and St. George even looked hopelessly and
+mechanically among these for the face that he sought.
+
+To some seats slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his
+attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of
+purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to
+have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs.
+Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham, in indescribably gorgeous apparel elaborately bent to
+receive--and a member of the High Council bent to hand--two
+glittering articles which St. George was certain were side-combs.
+There the lady sat, tilting her head to keep her tortoise-shell
+glasses on her nose, perpetually curving their chain over her ear, a
+gesture by which the side-combs were perpetually displaced. If the
+island people had been painted purple, St. George felt sure that she
+would have acted quite the same. Personality meant nothing to
+her--not, as with them, because it had been merged in something
+greater, but because, with her, it was overborne by self. And there
+sat Mr. Frothingham (who did not attend the play during court
+because he believed that a man of affairs should not unduly
+stimulate the imagination), his head thrown back so that his long
+hair rested on his amazing collar, his hands laid trimly along his
+knees. In that crystal air, instinct with its delicate, dominant
+implication of things imponderable, the personality of each
+persisted undisturbed, in a kind of adamantine unconsciousness.
+Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St. George
+smiled a shade bitterly. Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?
+Is love's uttermost gift so little? But as the music swelled with
+premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very
+transitoriness disclosed: the persistence of love, love's mere
+immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is
+elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to
+which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.
+
+Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by
+the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about
+the walls and from the alcoves of the lofty roof. Then a veil
+hanging between two pillars was drawn aside, and the prince's train
+appeared. There were a detachment of the guard, splendid in their
+unrelieved gold, and the officers of the court, at their head
+Cassyrus, the premier, who had manifestly been compounded of Heaven
+to be a drum-major, and had so undeviating a look that he seemed
+always to have been caught, red-handed, at his post. Last came
+Prince Tabnit, dressed in pure white save for a collar of precious
+stones from which hung the strange green gem that St. George
+remembered. His clear face and the whiteness of his hair lent to him
+an air of almost unearthly distinction. His delicate hands wearing
+no jewels were at his sides, and his head was magnificently erect.
+He mounted the dais as the music sank to silence, and without
+preface began to speak.
+
+"My people," he said, and St. George felt himself thrilling with the
+strength and tenderness of that voice, "in the continuance of this
+our time of trial we come among you that we may win strength and
+courage from your presence. Since one mind dwells in us all, we have
+no need of words of cheer. That no message from his Majesty, the
+King, has come to us is known to you all, with mourning. But the
+gods--to whom 'here' is the same as 'there'--will permit the
+possible, and they have permitted to us the presence of the daughter
+of our sovereign, by the grace of the infinite, heir to the throne
+of Yaque. In two days, should his Majesty not then have returned to
+his sorrowing people, she will, in accordance with our custom, be
+crowned Hereditary Princess of Yaque and, after one year, Queen of
+Yaque and your rightful sovereign."
+
+As the prince paused, a little breath of assent was in the room,
+more potent than any crudity of applause.
+
+"Next," pursued the prince, "we would invite your attention to our
+own affairs, which are of importance solely as they are affected by
+the immemorial tradition of the House of the Litany. Therefore, in
+accordance with the custom of our predecessors for two thousand
+years," lightly pursued the prince, "we have named this day as the
+day of our betrothal. Moreover, this is determined upon in justice
+to the daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque, whose marriage the
+law forbids until the choice of the head of the House of the Litany
+has been made..."
+
+St. George listened, and his hope soared heavenward as the hope of
+young love will soar, in spite of itself, at the mere sight of open
+sky. The daughters of the twenty peers of Yaque! Of course they were
+to be considered. Why should he fear that, because Olivia was in
+Yaque, the mere mention of a betrothal referred to Olivia? He was
+bold enough to smile at his fears, to smile even when, as the prince
+ceased speaking, the music sounded again, as it were from the air,
+in a chorus of pure young voices with a ripple of unknown strings in
+accompaniment.
+
+Suddenly, at the opening of great doors, a flood of saffron light
+was poured upon a stair, and at the summit appeared the leisurely
+head of a procession which the two men were destined never to
+forget. Across the gallery and down the stair--it might have been
+the Golden Stair linking Near with Far--came a score of exquisite
+women in all the glory of their youth, of perfect physical beauty
+and splendid strength and fullness of life; and the wonder was not
+their beauty more than a kind of dryad delicacy of that beauty,
+which was yet not frailty but a look of angelic strength. But they
+were not remote--they were gloriously human, almost, one would say,
+divinely human, all gentle movement and warmth and tender breath.
+They were not remote, save as one's own soul would be remote by its
+very excess of intimacy with life, Little maids, so shy that their
+actuality was certain, came before them carrying flowers, and these
+were followed by youths scattering fragrant burning powder whose
+fallen flames were instantly pounced upon and extinguished by small
+furry lemurs trained to lay silver discs upon the flames. And as
+they all ranged themselves about the throne a little figure appeared
+at the top of the stairway alone, beneath the lifted curtain.
+
+She was veiled; but the elastic step, the girlish grace, the poise
+and youthful dignity were not to be mistaken. The room whirled round
+St. George, and then closed in about him and grew dark. For this was
+the woman advancing to her betrothal; from the manner of her
+entrance there could be no doubt of that. And it was none of the
+daughters of the twenty peers. It was Olivia.
+
+She wore a trailing gown of rainbow hues, more like the hues of
+water than of texture, and the warm light fell upon these as she
+descended and variously multiplied them to beauty. Her little feet
+were sandaled and a veil of indescribable thinness was wound about
+her abundant hair and fell across her face, but the gold of her hair
+escaped the veil and rippled along her gown. Carven chains and
+necklaces were upon her throat, and bracelets of beaten gold and
+jewels upon her arms. About her forehead glittered a jeweled band
+with pendent gems which, at her moving, were like noon sun upon
+water.
+
+As he realized that this was indeed she whom he had come to seek,
+only to find her hedged about with difficulties--and it might be by
+divinities--which he had not dreamed of coping, a kind of madness
+seized St. George. The lights danced before his eyes, and his
+impulse had to do with rushing up to the dais and crying everybody
+defiance but Olivia. On the moon-lit deck of _The Aloha_ he had
+dreamed out the island and the rescue of the island princess, and a
+possible home-going on his yacht to a home about which he had even
+dared to dream, too. But it had not once occurred to him to forecast
+such a contingency as this, or, later, so to explain to himself
+Prince Tabnit's change of purpose in permitting her recognition as
+Princess of Yaque--indeed, if what Jarvo and Akko had told him in
+New York were accurate, in bringing her to the island at all. And
+yet what, he thought crazily, if his guess at her part in this
+betrothal were far wrong? What if her father's safety were not the
+only consideration? What if, not unnaturally dazzled by the
+fairy-land which had opened to her ... even while he feared, St.
+George knew far better. But the number of terrors possible to a man
+in love is equal to those of battle-fields.
+
+Amory bent toward him, murmuring excitedly.
+
+"Jupiter," he said, "is she the American girl?"
+
+"She's Miss Holland," answered St. George miserably.
+
+"No--no, not the princess," said Amory, "the other."
+
+St. George looked. On the stair was a little figure in rose and
+silver--very tiny, very fair, and no doubt the lawyer's daughter.
+
+"I dare say it is," he told him, as one would say, "Now what the
+deuce of it?"
+
+Prince Tabnit had risen to receive Olivia, and St. George had to see
+him extend his hand and assist her beside him upon the dais. In the
+absence of her father she was obliged to stand alone. Then the
+little figure in rose and silver and one of the daughters of the
+peers advanced and lifted her veil, and St. George wanted to shout
+with sudden exultation. This then was she--so near, so near. Surely
+no great harm could come to them so long as the sea and the mystery
+of the island no longer lay between them. Did she know of his
+presence? Although he and Amory were seated so near the throne, they
+were at one side, and her clear, pure profile was turned toward
+them. And Olivia did not lift her eyes throughout the prime
+minister's long address, of which St. George and Amory, so lapped
+were they in wild projects and importunities, heard nothing until,
+uttered with indescribable pompousness, as if Cassyrus were a
+dowager and had made the match himself, the concluding words beat
+upon St. George's heart like stones. They were the formal
+announcement of the betrothal of Olivia, daughter of his Majesty,
+Otho I of Yaque, to Tabnit, Prince of Yaque and Head of the House of
+the Litany.
+
+St. George saw Prince Tabnit kneel before Olivia and place a ring
+upon her hand--no doubt the ring which had betrothed the island
+princesses for three thousand years. He saw the High Council
+standing with bowed heads, like the necessary archangels in an old
+painting; he caught the flash of the turquoise-blue ephod of the
+head of the religious order, as the benediction was pronounced by
+its wearer. And through it all he said to himself that all would be
+well if only she understood, if only she had the supreme
+self-consciousness to play the game. After all he knew her so
+little. He was certain of her exquisite, playful fancy, but had she
+imagination? Would she see the value of the moment and watch herself
+moving through it? Or would she live it with that feminine,
+unhumourous seriousness which is woman's weakness? She had an
+exquisite independence, he was certain that she had humour, and he
+remembered how alive she had seemed to him, receptive, like a woman
+with ten senses. But after all, would not her graceful sanity of
+view, that sense of tradition and unerring taste which he so
+reverenced, yet handicap her now and prevent her from daring
+whatever she must dare?
+
+Amory was beside himself. It was all very well to feel a great
+sympathy for St. George, but the sight was more than journalistic
+flesh and blood could look upon with sympathetic calm.
+
+"An American girl!" he breathed in spite of himself. "Why, St.
+George, if we can leave this island alive--"
+
+"Well, _you_ won't," St. George explained, with brutal directness,
+"unless you can cut that."
+
+Before silence had again fallen, the prime minister, all his fever
+of importance still upon him, once more faced the audience. This
+time his words came to St. George like a thunderbolt:
+
+"In three days' time, at noon, in this the Hall of Kings," he cried,
+letting each phrase fall as if he were its proud inventor,
+"immediately following the official recognition of Olivia, daughter
+of Otho I, as Hereditary Princess of Yaque, there will be
+solemnized, according to the immemorial tradition of the island last
+observed six hundred and eighty-four years ago by Queen Pentellaria,
+the marriage of Olivia of Yaque, to his Highness, Prince Tabnit,
+head of the House of the Litany, and chief administrator of justice.
+_For the law prescribes that no unmarried woman shall sit upon the
+throne of Yaque._ At noon of the third day will be observed the
+double ceremony of the recognition and the marriage. May the gods
+permit the possible."
+
+There was a soft insistence of music from above, a stir and breath
+about the room, the premier backed away to his seat, and St. George,
+even with the horrified tightening at his heart, was conscious of a
+vague commotion from the vicinity of Mrs. Medora Hastings. Then he
+saw the prince rise and turn to Olivia, and extend his hand to
+conduct her from the hall. The great banquet room beyond the
+colonnade was at once thrown open, and there the court circle and
+the ministry were to gather to do honour to the new princess, whom
+Prince Tabnit was to lead to the seat at his right hand at the
+table's head.
+
+To the amazement of his Highness, Olivia made no movement to accept
+the hand that he offered. Instead, she sat slightly at one side of
+the great glittering throne, looking up at him with something like
+the faintest conceivable smile which, while one saw, became once
+more her exquisite, girlish gravity. When the music sank a little
+her voice sounded above it with a sweet distinctness:
+
+"One moment, if you please, your Highness," she said clearly.
+
+It was the first time that St. George had heard her voice since its
+good-by to him in New York. And before her words his vague fears for
+her were triumphantly driven. The spirit that he had hoped for was
+in her face, and something else; St. George could have sworn that he
+saw, but no one else could have seen the look, a glimpse of that
+delicate roguery that had held him captive when he had breakfasted
+with her--several hundred years before, was it?--at the Boris. Ah,
+he need not have feared for her, he told himself exultantly. For
+this was Olivia--of America--standing in a company of the women who
+seemed like the women of whom men dream, and whose presence, save in
+glimpses at first meetings, they perhaps never wholly realize. These
+were the women of the land which "no one can define or remember."
+And yet, as he watched her now, St. George was gloriously conscious
+that Olivia not only held her own among them, but that in some charm
+of vividness and of _knowledge of laughter_, she transcended them
+all.
+
+A ripple of surprise had gone round the room. For all the air of the
+ultimate about the island-women, St. George doubted whether ever in
+the three thousand years of Yaque's history a woman had raised her
+voice from that throne upon a like occasion. And such a tender,
+beguiling, cajoling little voice it was. A voice that held little
+remarques upon whatever it had just said, and that made one
+breathless to know what would come next.
+
+"Bully!" breathed Amory, his eyes shining behind his pince-nez.
+
+Prince Tabnit hesitated.
+
+"If the princess wishes to speak with us--" he began, and Olivia
+made a charming gesture of dissent, and all the jewels in her hair
+and upon her white throat caught the light and were set glittering.
+
+"No," she said gently, "no, your Highness. I wish to speak in the
+presence of my people."
+
+She gave the "my" no undue value, yet it fell from her lips with
+delicious audacity.
+
+"Indeed," she said, "I think, your Highness, that I will speak to my
+people myself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE END OF THE EVENING
+
+
+The Hall of Kings was very still as Olivia rose. She stood with one
+hand touching her veil's hem, the other resting on the low, carved
+arm of the throne, and at the coming and going of her breath her
+jewels made the light lambent with the indeterminate colours of
+those strange, joyous banners floating far above her head.
+
+Her voice was very sweet and a little tremulous--and it is the very
+grace of a woman's courage that her voice tremble never so slightly.
+It seemed to St. George that he loved her a thousand times the more
+for that mere persuasive wavering of her words. And, while he
+listened to what he felt to be the prelude of her message, it seemed
+to him that he loved her another thousand times the more--what
+heavenly ease there is in this arithmetic of love--for the tender
+meaning which, upon her lips, her father's name took on. When,
+speaking with simplicity and directness of the subject that lay
+uppermost in the minds of them all, she asked their utmost endeavour
+in their common grief, it was clear that what she said transcended
+whatever phenomena of mere experience lay between her and those who
+heard her, and they understood. The _rapport_ was like that among
+those who hear one music. But St. George listened, and though his
+mind applauded, it ran on ahead to the terrifying future. This was
+all very well, but how was it to help her in the face of what was to
+happen in three days' time?
+
+"Therefore," Olivia's words touched tranquilly among the flying ends
+of his own thought, "I am come before you to make that sacrifice
+which my love for my father, and my grief and my anxiety demand. I
+count upon your support, as he would count upon it for me. I ask
+that one heart be in us all in this common sorrow. And I am come
+with the unalterable determination both to renounce my throne
+there"--never was anything more enchanting than the way those two
+words fell from her lips--"and to postpone my marriage"--there never
+was anything more profoundly disquieting than _those_ two words in
+such a connection--"until such time as, by your effort and by my
+own, we may have news of my father, the king; and until, by your
+effort or by my own, the Hereditary Treasure shall be restored."
+
+So, serenely and with the most ingenuous confidence, did the
+daughter of the absent King Otho make disposition of the hour's
+events. Amory leaned forward and feverishly polished his pince-nez.
+
+"What do you think of that?" he put it, beneath his breath, "what
+_do_ you think of that?"
+
+St. George, watching that little figure--so adorably, almost
+pathetically little in its corner of the great throne--knew that he
+had not counted upon her in vain. Over there on the raised seats
+Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham were looking on
+matters as helplessly as they would look at a thunder-storm or a
+circus procession, and they were taking things quite as seriously.
+But Olivia, in spite of the tragedy that the hour held for her, was
+giving the moment its exact value, guiltless of the feminine
+immorality of panic. To give a moment its due without that panic,
+is, St. George knew, a kind of genius, like creating beauty, and
+divining another's meaning, and redeeming the spirit of a thing from
+its actuality. But by that time the arithmetic of his love was by
+way of being in too many figures to talk about. Which is the proper
+plight of love.
+
+Every one had turned toward Prince Tabnit, and as St. George looked
+it smote him whimsically that that impassive profile was like the
+profiles upon the ancient coins which, almost any day, might be cast
+up by a passing hoof on the island mold. Indeed, St. George thought,
+one might almost have spent the prince's profile at a fig-stall,
+and the vender would have jingled it among his silver and never have
+detected the cheat. But in the next moment the joyous mounting of
+his blood running riot in audacious whimsies was checked by the even
+voice of the prince himself.
+
+"The gratitude and love of this people," he said slowly, "are due to
+the daughter of its sovereign for what she has proposed. It is,
+however, to be remembered that by our ancient law the State and
+every satrapy therein shall receive no service, whether of blood or
+of bond, from an alien. The king himself could serve us only in that
+he was king. To his daughter as Princess of Yaque and wife of the
+Head of the House of the Litany, this service in the search for the
+sovereign and the Hereditary Treasure will be permitted, but she may
+serve us only from the throne."
+
+"Upon my soul, then that lets _us_ out," murmured Amory.
+
+And St. George remembered miserably how, in that dingy house in
+McDougle Street, he and Olivia had listened once before to the
+recital of that law from the prince's lips. If they had known how
+next they would hear it! If they had known then what that law would
+come to mean to her! What could she do now--what could even Olivia
+do now but assent?
+
+She could do a great deal, it appeared. She could incline her head,
+with a bewitching droop of eyelids, and look up to meet the eyes of
+the prince with a serenity that was like a smile.
+
+"In my country," said Olivia gravely, "when anything special arises
+they frequently find that there is no law to cover it. It would seem
+to us"--it was as though the humility of that "us" took from her
+superb daring--"that this is a matter requiring the advice of the
+High Council. Therefore," asked little Olivia gently, "will you not
+appoint, your Highness, a special session of the High Council to
+convene at noon to-morrow, to consider our proposition?"
+
+There was a scarcely perceptible stir among the members of the High
+Council, for even the liberals were, it would seem, taken aback by a
+departure which they themselves had not instituted. Olivia, still in
+submission to tradition which she could not violate, had gained the
+time for which she hoped. With a grace that was like the conferring
+of a royal favour, Prince Tabnit appointed the meeting of the High
+Council for noon on the following day.
+
+"May the gods permit the possible," he added, and once more extended
+his hand to Olivia. This time, with lowered eyes, she gave him the
+tips of her fingers and, as the beckoning music swelled a delicate
+prelude, she stepped from the dais and suffered the prince to lead
+her toward the banquet hall.
+
+Amory drew a long breath, and it came to St. George that if he,
+Amory, said anything about what he would give if he had a leased
+wire to the _Sentinel_ Office, there would no longer be room on the
+island for them both. But Amory said no such thing. Instead, he
+looked at St. George in distinct hesitation.
+
+"I say," he brought out finally, "St. George, by Jove, do you know,
+it seems to me I've seen Miss Frothingham before. And how jolly
+beautiful she is," he added almost reverently.
+
+"Maybe it was when you were a Phoenician galley slave and she went
+by in a trireme," offered St. George, trying to keep in sight the
+bright hair and the floating veil beyond the press of the crowd.
+Would he see Olivia and would he be able to speak with her, and did
+she know he was there, and would she be angry? Ah well, she could
+not possibly be angry, he thought; but with all this in his mind it
+was hardly reasonable of Amory to expect him to speculate on where
+Miss Frothingham might have been seen before. If it weren't for this
+Balator now, St. George said to himself restlessly, and suddenly
+observed that Balator was expecting them to follow him. So, in the
+slow-moving throng, all soft hues and soft laughter, they made their
+way toward the colonnade that cut off the banquet room. And at every
+step St. George thought, "she has passed here--and here--and here,"
+and all the while, through the mighty open rafters in the conical
+roof, were to be seen those strange banners joyously floating in the
+delicate, alien light. The wine of the moment flowed in his veins,
+and he moved under strange banners, with a strange ecstasy in his
+heart.
+
+Therefore, suddenly to hear Rollo's voice at his shoulder came as a
+distinct shock.
+
+"It's one of them little brown 'uns, sir," Rollo announced in his
+best tone of mystery. "He's settin' upstairs, sir, an' he's all fer
+settin' there _till_ he sees you. He says it's most important, sir."
+
+Amory heard.
+
+"Shall I go up?" he asked eagerly; "I'd like a whiff of a pipe,
+anyway. It'll be something to tie to."
+
+"Will you go?" asked St. George in undisguised gratitude. He was
+prepared to accept most risks rather than to lose sight of the star
+he was following.
+
+With a word to Balator who explained where, on his return, he could
+find them, Amory turned with Rollo, and slipped through the crowd.
+Having reasons of his own for getting back to the hall below, Amory
+was prepared to speed well the interview with "the little brown 'un"
+who, he supposed, was Jarvo.
+
+It was Jarvo--Jarvo, in a state of excitement, profound and
+incredible. The little man, from the annoyingly serene mode of mind
+in which he had left them, was become, for him, almost agitated. He
+sprang up from a divan in the great dressing-room of their apartment
+and approached Amory almost without greeting.
+
+"Adon, adon," he said earnestly, "you must leave the palace at
+once--at once. But to-night!"
+
+Amory hunted for his pipe, found and lighted it, pressing a
+cigarette upon Jarvo who accepted, and held it, alight, in the palm
+of his hand.
+
+"To-night," he repeated, as if it were a game.
+
+"Ah well, now," said Amory reasonably, "why, Jarvo? And we so
+comfortable."
+
+The little man looked at Amory beseechingly.
+
+"I know what I know," he said earnestly, "many things will happen.
+There is danger about the palace to-night--danger it may be for you.
+I do not know all, but I come to warn you, and to warn the adon who
+has been kind to us. You have brought us here when we were alone in
+America," said Jarvo simply. "Akko and I will help you now. It was
+Akko who remembered the tower."
+
+Amory looked down at the bowl of his pipe, and shook his vestas in
+their box, and turned his eyes to Rollo, listening near by with an
+air of the most intense abstraction. Yes, all these things were
+real. They were all real, and here was he, Amory, smoking. And yet
+what was all this amazing talk about danger in the palace, and being
+warned, and remembering the tower?
+
+"Anybody would think I was Crass, writing head-lines," he told
+himself, and blew a cloud of smoke through which to look at Jarvo.
+
+"What are you talking about?" he demanded sternly.
+
+Jarvo had a little key in his hand, which he shook. The key was on a
+slender, carved ring, and it jingled. And when he offered it to him
+Amory abstractedly took it.
+
+"See, adon," said Jarvo, "see! In the ilex grove on the road that we
+took last night there is a white tower--it may be that you have
+noticed it to-day. That tower is empty, and this is the key. There
+may be guards, but I shall know how to pass among them. You must
+come with me there to-night, the three. Even then it may be too
+late, I do not know. The gods will permit the possible. But this I
+know: the Royal Guard are of the lahnas, on whom the tax to make
+good the Hereditary Treasure will fall most heavily. They are filled
+with rage against your people--you and the king who is of your
+people. I do not know what they will do, but you are not safe for
+one moment in the palace. I come to warn you."
+
+Amory's pipe went out. He sat pulling at it abstractedly, trying to
+fit together what St. George had told him of the Hereditary Treasure
+situation. And more than at any other time since his arrival on the
+island his heart leaped up at the prospect of promised adventure.
+What if St. George's romantic apostasy were not, after all, to spoil
+the flavour of the kind of adventure for which he, Amory, had been
+hoping? He leaned eagerly forward.
+
+"What would you suggest?" he said.
+
+Jarvo's eyes brightened. At once he sprang to his feet and stood
+before Amory, taking soft steps here and there as he talked, in
+movement graceful and tenuous as the greyhound of which he had
+reminded St. George.
+
+"In the palace yard," explained the little man rapidly, "is a motor
+which came from Melita, bringing guests for the ceremony of
+to-night. They will remain in the palace until after the marriage of
+the prince, two days hence. But the motor--that must go back
+to-night to Melita, adon. I have made for myself permission to take
+it there. But you--the three--must go with me. At the tower in the
+ilex grove I shall leave you, and I shall return. Is this good?"
+
+"Excellent. But what afterward?" demanded Amory. "Are we all to keep
+house in the tower?"
+
+Jarvo shook his head, like a man who has thought of everything.
+
+"Through to-morrow, yes," he said, "but to-morrow night, when the
+dark falls--"
+
+He bent forward and spoke softly.
+
+"Did not the adon wish to ascend the mountain?" he asked.
+
+"Rather," said Amory, "but how, good heavens?"
+
+"I and Akko wish to ascend also; the prince has sent us no message,
+and we fear him," said Jarvo simply. "There are on the island, adon,
+six carriers, trained from birth to make the ascent. They are the
+sons of those whose duty it was to ascend, and they the sons for
+many generations. The trail is very steep, very perilous. Six were
+taught to go up with messages long before the knowledge of the
+wireless way, long before the flight of the airships. They are
+become a tradition of the island. It is with them that you must
+ascend--if you have no fear."
+
+"Fear!" cried Amory. "But these men, what of them? They are in the
+employ of the State. How do you know they will take us?"
+
+Jarvo dropped his eyes.
+
+"I and Akko," he said quietly, "we are two of these six carriers,
+adon."
+
+Then Amory leaped up, scattering the ashes of his pipe over the
+tiles. This, then, was what was the matter with the feet of the two
+men, about which they had all speculated on the deck of _The Aloha_,
+the feet trained from birth to make the ascent of the steep trail,
+feet become long, tenuous, almost prehensile--
+
+"It's miracles, that's what it is," declared Amory solemnly. "How on
+earth did they come to take you to New York?" he could not forbear
+asking.
+
+"The prince knew nothing of your country, adon," answered Jarvo
+simply. "He might have needed us to enter it."
+
+"To climb the custom-house," said Amory abstractedly, and laughed
+out suddenly in sheer light-heartedness. Here was come to them an
+undertaking to which St. George himself must warm as he had warmed
+at the prospect of the voyage. To go up the mountain to the
+threshold of the king's palace, where lived the daughter of the
+king.
+
+Amory bent himself with a will to mastering each detail of the
+little man's proposals. Rollo, they decided, was at once to make
+ready a few belongings in the oil-skins. Immediately after the
+banquet St. George and Amory were to mingle with the throng and
+leave the palace--no difficult matter in the press of the
+departures--and, on the side of the courtyard beneath the windows of
+the banquet room, Jarvo, already joined by Rollo, would be awaiting
+them in the motor bound for Melita.
+
+"It sounds as if it couldn't be done," said Amory in intense
+enjoyment. "It's bully."
+
+He paced up and down the room, talking it over. He folded his arms,
+and looked at the matter from all sides and wondered, as touching a
+story being "covered" for Chillingworth, whether he were leaving
+anything unthought.
+
+"Chillingworth!" he said to himself in ecstasy. "Wouldn't
+Chillingworth dote to idolatry upon this sight?"
+
+Then Amory stood still, facing something that he had not seen
+before. He had come, in his walk, upon a little table set near the
+room's entrance, and bearing a decanter and some cups.
+
+"Hello," he said, "Rollo, where did this come from?"
+
+Rollo came forward, velvet steps, velvet pressing together of his
+hands, face expressionless as velvet too.
+
+"A servant of 'is 'ighness, sir," he said--Rollo did that now and
+then to let you know that his was the blood of valets--"left it some
+time ago, with the compliments of the prince. It looks like a good,
+nitzy Burgundy, sir," added Rollo tolerantly, "though the man did
+say it was bottled in something B.C., sir, and if it was it's most
+likely flat. You can't trust them vintages much farther back than
+the French Revolootion, beggin' your pardon, sir."
+
+Amory absently lifted the decanter, and then looked at it with some
+curiosity. The decanter was like a vase, ornamented with gold
+medallions covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+beauty and variety of design. Serpents, men contending with lions,
+sacred trees and apes were chased in the gold, and the little cups
+of sard were engraved in pomegranates and segments of fruit and
+pendent acorns, and were set with cones of cornelian. The cups were
+joined by a long cord of thick gold.
+
+Amory set his hand to the little golden stopper, perhaps
+hermetically sealed, he thought idly, at about the time of the
+accidental discovery of glass itself by the Phoenicians. Amory was
+not imaginative, but as he thought of the possible age of the wine,
+there lay upon him that fascination communicable from any link
+between the present and the living past.
+
+"Solomon and Sargon," he said to himself, "the geese in the capitol,
+Marathon, Alexander, Carthage, the Norman conquest, Shakespeare and
+Miss Frothingham!"
+
+He smiled and twisted the carven stopper.
+
+"And the girl is alive," he said almost wonderingly. "There has been
+so much Time in the world, and yet she is alive now. Down there in
+the banquet room."
+
+The odour of the contents of the vase, spicy, penetrating,
+delicious, crept out, and he breathed it gratefully. It was like no
+odour that he remembered. This was nothing like Rollo's "good, nitzy
+Burgundy"--this was something infinitely more wonderful. And the
+odour--the odour was like a draught. And wasn't this the wine of
+wines, he asked himself, to give them courage, exultation, the most
+superb daring when they started up that delectable mountain? St.
+George must know; he would think so too.
+
+"Oh, I say," said Amory to himself, "we must put some strength in
+Jarvo's bones too--poor little brick!"
+
+With that Amory drew the carven stopper, fitted in the little funnel
+that hung about the neck of the vase, poured a half-finger of the
+wine in each cup, and lifted one in his hand. But the mere odour was
+enough to make a man live ten lives, he thought, smiling at his own
+strange exultation. He must no more than touch it to his lips, for
+he wanted a clear head for what was coming.
+
+"Come, Jarvo," he cried gaily--was he shouting, he wondered, and
+wasn't that what he was trying to do--to shout to make some far-away
+voice answer him? "Come and drink to the health of the prince. Long
+may he live, long may he live--without us!"
+
+Amory had stood with his back to the little brown man while he
+poured the wine. As he turned, he lifted one cup to his lips and
+Rollo gravely presented the other to Jarvo. But with a bound that
+all but upset the velvet valet, the little man cleared the space
+between him and Amory and struck the cup from Amory's hand.
+
+"Adon!" he cried terribly, "adon! Do not drink--do not drink!"
+
+The precious liquid splashed to the floor with the falling cup and
+ran red about the tiles. Instantly a powerful and delightful
+fragrance rose, and the thick fumes possessed the air. Amory threw
+out his hands blindly, caught dizzily at Rollo, and was half dragged
+by Jarvo to the open window.
+
+"Oh, I say, sir--" burst out Rollo, more upset over the loss of the
+wine than he was alarmed at the occurrence. If it came to losing a
+good, nitzy Burgundy, Rollo knew what that meant.
+
+"Adon," cried Jarvo, shaking Amory's shoulders, "did you taste the
+liquor--tell me--the liquor--did you taste?"
+
+Amory shook his head. Jarvo's face and the hovering Rollo and the
+whole room were enveloped in mist, and the wine was hot on his lips
+where the cup had touched them. Yet while he stood there, with that
+permeating fragrance in the air, it came to him vaguely that he had
+never in his life known a more perfectly delightful moment. If this,
+he said to himself vaguely, was what they meant by wine in the old
+days, then so far as his own experience went, the best "nitzy"
+Burgundy was no more than a flabby, _vin ordinaire_ beside it. Not
+that "flabby" was what he meant to call it, but that was the word
+that came. For he felt as if no less than six men were flowing in
+his veins, he summed it up to himself triumphantly.
+
+But after all, the effect was only momentary. Almost as quickly as
+those strange fumes had arisen they were dissipated. And when
+presently Amory stood up unsteadily from the seat of the window, he
+could see clearly enough that Jarvo, with terrified eyes, was
+turning the vase in his hands.
+
+"It is the same," he was saying, "it must be the same. The gods have
+permitted the possible. I was here to tell you."
+
+"Tell me what?" demanded Amory with ungrateful irritation. "Is the
+stuff poison?" he asked, tottering in spite of himself as he crossed
+the floor toward him. But Jarvo turned his face, and upon it was
+such an incongruous terror that Amory involuntarily stood still.
+
+"There are known to be two," said Jarvo, holding the vase at arm's
+length, "and the one is abundant life, if the draught is not
+over-measured. But the other is ten thousand times worse than
+death."
+
+"What do you mean?" cried Amory roughly. "What are you talking
+about? If the stuff is poison can't you say so?"
+
+Jarvo looked at him swiftly.
+
+"These things are not spoken aloud in Yaque," he said simply, and
+after that he held his peace. Amory threatened him and laughed at
+him, but Jarvo shook his head. At last Amory scoffed at the whole
+matter and stretched out his hand for the vase.
+
+"Come," he said, "at all events I'll take it with me. It can't be
+very much worse than the American liqueurs."
+
+"My word for it, sir, beggin' your pardon," said Rollo earnestly,
+"it's a kind of what you might call med-i-eval Burgundy, sir."
+
+"It is not well," said Jarvo, handing the vase with reluctance, "yet
+take it--but see that it touches no lips. I charge you that, adon."
+
+Amory smiled and slipped the little vase in his coat pocket.
+
+"It's all right," he said, "I won't let it get away from me. I can
+find my legs now; I'll go back down. Look sharp, Rollo. Be down
+there with the oil-skins. We put on this Tyrian purple stuff over
+the whole outfit," he explained to Jarvo, "and I suppose, you know,
+that you can get both robes back here for us, if we escape in them?"
+
+"Assuredly, adon," said Jarvo, "and you must escape without delay.
+This wine must mean that the prince, too, wishes you harm. Now let
+me be before you for a little, so that no one may see us together. I
+shall go now, immediately, to the motor--it is waiting already by
+the wall on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+banquet hall. I shall not fail you."
+
+"On the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the banquet
+room," repeated Amory. "Thanks, Jarvo. You're all kinds of a good
+fellow."
+
+"Yes, adon," gravely assented the little man from the threshold.
+
+Ten minutes later Amory followed. Already Rollo had packed the
+oil-skins, and Amory, his nerves steadied and the excitement of all
+that the night promised come upon him, hurried before him down the
+corridor, his thoughts divided in their allegiance between the
+delight of telling St. George what was toward, and the new and
+alluring delight of seeing Antoinette Frothingham near at hand in
+the banquet room. After all, he had had only the vaguest glimpse of
+a little figure in rose and silver, and he doubted if he could tell
+her from the princess, but for the interpreting gown.
+
+Amory looked up with an irrepressible thrill of delight. He was just
+at that moment crossing the high white audience-hall, the anteroom
+to the Hall of Kings--he, Amory, in Tyrian purple garments. If
+anything were needed to complete the picture it would be to meet
+face to face, there in that big, lonely room, a little figure in
+rose and silver. It made his heart beat even to think of the
+possibilities of that situation. He skirted the Hall of Kings, and
+stood in one of the archways of the colonnade, facing the banquet
+room.
+
+The banquet-table extended about three sides of the room, whose
+centre the guests faced. The middle space was left pure, unvexed by
+columns or furnishing. At the room's far end Amory glimpsed the
+prince, at his side Olivia's white veil, and her women about her;
+and, nearer, St. George and Balator in the place appointed. A guard
+came to conduct him, and he crossed to his seat and sank down with
+the look that could be made to mean whatever Amory meant.
+
+"I expect to be served," murmured the journalist in him, "by
+beautiful tame megatheriums, in sashes. And is that glyptodon
+salad?"
+
+St. George's eyes were upon the guests, so tranquilly seated, aware
+of the hour.
+
+"I fancy," he said in half-voice, "that presently we shall see
+little flames issuing from their hair, as there used from the hair
+of the ladies in Werner's ballets."
+
+Then as Balator leaned toward him in his splendid leisure, fostering
+his charm, there came an amazing interruption.
+
+The low key of the room was electrically raised by a cry, loosed
+from some other plight of being, like an odour of burning
+encroaching upon a garden.
+
+"Why have you not waited?" some one called, and the voice--clear,
+equal, imperious--evened its way upon the air and reduced to itself
+the soft speech of the others. Silence fell upon them all, and
+their eyes were toward a figure standing in the open interval of the
+room--a figure whose aspect thrilled St. George with sudden,
+inexplicable emotion.
+
+It was an old man, incredibly old, so that one thought first of his
+age. His beard and hair were not all grey, but he had grotesquely
+brown and wrinkled flesh. His stuff robe hung in straight folds
+about his singularly erect figure, and there was in his bearing the
+dignity of one who has understood all fine and gentle things, all
+things of quietude. But his look was vacant, as if the mind were
+asleep.
+
+"Why have you not waited?" he repeated almost wonderingly. "Why have
+you not sent for me?" and his eyes questioned one and another, and
+rested on the face of the prince upon the dais, with Olivia by his
+side. The guard, whom in some fashion the strange old man had
+eluded, hurried from the borders of the room. But he broke from them
+and was off up half the length of the hall toward the prince's seat.
+
+"Do you not know?" he cried as he went, "I am Malakh. Read one
+another's eyes and you will know. I am Malakh."
+
+As the guards closed about him he tottered and would have fallen
+save that they caught him roughly and pressed to a door, half
+carrying him, and he did not resist. But as speech was renewed
+another voice broke the murmur, and with great amazement St. George
+knew that this was Olivia's voice.
+
+"No," she cried--but half as if she distrusted her own strange
+impulse, "let him stay--let him stay."
+
+St. George saw the prince's look question her. He himself was unable
+to account for her unexpected intercession, and so, one would have
+said, was Olivia. She looked up at the prince almost fearfully, and
+down the length of the listening table, and back to the old man
+whose eyes were upon her face.
+
+"He is an old man, your Highness," St. George heard her saying, "let
+him stay."
+
+Prince Tabnit, who gave a curious impression of doing everything
+that he did in obedience to inertia rather than in its defiance,
+indicated some command to the puzzled guards, and they led old
+Malakh to a stone bench not far from the dais, and there he sank
+down, looking about him without surprise.
+
+"It is well," he said simply, "Malakh has come."
+
+While St. George was marveling--but not that the old man spoke the
+English, for in Yaque it was not surprising to find the very madmen
+speaking one's own tongue--Balator explained the man.
+
+"He is a poor mad creature," Balator said. "He walks the streets of
+Med saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say, 'king,' and so he is
+seeking the king. But he is mad, and they say that he always weeps,
+and therefore they pretend to believe that he says 'Malakh,' which
+is to say 'salt.' And they call him that for his tears. Doubtless
+the princess does not understand. Her Highness has a tender heart."
+
+St. George was silent. The incident was trivial, but Olivia had
+never seemed so near.
+
+Sometimes in the world of commonplace there comes an extreme hour
+which one afterward remembers with "Could that have been I? But
+could it have been I who did that?" And one finds it in one's heart
+to be certain that it was not one's self, but some one else--some
+one very near, some one who is always sharing one's own
+consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's moments. "Perhaps,"
+St. George would have said, "there is some such person who is
+nearly, but not quite, I myself. And if there is, it was he and not
+I who was at that banquet!" It was one of the hours which seem to
+have been made with no echo. It was; and then passed into other
+ways, and one remembered only a brightness. For example, St. George
+listened to what Balator said, and he heard with utmost
+understanding, and with the frequent pleasure of wonder, and was now
+and then exquisitely amused as one is amused in dreams. But even as
+he listened, if he tried to remember the last thing that was said,
+and the next to the last thing, he found that these had escaped him;
+and as he rose from the table he could not recall ten words that had
+been spoken. It was as if the some one very near, who is always
+sharing one's consciousness and inexplicably mixing with one's
+moments, had taken St. George's part at the banquet while he,
+himself, sat there in the role of his own outer consciousness. But
+neither he nor that hypothetical "some one else," who was also he,
+lost for one instant the heavenly knowledge that Olivia was up there
+at the head of the table.
+
+Amory, in spite of diplomatic effort, had not succeeded in imparting
+to St. George anything of his talk with Jarvo. Balator was too near,
+and the place was somehow too generally attentive to permit a secret
+word. So, as they rose from the table, St. George was still in
+ignorance of what was toward and knew nothing of either the Ilex
+Tower or the possibilities of the morrow. He had only one thought,
+and that was to speak with Olivia, to let her know that he was there
+on the island, near her, ready to serve her--ah well, chiefly, he
+did not disguise from himself, what he wanted was to look at her and
+to hear her speak to him. But Amory had depended on the confusion of
+the rising to communicate the great news, and to tell about Jarvo,
+waiting in a motor out there in the palace courtyard, by the wall on
+the side opposite the windows of the banquet room. In an auspicious
+moment Amory looked warily about, thrilling with premonition of his
+friend's enthusiasm.
+
+Before he could speak, St. George uttered a startled exclamation,
+caught at Amory's arm, sprang forward, and was off up the long room,
+dragging Amory with him.
+
+About the dais there was suddenly an appalling confusion. Push of
+feet, murmurs, a cry and, visible over the heads between, a
+glistening of gold uniforms closing about the throne seats, flashing
+back to the long, open windows, disappearing against the night...
+
+"What is it?" cried Amory as he ran. "What is it?"
+
+"Quick," said St. George only, "I don't know. They've gone with
+her."
+
+Amory did not understand, but he saw that Olivia's seat was empty;
+and when he swept the heads for her white veil, it was not there.
+
+"Who has?" he said.
+
+St. George swerved to the side of the room toward the windows, and
+old Malakh stood there, crying out and pointing.
+
+"The guard, I think," St. George answered, and was over the low sill
+of a window, running headlong across the courtyard, Amory behind
+him. "There they go," St. George cried. "Good God, what are we to
+do? There they go."
+
+Amory looked. Down a side avenue--one of those tunnels of shadow
+that taught the necessity of mystery--a great motor car was
+speeding, and in the dimness the two men could see the white of
+Olivia's floating veil.
+
+At this, Amory wheeled and searched the length of wall across the
+yard. If only--if only--
+
+There on the side of the courtyard opposite the windows of the
+banquet room stood the motor that was that night to go back to
+Melita. Bolt upright on the seat was Jarvo, and climbing in the
+tonneau, with his neck stretched toward the confusion of the palace,
+was Rollo. Jarvo saw Amory, who beckoned; and in an instant the car
+was beside them and the two men were over the back of the tonneau in
+a flash.
+
+"That way," cried St. George, with no time to waste on the miracle
+of Jarvo's appearance, "that way--there. Where you see the white."
+
+At a touch the motor plunged away into the fragrant darkness. Amory
+looked back. Figures crowded the windows of the palace, and streamed
+from the banquet hall into the courtyard. Men hurried through the
+hall, and there was clamour of voices, and in the honey-coloured air
+the great bulk of the palace towered like a faithless sentinel, the
+alien banners in nameless colours sending streamers into the
+moon-lit upper spaces.
+
+On before, down nebulous ways, went the whiteness of the floating
+veil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+BETWEEN-WORLDS
+
+
+Down nebulous ways they went, the thin darkness flowing past them.
+The sloping avenue ran all the width of the palace grounds, and here
+among slim-trunked trees faint fringes of the light touched away the
+dimness in the open spaces and expressed the borders of the dusk.
+Always the way led down, dipping deeper in the conjecture of shadow,
+and always before them glimmered the mist of Olivia's veil, an
+eidolon of love, of love's eternal Vanishing Goal.
+
+And St. George was in pursuit. So were Amory and Jarvo, and Rollo of
+the oil-skins, but these mattered very little, for it was St. George
+whose eyes burned in his pale face and were striving to catch the
+faintest motion in that fleeing car ahead.
+
+"Faster, Jarvo," he said, "we're not gaining on them. I think
+they're gaining on us. Put ahead, can't you?"
+
+Amory vexed the air with frantic questionings. "How did it happen?"
+he said. "Who did it? Was it the guard? What did they do it for?"
+
+"It looks to me," said St. George only, peering distractedly into
+the gloom, "as if all those fellows had on uniforms. Can you see?"
+
+Jarvo spoke softly.
+
+"It is true, adon," he said, "they are of the guard. This is what
+they had planned," he added to Amory. "I feared the harm would be to
+you. It is the same. Your turn would be the next."
+
+"What do you mean?" St. George demanded.
+
+Amory, with some incoherence, told him what Jarvo had come to them
+to propose, and heightened his own excitement by plunging into the
+business of that night and the next, as he had had it from the
+little brown man's lips.
+
+"Up the mountain to-morrow night," he concluded fervently, "what do
+you think of that? Do you see us?"
+
+"Maniac, no," said St. George shortly, "what do we want to go up the
+mountain for if Miss Holland is somewhere else? Faster, Jarvo, can't
+you?" he urged. "Why, this thing is built to go sixty miles an hour.
+We're creeping."
+
+"Perhaps it's better to start in gentle and work up a pace, sir,"
+observed Rollo inspirationally, "like a man's legs, sir, beggin'
+your pardon."
+
+St. George looked at him as if he had first seen him, so that Amory
+once more explained his presence and pointed to the oil-skins. And
+St. George said only:
+
+"Now we're coming up a little--don't you think we're coming up a
+little? Throw it wide open, Jarvo--now, go!"
+
+"What are you going to do when you catch them?" demanded Amory. "We
+can't lunge into them, for fear of hurting Miss Holland. And who
+knows what devilish contrivance they've got--dum-dum bullets with a
+poison seal attachment," prophesied Amory darkly. "What are you
+going to do?"
+
+"I don't know what we're going to do," said St. George doggedly,
+"but if we can overtake them it won't take us long to find out."
+
+Never so slightly the pursuers were gaining. It was impossible to
+tell whether those in the flying car knew that they were followed,
+and if they did know, and if Olivia knew, St. George wondered
+whether the pursuit were to her a new alarm, or whether she were
+looking to them for deliverance. If she knew! His heart stood still
+at the thought--oh, and if they had both known, that morning at
+breakfast at the Boris, that _this_ was the way the genie would come
+out of the jar. But how, if he were unable to help her? And how
+could he help her when these others might have Heaven knew what
+resources of black art, art of all the colours of the Yaque
+spectrum, if it came to that? The slim-trunked trees flew past them,
+and the tender branches brushed their shoulders and hung out their
+flowers like lamps. Warm wind was in their faces, sweet,
+reverberant voices of the wood-things came chorusing, and ahead
+there in the dimness, that misty will-o'-the-wisp was her veil,
+Olivia's veil. St. George would have followed if it had led him
+between-worlds.
+
+In a manner it did lead him between-worlds. Emerging suddenly upon a
+broader avenue their car followed the other aside and shot through a
+great gateway of the palace wall--a wall built of such massive
+blocks that the gateway formed a covered passageway. From there,
+delicately lighted, greenly arched, and on this festal night, quite
+deserted, went the road by which, the night before, they had entered
+Med.
+
+"Now," said St. George between set teeth, "now see what you can do,
+Jarvo. Everything depends on you."
+
+Evidently Jarvo had been waiting for this stretch of open road and
+expecting the other car to take it. He bent forward, his wiry
+little frame like a quivering spring controlling the motion. The
+motor leaped at his touch. Away down the road they tore with the
+wind singing its challenge. Second by second they saw their
+gain increase. The uniforms of the guards in the car became
+distinguishable. The white of Olivia's veil merged in the
+brightness of her gown--was it only the shining of the gold of the
+uniforms or could St. George see the floating gold of her hair?
+Ah, wonderful, past all speech it was wonderful to be fleeing
+toward her through this pale light that was like a purer element
+than light itself. With the phantom moving of the boughs in the
+wood on either side light seemed to dance and drip from leaf to
+leaf--the visible spirit of the haunted green. The unreality of it
+all swept over him almost stiflingly. Olivia--was it indeed Olivia
+whom he was following down lustrous ways of a land vague as a
+star; or was his pursuit not for her, but for the exquisite,
+incommunicable Idea, and was he following it through a world
+forth-fashioned from his own desire?
+
+Suddenly indistinguishable sounds were in his ears, words from
+Amory, from Jarvo certain exultant gutturals. He felt the car
+slacken speed, he looked ahead for the swift beckoning of the veil,
+and then he saw that where, in the delicate distance, the other
+motor had sped its way, it now stood inactive in the road before
+them, and they were actually upon it. The four guards in the motor
+were standing erect with uplifted faces, their gold uniforms shining
+like armour. But this was not all. There, in the highway beside the
+car, the mist of her veil like a halo about her, Olivia stood alone.
+
+St. George did not reckon what they meant to do. He dropped over the
+side of the tonneau and ran to her. He stood before her, and all the
+joy that he had ever known was transcended as she turned toward
+him. She threw out her hands with a little cry--was it gladness, or
+relief, or beseeching? He could not be certain that there was even
+recognition in her eyes before she tottered and swayed, and he
+caught her unconscious form in his arms. As he lifted her he looked
+with apprehension toward the car that held the guards. To his
+bewilderment there was no car there. The pursued motor, like a
+winged thing of the most innocent vagaries, had taken itself off
+utterly. And on before, the causeway was utterly empty, dipping idly
+between murmurous green. But at the moment St. George had no time to
+spend on that wonder.
+
+He carried Olivia to the tonneau of Jarvo's car, jealous when Rollo
+lifted her gown's hem from the dust of the road and when Amory threw
+open the door. He held her in his arms, half kneeling beside her,
+profoundly regardless where it should please the others to dispose
+themselves. He had no recollection of hearing Jarvo point the way
+through the trees to a path that led away, as far from them as a
+voice would carry, to the Ilex Tower whose key burned in Amory's
+pocket, promising radiant, intangible things to his imagination. St.
+George understood with magnificent unconcern that Amory and Rollo
+were gone off there to wait for the return of him and Jarvo; he took
+it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken
+back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he
+knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving
+across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate
+destination in which he found himself believing with infinite faith.
+
+For this was Olivia, in his arms. St. George looked down at her, at
+the white, exquisite face with its shadow of lashes, and it seemed
+to him that he must not breathe, or remember, or hope, lest the gods
+should be jealous and claim the moment, and leave him once more
+forlorn. That was the secret, he thought, not to touch away the
+elusive moment by hope or memory, but just to live it, filled with
+its ecstasies, borne on the crest of its consciousness. It seemed to
+him in some intimately communicated fashion, that the moment, the
+very world of the island, was become to him a more intense object
+of consciousness than himself. And somehow Olivia was its
+expression--Olivia, here in his arms, with the stir of her breath
+and the light, light pressure of her body and the fall of her hair,
+not only symbols of the sovereign hour, but the hour's realities.
+
+On either side the phantom wood pressed close about them, and its
+light seemed coined by goblin fingers. Dissolving wind, persuading
+little voices musical beyond the domain of music that he knew,
+quick, poignant vistas of glades where the light spent itself in
+its longed-for liberty of colour, labyrinthine ways of shadow that
+taught the necessity of mystery. There was something lyric about it
+all. Here Nature moved on no formal lines, understood no frugality
+of beauty, but was lavish with a divine and special errantry to a
+divine and special understanding. And it had been given St. George
+to move with her merely by living this hour, with Olivia in his
+arms.
+
+The sweet of life--the sweet of life and the world his own. The
+words had never meant so much. He had often said them in exultation,
+but he had never known their truth: the world was literally his own,
+under the law. Nothing seemed impossible. His mind went back to the
+unexplained disappearing of that other motor and, however it had
+been, that did not seem impossible either. It seemed natural, and
+only a new doorway to new points of contact. In this amazing land no
+speculation was too far afield to be the food of every day. Here men
+understood miracle as the rest of the world understands invention.
+Already the mere existence of Yaque proved that the space of
+experience is transcended--and with the thought a fancy, elusive and
+profound, seized him and gripped at his heart with an emotion wider
+than fear. What had become of the other car? Had it gone down some
+road of the wood which the guards knew, or ... The words of Prince
+Tabnit came back to him as they had been spoken in that wonderful
+tour of the island. "The higher dimensions are being conquered.
+Nearly all of us can pass into the fifth at will, 'disappearing,' as
+you have the word." Was it possible that in the vanishing of the
+pursued car this had been demonstrated before him? Into this space,
+inclusive of the visible world and of Yaque as well, had the car
+passed _without the pursuers being able to point_ to the direction
+which it had taken? St. George smiled in derision as this flashed
+upon him, and it hardly held his thought for a moment, for his eyes
+were upon Olivia's face, so near, so near his own ... Undoubtedly,
+he thought vaguely, that other motor had simply swerved aside to
+some private opening of the grove and, from being hard-pressed and
+almost overtaken, was now well away in safety. Yet if this were so,
+would they not have taken Olivia with them? But to that strange and
+unapparent hyperspace they could not have taken her, because she did
+not understand. "...just as one," Prince Tabnit had said, "who
+understands how to die and come to life again would not be able to
+take with him any one who himself did not understand how to
+accompany him..."
+
+Some terrifying and exalting sense swept him into a new intimacy of
+understanding as he realized glimmeringly what heights and depths
+lay about his ceasing to see that car of the guard. Yet, with
+Olivia's head upon his arm, all that he theorized in that flash of
+time hung hardly beyond the border of his understanding. Indeed, it
+seemed to St. George as if almost--almost he could understand, as if
+he could pierce the veil and know utterly all the secrets of spirit
+and sense that confound. "We shall all know _when we are able to
+bear it_," he had once heard another say, and it seemed to him now
+that at last he was able to bear it, as if the sense of the
+uninterrupted connection between the two worlds was almost a part of
+his own consciousness. A moment's deeper thought, a quicker flowing
+of the imagination, a little more poignant projecting of himself
+above the abyss and he, too, would understand. It came to him that
+he had almost understood every time that he had looked at Olivia.
+Ah, he thought, and how exquisite, how matchless she was, and what
+Heaven beyond Heaven the world would hold for him if only she were
+to love him. St. George lifted the little hand that hung at her
+side, and stooped momentarily to touch his cheek to the soft hair
+that swept her shoulder. Here for him lay the sweet of life--the
+sweet of the world, ay, and the sweet of all the world's mysteries.
+This alien land was no nearer the truth than he. His love was the
+expression of its mystery. They went back through the great
+archway, and entered the palace park. Once more the slim-trunked
+trees flew past them with the fringes of light expressing the
+borders of the dusk. St. George crouched, half-kneeling, on the
+floor of the tonneau, his free hand protecting Olivia's face from
+the leaning branches of heavy-headed flowers. He had been so
+passionately anxious that she should know that he was on the island,
+near her, ready to serve her; but now, save for his alarm and
+anxiety about her, he felt a shy, profound gratitude that the hour
+had fallen as it had fallen. Whatever was to come, this nearness to
+her would be his to remember and possess. It had been his supreme
+hour. Whether she had recognized him in that moment on the road,
+whether she ever knew what had happened made, he thought, no
+difference. But if she was to open her eyes as they reached the
+border of the park, and if she was to know that it was like this
+that the genie had come out of the jar--the mere notion made him
+giddy, and he saw that Heaven may have little inner Heaven-courts
+which one is never too happy to penetrate.
+
+But Olivia did not stir or unclose her eyes. The great strain of the
+evening, the terror and shock of its ending, the very relief with
+which she had, at all events, realized herself in the hands of
+friends were more than even an island princess could pass through in
+serenity. And when at last from the demesne of enchantment the car
+emerged in the court of the palace, Olivia knew nothing of it and,
+as nearly as he could recall afterward, neither did St. George. He
+understood that the courtyard was filled with murmurs, and that as
+Olivia was lifted from the car the voice of Mrs. Medora Hastings, in
+all its excesses of tone and pitch, was tilted in a kind of
+universal reproving. Then he was aware that Jarvo, beseeching him
+not to leave the motor, had somehow got him away from all the tumult
+and the questioning and the crush of the other motors setting
+tardily off down the avenue in a kind cf majestic pursuit of the
+princess. After that he remembered nothing but the grateful gloom of
+the wood and the swift flight of the car down that nebulous way,
+thin darkness flowing about him.
+
+He was to go back to join Amory in some kind of tower, he knew; and
+he was infinitely resigned, for he remembered that this was in some
+way essential to his safety, and that it had to do with the ascent
+of Mount Khalak to-morrow night. For the rest St. George was certain
+of nothing save that he was floating once more in a sea of light,
+with the sweet of the world flowing in his veins; and upon his arm
+and against his shoulder he could still feel the thrill of the
+pressure of Olivia's head.
+
+The genie had come out of the jar--and never, never would he go
+back.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE LINES LEAD UP
+
+
+In the late hours of the next afternoon Rollo, with a sigh, uncoiled
+himself from the shadow of the altar to the god Melkarth, in the
+Ilex Temple, and stiffly rose. Vicissitudes were not for Rollo, who
+had not fathomed the joys of adaptability; and the savour of the
+sweet herbs which, from Jarvo's wallet, he had that day served, was
+forgotten in his longing for a drop of tarragan vinegar and a bulb
+of garlic with which to dress the herbs. His lean and shadowed face
+wore an expression of settled melancholy.
+
+"Sorrow's nothing," he sententiously observed. "It's trouble that
+does for a man, sir."
+
+St. George, who lay at full length on a mossy sill of the king's
+chapel counting the hours of his inaction, continued to look out
+over the glistening tops of the ilex trees.
+
+"Speaking of trouble," he said, "what would you say, Rollo, to
+getting back to the yacht to-night, instead of going up the mountain
+with us?"
+
+Rollo dropped his eyes, but his face brightened under, as it were,
+his never-lifted mask.
+
+"Oh, sir," he said humbly, "a person is always willing to do
+whatever makes him the most useful."
+
+"Little Cawthorne and Bennietod," went on St. George, "ten to one
+will take to the trail to-night, if they haven't already. They'll be
+coming to Med and reorganizing the police force, or raising a
+standing army or starting a subway. You'd do well to drop down and
+give them some idea of what's happened, and I fancy you'd better all
+be somewhere about on the day after to-morrow, at noon. Not that
+there will be any wedding at that time," explained St. George
+carefully, "although there may be something to see, all the same.
+But you might tell them, you know, that Miss Holland is due to marry
+the prince then. Can you get back to the yacht alone?"
+
+Rollo hadn't thought of that, and his mask fell once more into its
+lines of misery.
+
+"I don't know, sir," he said doubtfully, "most men can go up a steep
+place all right. It's comin' down that's hard on the knees. And if I
+was to try it alone, sir--"
+
+Jarvo made a sign of reassurance.
+
+"That is not well," he said, "you would be dashed to pieces. Ulfin,
+one of the six, will wait for us to-night on the edge of the grove.
+He can conduct the way to the vessel."
+
+"Ah, sir," said Rollo, not without a certain self-satisfaction,
+"something is always sure to turn up, sir."
+
+From a tour of the temple Amory came listlessly back to the king's
+chapel. There, where the descendants of Abibaal had worshiped until
+their idols had been refined by Time to a kind of decoration, the
+Americans and Jarvo had spent the night. They had slept stretched on
+benches of beveled stone. They had waked to trace the figures in a
+length of tapestry representing the capture of Io on the coast of
+Argolis, doubtless woven by an eye-witness. They had bathed in a
+brook near the entrance where stood the altar for the sacrifice
+round which the priests and _hierodouloi_ had been wont to dance,
+and where huge architraves, metopes and tryglyphs, massive as those
+at Gebeil and Tortosa and hewn from living rock, rose from the
+fragile green of the wood like a huge arm signaling its eternal
+"Alas!" They had partaken of Jarvo's fruit and sweet herbs, and
+Rollo had served them, standing with his back to the niche where
+once had looked augustly down the image of the god. And now Amory,
+with a smile, leaned against a wall where old vines, grown
+miraculously in crannies, spread their tendrils upon the friendly
+hieroglyphic scoring of the crenelated stone, and summed up his
+reflections of the night.
+
+"I've got it," he announced, "I think it was up in the Adirondacks,
+summer before last. I think I was in a canoe when she went by in a
+launch, with the Chiswicks. Why, do you know, I think I dreamed
+about Miss Frothingham for weeks."
+
+St. George smiled suddenly and radiantly, and his smile was for the
+sake of both Rollo and Amory--Rollo whose sense of the commonplace
+nothing could overpower, Amory who talked about the Chiswicks in the
+Adirondacks. Why not? St. George thought happily. Here in the temple
+certain precious and delicate idols were believed to be hidden in
+alcoves walled up by mighty stone; and here, Jarvo was telling them,
+were secret exits to the road contrived by the priests of the temple
+at the time of their oppression by the worshipers of another god;
+but yet what special interest could he and Amory have in brooding
+upon these, or the ancient Phoenicians having "invited to traffic by
+a signal fire," when they could sit still and remember?
+
+"To-night," he said aloud, feeling a sudden fellowship for both
+Amory and Rollo, "to-night, when the moon rises, we shall watch it
+from the top of the mountain."
+
+Then he wondered, many hundred times, whether Olivia could possibly
+have recognized him.
+
+When the dark had fallen they set out. The ilex grove was very still
+save for a fugitive wind that carried faint spices, and they took a
+winding way among trunks and reached the edge of the wood without
+adventure. There Ulfin and another of the six carriers were waiting,
+as Jarvo had expected, and it was decided that they should both
+accompany Rollo down to the yacht.
+
+Rollo handed the oil-skins to St. George and Amory, and then stood
+crushing his hat in his hands, doing his best to speak.
+
+"Look sharp, Rollo," St. George advised him, "don't step one foot
+off a precipice. And tell the people on the yacht not to worry. We
+shall expect to see them day after to-morrow, somewhere about. Take
+care of yourself."
+
+"Oh, sir," said Rollo with difficulty, "good-by, sir. I '_ope_
+you'll be successful, sir. A person likes to succeed in what they
+undertake."
+
+Then the three went on down the glimmering way where, last night,
+they had pursued the floating pennon of the veil. There were few
+upon the highway, and these hardly regarded them. It occurred to St.
+George that they passed as figures in a dream will pass, in the
+casual fashion of all unreality, taking all things for granted. Yet,
+of course, to the passers-by upon the road to Med, there was nothing
+remarkable in the aspect of the three companions. All that was
+remarkable was the adventure upon which they were bound, and nobody
+could possibly have guessed that.
+
+Almost a mile lay between them and the point where the ascent of
+the mountain was to be begun. The road which they were taking
+followed at the foot of the embankment which girt the island, and it
+led them at last to a stretch of arbourescent heath, piled with
+black basaltic rocks. Here, where the light was dim like the glow
+from light reflected upon low clouds, they took their way among
+great branching cacti and nameless plants that caught at their
+ankles. A strange odour rose from the earth, mineral, metallic, and
+the air was thick with particles stirred by their feet and more
+resembling ashes than dust. This was a waste place of the island,
+and if one were to lift a handful of the soil, St. George thought,
+it was very likely that one might detect its elements; as, here the
+dust of a temple, here of a book, here a tomb and here a sacrifice.
+He felt himself near the earth, in its making. He looked away to the
+sugar-loaf cone of the mountain risen against the star-lit sky.
+Above its fortress-like bulk with circular ramparts burned the clear
+beacon of the light on the king's palace. As he saw the light, St.
+George knew himself not only near the earth but at one with the very
+currents of the air, partaker of now a hope, now a task, now a
+spell, and now a memory. It was as if love had made him one with the
+dust of dead cities and with their eternal spiritual effluence.
+
+At length they crossed the broad avenue that led from the
+Eurychorus to Melita, and struck into the road that skirted the
+mountain; and where a thicket of trees flung bold branches across
+the way, three figures rose from the ground before them, and Akko
+stepped forward and saluted, his white teeth gleaming. Immediately
+Jarvo led the way through a strip of underbrush at the base of the
+mountain, and they emerged in a glade where the light hardly
+penetrated.
+
+Here were distinguishable the palanquins in which the ascent was to
+be made. These were like long baskets, upborne by a pole of great
+flexibility broadening to a wider support beneath the body of the
+basket and provided with rubber straps through which the arms were
+passed. When St. George and Amory were seated, Jarvo spoke
+hesitatingly:
+
+"We must bandage your eyes, adon," he said.
+
+"Oh really, really," protested St. George, "we don't understand half
+we do see. Do let us see what we can."
+
+"You must be blindfolded, adon," repeated Jarvo firmly.
+
+Amory, passing his arms reflectively through the rubber straps which
+Akko held for him, spoke cheerfully:
+
+"I'll go up blindfold," he submitted, "if I can smoke."
+
+"Neither of us will," said St. George with determination. "See
+here, Jarvo, we are both level-headed. We pledge you our word of
+honour, in addition, not to dive overboard. Now--lead on."
+
+"It has never been done," said the little brown man with obstinacy,
+"you will lose your reason, adon."
+
+"Ah well now, if we do," said St. George, "pitch us over and leave
+us. Besides, I think we have. Lead on, please."
+
+Against the will of the others, he prevailed. The light oil-skins
+were placed in the baskets, each of which was shouldered by two men,
+Jarvo bearing the foremost pole of St. George's palanquin. All the
+carriers had drawn on long, soft shoes which, perhaps from some
+preparation in which they had been dipped, glowed with light,
+illuminating the ground for a little distance at every step.
+
+"Are you ready, adon?" asked Jarvo and Akko at the same moment.
+
+"Ready!" cried St. George impatiently.
+
+"Ready," said Amory languidly, and added one thought more: "I hope
+for Chillingworth's sake," he said, "that Frothingham is a notary
+public. We'll have to have somebody's seal at the bottom of all this
+copy."
+
+The baskets were lightly lifted. Jarvo gave a sharp command, and all
+four of the men broke into a rhythmic chant. Jarvo, leading the way,
+sprang immediately upon the first foothold, where none seemed to
+be, and without pause to the next. So perfectly were the men trained
+that it was as if but one set of muscles were inspiring the
+movements made to the beat of that monotonous measure. In their
+strong hands the flexible pole seemed to give as their bodies gave,
+and so lightly did they leap upward that the jar of their alighting
+was hardly perceptible, as if, as had occurred to St. George as they
+ascended the lip of the island, gravity were here another matter.
+So, without pause, save in the rhythm of that strange march music,
+the remarkable progress was begun.
+
+St. George threw one swift glance upward and looked down,
+shudderingly. Beetling above them in the great starlight hung the
+gigantic pile, wall upon wall of rock hewn with such secret foothold
+that it was a miracle how any living thing could catch and cling to
+its forbidding surface. Only lifelong practice of the men, who from
+childhood had been required to make the ascent and whose fathers and
+fathers' fathers before them had done the same, could have accounted
+for that catlike ability to cling to the trail where was no trail.
+The sensation of the long swinging upward movement was unutterably
+alien to anything in life or in dreams, and the sheer height above
+and the momently-deepening chasm below were presences contending for
+possession.
+
+Strange fragrance stole from gum and bark of the decreasing
+vegetation. Dislodged stones rolled bounding from rock to rock into
+the abyss. To right and left the way went. There was not even the
+friendly beacon of the summit to beckon them. It seemed to St.
+George that their whole safety lay in motion, that a moment's
+cessation from the advance would hurl them all down the sides of the
+declivity. Since the ascent began he had not ceased to look down;
+and now as they rose free of the tree-tops that clothed the base of
+the mountain he could see across the plain, and beyond the bounding
+embankment of the island to the dark waste of the sea. Somewhere out
+there _The Aloha_ was rocking. Somewhere, away to the northwest, the
+lights of New York harbour shone. _Did_ they, St. George wondered
+vaguely; and, when he went back, how would they look to him? It
+seemed to him in some indeterminate fashion that when he saw them
+again there would be new lines and sides of beauty which he had
+never suspected, and as if all the world would be changed, included
+in this new world that he had found.
+
+Half-way up the ascent a resting-place was contrived for the
+carriers. The projection upon which the baskets were lowered was
+hardly three feet in width. Its edge dropped into darkness. Within
+reach, leaves rustled from the summit of a tree rooted somewhere in
+the chasm. The blackness below was vast and to be measured only by
+the memory of that upward course. Gemmed by its lighted hamlets the
+fair plain of the island lay, with Med and Melita glowing like lamps
+to the huge dusk.
+
+"St. George," said Amory soberly, "if it's all true--if these people
+do understand what the world doesn't know anything about--"
+
+"Yes," said St. George.
+
+"It makes a man feel--"
+
+"Yes," said St. George, "it does."
+
+This, they afterward remembered, was all that they said on the
+ascent. One wonders if two, being met among the "strengthless tribes
+of the dead," would find much more to say.
+
+Then they went on, scaling that invisible way, with the twinkling
+feet of the carriers drawing upward like a thread of thin gold which
+they were to climb. What, St. George thought as the way seemed to
+lengthen before them, what if there were no end? What if this were
+some gigantic trick of Destiny to keep him for the rest of his life
+in mid-air, ceaselessly toiling up, a latter-day Sisyphus, in a
+palanquin? He had dreamed of stairs in the darkness which men
+mounted and found to have no summits, and suppose this were such a
+stair? Suppose, among these marvels that were related to his dreams,
+he had, as it were, tossed a ball of twine in the air and, like the
+Indian jugglers, climbed it? Suppose he had built a castle in the
+clouds and tenanted it with Olivia, and were now foolhardily
+attempting to scale the air? Ah well, he settled it contentedly,
+better so. For this divine jugglery comes once into every life, and
+one must climb to the castle with madness and singing if he would
+attain to the temples that lie on the castle-plain.
+
+Gradually, as they approached the summit, the ascent became less
+precipitous. As they neared the cone their way lay over a kind of
+natural fosse at the cone's base; and, although the mountain did not
+reach the level of perpetual snow, yet an occasional cool breath
+from the dark told where in some natural cavern snow had lain
+undisturbed since the unremembered eruption of the sullen, volcanic
+peak. Then came a breath of over-powering sweetness from some secret
+thicket, and something was struck from the feet of the bearers that
+was like white pumice gravel. St. George no longer looked downward;
+the plain and the waste of the sea were in a forgotten limbo, and he
+searched eagerly on high for the first rays of the light that marked
+the goal of his longing.
+
+Yet he was unprepared when, swerving sharply and skirting an immense
+shoulder of rock, Jarvo suddenly emerged upon a broad retaining wall
+of stone bordering a smooth, moon-lit terrace extending by shallow
+flights of steps to the white doors of the king's palace itself.
+
+As St. George and Amory freed themselves and sprang to their feet
+their eyes were drawn to a glory of light shining over the low
+parapet which surrounded the terrace.
+
+"Look," cried St. George victoriously, "the moon!"
+
+From the sea the moon was momently growing, like a giant bubble, and
+a bright path had issued to the mountain's foot. "See," she would
+doubtless have said if she could, "I would have shown you the way
+here all your life if only you had looked properly." But at all
+events St. George's prophecy was fulfilled: From the top of Mount
+Khalak they were watching the moon rise. St. George, however, was
+not yet in the company whose image had pleasantly besieged him when
+he had prophesied. He turned impatiently to the palace. Jarvo,
+resting on the stones where he had sunk down, signaled them to go
+on, and the two needed no second bidding. They set off briskly
+across the plateau, Amory looking about him with eager curiosity,
+St. George on the crest of his divine expectancy.
+
+The palace was set on the west of the gentle slope to which the
+mountain-top had been artificially leveled. The terrace led up on
+three sides from the marge of the height to the great portals. Over
+everything hung that imponderable essence that was clearer and purer
+than any light--"better than any light that ever shone." In its
+glamourie, with that far ocean background, the palace of pale stone
+looked unearthly, a sky thing, with ramparts of air. The principle
+of the builders seemed not to have been the ancient dictum that
+"mass alone is admirable," for the great pile was shaped, with
+beauty of unknown line, in three enormous cylinders, one rising from
+another, the last magnificently curved to a huge dome on whose
+summit burned with inconceivable brilliance the light which had been
+a beacon to the longing eyes turned toward it from the deck of _The
+Aloha_. In the shadow of the palace rose two high towers,
+obelisk-shaped from the pure white stone. Scattered about the slope
+were detached buildings, consisting of marble monoliths resting upon
+double bases and crowned with carved cornices, or of truncated
+pyramids and pyramidions. These had plinths of delicately-coloured
+stone over which the light diffused so that they looked luminous,
+and the small blocks used to fill the apertures of the courses shone
+like precious things. Adjacent to one of the porches were two
+conical shrines, for images and little lamps; and, near-by, a fallen
+pillar of immense proportions lay undisturbed upon the court of
+sward across which it had some time shivered down.
+
+But if the palace had been discovered to be the preserved and
+transported Temple of Solomon it could not have stayed St. George
+for one moment of admiration. He was off up the slope, seeing only
+the great closed portals, and with Amory beside him he ran boldly up
+the long steps. It was a part of the unreality of the place that
+there seemed absolutely no sign of life about the King's palace. The
+windows glowed with the soft light within, but there were no guards,
+no servants, no sign of any presence. For the first time, when they
+reached the top of the steps, the two men hesitated.
+
+"Personally," said Amory doubtfully, "I have never yet tapped at a
+king's front door. What does one do?"
+
+St. George looked at the long stone porches, uncovered and girt by a
+parapet following the curve of the facade.
+
+"Would you mind waiting a minute?" he said.
+
+With that he was off along the balcony to the south--and afterward
+he wondered why, and if it is true that Fate tempts us in the way
+that she would have us walk by luring us with unseen roses budding
+from the air.
+
+Where the porch abruptly widened to a kind of upper terrace, like a
+hanging garden set with flowering trees, three high archways opened
+to an apartment whose bright lights streamed across the grass-plots.
+St. George felt something tug at his heart, something that urged him
+forward and caught him up in an ecstasy of triumph and hope
+fulfilled. He looked back at Amory, and Amory was leaning on the
+parapet, apparently sunk in reflections which concerned nobody. So
+St. George stepped softly on until he reached the first archway, and
+there he stopped, and the moment was to him almost past belief.
+Within the open doorway, so near that if she had lifted her eyes
+they must have met his own, was the woman whom he had come across
+the sea to seek.
+
+St. George hardly knew that he spoke, for it was as if all the world
+were singing her name.
+
+"Olivia!" he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE ISLE OF HEARTS
+
+
+The room in which St. George was looking was long and lofty and hung
+with pale tapestries. White pillars supporting the domed white
+ceiling were wound with garlands. The smoke from a little brazen
+tripod ascended pleasantly, and about the windows stirred in the
+faint wind draperies of exceeding thinness, woven in looms stilled
+centuries ago.
+
+Olivia was crossing before the windows. She wore a white gown strewn
+with roses, and she seemed as much at home on this alien
+mountain-top as she had been in her aunt's drawing-room at the
+Boris. But her face was sad, and there was not a touch of the
+piquancy which it had worn the night before in the throne-room, nor
+of its delicious daring as she had sped past him in the big Yaque
+touring car. Save for her, the room was deserted; it was as if the
+prince had come to the castle and found the Sleeping Princess the
+only one awake.
+
+If in that supreme moment St. George had leaped forward and taken
+her in his arms no one--no one, that is, in the fairy-tale of what
+was happening--would greatly have censured him. But he stood without
+for a moment, hardly daring to believe his happiness, hardly knowing
+that her name was on his lips.
+
+He had spoken, however, and she turned quickly, her look uncertainly
+seeking the doorway, and she saw him. For a moment she stood still,
+her eyes upon his face; then with a little incredulous cry that
+thrilled him with a sudden joyous hope that was like belief, she
+came swiftly toward him.
+
+St. George loved to remember that she did that. There was no waiting
+for assurance and no fear; only the impulse, gloriously obeyed, to
+go toward him.
+
+He stepped in the room, and took her hands in his and looked into
+her eyes as if he would never turn away his own. In her face was a
+dawning of glad certainty and welcome which he could not doubt.
+
+"You," she cried softly, "you. How is it possible? But how is it
+possible?"
+
+Her voice trembled a little with something so sweet that it raced
+through his veins with magic.
+
+"Did you rub the lamp?" he said. "Because I couldn't help coming."
+
+She looked at him breathlessly.
+
+"Have you," he asked her gravely, "eaten of the potatoes of Yaque?
+And are you going to say, 'Off with his head'? And can you tell me
+what is the population of the island?"
+
+At that they both laughed--the merry, irrepressible laugh of youth
+which explains that the world is a very good place indeed and that
+one is glad that one belongs there. And the memory of that breakfast
+on the other side of the world, of their happy talk about what would
+happen if they two were impossibly to meet in Yaque came back to
+them both, and set his heart beating and flooded her face with
+delicate colour. In her laugh was a little catching of the breath
+that was enchanting.
+
+"Not yet," she said, "your head is safe till you tell me how you got
+here, at all events. Now tell me--oh, tell me. I can't believe it
+until you tell me."
+
+She moved a little away from the door.
+
+"Come in," she said shyly, "if you've come all the way from America
+you must be very tired."
+
+St. George shook his head.
+
+"Come out," he pleaded, "I want to stand on top of a high mountain
+and show you the whole world."
+
+She went quite simply and without hesitation--because, in Yaque, the
+maddest things would be the truest--and when she had stepped from
+the low doorway she looked up at him in the tender light of the
+garden terrace.
+
+"If you are quite sure," she said, "that you will not disappear in
+the dark?"
+
+St. George laughed happily.
+
+"I shall not disappear," he promised, "though the world were to turn
+round the other way."
+
+They crossed the still terrace to the parapet and stood looking out
+to sea with the risen moon shining across the waters. The light wind
+stirred in the cedrine junipers, shaking out perfume; the great
+fairy pile of the palace rose behind them; and before them lay the
+monstrous moon-lit abyss than whose depths the very stars, warm and
+friendly, seemed nearer to them. To the big young American in blue
+serge beside the little new princess who had drawn him over seas the
+dream that one is always having and never quite remembering was
+suddenly come true. No wonder that at that moment the patient Amory
+was far enough from his mind. To St. George, looking down upon
+Olivia, there was only one truth and one joy in the universe, and
+she was that truth and that joy.
+
+"I can't believe it," he said boyishly.
+
+"Believe--what?" she asked, for the delight of hearing him say so.
+
+"This--me--most of all, you!" he answered.
+
+"But you must believe it," she cried anxiously, "or maybe it will
+stop being."
+
+"I will, I will, I am now!" promised St. George in alarm.
+
+Whereat they both laughed again in sheer light-heartedness. Then,
+resting his broad shoulders against a prism of the parapet, St.
+George looked down at her in infinite content.
+
+"You found the island," she said; "what is still more wonderful you
+have come here--but _here_--to the top of the mountain. Oh, did you
+bring news of my father?"
+
+St. George would have given everything save the sweet of the moment
+to tell her that he did.
+
+"But now," he added cheerfully, and his smile disarmed this of its
+over-confidence, "I've only been here two days or so. And, though it
+may look easy, I've had my hands full climbing up this. I ought to
+be allowed another day or two to locate your father."
+
+"Please tell me how you got here," Olivia demanded then.
+
+St. George told her briefly, omitting the yacht's ownership,
+explaining merely that the paper had sent him and that Jarvo and
+Akko had pointed the way and, save for that journey down nebulous
+ways in the wake of her veil the night before, sketching the
+incidents which had followed his arrival upon the island.
+
+"And one of the most agreeable hours I've had in Yaque," he
+finished, "was last night, when you were chairman of the meeting.
+That was magnificent."
+
+"You _were_ there!" cried Olivia, "I thought--"
+
+"That you saw me?" St. George pressed eagerly.
+
+"I think that I thought so," she admitted.
+
+"But you never looked at me," said St. George dolefully, "and I had
+on a forty-two gored dress, or something."
+
+"Ah," Olivia confessed, "but I had thought so before when I knew it
+couldn't be you."
+
+St. George's heart gave a great bound.
+
+"When before?" he wanted to know ecstatically.
+
+"Ah, before," she explained, "and then afterward, too."
+
+"When afterward?" he urged.
+
+(Smile if you like, but this is the way the happy talk goes in Yaque
+as you remember very well, if you are honest.)
+
+"Yesterday, when I was motoring, I thought--"
+
+"I was. You did," St. George assured her. "I was in the prince's
+motor. The procession was temporarily tied up, you remember. Did you
+really think it was I?"
+
+But this the lady passed serenely over.
+
+"Last night," she said, "when that terrible thing happened, who was
+it in the other motor? Who was it, there in the road when I--was it
+you? Was it?" she demanded.
+
+"Did you think it was I?" asked St. George simply.
+
+"Afterward--when I was back in the palace--I thought I must have
+dreamed it," she answered, "and no one seemed to know, and _I_
+didn't know. But I did fancy--you see, they think father has taken
+the treasure," she said, "and they thought if they could hide me
+somewhere and let it be known, that he would make some sign."
+
+"It was monstrous," said St. George; "you are really not safe here
+for one moment. Tell me," he asked eagerly, "the car you were
+in--what became of that?"
+
+"I meant to ask you that," she said quickly. "I couldn't tell, I
+didn't know whether it turned aside from the road, or whether they
+dropped me out and went on. Really, it was all so quick that it was
+almost as if the motor had stopped being, and left me there."
+
+"Perhaps it did stop being--in this dimension," St. George could not
+help saying.
+
+At this she laughed in assent.
+
+"Who knows," she said, "what may be true of us--_nous autres_ in the
+Fourth Dimension? In Yaque queer things are true. And of course you
+never can tell--"
+
+At this St. George turned toward her, and his eyes compelled hers.
+
+"Ah, yes, you can," he told her, "yes, you can."
+
+Then he folded his arms and leaned against the stone prisms again,
+looking down at her. Evidently the magician, whoever he was, did not
+mind his saying that, for the palace did not crumble or the moon
+cease from shining on the white walls.
+
+"Still," she answered, looking toward the sea, "queer things _are_
+true in Yaque. It is queer that you are here. Say that it is."
+
+"Heaven knows that it is," assented St. George obediently.
+
+Presently, realizing that the terrace did not intend to turn into a
+cloud out-of-hand, they set themselves to talk seriously, and St.
+George had not known her so adorable, he was once more certain, as
+when she tried to thank him for his pursuit the night before. He had
+omitted to mention that he had brought her back alone to the Palace
+of the Litany, for that was too exquisite a thing, he decided, to be
+spoiled by leaving out the most exquisite part. Besides, there was
+enough that was serious to be discussed, in all conscience, in spite
+of the moon.
+
+"Tell me," said St. George instead, "what has happened to you since
+that breakfast at the Boris. Remember, I have come all the way from
+New York to interview you, Mademoiselle the Princess."
+
+So Olivia told him the story of the passage in the submarine which
+had arrived in Yaque two days earlier than _The Aloha_; of the first
+trip up Mount Khalak in the imperial airship; of Mrs. Hastings'
+frantic fear and her utter refusal ever to descend; and of what she
+herself had done since her arrival. This included a most practical
+account of effort that delighted and amazed St. George. No wonder
+Mrs. Hastings had said that she always left everything "executive"
+to Olivia. For Olivia had sent wireless messages all over the island
+offering an immense reward for information about the king, her
+father; she had assigned forty servants of the royal household to
+engage in a personal search for such information and to report to
+her each night; she had ordered every house in Yaque, not excepting
+the House of the Litany and the king's palace itself, to be searched
+from dungeon to tower; and, as St. George already knew, she had
+brought about a special meeting of the High Council at noon that
+day.
+
+"It was very little," said the American princess apologetically,
+"but I did what I could."
+
+"What about the meeting of the High Council?" asked St. George
+eagerly; "didn't anything come of that?"
+
+"Nothing," she answered, "they were like adamant. I thought of
+offering to raise the Hereditary Treasure by incorporating the
+island and selling the shares in America. Nobody could ever have
+found what the shares stood for, but that happens every day. Half
+the corporations must be capitalized chiefly in the Fourth
+Dimension. That is all," she added wearily, "save that day after
+to-morrow I am to be married."
+
+"That," St. George explained, "is as you like. For if your father
+is on the island we shall have found him by day after to-morrow, at
+noon, if we have to shake all Yaque inside out, like a paper sack.
+And if he isn't here, we simply needn't stop."
+
+Olivia shook her head.
+
+"You don't know the prince," she said. "I have heard enough to
+convince me that it is quite as he says. He holds events in the
+hollow of his hand."
+
+"Amory proposed," said St. George, "that we sit up here and throw
+pebbles at him for a time. And Amory is very practical."
+
+Olivia laughed--her laugh was delicious and alluring, and St. George
+came dangerously near losing his head every time that he heard it.
+
+"Ah," she cried, "if only it weren't for the prince and if we had
+news of father, what a heavenly, heavenly place this would be, would
+it not?"
+
+"It would, it would indeed," assented St. George, and in his heart
+he said, "and so it is."
+
+"It's like being somewhere else," she said, looking into the abyss
+of far waters, "and when you look down there--and when you look up,
+you nearly _know_. I don't know what, but you nearly know. Perhaps
+you know that 'here' is the same as 'there,' as all these people
+say. But whatever it is, I think we might have come almost as near
+knowing it in New York, if we had only known how to try."
+
+"Perhaps it isn't so much knowing," he said, "as it is being where
+you can't help facing mystery and taking the time to be amazed.
+Although," added St. George to himself, "there are things that one
+finds out in New York. In a drawing-room, at the Boris, for
+instance, over muffins and tea."
+
+"It will be delightful to take all this back to New York," Olivia
+vaguely added, as if she meant the fairy palace and the fairy sea.
+
+"It will," agreed St. George fervently, and he couldn't possibly
+have told whether he meant the mystery of the island or the mystery
+of that hour there with her. There was so little difference.
+
+"Suppose," said Olivia whimsically, "that we open our eyes in a
+minute, and find that we are in the prince's room in McDougle
+Street, and that he has passed his hand before our faces and made us
+dream all this. And father is safe after all."
+
+"But it isn't all a dream," St. George said softly, "it can't
+possibly all be a dream, you know."
+
+She met his eyes for a moment.
+
+"Not your coming away here," she said, "if the rest is true I
+wouldn't want that to be a dream. You don't know what courage this
+will give us all."
+
+She said "us all," but that had to mean merely "us," as well. St.
+George turned and looked over the terrace. What an Arabian night it
+was, he was saying to himself, and then stood in a sudden amazement,
+with the uncertain idea that one of the Schererazade magicians had
+answered that fancy of his by appearing.
+
+A little shrine hung thick with vines, its ancient stone chipped and
+defaced, stood on the terrace with its empty, sightless niche turned
+toward the sea. Leaning upon its base was an old man watching them.
+His eyes under their lowered brows were peculiarly intent, but his
+look was perfectly serene and friendly. His stuff robe hung in
+straight folds about his singularly erect figure, and his beard and
+hair were not all grey. But he was very old, with incredibly brown
+and wrinkled flesh, and his face was vacant, as if the mind were
+asleep.
+
+As he looked, St. George knew him. Here on the top of this mountain
+was that amazing old man whom he had last seen in the banquet hall
+at the Palace of the Litany--that old Malakh for whom Olivia had so
+unexplainably interceded.
+
+"What is that man doing here?" St. George asked in surprise.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"He is a mad old man, they said," Olivia told him, "down there they
+call him Malakh--that means 'salt'--because they said he always
+weeps. We had stopped to look at a metallurgist yesterday--he had
+some zinc and some metals cut out like flowers, and he was making
+them show phosphorescent colours in his little dark alcove. The old
+man was watching him and trying to tell him something, but the
+metallurgist was rude to him and some boys came by and jostled him
+and pushed him about and taunted him--and the metallurgist actually
+explained to us that every one did that way to old Malakh. So I
+thought he was better off up here," concluded Olivia tranquilly.
+
+St. George was silent. He knew that Olivia was like this, but
+everything that proved anew her loveliness of soul caught at his
+heart.
+
+"Tell me," he said impulsively, "what made you let him stay last
+night, there in the banquet hall?"
+
+She flushed, and shook her head with a deprecatory gesture.
+
+"I haven't an idea," she said gravely, "I think I must have done it
+so the fairies wouldn't prick their feet on any new sorrow. One has
+to be careful of the fairies' feet."
+
+St. George nodded. It was a charming reason for the left hand to
+give the right, and he was not deceived.
+
+"Look at him," said St. George, almost reverently, "he looks like a
+shade of a god that has come back from the other world and found his
+shrine dishonoured."
+
+Some echo of St. George's words reached the old man and he caught
+at it, smiling. It was as if he had just been thinking what he
+spoke.
+
+"There are not enough shrines," he said gently, "but there are far
+too many gods. You will find it so."
+
+Something in his words stirred St. George strangely. There was about
+the old creature an air of such gentleness, such supreme repose and
+detachment that, even in that place of quiet, his presence made a
+kind of hush. He was old and pallid and fragile, but there lingered
+within him, while his spirit lingered, the perfume of all fine and
+gentle things, all things of quietude. When he had spoken the old
+man turned and moved slowly down the ways of strange light, between
+the fallen temples builded to forgotten gods, and he seemed like the
+very spirit of the ancient mountain, ignorant of itself and knowing
+all truth.
+
+"How strange," said St. George, looking after him, "how unutterably
+strange and sad."
+
+"That is good of you," said Olivia. "Aunt Dora and Antoinette
+thought I'd gone quite off my head, and Mr. Frothingham wanted to
+know why I didn't bring back some one who could have been called as
+a witness."
+
+"Witness," St. George echoed; "but the whole place is made of
+witnesses. Which reminds me: what is the sentence?"
+
+"The sentence?" she wondered.
+
+"The potatoes of Yaque," he reminded her, "and my head?"
+
+"Ah well," said Olivia gravely, "inasmuch as the moon came up in the
+east to-night instead of the west, I shall be generous and give you
+one day's reprieve."
+
+"Do you know, I _thought_ the moon came up in the east to-night,"
+cried St. George joyfully.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was half an hour afterward that Amory's languid voice from
+somewhere in the sky broke in upon their talk. As he came toward
+them across the terrace St. George saw that he was miraculously not
+alone.
+
+Afterward Amory told him what had happened and what had made him
+abide in patience and such wondrous self-effacement.
+
+When St. George had left him contemplating the far beauties of the
+little blur of light that was Med, Mr. Toby Amory set a match to one
+of his jealously expended store of Habanas and added one more aroma
+to the spiced air. To be standing on the doorstep of a king's
+palace, confidently expecting within the next few hours to assist in
+locating the king himself was a situation warranting, Amory thought,
+such fragrant celebration, and he waited in comparative content.
+
+The moon had climbed high enough to cast a great octagonal shadow on
+the smooth court, and the Habana was two-thirds memory when,
+immediately back of Amory, a long window opened outward, releasing
+an apparition which converted the remainder of the Habana into a
+fiery trail ending out on the terrace. It was a girl of rather more
+than twenty, exquisitely petite and pretty, and wearing a ruffley
+blue evening gown whose skirt was caught over her arm. She stopped
+short when she saw Amory, but without a trace of fear. To tell the
+truth, Antoinette Frothingham had got so desperately bored
+withindoors that if Amory had worn a black mask or a cloak of flame
+she would have welcomed either.
+
+For the last two hours Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham had sat in a white marble room of the king's palace,
+playing chess on Mr. Frothingham's pocket chess-board. Mr.
+Frothingham, who loathed chess, played it when he was tired so that
+he might rest and when he was rested he played it so that he might
+exercise his mind--on the principle of a cool drink on a hot day and
+a hot drink on a cool day. Mrs. Hastings, who knew nothing at all
+about the game, had entered upon the hour with all the suave
+complacency with which she would have attacked the making of a pie.
+Mrs. Hastings had a secret belief that she possessed great aptitude.
+
+Antoinette Frothingham, the lawyer's daughter, had leaned on the
+high casement and looked over the sea. The window was narrow, and
+deep in an embrasure of stone. To be twenty and to be leaning in
+this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly
+suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had
+been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle
+tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no
+possibility of any knight within an altitude of many hundred feet.
+
+"The dear little ponies' heads!" Mrs. Hastings had kept saying.
+"What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don't you think?
+That's what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings--at least,
+that's what he always said to me: 'Most games are so _needless_, but
+chess is really up and down poetic'"
+
+Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in
+silence.
+
+"Um," he had responded liberally.
+
+"I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, "neither he nor
+I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano
+in the middle of the ocean. It's this awful feeling," Mrs. Hastings
+had cried querulously, "of being neither on earth nor under the
+water nor in Heaven that I object to. And nobody can get to us."
+
+"That's just it, Mrs. Hastings," Antoinette had observed earnestly
+at this juncture.
+
+"Um," said Mr. Frothingham, then, "not at all, not at all. We have
+all the advantages of the grave and none of its discomforts."
+
+Whereupon Antoinette, rising suddenly, had slipped out of the white
+marble room altogether and had found the knight smoking in
+loneliness on the very veranda.
+
+Amory put his cap under his arm and bowed.
+
+"I hope," he said, "that I haven't frightened you."
+
+He was an American! Antoinette's little heart leaped.
+
+"I am having to wait here for a bit," explained Amory, not without
+vagueness.
+
+Miss Frothingham advanced to the veranda rail and contrived a shy
+scrutiny of the intruder.
+
+"No," she said, "you didn't frighten me in the least, of course.
+But--do you usually do your waiting at this altitude?"
+
+"Ah, no," answered Amory with engaging candour, "I don't. But
+I--happened up this way." Amory paused a little desperately. In that
+soft light he could not tell positively whether this was Miss
+Holland or that other figure of silver and rose which he had seen in
+the throne room. The blue gown was not interpretative. If she was
+Miss Holland it would be very shabby of him to herald the surprise.
+Naturally, St. George would appreciate doing that himself. "I'm
+looking about a bit," he neatly temporized.
+
+Antoinette suddenly looked away over the terrace as her eyes met
+his, smiling behind their pince-nez. Amory was good to look at, and
+he had never been more so than as he towered above her on the steps
+of the king's palace. Who was he--but who was he? Antoinette
+wondered rapidly. Had a warship arrived? Was Yaque taken? Or
+had--she turned eyes, round with sudden fear, upon Amory.
+
+"Did Prince Tabnit send you?" she demanded.
+
+Amory laughed.
+
+"No, indeed," he said. Amory had once lived in the South, and he
+accented the "no" very takingly. "I came myself," he volunteered.
+
+"I thought," explained Antoinette, "that maybe he opened a door in
+the dark, and you walked out. It _is_ rather funny that you should
+be here."
+
+"You are here, you know," suggested Amory doubtfully.
+
+"But I may be a cannibal princess," Antoinette demurely pointed out.
+It was not that her astonishment was decreasing; but why--modernity
+and the democracy spoke within her--waste the possibilities of a
+situation merely because it chances to be astonishing? Moments of
+mystery are rare enough, in all conscience; and when they do arrive
+all the world misses them by trying to understand them. Which is
+manifestly ungrateful and stupid. They do these things better in
+Yaque.
+
+"You maybe," agreed Amory evenly, "though I don't know that I ever
+met a desert island princess in a dinner frock. But then, I am a
+beginner in desert islands."
+
+"Are you an American?" inquired Antoinette earnestly.
+
+Amory looked up at the frowning facade of the king's palace, and he
+could have found it in his heart to believe his own answer.
+
+"I'm the ghost," he confessed, "of a poor beggar of a Phoenician who
+used to make water-jars in Sidon. I have been condemned to plow the
+high seas and explore the tall mountains until I find the Pitiful
+Princess. She must be up at the very peak, in distress, and I--"
+
+Amory stopped and looked desperately about him. Would St. George
+never come? How was he, Amory, to be accountable for what he told if
+he were left here alone in these extraordinary circumstances?
+
+Then Antoinette lightly clapped her hands.
+
+"A ghost!" she exclaimed with pleasure. "Miss Holland hoped the
+place was haunted. A Phoenician ghost with an Alabama accent."
+
+She had said "Miss Holland hoped."
+
+"Aren't you--aren't you Miss Holland?" demanded Amory promptly, a
+joyful note of uncertainty in his voice.
+
+Antoinette shook her head.
+
+"No," she said, "though I don't know why I should tell you that."
+
+From Amory's soul rolled a burden that left him treading air on
+Mount Khalak. She was not Miss Holland. What did he care how long
+St. George stayed away?
+
+"I am Tobias Amory," he said, "of New York. Most people don't know
+about the Sidonian ghost part. But I've told you because I thought,
+perhaps, you might be the Pitiful Princess."
+
+Antoinette's heart was beating pleasantly. Of New York! How--oh, how
+did he get here? Was there, then, a wishing-stone in that window
+embrasure where she had been sitting, and had the knight come
+because she had willed it? How much did he know? How much ought she
+to tell? Nothing whatever, prudently decided the lawyer's daughter.
+
+"I've had, I'm almost certain, the pleasure of seeing you before,"
+imparted Amory pleasantly, adjusting his pince-nez and looking down
+at her. She was so enchantingly tiny and he was such a giant.
+
+"In New York?" demanded Antoinette.
+
+"No," said Amory, "no. Do desert island princesses get to New York
+occasionally, then? No, I think I saw you in Yaque. Yesterday. In a
+silver automobile. Did I?"
+
+Antoinette dimpled.
+
+"We frightened them all to death," she recalled. "Did we frighten
+you?"
+
+"So much," admitted Amory, "that I took refuge up here."
+
+"Where were you?" Antoinette asked curiously. Really, he was very
+amusing--this big courtly creature. How agreeable of Olivia to stay
+away.
+
+"Ah, tell me how you got here," she impetuously begged. "Desert
+island people don't see people from New York every day."
+
+"Well then, O Pitiful Princess," said the Shade from Sidon, "it was
+like this--"
+
+It was easy enough to fleet the time carelessly, and assuredly that
+high moon-lit world was meant to be no less merry than the golden.
+Whoever has chanced to meet a delightful companion on some silver
+veranda up in the welkin knows this perfectly well; and whoever has
+not is a dull creature. But there are delightful folk who are wont
+to suspect the dullest of harbouring some sweet secret, some sense
+of "those sights which alone (says the nameless Greek) make life
+worth enduring," and this was akin to such a sight.
+
+After a time, at Antoinette's conscientious suggestion, they
+strolled the way that St. George had taken. And to Olivia and the
+missing adventurer over by the parapet came Amory's soft query:
+
+"St George, may I express a friendly concern?"
+
+"Ah, come here, Toby," commanded St. George happily, "her Highness
+and I have been discussing matters of state."
+
+"Antoinette!" cried Olivia in amazement. From time immemorial
+royalty has perpetually been surprised by the behaviour of its
+ladies-in-waiting.
+
+"I've been remembering a verse," said Amory when he had been
+presented to Olivia, "may I say it? It goes:
+
+          "'I'll speak a story to you,
+              Now listen while I try:
+            I met a Queen, and she kept house
+              A-sitting in the sky.'"
+
+"Come in and say it to my aunt," Olivia applauded. "Aunt Dora is
+dying of ennui up here."
+
+They crossed the terrace in the hush of the tropic night. Through
+the fairy black and silver the four figures moved, and it was as if
+the king's palace--that sky thing, with ramparts of air--had at
+length found expression and knew a way to answer the ancient
+glamourie of the moon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A VIGIL
+
+
+Upon Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, drowsing over the
+pocket chess-board, the sound of footsteps and men's voices in the
+corridor acted with electrical effect. Then the door was opened and
+behind Olivia and Antoinette appeared the two visitors who seemed to
+have fallen from the neighbouring heavens. The two chess-pretenders
+looked up aghast. If there were a place in the world where
+chaperonage might be relaxed the uninformed observer would say that
+it would be the top of Mount Khalak.
+
+"Mercy around us!" cried Mrs. Medora Hastings, "if it isn't that
+newspaper man! He's probably come over here to cable it all over the
+front page of every paper in New York. Well," she added
+complacently, as if she had brought it all about, "it seems good to
+see some of your own race. How _did_ you get here? Some trick, I
+suppose?"
+
+"My dear fellows," burst out Mr. Augustus Frothingham fervently,
+"thank God! I'm not, ordinarily, unequal to my situations, but I
+confess to you, as I would not to a client, that I don't object to
+sharing this one. How did you come?"
+
+"It's a house-party!" said Antoinette ecstatically.
+
+Amory looked at her in her blue gown in the light of the white room,
+and his spirits soared heavenward. Why should St. George have an
+idea that he controlled the hour?
+
+From a tumult of questioning, none of which was fully answered
+before Mrs. Hastings put another query, the lawyer at length
+elicited the substance of what had occurred.
+
+"You came up the side of the mountain, carried by four of those
+frightful natives?" shrilled Mrs. Hastings. "Olivia, think. It's a
+wonder they didn't murder you first and throw you over afterward,
+isn't it, Olivia? Oh, and my poor dear brother. To think of his
+lying somewhere all mangled and bl--"
+
+Emotion overcame Mrs. Hastings. Her tortoise-shell glasses fell to
+her lap and both her side-combs tinkled melodiously to the tiled
+floor.
+
+"This reminds me," said Mr. Frothingham, settling back and finding a
+pencil with which to emphasize his story, "this reminds me very much
+of a case that I had on the June calendar--"
+
+In half an hour St. George and Amory saw that all serious
+consideration of their situation must be accomplished alone with
+Olivia; for in that time Mr. Frothingham had been reminded of two
+more cases and Mrs. Hastings had twice been reduced to tears by the
+picture of the possible fate of her brother. Moreover, there
+presently appeared supper--a tray of the most savoury delicacies, to
+produce which Olivia had slipped away and, St. George had no doubt,
+said over some spell in the kitchens. Supper in the white marble
+room of the king's palace was almost as wonderful as muffins and tea
+at the Boris.
+
+There were Olivia in her gown of roses on one side of the table and
+Antoinette on the other and between them the hungry and happy
+adventurers. Across the room under a tall silver vase that might
+have been the one proposed by Achilles at the funeral games for
+Patroclus ("that was the work of the 'skilful Sidonians'" St. George
+recalled with a thrill), Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham were
+conscientiously finishing their chess, since the lawyer believed in
+completing whatever he undertook, if for nothing more than a warning
+never to undertake it again. Manifestly the little ivory kings and
+queens and castles were in league with all the other magic of the
+night, for the game prolonged itself unconscionably, and the supper
+party found it far from difficult to do the same. St. George looked
+at Olivia in her gown of roses, and his eyes swept the high white
+walls of the room with its frescoes and inscriptions, its broken
+statues and defaced chests of stone and ancient armour, and so back
+to Olivia in her gown of roses, with her little ringless hands
+touching and lifting among the alien dishes as she ministered to
+him. What a dear little gown of roses and what beautiful hands, St.
+George thought; and as for the broken statues and the inscriptions
+and the contents of the stone chests, nobody had paid any attention
+to them for so long that they could hardly have missed his regard.
+Nor Amory's. For Amory was in the midst of a reminiscent reference
+to the Chiswicks, in the Adirondacks, and to Antionette Frothingham
+in a launch.
+
+At last they all were aware that the chess-board was being closed
+and Mrs. Hastings had risen.
+
+"I suppose," she was saying, "that they have an idea here, the poor
+deluded creatures, that it is very late. But I tell Olivia that we
+are so much farther east it _can't_ be very late in New York at this
+minute, and I intend to go to bed by my watch as I always do, and
+that is New York time. If I were in New York I wouldn't be sleepy
+now, and I'm no different here, am I? I don't think people are half
+independent enough."
+
+Mrs. Hastings stepped round a stone god, almost faceless, that stood
+in a little circular depression in the floor.
+
+"Olivia, where," she inquired, patting the bobbing, ticking jet on
+her gown, "where do you think that frightful, mad, old man is?"
+
+"I heard him cross the corridor a little while ago," Olivia
+answered. "I think he went to his room."
+
+"I must say, Olivia," said Mrs. Hastings with a damp sigh, "that you
+are very selfish where I am concerned--in _this_ matter."
+
+"Ah," said Olivia, "please, Aunt Dora. He is far too feeble to harm
+any one. And he's away there on the second floor."
+
+"I'm sure he's a murderer," protested Mrs. Hastings. "He has the
+murderer's eye. Mr. Hastings would have said he has. We all sleep on
+the ground floor here," she continued plaintively, "because we are
+so high up anyway that I think the air must be just as pure as it
+would be up stairs. I always leave my window up the width of my
+handkerchief-box."
+
+As they went out to the great corridor Olivia spoke softly to St.
+George.
+
+"Look up," she said.
+
+He looked, and saw that the vast circular chamber was of
+incalculable height, extending up to the very dome of the palace,
+and shaping itself to the lines of the topmost of the three huge
+cones. It was a great well of light, playing over strange frescoes
+of gods and daemons, of constellations and of beasts, and exquisite
+with all the secret colours of some other way of vision. As high as
+the eye could see, the precious metals upon the skeleton of the open
+roof shone in the bright light that was set there--the light on the
+summit of the king's palace.
+
+St. George turned from the glory of it and looked into her eyes.
+
+"'A new Heaven and a new earth,'" he said; but he did not mean the
+dome of light nor yet the splendour of the palace.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Manifestly, there is no use in being asleep when one can dream
+rather better awake. St. George wandered aimlessly between his room
+and Amory's and took the time to reflect that when a man looks the
+way Amory did he might as well have Cupids painted on his coat.
+
+"St. George," Amory said soberly, "is this the way you've been
+feeling all the way here? Is this what you came for? Then, on my
+soul, I forgive you everything. I would have climbed ten mountains
+to meet Antoinette Frothingham."
+
+"I've been watching you, you son of Dixie," said St. George darkly;
+"don't you lose your head just when you need it most."
+
+"I have a notion yours is gone," defended Amory critically, "and
+mine is only going."
+
+"That's twice as dangerous," St. George wisely opined;
+"besides--mine is different."
+
+"So is mine," said Amory, "so is everybody's."
+
+St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace. Amory
+didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and
+St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the
+south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood;
+and there, because the night would have it no other way, he
+stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe,
+and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business
+of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a
+field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal
+experiences where words themselves are born. Better and more
+intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.
+
+He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith
+been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and
+thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies,
+breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of
+what will be. He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman
+mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to
+the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told
+himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His
+mother and the bishop at Tuebingen and on the Baltic! Curiously
+enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the
+bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
+All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast
+kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was
+Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.
+
+He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman
+emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken
+with him, when something--he was not sure whether it was a voice or
+a touch--startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked
+drowsily out at the glorified blackness--as if black were no longer
+absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been
+pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more
+inclusive than white. The very dark seemed delicately vocal and to
+"fill the waste with sound" no less than the wash of the waves. St.
+George awoke deliciously confused by a returning sense of the sweet
+and the joy of the night.
+
+"'This was the loneliest beach between two seas,'" there flitted
+through his mind, "'and strange things had been done there in the
+ancient ages.'" He turned among the vines, half listening. "And in
+there is the king's daughter," he told himself, "and this is
+certainly 'the strangest thing that ever befell between two seas.'
+And I have a great mind to look up the old woman of that tale who
+must certainly be hereabout, dancing 'widdershins.'"
+
+Then, like a bright blade unsheathed in a quiet chamber, a cry of
+great and unmistakable fear rang out from the palace--a woman's
+cry, uttered but once, and giving place to a silence that was even
+more terrifying. In an instant St. George was on his feet, running
+with all his might.
+
+"Coming!" he called, "where are you--where are you?" And his heart
+pounded against his side with the certainty that the voice had been
+Olivia's.
+
+It was unmistakably Olivia's voice that replied to him.
+
+"Here!" she cried clearly, and St. George followed the sound and
+dashed through the long open window of the room next that in which
+he had first seen her that night.
+
+"Here," she repeated, "but be careful. Some one is in this room."
+
+"Don't be afraid," he cried cheerily into the dark. "It's all
+right," which is exactly what he would have said if there had been
+about dragons and real shades from Sidon.
+
+The room was now in darkness, and in the dim light cast by the high
+moon he could at first discern nothing. He heard a silken rustling
+and the tap of slippered feet. The next instant the apartment was
+quick with light, and in the curtained entrance to an inner room,
+Olivia, in a brown dressing-gown, her hair vaguely bright about her
+flushed face, stood confronting him.
+
+Between them, his thin hand thrown up, palm outward, to protect his
+eyes from the sudden light, was the old man whom St. George had last
+seen by the shrine on the terrace.
+
+St. George was prepared for a mere procession of palace ghosts, but
+at this strange visitor he stared for an uncomprehending moment.
+
+"What are you doing here?" he said wonderingly to him; "what in the
+world are you doing here?"
+
+The old man looked uncertainly about him, one hand spread against
+the pillar behind him, the other fumbling at his throat.
+
+"I think," he answered almost indistinguishably, "I think that I
+meant to sit here--to sit in the room beyond, where the mock stars
+shine."
+
+Olivia uttered an exclamation.
+
+"How could he possibly know that?" she said.
+
+"But what does he mean?" asked St. George.
+
+She crossed swiftly to a portiere hanging by slender rings from the
+full height of the lofty room, and at her bidding St. George
+followed her. She pushed aside the curtain, revealing a huge cave of
+the dark, a room whose walls were sunk in shadow. But overhead the
+ceiling was constellated in stars, so that it seemed to St. George
+as if he were looking into a nearer heaven, homing the far lights
+that he knew. The Pleiades, Orion, and the Southern Cross, blazing
+down with inconceivable brilliance, were caught and held captive in
+the cup of this nearer sky.
+
+"It is like this at night," Olivia said, "but we see nothing in the
+daytime, save the vague outlines of here and there a star. But how
+could he have known? There is no other door save this."
+
+The old man had followed them and stood, his eyes fixed on the
+shining points.
+
+"It is done well," he said softly, "it makes one feel the
+firmament."
+
+St. George, thrilling with the strangeness of what he saw, and the
+strangeness of being there with Olivia and this weird old man of the
+mountain, turned toward him almost fearfully. How did he know,
+indeed?
+
+"Ah well," he said, striving to reassure her, "I've no doubt he has
+wandered in here some evening, while you were at dinner. No doubt--"
+
+He stopped abruptly, his eyes fixed on the old man's hand. For as he
+lifted it St. George had thought that something glittered. Without
+hesitation he caught the old man's arm about the wrist, and turned
+his hand in his own palm. In the thin fingers he found a small
+sealed tube, filled with something that looked like particles of
+nickel.
+
+"Do you mind telling me what that is?" asked St. George.
+
+Old Malakh's eyes, liquid and brown and very peaceful, met his own
+without rebuke.
+
+"Do you mean the gem?" he asked gently. "It is a very beautiful
+ruby."
+
+Then St. George saw upon the hand that held the sealed tube a ring
+of matchless workmanship, set with a great ruby that smouldered in
+the shadow where they stood. Olivia looked at St. George with
+startled eyes.
+
+"He was not wearing this when we first saw him," she said. "I
+haven't seen him wearing it at all."
+
+St. George confronted the old man then and spoke with some
+determination.
+
+"Will you please tell us," he said, "what there is in this tube, and
+how you came by this ring?"
+
+Old Malakh looked down reflectively at his hand, and back to St.
+George's face. It was wonderful, the air of courtliness and urbanity
+and delicate breeding which persisted through age and infirmity and
+the fallow mind.
+
+"I wish that I might tell you," he said humbly, "but I have only
+little lights in my head, instead of words. And when I say them,
+they do not mean--what they _shine_. Do you not see? That is why
+every one laughs. But I know what the lights say."
+
+St. George looked at Olivia helplessly.
+
+"Will you tell me where his room is?" he said, "and I'll go back
+with him. I don't know what to make of this, quite, but don't be
+frightened. It's all right. Didn't you say he is on the second
+floor?"
+
+"Yes, but don't go alone with him," begged Olivia suddenly, "let me
+call some of the servants. We don't know what he may do."
+
+St. George shook his head, smiling a little in sheer boyish delight
+at that "we." "We" is a very wonderful word, when it is not put to
+unimportant uses by kings, editors and the like.
+
+"I'd rather not, thank you," he said. "I'll have a talk with him, I
+think."
+
+"His room is at the top of the stair, on the left," said Olivia
+reluctantly, "but I wish--"
+
+"We shall get on all right," St. George assured her, "and don't let
+this worry you, will you? I was smoking on the terrace. I'll be
+there for a while yet. Good night," he said from the doorway.
+
+"Good night," said Olivia. "Good night--and, oh, I thank you."
+
+St. George's expectation of having a talk with the old man was,
+however, unfounded. Old Malakh led the way to his room--a great
+place of carven seats and a frowning bed-canopy and high windows,
+and doors set deep in stone; and he begged St. George to sit down
+and permitted him to examine the sealed tube filled with little
+particles that looked like nickel, and spoke with gentle irrelevance
+the while. At the last St. George left him, feeling as if he were
+committing not so much an indignity as a social solecism when he
+locked the door upon the lonely creature, using for the purpose a
+key-like implement chained to the lock without and having a ring
+about the size of the iron crown of the Lombards.
+
+"Good night," old Malakh told him courteously, "good night. But yet
+all nights are good--save the night of the heart."
+
+St. George went back to the terrace. For hours he paced the paths of
+that little upper garden or lay upon the wall among the pungent
+vines. But now he forgot the iridescent dark and the companion-sea
+and the high moon and the king's palace, for it was not these that
+made the necromancy of the night. It was permitted him to watch
+before the threshold while Olivia slept, as lovers had watched in
+the youth of the world. Whatever the morrow held, to-night had been
+added to yesternight. Not until the dawn of that morrow whitened the
+sky and drew from the vapourous plain the first far towers of Med,
+the King's City, did St. George say good night to her glimmering
+windows.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+GLAMOURIE
+
+
+There is a certain poster, all stars and poppies and deep grass; and
+over these hangs a new moon which must surely have been cut by fairy
+scissors, for it looks as much like a cake or a cowslip as it looks
+like a moon. But withal it sheds a light so eery and strangely
+silver that the poster seems, in spite of the poppies, to have been
+painted in Spring-wind.
+
+"Never," said some chance visitors vehemently, "have I seen such a
+moon as that!"
+
+"But ah, sir, and ah, madame," was the answer--it is not recorded
+whether the poster spoke or whether some one spoke for it--"wouldn't
+you like to?"
+
+Now, therefore, concerning the sweet of those hours in the king's
+palace the Vehement may be tempted to exclaim that in life things
+never happen like that. Ah--do they not so? You have only to go back
+to the days when young love and young life were yours to recall
+distinctly that the most impossible things were every-day
+occurrences. What about the time that you went down one street
+instead of up another and _that_ changed the entire course of your
+days and brought you two together? What about the song, the June,
+the letter that touched the world to gold before your eyes and
+caught you up in a place of clouds? Remembering that magic, it is
+quite impossible to assert that any charming thing whatever would
+not have happened. Is there not some wonderland in every life? And
+is not the ancient citadel of Love-upon-the-Heights that common
+wonderland? One must believe in all the happiness that one can.
+
+But if the Most Vehement--who are as thick as butterflies--still
+remain unconvinced and persist that they never heard of things
+fallen out thus, there is left this triumph:
+
+"Ah, sir, or ah, madame, wouldn't you like to?"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A fugitive wind rollicking in from sea next morning swept through
+the palace and went on around the world; and thereafter it had an
+hundred odourous ways of attracting attention, which were merely its
+own tale of what pleasant things it had seen and heard on high.
+
+For example, that breakfast. A cloth had been laid at one end of the
+long stone table whereat, since the days of Abibaal, brother to
+Hiram, friend to David, kings had breakfasted and banqueted, and
+this cloth had now been set with the ancient plate of the
+palace--dishes that looked like helmets and urns and discs. Here
+Olivia and Antoinette, in charming print frocks, made a kind of tea
+in a kind of biblical samovar and served it in vessels that
+resembled individual trophies of the course. And here St. George and
+Amory praised the admirable English muffins which some one had
+taught the dubious cook to make; and Mr. Augustus Frothingham
+tip-fingered his way about his plate among alien fruits and
+queer-shaped cakes. "Are they cookies or are they manna?" Amory
+wondered, "for they remind me of coriander seeds." And here Mrs.
+Hastings, who always awoke a thought impatient and became
+ultra-complacent with no interval of real sanity, wistfully asked
+for a soft-boiled egg and added plaintively:
+
+"Though I dare say the very hens in Yaque lay something besides
+eggs--pineapples, very likely."
+
+"I suppose," speculated Amory, "that when we get perfectly
+intuitionized we won't have to eat either one because we'll know
+beforehand exactly how they both taste."
+
+"A _reductio ad absurdum_, my young friend," said the lawyer
+sternly; "the real purpose of eating will remain for ever
+unchanged."
+
+Later, while Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham went out on the
+terrace in the sun and wished for a morning paper ("I miss the
+weather report so," complained Mrs. Hastings) the four young people
+with Jarvo and Akko for guides set out to explore the palace. For
+St. George had risen from his two hours' sleep with some
+clearly-defined projects, and he meant first to go over every niche
+and corner of the great pile where one--say a king--might be hidden
+with twenty other kings, and no one be at all the wiser.
+
+What a morning it was! When the rollicking wind got to that part of
+the story it must have told about it in such intimating perfumes
+that even the unimaginative were constrained to sit idle, "thinking
+delicate thoughts." There never was a fairer temple of romance, a
+very temple of Young Love's Plaisaunce; and since the coming of St.
+George and Amory all the cavernous chambers and galleries were
+become homes of hope that the king would be found and all would yet
+be well.
+
+To the main part of the palace there were storey after storey, all
+octagons and pentagons and labyrinths, so that incredulity and
+amazement might increase with every step. How they had ever raised
+those massive blocks of stone to that great height no one can
+guess unless, indeed, Amory's theory were correct and the palace
+had originally been built upon level ground and had had its
+surroundings blasted neatly away to make a mountain. At all events
+there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked
+stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the
+planetary deities--Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white
+bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in
+the form of a rising flame--types taken from the heavens and from
+the abyss. There were roofs of sound fir and sweet cedar, carven
+cornices, cave-like window embrasures with no glass, and little
+circular rooms built about shrines in which sat broken images of
+Baal the sun god, of a sandaled Astarte, and a ravening Melkarth,
+with the lion's skin.
+
+From a great upper corridor there went a stairway, each deep step
+of which was placed on the back of a stone lion of increasing
+size, until the tallest lion's head extended close to the painted
+ceiling, and there were comfortable benches cut in his gigantic
+paws. Many of the rooms were without furnishing, some were filled
+with vague, splendid stuff mouldering away, and others with most
+luxuriously-devised ministries to beauty and comfort. The palace
+was curiously and wonderfully an habitation of more than two
+thousand years ago, furnished with a taste and luxury in advance
+of this moment's civilization of the world. The heart of that
+elder world beat strangely in one of the upper chambers where they
+came upon a little work-shop, strewn with unknown metals and tools
+and empty crucibles, and in their midst a rectangular metallic
+plate partly traced with a device of boughs, appearing, in one
+light, slightly fluorescent.
+
+"It is the work of the Princess Simyra, adon," said Jarvo. "She was
+the daughter of King Thabion, and when she died what she had touched
+in this room was left unmoved. But it was very many years ago--I
+have forgotten. Every one has forgotten."
+
+They went down among the very roots of the palace, three full
+storeys below the surface of the summit. Jarvo went before, lighting
+the way, and they threaded vaulted corridors and winding passages,
+and emerged at last in a silent, haunted chamber whose stones had
+been hewn and sunken there, before Issus. This was the chamber of
+the tombs of the kings, and its floor echoed to their footsteps, now
+hollowly, now with ringing clearness. Three sides of the mighty hall
+were lined with _loculi_ or niches, each as deep as the length of a
+man. About the floor stood stone sarcophagi and beneath the long
+flags kings were sleeping, each with his abandoned name graven on
+the stones, washed year-long by the dark. In the room's centre was a
+lofty cylindrical tomb, mounted by four steps, and this was the
+resting-place of King Abibaal, the younger son of King Abibaal of
+Tyre, and the brother to King Hiram, who ruled in Tyre when the
+Phoenicians who settled Yaque, or Arqua, first passed the Straits of
+Gibraltar and gained the open sea. ("Dear me," said Mrs. Hastings
+when they told her, "I was at Mount Vernon once, and the
+Washingtons' tombs there impressed me very deeply, but they were
+nothing to these in point of age, were they?") Sunken in the wall
+was a tomb of white marble hewn in a five-faced pyramidion, where
+slept Queen Mitygen, who ruled in Yaque while Alexander was king of
+Persia. There was said to have been buried with her a casket of
+love-letters from Alexander, who may have known Yaque and probably
+at one time visited it and, in that case, was entertained in the
+very palace. And if this is true the story of his omission to
+conquer the island may one day divert the world.
+
+Jarvo bent before a low tomb whose stone was delicately scored with
+winged circles.
+
+"Perhaps," he said, "you will recall the accounts of the kidnapped
+Egyptian priestesses sold to the Theoprotions by Phoenician
+merchants in the heroic age of Greece? They were not all sold. Here
+lie the bones of four, given royal burial because of their holy
+office."
+
+Nothing was unbelievable--nothing had been unbelievable for so long
+that these four had almost learned that everything is possible.
+Which, if you come to think of it, and no matter how absurdly you
+learn it, is a thing immeasurably worth realizing in this world of
+possibilities. It is one of our two magics.
+
+"And this," Jarvo said softly, pausing before a vacant niche
+opposite the tomb of King Abibaal, "this will be the receptacle for
+the present king of Yaque, his Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of
+God."
+
+Olivia suddenly looked up at St. George, her face pale in the
+ghostly light. There it had been, waiting for them all the while,
+the sense of the vivid personal against the vague eternal. But her
+involuntary appeal to him, slight as it was, thrilled St. George
+with tenderness as vivid as this tragic element itself.
+
+They went back to the sun and the sweet messengering air above, and
+crossed a little vacant grassy court on the north side of the
+mountain. Here they saw that the palace climbed down the northern
+slope from the summit, and literally overhung the precipice where
+the supports were made fast by gigantic girders run in the living
+rock. A little observatory was built below the edge of the mountain,
+and this box of a place had a glass floor, and one felt like a fly
+on the sky as one stood there. It was said that a certain king of
+Yaque, sometime in the course of the Punic Wars, had thrown himself
+from this observatory in a rage because his court electrician had
+died, but how true this may be it is impossible to say because so
+little is known about electricity. Below the building lay quite the
+most wonderful part of the king's palace.
+
+Here in the long north rooms, hermetically quiet, was the heart of
+the treasure of the ancient island. Here, saved inexplicably from
+the wreck of the past, were a thousand testimonies to that lost and
+but half-guessed art of the elder world. Beautiful things, made in
+the days when King Solomon built the Temple at Jerusalem, lined the
+walls, and filled the stone shelves, together with curios of that
+later day when Phoenicia stood first in knowledge of the plastic and
+glyptic arts. Workers in gold and ivory, in gems and talismans, in
+brass and fine linen and purple had done the marvels which those
+courtier adventurers brought with them over the sea, and to these,
+from year to year, had been added the treasure of private
+chests--necklaces and coronals and hair-loops, bottles and vases of
+glass coloured with metallic oxides, and patterned aggry-beads, now
+sometimes found in ancient tombs on the Ashantee coasts. Beneath an
+altar set with censers and basins of gold was a chest brought from
+Amathus, its ogive lid carved with _bigae_ or two-horsed chariots,
+and it was in this chest, Jarvo told them, that the Hereditary
+Treasure had been kept. The chamber walls were covered with
+bas-reliefs in the ill-proportioned and careful carving of the
+Phoenician artists not yet under Greek influence, and all about were
+set the wonderful bronzes, such as Tyrian artificers made for the
+Temple. The other chambers gave still deeper utterance to days
+remote, for it was there that the king's library had been collected
+in case after case, filled with parchment rolls preserved and copied
+from age to age. What might not be there, they wondered--annals,
+State documents, the Phoenician originals of histories preserved
+elsewhere only in fragments of translation or utterly lost, the
+secrets of science and magic known to men the very forms of whose
+names have perished; and not only the longed-for poems of Sido and
+Jopas, but of who could tell how many singing hearts, lyric with joy
+and love and still voiceful here in these strange halls? These were
+chambers such as no one has ever entered, for this was the vexing of
+no unviolated tomb and no buried city, but the actual return to the
+Past, watching lonely on the mountain.
+
+"Clusium," said Amory softly. "I had actually wanted to go to the
+cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!"
+
+"No, you didn't, Toby," said St. George pleasantly, "you wanted to
+go somewhere and you called it Clusium. You wanted an adventure and
+you thought Clusium was the name of it."
+
+"I know," said Amory shamelessly, "and there are no end of names for
+it. But it's always the same thing. _Excepting this_."
+
+"Excepting this," St. George repeated fervently as they turned to
+go; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sang
+that, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faint
+voices from every shelf in the room,--voices that of old had
+thrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.
+
+Woke now to the eternal echo--an echo that touched delicately
+through the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on all
+that happened. Otherwise, if they four were not all a little
+echo-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face of
+danger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found time
+for the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, because
+they hold revelation. There were, too, some events; but an event is
+a clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.
+The delicious moments are when the intangibilities prevail and
+pervade and possess. In the king's palace there must have been
+shrines to intangibilities--as there should be everywhere--for they
+seemed to come there, and belong.
+
+The mere happenings included, for example, a talk that St. George
+had with Mr. Augustus Frothingham on the terrace after luncheon,
+in which St. George laid before the lawyer a plan which he had
+virtually matured and of which he himself thought very well.
+Thought so well, because of its possibilities, that his face was
+betrayingly eager as he told about it. It was, briefly, that
+inasmuch as four of the six men who could scale the mountain were
+now on its summit, and inasmuch as all the airships were there
+also, now, therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque,
+were in a perfectly impregnable position--counting out Fifth
+Dimension contingencies, which of course might include appearings
+as well as disappearings--and why shouldn't they stay there, and
+let the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked? And
+when the lawyer said, "But, my dear fellow," as he was bound to
+say, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, by
+noon of the following day, two determined persons who, if Jarvo
+would get word to them, would with perfect certainty find Mr. Otho
+Holland, the king, if he were on the island. And when "Well, but
+my dear fellow" occurred again, St. George replied with deference
+that he knew it, but although he never had managed an airship he
+fancied that perhaps he might help with one; and down there in the
+harbour was a yacht waiting to sail for New York, and therefore no
+one need even set foot on the island who didn't wish. And Mr.
+Frothingham laid one long hand on each coat-lapel and threw back
+his head until his hair rested on his collar, and he looked at the
+palace--that Titan thing of the sky with ramparts of air--and
+said, "Nothing in all my experience--" and St. George left him,
+deep in thought.
+
+On the way back he chanced upon Mrs. Hastings, seated on a bench of
+lapidescent wood in the portico--and a Titanic portico it looked by
+day--and, having sent for the palace chef, she was attempting to
+write down the recipe for the salad of that day's luncheon, although
+it was composed chiefly of fowls now extinct everywhere excepting in
+Yaque.
+
+"But my poultry man will get them for me," she urged with
+determination; "I have only to tell him the name of what I want, and
+he can always produce it in tins, nicely labeled."
+
+Later, St. George came upon old Malakh, leaning on the terrace wall,
+looking out to sea, and stood close beside him, marveling at the
+pallor and the thousand wrinkles of the man's strange face. The face
+was stranger by day than it had been by night--this St. George had
+felt when he went that morning to release him, and the old man
+leaned from the frowning bed-hangings to bid him a gentle good
+morning. Could he be, St. George now wondered vaguely, a citizen of
+the fifteenth or twentieth dimension, and, there, did they live to
+his incredible age? Then he noticed that the old man was not wearing
+the ruby ring.
+
+"I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakh
+answered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and at
+other things.
+
+To everything that he asked him the old man returned only his
+urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism.
+When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would
+consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George
+himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I
+would far rather talk with one madman with this madman's manners
+than to sup with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murder
+us, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Olivia
+had no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could one
+possibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle.
+
+All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing as
+only that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that went
+before. St. George was saying to himself that at last the _Here_ and
+the _Now_ were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for the
+morrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noon
+they all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leaves
+above carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. They
+leaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the glory
+of the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings of
+gulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did not
+know they gave--ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind told
+about that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their young
+courage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility of
+their understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. For
+the wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, and
+one has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth.
+Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spite
+of the little wing-like moments that hold not history but
+revelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendent
+sword of "To-morrow, at noon."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+BENEATH THE SURFACE
+
+
+Up came the dusk to the doors of the king's palace--a hurry of grey
+banners flowing into the empty ways where the sun had been. Upon
+this high dominion Night could not advance unheralded, and here the
+Twilight messengered her coming long after the dark lay thick on the
+lowland and on the toiling water.
+
+St. George, leaning from Amory's window, looked down on the shadows
+rising in exquisite hesitation, as if they came curling from the
+lighted censer of Med. There is no doubt at all, Olivia had said
+gravely, that the dusk is patterned, if only one could see
+it--figured in unearthly flowers, in wandering stars, in upper-air
+sprites, grey-winged, grey-bodied, so that sometimes glimpsing them
+one fancies them to be little living goblins. He smiled, remembering
+her words, and glanced over his shoulder down the long room where
+the other light was now beginning to creep about, first expressing,
+then embracing the chamber dusk. It seemed precisely the moment
+when something delicate should be caught passing from gloom to
+radiance, to be thankfully remembered. But only many-winged colours
+were visible, though he could hear a sound like little murmurous
+speech in the dusky roof where the air had a recurrent fashion of
+whispering knowingly.
+
+Indeed, the air everywhere in the palace had a fashion of whispering
+knowingly, for it was a place of ghostly draughts and blasts
+creeping through chambers cleft by yawning courts and open corridors
+and topped by that skeleton dome. And as St. George turned from the
+window he saw that the door leading into the hall, urged by some
+nimble gust, imaginative or prying, had swung ajar.
+
+St. George mechanically crossed the room to close the door, noting
+how the pale light warmed the stones of that cave-like corridor.
+With his hand upon the latch his eyes fell on something crossing the
+corridor, like a shadow dissolving from gloom to gloom. Well beyond
+the open door, stealing from pillar to pillar in the dimness and
+moving with that swiftness and slyness which proclaim a covert
+purpose as effectually as would a bell, he saw old Malakh.
+
+Now St. George was in felt-soled slippers and he was coatless,
+because in the adjoining room Jarvo, with a heated, helmet-like
+apparatus, was attempting to press his blue serge coat. In that
+room too was Amory, catching glimpses of himself in a mirror of
+polished steel, but within reach, on the divan where Jarvo had just
+laid it, was Amory's coat; and St. George caught that up, slipped it
+on, and was off down the corridor after the old man, moving as
+swiftly and slyly as he. St. George had no great faith in him or in
+what he might know, but the old man puzzled him, and mystification
+is the smell of a pleasant powder.
+
+The palace was very still. Presumably, Mrs. Hastings and Mr.
+Frothingham were already at chess in the drawing-room awaiting
+dinner. St. George heard a snatch of distant laughter, in quick
+little lilts like a song, and it occurred to him that its echo there
+was as if one were to pin a ruffle of lace to the grim stones. Some
+one answered the laugh, and he heard the murmurous touching of soft
+skirts entering the corridor as he dived down the ancient dark of
+one of the musty passages. There the silence was resumed. In the
+palace it was as though the stillness were some living sleeper,
+waking with protests, thankful for the death of any echo.
+
+No one was in the gallery. St. George, stepping softly, followed as
+near as he dared to that hurrying figure, flitting down the dark. A
+still narrower hallway connected the main portion of the palace with
+a shoulder of the south wing, and into this the old man turned and
+skirted familiarly the narrow sunken pool that ran the length of
+the floor, drawing the light to its glassy surface and revealing the
+shadows sent clustering to the indistinguishable roof.
+
+Midway the gallery sprang a narrow stairway, let in the wall and
+once leading to the ancient armoury, but now disused and piled with
+rubbish. Old Malakh went up two steps of this old stairway, turned
+aside, and slipped away so swiftly that his amazed pursuer caught no
+more than an after-flutter of his dun-coloured garments. St. George,
+his softly-clad feet making no noise upon the stones, bounded
+forward and saw, through a triangular aperture in the stones, and
+set so low that a man must crouch upon the step to enter, a yawning
+place of darkness.
+
+He might very well have been taking his life in his hands, for he
+could have no idea whether the aperture led to the imperial dungeons
+or to the imperial rain-water cistern; but St. George instantly bent
+and slipped down into that darkness, thick with the dust of the
+flight of the old man. With the distinctly pleasurable sensation of
+being still alive he found himself standing upright upon an uneven
+floor of masonry. He thrust out his arms and touched sides of mossy
+rock. Then just before him a pale flame flickered. The old man had
+kindled a little taper that hardly did more than make shallow
+hollows in the darkness through which he moved.
+
+It was easy to follow now, and St. George went breathlessly on
+past the rudely-hewn walls and giant pillars of that hidden way.
+He might have been lost with ease in any of the lower processes of
+the palace which they had that morning visited; but he could not
+be deceived about the chambers which he had once seen, and this
+subterranean course was new to him. Was it, he wondered, new to
+Olivia, and to Jarvo? Else why had it been omitted in that
+morning's search? And was this strange guide going on at random,
+or did he know--something? A suspicion leaped to St. George's mind
+that made his heart beat. The king--might he be down here
+after all, and might this weird old man know where? His own
+consciousness became chiefly conjecture, and every nerve was alert
+in the pursuit; not the less because he realized that if he were
+to lose this strange conductor who went on before, either in
+secure knowledge or in utter madness, he himself might wander for
+the rest of his life in that nether world.
+
+Past grim latchless doors sealing, with appropriate gestures, their
+forgotten secrets, past outlying passages winding into the heart of
+the mountain, past niches filled with shapeless crumbling rubbish
+they hurried--the mad old man and his bewildered pursuer. Twice the
+way turned, gradually narrowing until two could hardly have passed
+there, and at last apparently terminated in a short flight of
+steps. Old Malakh mounted with difficulty and St. George, waiting,
+saw him standing before a blank stone wall. Immediately and without
+effort the old man's scanty strength served to displace one of the
+wall's huge stones which hung upon a secret pivot and rolled
+noiselessly within. He stepped through the aperture, and St. George
+sprang behind him, watched his moment to cross the threshold,
+crouched in the leaping shadow of the displaced stone and
+looked--looked with the undistinguishing amazement that a man feels
+in the panorama of his dreams.
+
+The room was small and low and set with a circular bench, running
+about a central pillar. On the table was a confusion of things
+brilliantly phosphorescent, emitting soft light, and mingled with
+bulbs, coils and crucibles lying in a litter of egg-shells,
+feathers, ivory and paper. But it was not these that held St. George
+incredulous; it was the fire that glowed in their midst--a fire that
+leaped and trembled and blazed inextinguishable colour, smouldering,
+sparkling, tossing up a spray of strange light, lambent with those
+wizard hues of the pennons and streamers floating joyously from the
+dome of the Palace of the Litany--the fire from the subject hearts
+of a thousand jewels. There could be no doubting what he saw. There,
+flung on the table from the mouth of a carven casket and harbouring
+the captive light of ages gone, glittered what St. George knew
+would be the gems of the Hereditary Treasure of the kings of Yaque.
+
+But for old Malakh to know where the jewels were--that was as
+amazing as was their discovery. St. George, breathing hard in his
+corner, watched the long, fine hands of the old man trembling among
+the delicate tubes and spindles, lingering lovingly among the
+stones, touching among the necklaces and coronals of the dead queens
+whose dust lay not far away. It was as if he were summoning and
+discarding something shining and imponderable, like words. The
+contents of the casket which all Yaque had mourned lay scattered in
+this secret place of which only this strange, mad creature, a chance
+pensioner at the palace, had knowledge.
+
+Suddenly the memory of Balator's words smote St. George with new
+perception. "He walks the streets of Med," Balator had told him at
+the banquet, "saying 'Melek, Melek,' which is to say 'king,' and so
+he is seeking the king. But he is mad, and he weeps; and therefore
+they pretend to believe that he says, 'Malakh,' which is to say
+'salt,' and they call him that, for his tears."
+
+Could old Malakh possibly know something of the king? The hope
+returned to St. George insistently, and he watched, spending his
+thought in new and extravagant conjecture, his mental vision
+blurring the details of that heaped-up, glistening confusion; and on
+the opposite side of the table the old man lifted and laid down
+that rainbow stuff of dreams, delighting in it, speaking softly
+above it. Had he been the king's friend, St. George was asking--but
+why did no one know anything of him? Or had he been an enemy who had
+done the king violence--but how was that possible, in his age and
+feebleness? Mystifying as the matter was, St. George exulted as much
+as he marveled; for it would be his, at all events, to place the
+jewels in Olivia's hands and clear her father's name; he longed to
+step out of the dark and confront the old man and seize the casket
+out of hand, and he would probably have done so and taken his
+chances at getting back to the upper world, had he not been chained
+to his corner by the irresistible hope that the old man knew
+something more--something about the king. And while he wondered,
+reflecting that at any cost he must prevent the replacing of the
+pivotal stone, he saw old Malakh take up his taper, turn away from
+the table, and open a door which the room's central pillar had cut
+from his view.
+
+He was around the table in an instant. The open door revealed three
+stone steps which the old man was ascending, one at a time.
+Following him cautiously St. George heard a door grate outward at
+the head of the stair, saw the taper move forward in darkness, and
+the next moment found himself standing in the room of the tombs of
+the kings of Yaque. And he saw that the panel which had swung
+inward to admit them was set low in the monolithic tomb of King
+Abibaal himself.
+
+Old Malakh had crossed swiftly to the wall opposite the tomb, and
+stood before the vacant niche which was to be occupied, as Jarvo had
+announced, by "His Majesty, King Otho, by the grace of God." There,
+setting aside his taper, the old man stretched his arms upward to
+the empty shelf and with a gesture of inconceivable weariness bowed
+his head upon them and stood silent, the leaping candle-light
+silvering his hair.
+
+"Upon my soul," thought St George with finality, "he's murdered him.
+Old Malakh has murdered the king, and it's driven him crazy."
+
+With that he did step out of the dark, and he laid his hand suddenly
+upon the old man's shoulder.
+
+"Malakh," he said, "what have you done with the king?"
+
+The old man lifted his head and turned toward St. George a face of
+singular calm. It was as if so many phantoms vexed his brain that a
+strange reality was of little consequence. But as his eyes met those
+of St. George a sudden dimness came over them, the lids fluttered
+and dropped, and his lips barely formed his words:
+
+"The king," he said. "I did not leave the king. It was the king who
+somehow went away and left me here--"
+
+He threw out his hands blindly, tottered and swayed from the wall;
+and St. George received him as he fell, measuring his length upon
+the stones before King Otho's future tomb.
+
+St. George caught down the light and knelt beside him. Death seemed
+to have come "pressing within his face," and breathing hardly
+disquieted his breast. St. George fumbled at the old man's robe, and
+beneath his fingers the heart fluttered never so faintly. He
+loosened the cloth at the withered throat, passed his hand over the
+still forehead, and looked desperately about him.
+
+The other inmates of the palace were, he reflected, about two good
+city blocks from him; and he doubted if he could ever find his
+unaided way back to them. Mechanically, though he knew that he
+carried no flask, he felt conscientiously through his pockets--a
+habit of the boy in perplexity which never deserts the man
+in crises. In the inside pocket of the coat that he was
+wearing--Amory's coat--his fingers suddenly closed about
+something made of glass. He seized it and drew it forth.
+
+It was a little vase of rock-crystal, ornamented with gold
+medallions, covered with exquisite and precise engraving of great
+beauty and variety of design--gryphons, serpents, winged discs, men
+contending with lions. St. George stared at it uncomprehendingly. In
+the press of events of the last eight-and-forty hours Amory had
+quite forgotten to mention to him the prince's intended gift of
+wine, almost three thousand years old, sealed in Phoenicia.
+
+St. George drew the stopper. In an instant an odour, spicy,
+penetrating, delicious, saluted him and gave life to the dead air of
+the room. For a moment he hesitated. He knew that the flask had not
+been among Amory's belongings and that he himself had never seen it
+before. But the odour was, he thought, unmistakable, and so powerful
+that already he felt as if the liquor were racing through his own
+veins. He touched it to his lips; it was like a full draught of some
+marvelous elixir. Sudden confidence sat upon St. George, and
+thanking his guiding stars for the fortunate chance, he
+unhesitatingly set the flask to the old man's lips.
+
+There was a long-drawn, shuddering breath, a fluttering of the
+eyelids, a movement of the limbs, and after that old Malakh lay
+quite still upon the stones. Once more St. George thrust his hand
+within the bosom of the loose robe, and the heart was beating
+rapidly and regularly and with amazing force. In a moment deep
+breaths succeeded one another, filling the breast of the unconscious
+man; but the eyelids did not unclose, and St. George took up the
+taper and bent to scan the quiet face.
+
+St. George looked, and sank to his knees and looked again, holding
+the light now here, now there, and peering in growing bewilderment.
+What he saw he was wholly unable to define. It was as if a mask were
+slowly to dissolve and yet to lie upon the features which it had
+covered, revealing while it still made mock of concealing. Colour
+was in the lips, colour was stealing into the changed face. The
+_changed_ face--changed, St. George could not tell how; and the
+longer he looked, and though he rubbed his eyes and turned them
+toward the dark and then looked again, moving the taper, he could
+neither explain nor define what had happened.
+
+He set the candle on the floor and sprang away from the quiet
+figure, searching the dark. The great silent place, with its
+shoulders of sarcophagi jutting from the gloom was black save for
+the little ring of pallid light about that prostrate form. St.
+George sent his hand to his forehead, and shook himself a bit, and
+straightened his shoulders with a smile.
+
+"It must be the stuff you've tasted," he addressed himself solemnly.
+"Heaven knows what it was. It's the stuff you've tasted."
+
+Though he had barely touched his lips to the rock-crystal vase St.
+George's blood was pounding through his veins, and a curious
+exhilaration filled him. He looked about at the rims and corners of
+the tombs caught by the light, and he laughed a little--though this
+was not in the least what he intended--because it passed through
+his mind that if King Abibaal and Queen Mitygen, for example, might
+be treated with the contents of the mysterious vase they would no
+doubt come forth, Abibaal with memories of the Queen of Sheba in his
+eyes, and Queen Mitygen with her casket of Alexander's letters. Then
+St. George went down on his knees again, and raised the old man's
+head until it rested upon his own breast, and he passed the candle
+before his face, his hand trembling so that the light flickered and
+leaped up.
+
+This time there was no mistaking. The tissues of old Malakh's ashen
+face and throat and pallid hands were undergoing some subtle
+transfiguration. It was as if new blood had come encroaching in
+their veins. It was as if the muscles were become firm and full, as
+if the wrinkled skin had been made smooth, the lips grown fresh, as
+if--the word came to St. George as he stared, spell-stricken--as if
+_youth_ had returned.
+
+St. George slipped down upon the stones and sat motionless. There
+was a little blue, forked vein on the man's forehead, and upon this
+he fastened his eyes, mechanically following it downward and back.
+Lines had crossed it, and there had been a deep cleft between the
+eyes, but these had disappeared, leaving the brow almost smooth. The
+cheeks were now tinged with colour, and the throat, where he had
+pulled aside the robe, showed firm and white. Mechanically St.
+George passed his hand along the inert arm, and it was no more
+withered than his own--the arm of no greybeard, but of a man in the
+prime of life. What did it mean--what did it mean? St. George
+waited, the blood throbbing in his temples, a mist before his eyes.
+What did it mean?
+
+The minutes dragged by and still the unconscious man did not stir or
+unclose his eyes. From time to time St. George pressed his hand to
+the heart, and found it beating on rhythmically, powerfully. When he
+found himself sitting with averted head, as if he were afraid to
+look back at that changing face, a fear seized him that he had lost
+his reason and that what he imagined himself to see was a phase of
+madness. So he left the old man's side and sturdily tramped away
+into the huge dark of the room, resolutely explaining to himself
+that this was all very natural; the old man had been ill, improperly
+nourished, and the powerful stimulant of the wine had partly
+restored him. But even while he went over it St. George knew in his
+heart that what had happened was nothing that could be so explained,
+nothing that could be explained at all by anything within his ken.
+
+His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath
+of the place smote his face as he moved. He stumbled on a displaced
+tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and
+reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness. The taper rays
+struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet
+of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock. St. George remembered
+a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries,
+coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air. It
+seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far
+slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this
+ghost place. Back there, where the light glimmered beside the tomb
+of King Abibaal, nobody could tell what awaited him. If the man
+could change like this, might he not take on some shape too hideous
+to bear in the silence? St. George stood still, suddenly
+clenching his hands, trying to reach out through the dark and to
+grasp--himself, the self that seemed slipping away from him. But was
+he mad already, he wondered angrily, and hurried back to the far
+flickering light, stumbling, panting, not daring to look at the
+figure on the floor, not daring not to look.
+
+He resolutely caught up the candle and peered once more at the face.
+As steadily and swiftly as change in the aspect of the sky the face
+had gone on changing. St. George had followed to the chamber an old
+tottering man; the figure before him was a man of not more than
+fifty years.
+
+St. George let fall the candle, which flickered down, upright in its
+socket; and he turned away, his hand across his eyes. Since this was
+manifestly impossible he must be mad, something in the stuff that
+he had tasted had driven him mad. He felt strong as a lion, strong
+enough to lift that prostrate figure and to carry it through the
+winding passages into the midst of those above stairs, and to beg
+them in mercy to tell him how the man looked. What would _she_ say?
+He wondered what Olivia would say. Dinner would be over and they
+would be in the drawing-room--Olivia and Amory and Antoinette
+Frothingham; already the white room and the lights and Antoinette's
+laughter seemed to him of another world, a world from which he had
+irrevocably passed. Yet there they were above, the same roof
+covering them, and they did not know that down here in this place of
+the dead he, St. George, was beyond all question going mad.
+
+With a cry he pulled off Amory's coat, flung it over the unconscious
+man, and rushed out into the blackness of the corridor. He would not
+take the light--the man must not die alone there in the dark--and
+besides he had heard that the mad could see as well in the dark as
+in the light. Or was it the blind who could see in the dark? No
+doubt it was the blind. However, he could find his way, he thought
+triumphantly, and ran on, dragging his hand along the slippery
+stones of the wall--he could find his way. Only he must call out, to
+tell them who it was that was lost. So he called himself by name,
+aloud and sternly, and after that he kept on quietly enough, serene
+in the conviction that he had regained his self-control, fighting to
+keep his mind from returning to the face that changed before his
+eyes, like the appearances in the puppet shows. But suddenly he
+became conscious that it was his own name that he went shouting
+through the passages; and that was openly absurd, he reasoned, since
+if he wanted to be found he must call some one else's name. But he
+must hurry--hurry--hurry; no one could tell what might be happening
+back there to that face that changed.
+
+"Olivia!" he shouted, "Amory! Jarvo--oh, Jarvo! Rollo, you
+scoundrel--"
+
+Whereat the memory that Rollo was somewhere on a yacht assailed him,
+and he pressed on, blindly and in silence, until glimmering before
+him he saw a light shining from an open door. Then he rushed forward
+and with a groan of relief threw himself into the room. Opposite the
+door loomed the grim sarcophagus of King Abibaal, and beside it on
+the floor lay the figure with the face that changed. He had gone a
+circle in those tortuous passages, and this was the room of the
+tombs of the kings.
+
+He dragged himself across the chamber toward the still form. He must
+look again; no one could tell what might have happened. He pulled
+down the coat and looked. And there was surely nothing in the
+delicate, handsome, English-looking face upturned to his to give
+him new horror. It was only that he had come down here in the wake
+of a tottering old creature, and that here in his place lay a man
+who was not he. Which was manifestly impossible.
+
+Mechanically St. George's hand went to the man's heart. It was
+beating regularly and powerfully, and deep breaths were coming from
+the full, healthily-coloured lips. For a moment St. George knelt
+there, his blood tingling and pricking in his veins and pulsing in
+his temples. Then he swayed and fell upon the stones.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When St. George opened his eyes it was ten o'clock of the following
+morning, though he felt no interest in that. There was before him a
+great rectangle of light. He lifted his head and saw that the light
+appeared to flow from the interior of the tomb of King Abibaal. The
+next moment Amory's cheery voice, pitched high in consternation and
+relief, made havoc among the echoes with a background of Jarvo's
+smooth thanksgiving for the return of adon.
+
+St. George, coatless, stiff from the hours on the mouldy stones,
+dragged himself up and turned his eyes in fear upon the figure
+beside him. It flashed hopefully through his mind that perhaps it
+had not changed, that perhaps he had dreamed it all, that perhaps
+...
+
+By his first glance that hope was dispelled. From beneath Amory's
+coat on the floor an arm came forth, pushing the coat aside, and a
+man slenderly built, with a youthful, sensitive face and somewhat
+critically-drooping lids, sat up leisurely and looked about him in
+slow surprise, kindling to distinct amusement.
+
+"Upon my soul," he said softly, "what an admission--what an
+admission! I can not have made such a night of it in years."
+
+Upon which Jarvo dropped unhesitatingly to his knees.
+
+"Melek! Melek!" he cried, prostrating himself again and again. "The
+King! The King! The gods have permitted the possible."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A MORNING VISIT
+
+
+In an upper room in the Palace of the Litany, fair with all the
+burnished devices of the early light, Prince Tabnit paced on that
+morning of mornings of his marriage day. Because of his great
+happiness the whole world seemed to him like some exquisite intaglio
+of which this day was the design.
+
+The room, "walled with soft splendours of Damascus tiles," was laid
+with skins of forgotten animals and was hung with historic
+tapestries dyed by ancient fingers in the spiral veins of the Murex.
+There were frescoes uniting the dream with its actuality, columns
+carved with both lines and names of beauty, pilasters decorated with
+chain and checker-work and golden nets. A stairway led to a high
+shrine where hung the crucified Tyrian sphinx. The room was like a
+singing voice summoning one to delights which it described. But
+whatever way one looked all the lines neither pointed nor seemed to
+have had beginning, but being divorced from source and direction
+expressed merely beauty, like an altar "where none cometh to pray."
+
+Prince Tabnit, in his trailing robe of white embroidered by a
+thousand needles, looked so akin to the room that one suspected it
+of having produced him, Athena-wise, from, say, the great black
+shrine. When he paused before the shrine he seemed like a child come
+to beseech some last word concerning the Riddle, rather than a man
+who believed himself to have mastered all wisdom and to have nailed
+the world-sphinx to her cross.
+
+     "Surely there is a vein for the silver
+      And a place for the gold where they fine it.
+      Iron is taken out of the earth
+      And brass is moulton out of the stone.
+      Man setteth an end to darkness
+      And searcheth out all perfection:
+      The stones of darkness and of the shadow of death,"
+
+he was repeating softly. "So it is," he added, "'and searcheth to
+the farthest bound.' Have I not done so? And do I not triumph?"
+
+Then the youth who had once admitted St. George and his friends to
+that far-away house in McDougle Street--with the hokey-pokey man
+outside the door--entered with the poetry of deference; and if, as
+he bent low, there was a lift and droop of his eyelids which tokened
+utter bewilderment, not to say agitation, he was careful that the
+prince should not see that.
+
+"Her Highness, the Princess of Yaque, Mrs. Hastings, Mr. Augustus
+Frothingham and Miss Frothingham ask audience, your Highness," he
+announced clearly.
+
+Prince Tabnit turned swiftly.
+
+"Whom do you say, Matten?" he questioned and when the boy had
+repeated the names, meditated briefly. He was at a loss to fathom
+what this strange visit might portend; beyond doubt, he reflected
+(in a world which was an intaglio of his own designing) it portended
+nothing at all. He hastened forward to wait upon them and paused
+midway the room, for the highest tribute that a Prince of the Litany
+could pay to another was to receive him in this chamber of the
+Crucified Sphinx.
+
+"Conduct them here, Matten," he commanded, and took up his station
+beside an hundred-branched candlestick made in Curium. There he
+stood when, having been led down corridors of ivory and through
+shining anterooms, Mrs. Hastings and Olivia and Antoinette appeared
+on the threshold of the chamber, followed by Mr. Frothingham. As the
+prince hastened forward to meet them with sweepings of his gown
+embroidered by a thousand needles and bent above their hands
+uttering gracious words, assuredly in all the history of Med and of
+the Litany the room of the Crucified Sphinx had never presented a
+more peculiar picture.
+
+Into that tranquil atmosphere, dream-pervaded, Mrs. Medora Hastings
+swept with all the certainty of an opinion bludgeoning the frail
+security of a fact. She had refused to have her belongings sent to
+the apartments in the House of the Litany placed that day at her
+disposal, preferring to dress for the coronation before she
+descended from Mount Khalak. She was therefore in a robe of black
+samite, trimmed with the fur of a whole chapter of extinct animals,
+and bangles and pendants of jewels bobbed and ticked all about her.
+But on her head she wore the bonnet trimmed with a parrot, set, as
+usual, frightfully awry. Beside her, with all the timidity of
+charming reality in the presence of fantasy, came Olivia and
+Antoinette--Olivia in a walking frock of white broadcloth, with an
+auto coat of hunting pink, and a cap held down by yards of cloudy
+veiling; Antoinette in a blue cloth gown, and about them both--stout
+little boots and suede gloves and smart shirt-waists--such an air of
+actuality as this chamber, prince and Sphinx and tradition and all,
+could not approach. Mr. Augustus Frothingham had struck his usual
+incontestable middle-ground by appearing in the blue velvet of a
+robe of State, over which he had slipped his light covert top-coat,
+and he carried his immaculate top-hat and a silver-headed stick.
+
+"Prince Tabnit," said Mrs. Medora Hastings without ceremony, "what
+have they done with that poor young man? Ask him, Olivia," she
+besought, sinking down upon a chair of verd antique and extending a
+limp, plump hand to the niece who always did everything executive.
+
+Olivia was very pale. She had hardly slept, night-long. Alarm at the
+inexplicable disappearance of St. George at dinner-time the day
+before and at the discovery that old Malakh was nowhere about had,
+by morning, deepened to unreasoning fear among them all. And then
+Olivia, knowing nothing of what had taken place in the room of the
+tombs, had resolved upon a desperate expedient, had bundled into an
+airship her almost prostrate aunt, Mr. Frothingham and his excited
+little daughter, and had borne down upon the Palace of the Litany
+two hours before noon. Amory, frantic with apprehension, had stayed
+behind with Jarvo, certain that St. George could not have left the
+mountain. But now that Olivia stood before the prince it required
+but a moment to convince her that Prince Tabnit really knew nothing
+of St. George's whereabouts. Indeed, since his gift of Phoenician
+wine, sealed three thousand years ago, and the immediate evanishment
+of the two Americans, his Highness had no longer vexed his thought
+with them, and he was genuinely amazed to know that (in a world
+which was an intaglio of his own designing) these two had actually
+spent yesterday at the king's palace on Mount Khalak. He perceived
+that he must give them more definite attention than his half-idle
+device of the wine--intended as that had been as a mere hyperspatial
+practical joke, not in the least irreconcilable with his office of
+host.
+
+"Mr. St. George came to Yaque to help me find my father," Olivia was
+concluding earnestly, "and if anything has happened to him, Prince
+Tabnit, I alone am responsible."
+
+The prince reflected for a moment, his eyes fixed upon the
+hundred-branched candlestick. Then:
+
+"Mr. St. George's disappearance," he said, "has prevented a still
+more unpleasant catastrophe."
+
+"Catastrophe!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, quite without tucking in her
+voice at the corners, "I have thought of no other word since I got
+to be royalty."
+
+"A world experience, a world experience, dear Madame," contributed
+Mr. Frothingham, his hands laid trimly along his blue velvet lap.
+
+"But that doesn't make it any easier to bear, no matter what anybody
+says," retorted the lady.
+
+"Inasmuch," pursued Prince Tabnit with infinite regret, "as these
+Americans have, as you say, assisted in the search for your father,
+the king, they have most unfortunately violated that ancient law
+which provides that no State or satrapy shall receive aid, whether
+of blood or of bond, from an alien. The Royal House alone is
+exempt."
+
+"And the penalty," demanded Olivia fearfully. "Is there a penalty?
+What is that, Prince Tabnit?"
+
+The voice of the prince was never more mellow.
+
+"Do not be alarmed, I beg," he hastened his reassurance. "Upon the
+return of Mr. St. George, he and his friend will simply be set
+adrift in a rudderless airship, an offering to the great idea of
+space."
+
+Mrs. Hastings swayed toward the prince in her chair of verd antique,
+and her voice seemed to become brittle in the air.
+
+"Oh, is that what you call being ahead of the time," she demanded
+shrilly, "getting behind science to behave like Nero? And for my
+part I don't see anything whatever about the island that is ahead of
+the times. You haven't even got silk shoe-laces. I actually had to
+use a cloth-of-gold sandal strap to lace my oxfords, and when I lost
+a cuff-link I was obliged to make shift with two sides of one of
+Queen Agothonike's ear-rings that I found in the museum at the
+palace. And that isn't all," went on the lady, wrong kindling wrong,
+"what do you do for paper and envelopes? There is not a quire to be
+found in Med. They offered me _wireless blanks_--an ultra form that
+Mr. Hastings would never have considered in good taste. And how
+about visiting cards? I tried to have a plate made, and they showed
+me a wireless apparatus for flashing from the doorstep the name of
+the visitor--an electrical entrance which Mr. Hastings would have
+considered most inelegant. Ahead of the times, with your rudderless
+airships! I have always said that the electric chair is a way to be
+barbarous and good form at the same time, and that is what I think
+about Yaque!"
+
+Mr. Frothingham's hands worked forward convulsively on his blue
+velvet knees.
+
+"My dear Madame," he interposed earnestly, "the history of criminal
+jurisprudence, not to mention the remarkable essay of the Marquis
+Beccaria--proves beyond doubt that the extirpation of the offender
+is the only possible safety for the State--"
+
+Olivia rose and stood before the prince, her eyes meeting his.
+
+"You will permit this sentence?" she asked steadily. "As head of the
+House of the Litany, you will execute it, Prince Tabnit?"
+
+"Alas!" said the prince humbly, "it is customary on the day of the
+coronation to set adrift all offenders. I am the servant of the
+State."
+
+"Then, Prince Tabnit, I can not marry you."
+
+At this Mrs. Hastings looked blindly about for support, and Mr.
+Frothingham and Antoinette flew to her side. In that moment the lady
+had seen herself, prophetically, in black samite and her parrot
+bonnet, set adrift in the penitential airship with her rebellious
+niece.
+
+For a moment Prince Tabnit hesitated: he looked at Olivia, who was
+never more beautiful than as she defied him; then he walked slowly
+toward her, with sweep and fall of his garments embroidered by a
+thousand needles. Antoinette and her father, ministering to Mrs.
+Hastings, heard only the new note that had crept into his voice, a
+thrill, a tremour--
+
+"Olivia!" he said.
+
+Her eyes met his in amazement but no fear.
+
+"In a land more alien to me than the sun," said the prince, "I saw
+you, and in that moment I loved you. I love you more than the life
+beyond life upon which I have laid hold. I brought you to this
+island to make you my wife. Do you understand what it is that I
+offer you?"
+
+Olivia was silent. She was trembling a little at the sheer enormity
+of the moment. Suddenly, Prince Tabnit seemed to her like a name
+that she did not know.
+
+"Will you not understand what I mean?" he besought with passionate
+earnestness. "Can I make my words mean nothing to you? Do you not
+see that it is indeed as I say--that I have grasped the secret of
+life within life, beyond life, transcending life, as his
+understanding transcends the man? The wonder of the island is but
+the alphabet of wisdom. The secrets of life and death and being
+itself are in my grasp. The hidden things that come near to you in
+beauty, in dream, in inspiration are mine and my people's. All
+these I can make yours--I offer you life of a fullness such as the
+people of the world do not dream. I will love you as the gods love,
+and as the gods we will live and love--it may be for ever. Nothing
+of high wisdom shall be unrevealed to us. We shall be what the world
+will be when it nears the close of time. Come to me--trust me--be
+beside me in all the wonder that I know. But above all, love me, for
+I love you more than life, and wisdom, and mystery!"
+
+Olivia understood, and she believed. The mystery of life had always
+been more real to her than its commonplaces, and all her years she
+had gone half-expecting to meet some one, unheralded, to whom all
+things would be clear, and who should make her know by some secret
+sign that this was so, and should share with her. She had no doubt
+whatever that Prince Tabnit spoke the truth--just as the daughter of
+the river-god Inachus knew perfectly that she was being wooed by a
+voice from the air. Indeed, the world over, lovers promise each
+other infinite things, and are infinitely believed.
+
+"I do understand you, Prince Tabnit," Olivia said simply, "I do
+understand something of what you offer me. I think that these things
+were not meant to be hidden from men always, so I can even believe
+that you have all that you say. But--there is something more."
+
+Olivia paused--and swiftly, as if some little listening spirit had
+released the picture from the air, came the memory of that night
+when she had stood with St. George on that airy rampart beside the
+wall of blossoming vines.
+
+"There is something more," she repeated, "when two love each other
+very much I think that they have everything that you have said, and
+more."
+
+He looked at her in silence. The stained light from some high window
+caught her veil in meshes of rose and violet--fairy colours,
+witnessing the elusive, fairy, invincible truth of what she said.
+
+"You mean that you do not love me?" said the prince gently.
+
+"I do not love you, your Highness," said Olivia, "and as for the
+wisdom of which you speak, that is worse than useless to you if you
+can do as you say with two quite innocent men." She hesitated,
+searching his face. "Is there no way," she said, "that I, the
+daughter of your king, can save them? I will appeal to the people!"
+
+The prince met her eyes steadily, adoringly.
+
+"It would avail nothing," he said, "they are at one with the law.
+Yet there is a way that I can help you. If Mr. St. George returns,
+as he must, he and his friends shall be set adrift with due
+ceremony--but in an imperial airship, with a man secretly in
+control. By night they can escape to their yacht. This I will
+do--upon one condition."
+
+"Oh--what is that?" she asked, and for all the reticence of her
+eagerness, her voice was a betrayal.
+
+Prince Tabnit turned to the window. Below, in the palace grounds,
+and without, in the Eurychorus, a thousand people awaited the
+opening of the palace doors. They filled the majestic avenue, poured
+up the shadowed alleys that taught the necessity of mystery, were
+grouped beneath the honey-sweet trees; and above their heads, from
+every dome and column in the fair city, flowed and streamed the
+joyous, wizard, nameless colours of the pennons blown heavenward
+against the blue. They were come, this strange, wise, elusive
+people, to her marriage.
+
+The prince was smiling as he met her eyes; for the world was always
+the exquisite intaglio, and to-day was its design.
+
+"They know," he said simply, "what was to have been at noon to-day.
+Do you not understand my condition?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+IN THE HALL OF KINGS
+
+
+Somewhat before noon the great doors of the Palace of the Litany and
+of the Hall of Kings were thrown open, and the people streamed in
+from the palace grounds and the Eurychorus. Abroad among
+them--elusive as that by which we know that a given moment belongs
+to dawn, not dusk--was the sense of questioning, of unrest, of
+expectancy that belongs to the dawn itself. Especially the youths
+and maidens--who, besides wisdom, knew something of spells--waited
+with a certain wistfulness for what might be, for Change is a kind
+of god even to the immortals. But there were also those who weighed
+the departures incident to the coming of the strange people from
+over-seas; and there were not lacking conservatives of the old
+regime to shake wise heads and declare that a barbarian is a
+barbarian, the world over.
+
+All that rainbow multitude, clad for festival, rose with the first
+light music that stole, winged and silken, from hidden cedar
+alcoves, and some minutes past the sounding of the hour of noon the
+chamfered doors set high in the south wall of the Hall of Kings were
+swung open, and at the head of the stair appeared Olivia.
+
+She was alone, for the custom of Yaque required that the island
+princesses should on the day of their recognition first appear alone
+before their people in token of their mutual faith. From the
+wardrobes at the castle Olivia had chosen the coronation gown of
+Queen Mitygen herself. It was of fine lace woven in a single piece,
+and it lay in a foam of shining threads traced with pure lines of
+shadow. On her head were a jeweled coronal and jeweled hair-loops in
+the Phoenician fashion, once taken from a king's casket and sent
+secretly, upon the decline of Assyrian ascendancy, to be bartered in
+the marts of Coele-Syria. Chains of jewels, in a noon of colour, lay
+about her throat, as once they lay upon the shoulders of the dead
+queens of Yaque and, before them, of the women of the elder
+dynasties long since recorded in indifferent dust. Girdling her
+waist was a zone of rubies that burned positive in the tempered
+light. With all her delicacy, Olivia was like her rubies--vivid,
+graphic, delineated not by light but by line.
+
+The members of the High Council rustled in their colour and white,
+and flashed their golden stars; the Golden Guards (save the apostate
+few who were that day sentenced to be set adrift) were filling the
+stairway like a bank of buttercups; and Olivia's women, led by
+Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated, were
+entering by an opposite door. In the raised seats near the High
+Council, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham leaned to wave a
+sustaining greeting. Until that high moment Mrs. Medora Hastings had
+been by no means certain that Olivia would appear at all, though she
+openly nourished the hope that "everything would go off smoothly."
+("I don't care much for foreigners and never have," she confided to
+Mr. Frothingham, "still, I was thinking while I was at breakfast,
+after all, to the prince _we are_ the foreigners. There is something
+in that, don't you think? And then the dear prince--he is so very
+metaphysical!")
+
+Upon the beetling throne Olivia took her place, and her women sank
+about her like tiers of sunset clouds. She was so little and so
+beautiful and so unconsciously appealing that when Prince Tabnit and
+Cassyrus and the rest of the court entered, it is doubtful if an eye
+left Olivia, to homage them. But Prince Tabnit was the last to note
+that, for he saw only Olivia; and the world--the world was an
+intaglio of his own designing.
+
+With due magnificence the preliminary ceremonies of the coronation
+proceeded--musty necessities, like oaths and historical truths,
+being mingled with the most delicate observances, such as the
+naming of the former princesses of the island, from Adija, daughter
+of King Abibaal, to Olivia, daughter of King Otho; and such as
+counting the clouds for the misfortunes of the regime. This last
+duty fell to the office of the lord chief-chancellor, and from an
+upper porch he returned quickening with the intelligence that there
+was not a cloud in the sky, a state of the heavens known to no
+coronation since Babylon was ruled by Assyrian viceroys. The lord
+chief-chancellor and Cassyrus themselves brought forth the crown--a
+beautiful crown, shining like dust-in-the-sun--and Cassyrus, in a
+voice that trumpeted, rehearsed its history: how it had been made of
+jewels brought from the coffers of Amasis and Apries, when King
+Nebuchadnezzar wrested Phoenicia from Egypt, and, too, of all manner
+of precious stones sent by Queen Atossa, wife of Darius, when the
+Crotoniat Democedes, with two triremes and a trading vessel, visited
+Yaque before they went to survey Hellenic shores, with what
+disastrous result. And Olivia, standing in the queen's gown,
+listened without hearing one word, and turned to have her veil
+lifted by Antoinette and the daughter of a peer of Yaque; and she
+knelt before the people while the lord chief-chancellor set the
+crown on her bright hair. It was a picture that thrilled the lord
+chief-chancellor himself--who was a worshiper of beauty, and a man
+given to angling in the lagoon and making metric translations of the
+inscriptions.
+
+Then it was in the room as if a faint flame had been breathed upon
+and had upleaped in a thousand ways of expectancy, and as if a
+secret sign had been set in the lift and dip of the music--the music
+that was so like the great chamber with its lift and dip of carven
+line. The thrill with which one knows the glad news of an unopened
+letter was upon them all, and they heard that swift breath of an
+event that stirs before its coming. When Olivia's women fell back
+from the dais with wonder and murmur, the murmur was caught up in
+the great hall, and ran from tier to tier as amazement, as
+incredulity, and as thanksgiving.
+
+For there, beside the beetling throne, was standing a man, slenderly
+built, with a youthful, sensitive face and critically-drooping lids,
+and upon them all his eyes were turned in faint amusement warmed by
+an idle approbation.
+
+"Perfect--perfect. Quite perfect," he was saying below his breath.
+
+Olivia turned. The next moment she stood with outstretched arms
+before her father; and King Otho, in his long, straight robe,
+encrusted with purple amethysts, bent with exquisite courtesy above
+his daughter's hands.
+
+"My dear child," he murmured, "the picture that you make entirely
+justifies my existence, but hardly my absence. Shall we ask his
+Highness to do that?"
+
+It mattered little who was to do that so long as it was done. For to
+that people, steeped in dream, risen from the crudity of mere events
+to breathe in the rarer atmosphere of their significance, here was a
+happening worthy their attention, for it had the dignity of mystery.
+Even Mrs. Medora Hastings, billowing toward the throne with cries,
+was less poignantly a challenge to be heard. Upon her the king laid
+a tranquillizing hand and, with a droop of eyelids in recognition of
+Mr. Frothingham, he murmured: "Ah, Medora--Medora! Delight in the
+moment--but do not embrace it," while beside him, star-eyed, Olivia
+stood waiting for Prince Tabnit to speak.
+
+To Olivia, trembling a little as she leaned upon his arm, King Otho
+bent with some word, at which she raised to his her startled face,
+and turned from him uncertainly, and burned a heavenly colour from
+brow to chin. Then, her father's words being insistent in her ear,
+and her own heart being tumultuous with what he had told her, she
+turned as he bade her, and, following his glance, slipped beneath a
+shining curtain that cut from the audience chamber the still
+seclusion of the King's Alcove, a chamber long sacred to the
+sovereigns of Yaque.
+
+Confused with her wonder and questioning, hardly daring to
+understand the import of her father's words, Olivia went down a
+passage set between two high white walls of the palace, open
+to-day to the upper blue and to the floating pennons of the dome.
+Here, prickly-leaved plants had shot to the cornices with
+uncouth contorting of angled boughs, and in their inner green
+ruffle-feathered birds looked down on her with the uncanny
+interest of myriapods. She caught about her the lace of her skirts
+and of her floating veil, and the way echoed musically to the
+touch of her little sandals and was bright with the shining of her
+diadem. And at the end of the passage she lifted a swaying curtain
+of soft dyes and entered the King's Alcove.
+
+The King's Alcove laid upon one the delicate demands of calm open
+water--for its floor of white transparent tiles was cunningly traced
+with the reflected course of the carven roof, and one seemed to look
+into mirrored depths of disappearing line between spaces shaped like
+petals and like chevrons. In the King's Alcove one stood in a world
+of white and one's sight was exquisitely won, now by a niche open to
+a blue well of sea and space, now by silver plants lucent in high
+casements. And there one was spellbound with this mirroring of the
+Near which thus became the Remote, until one questioned gravely
+which was "there" and which was "here," for the real was extended
+into vision, and vision was quickened to the real, and nothing lay
+between. But to Olivia, entering, none of these things was clearly
+evident, for as the curtain of many dyes fell behind her she was
+aware of two figures--but the one, with a murmured word which she
+managed somehow to answer without an idea what she said or what it
+had said either, vanished down the way that she had come. And she
+stood there face to face with St. George.
+
+He had risen from a low divan before a small table set with figs and
+bread and a decanter of what would have been bordeaux if it had not
+been distilled from the vineyards of Yaque. He was very pale and
+haggard, and his eyes were darkly circled and still fever-bright.
+But he came toward her as if he had quite forgotten that this is a
+world of danger and that she was a princess and that, little more
+than a week ago, her name was to him the unknown music. He came
+toward her with a face of unutterable gladness, and he caught and
+crushed her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he could
+look to the distant soul of her. He led her to a great chair hewn
+from quarries of things silver and unremembered, and he sat at her
+feet upon a bench that might have been a stone of the altar of some
+forgotten deity of dreams, at last worshiped as it should long have
+been worshiped by all the host that had passed it by. He looked up
+in her face, and the room was like a place of open water where
+heaven is mirrored in earth, and earth reflects and answers heaven.
+
+St. George laughed a little for sheer, inextinguishable happiness.
+
+"Once," he said, "once I breakfasted with you, on tea and--if I
+remember correctly--gold and silver muffins. Won't you breakfast
+with me now?"
+
+Olivia looked down at him, her heart still clamourous with its
+anxiety of the night and of the morning.
+
+"Tell me where you can have been," she said only; "didn't you know
+how distressed we would be? We imagined everything--in this dreadful
+place. And we feared everything, and we--" but yet the "we" did not
+deceive St. George; how could it with her eyes, for all their
+avoidings, so divinely upon him?
+
+"Did you," he said, "ah--did you wonder? I wish I knew!"
+
+"And my father--where did you find him?" she besought. "It was you?
+You found him, did you not?"
+
+St. George looked down at a fold of her gown that was fallen across
+his knee. How on earth was he ever to move, he wondered vaguely, if
+the slightest motion meant the withdrawing of that fold. He looked
+at her hand, resting so near, so near, upon the arm of the chair;
+and last he looked again into her face; and it seemed wonderful and
+before all things wonderful, not that she should be here, jeweled
+and crowned, but that he should so unbelievably be here with her.
+And yet it might be but a moment, as time is measured, until this
+moment would be swept away. His eyes met hers and held them.
+
+"Would you mind," he said, "now--just for a little, while we wait
+here--not asking me that? Not asking me anything? There will be time
+enough in there--when _they_ ask me. Just for now I only want to
+think how wonderful this is."
+
+She said: "Yes, it is wonderful--unbelievable," but he thought that
+she might have meant the white room or her queen's robe or any one
+of all the things which he did not mean.
+
+"_Is_ it wonderful to you?" he asked, and he said again: "I wish--I
+wish I knew!"
+
+He looked at her, sitting in the moon of her laces and the stars of
+her gems, and the sense of the immeasurableness of the hour came
+upon him as it comes to few; the knowledge that the evanescent
+moment is very potent, the world where the siren light of the Remote
+may at any moment lie quenched in some ashen present. To him, held
+momentarily in this place that was like shoreless, open water, the
+present was inestimably precious and it lay upon St. George like the
+delicate claim of his love itself. What the next hour held for them
+neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him
+crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand
+lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her
+fingers to his lips.
+
+"Olivia--dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do--what
+will happen--oh, may I tell you _now_?"
+
+There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not
+withdrawn from his. And so he did tell her, told her all his heart
+as he had known his heart to be that last night on _The Aloha_, and
+in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those
+hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the
+vigil that followed, and always--always, ever since he could
+remember, only that he hadn't known that he was waiting for her, and
+now he knew--now he knew.
+
+"Must you not have known, up there in the palace," he besought her,
+"the night that I got there? And yesterday, all day yesterday, you
+must have known--didn't you know? I love you, Olivia. I couldn't
+have told you, I couldn't have let you know, only now, when we can't
+know what may come or what they may do--oh, say you forgive me.
+Because I love you--I love you."
+
+She rose swiftly, her veil floating about her, silver over the gold
+of her hair; and the light caught the enchantment of the gems of the
+strange crown they had set upon her head, and she looked down at
+him in almost unearthly beauty. He stood before her, waiting for the
+moment when she should lift her eyes. And the eyes were lifted, and
+he held out his arms, and straight to them, regardless of the
+coronation laces of Queen Mitygen, went Olivia, Princess of Yaque.
+He put aside her shining hair, as he had put it aside in that divine
+moment in the motor in the palace wood; and their lips met, in that
+world that was like the shoreless open sea where earth reflects
+heaven, and heaven comes down.
+
+They sat upon the white-cushioned divan, and St. George half knelt
+beside her as he had knelt that night in the fleeing motor, and
+there were an hundred things to say and an hundred things to hear.
+And because this fragment of the past since they had met was
+incontestably theirs, and because the future hung trembling before
+them in a mist of doubt, they turned happy, hopeful eyes to that
+future, clinging to each other's hands. The little chamber of
+translucent white, where one looked down to a mirrored dome and up
+to a kind of sky, became to them a place bounded by the touch and
+the look and the voice of each other, as every place in the world is
+bounded for every heart that beats.
+
+"Sweetheart," said St. George presently, "do you remember that you
+are a princess, and I'm merely a kind of man?"
+
+Was it not curious, he thought, that his lips did not speak a new
+language of their own accord?
+
+"I know," corrected Olivia adorably, "that I'm a kind of princess.
+But what use is that when it only makes trouble for us?"
+
+"Us"--"makes trouble for us." St. George wondered how he could ever
+have thought that he even guessed what happiness might be when
+"trouble for us" was like this. He tried to say so, and then:
+
+"But do you know what you are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you
+see--dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world
+that you can never, never get back?"
+
+Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It
+seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his
+forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it
+back. To prove that _that_ was not incredible, St. George turned
+until his lips brushed her wrist.
+
+"Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very
+possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the
+rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming
+they will sometime know?"
+
+Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.
+
+"I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of
+that."
+
+"You'll never be sorry--never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely
+denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.
+
+"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
+
+That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he
+whimsically remembered something else:
+
+"You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is
+another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a
+queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And
+in New York--in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."
+
+"No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I _insist_ upon a
+flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the
+altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour
+dissolving to mirrored point and light--the mystic union of sight
+with dream--and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine
+resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different--a flat," she said
+shyly.
+
+Wouldn't it--wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?
+
+"Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.
+
+"But it will be different, just different enough to like better,"
+she admitted then. "You know that I think so," she said.
+
+"If only you knew how much I think so," he told her, "how I have
+thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris.
+Olivia, dear heart--when did you think so first--"
+
+She shook her head and laid her hands upon his and drew them to her
+face.
+
+"Now, now--now!" she cried, "and there never was any time but now."
+
+"But there will be--there will be," he said, his lips upon her hair.
+
+After a time--for Time, that seems to have no boundaries in the
+abstract, is a very fiend for bounding the divine concrete--after a
+time Amory spoke hesitatingly on the other side of the curtain of
+many dyes.
+
+"St. George," he said, "I'm afraid they want you. Mr. Holland--the
+king, he's got through playing them. He wants you to get up and give
+'em the truth, I think."
+
+"Come in--come in, Amory," St. George said and lifted the curtain,
+and "I beg your pardon," he added, as his eyes fell upon Antoinette
+in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated. She had followed
+Olivia from the hall, and had met Amory midway the avenue of prickly
+trees, and they had helpfully been keeping guard. Now they went on
+before to the Hall of Kings, and St. George, remembering what must
+happen there, turned to Olivia for one crowning moment.
+
+"You know," she said fearfully, "before father came the prince
+intended the most terrible things--to set you and Mr. Amory adrift
+in a rudderless airship--"
+
+St. George laughed in amusement. The poor prince with his impossible
+devices, thinking to harm him, St. George--_now_.
+
+"He meant to marry you, he thought," he said, "but, thank Heaven, he
+has your father to answer to--and me!" he ended jubilantly.
+
+And yet, after all, Heaven knew what possibilities hemmed them
+round. And Heaven knew what she was going to think of him when she
+heard his story. He turned and caught her to him, for the crowning
+moment.
+
+"You love me--you love me," he said, "no matter what happens or what
+they say--no matter what?"
+
+She met his eyes and, of her own will, she drew his face down to
+hers.
+
+"No matter what," she answered. So they went together toward the
+chamber which they had both forgotten.
+
+When they reached the Hall of Kings they heard King Otho's
+voice--suave, mellow, of perfect enunciation:
+
+"--some one," the king was concluding, "who can tell this
+considerably better than I. And it seems to me singularly fitting
+that the recognition of the part eternally played by the 'possible'
+be temporarily deferred while we listen to--I dislike to use the
+word, but shall I say--the facts."
+
+It seemed to St. George when he stood beside the dais, facing that
+strange, eager multitude with his strange unbelievable story upon
+his lips--the story of the finding of the king--as if his own voice
+were suddenly a part of all the gigantic incredibility. Yet the
+divinely real and the fantastic had been of late so fused in his
+consciousness that he had come to look upon both as the
+normal--which is perhaps the only sane view. But how could he tell
+to others the monstrous story of last night, and hope to be
+believed?
+
+None the less, as simply as if he had been narrating to
+Chillingworth the high moment of a political convention, St. George
+told the people of Yaque what had happened in that night in the room
+of the tombs with that mad old Malakh whom they all remembered. It
+came to him as he spoke that it was quite like telling to a field of
+flowers the real truth about the wind of which they might be
+supposed to know far more than he; and yet, if any one were to tell
+the truth about the wind who would know how to listen? He was not
+amazed that, when he had done, the people of Yaque sat in a profound
+silence which might have been the silence of innocent amazement or
+of utter incredulity.
+
+But there was no mistaking the face of Prince Tabnit. Its cool
+tolerant amusement suddenly sent the blood pricking to St. George's
+heart and filled him with a kind of madness. What he did was the
+last thing that he had intended. He turned upon the prince, and his
+voice went cutting to the farthest corner of the hall:
+
+"Men and women of Yaque," he cried, "I accuse your prince of the
+knowledge that can take from and add to the years of man at will. I
+accuse him of the deliberate and criminal use of that knowledge to
+take King Otho from his throne!"
+
+St. George hardly knew what effect his words had. He saw only
+Olivia, her hands locked, her lips parted, looking in his face in
+anguish; and he saw Prince Tabnit smile. Prince Tabnit sat upon the
+king's left hand, and he leaned and whispered a smiling word in the
+ear of his sovereign and turned a smiling face to Olivia upon her
+father's right.
+
+"I know something of your American newspapers, your Majesty," the
+prince said aloud, "and these men are doing their part excellently,
+excellently."
+
+"What do you mean, your Highness?" demanded St. George curtly.
+
+"But is it not simple?" asked the prince, still smiling. "You have
+contrived a sensation for the great American newspaper. No one can
+doubt."
+
+King Otho leaned back in the beetling throne.
+
+"Ah, yes," he said, "it is true. Something has been contrived.
+But--is the sensation of _his_ contriving, Prince?"
+
+Olivia stood silent. It was not possible, it was not possible, she
+said over mechanically. For St. George to have come with this story
+of a potion--a drug that had restored youth to her father, had
+transformed him from that mad old Malakh--
+
+"Father!" she cried appealingly, "don't you remember--don't you
+know?"
+
+King Otho, watching the prince, shook his head, smiling.
+
+"At dawn," he said, "there are few of us to be found remaining still
+at table with Socrates. I seem not to have been of that number."
+
+"Olivia!" cried St. George suddenly.
+
+She met his eyes for a moment, the eyes that had read her own, that
+had given message for message, that had seen with her the glory of a
+mystic morning willingly relinquished for a diviner dawn. Was she
+not princess here in Yaque? She laid her hand upon her father's
+hand; the crown that they had given her glittered as she turned
+toward the multitude.
+
+"My people," she said ringingly, "I believe that that man speaks the
+truth. Shall the prince not answer to this charge before the High
+Council now--here--before you all?"
+
+At this King Otho did something nearly perceptible with his
+eyebrows. "Perfect. Perfect. Quite perfect," he said below his
+breath. The next instant the eyelids of the sovereign drooped
+considerably less than one would have supposed possible. For from
+every part of the great chamber, as if a storm long-pent had forced
+the walls of the wind, there came in a thousand murmurs--soft,
+tremulous, definitive--the answering voice to Olivia's question:
+
+"Yes. Yes. Yes..."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+OUT OF THE HALL OF KINGS
+
+
+In Prince Tabnit's face there was a curious change, as if one were
+suddenly to see hieroglyphics upon a star where before there had
+been only shining. But his calm and his magnificent way of authority
+did not desert him, as so grotesque a star would still stand lonely
+and high in the heavens. He spoke, and upon the multitude fell
+instant silence, not the less absolute that it harboured foreboding.
+
+"Whatever the people would say to me," said the prince simply, "I
+will hear. My right hand rests in the hand of the people. In return
+I decree allegiance to the law. Your princess stands before you,
+crowned. This most fortunate return of his Majesty, the King, can
+not set at naught the sacred oath which has just left her lips.
+Henceforth, in council and in audience, her place shall be at his
+Majesty's right hand, as was the place of that Princess Athalme,
+daughter of King Kab, in the dynasty of the fall of Rome. Is it not,
+therefore, but the more incumbent upon your princess to own her
+allegiance to the law of the island by keeping her troth with
+me--that troth witnessed and sanctioned by you yourselves? This
+ceremony concluded I will answer the demands of the loyal subjects
+whose interests alone I serve. For we obey that which is higher than
+authority--the law, born in the Beginning--"
+
+Prince Tabnit's voice might almost have taken his place in his
+absence, it was so soft, so fine of texture, no more consciously
+modulated than is the going of water or the way of a wing. It was
+difficult to say whether his words or, so to say, their fine fabric
+of voice, begot the silence that followed. But all eyes were turned
+upon Olivia. And, Prince Tabnit noting this, before she might speak
+he suddenly swept his flowing robes embroidered by a thousand
+needles to a posture of humility before his sovereign.
+
+"Your Majesty," he besought, "I pray your consent to the bestowal
+upon my most unworthy self of the hand of your daughter, the
+Princess Olivia."
+
+King Otho leaned upon the arm of his carven throne. Against its
+strange metal his hand was cameo-clear.
+
+"For the king," he was remembering softly, "'the Pyrenees, or so he
+fancied, ceased to exist.' For another 'the mountains of Daphne are
+everywhere.' Each of us has his impossible dream to prove that he
+is an impossible creature. Why not I? To be normal is the cry of all
+the hobgoblins ... And what does the princess say?" he asked aloud.
+
+"Her Highness has already given me the great happiness to plight me
+her troth," said Prince Tabnit.
+
+King Otho's eyebrows flickered from their parallel of repose.
+
+"In Yaque or in America," he murmured, "the Americans do as the
+Americans do. None of us is mentioned in Deuteronomy, but what is
+the will of the princess?" the American Sovereign asked.
+
+Mrs. Hastings, seated near the dais, heard; and as she turned, a
+rhinestone side-comb slipped from her hair, tinkled over the jewels
+of her corsage and shot into the lap of a member of the High
+Council. He, never having seen a side-comb, fancied that it might be
+an infernal machine which he had never seen either, and,
+palpitating, flashed it to the guardian hand of Mr. Frothingham. At
+the same moment:
+
+"Ah, why, Otho," said Mrs. Hastings audibly, "we had two ancestors
+at Bannockburn!"
+
+"Bannockburn!" argued Mr. Augustus Frothingham, below the voice,
+"Bannockburn. But what, my dear Mrs. Hastings, is Bannockburn beside
+the Midianites and the Moabites and the Hittites and the Ammonites
+and the Levites?"
+
+In this genealogical moment the prince leaned toward Olivia.
+
+"Choose," he said significantly, but so softly that none might hear,
+"oh, my beloved, choose!"
+
+The faces of the great assembly blurred and wavered before Olivia,
+and the low hum of the talk in the room was relative, like the
+voices of passers-by. She looked up at the prince and away from him
+in mute appeal to something that ought to help her and would not.
+For Olivia was of those who, never having seen the face of Destiny
+very near, are accustomed to look upon nothing as wholly
+irrevocable; and--for one of her graces--she had the feminine
+expectation that, if only events can be sufficiently postponed,
+something will intervene; which is perhaps a heritage of the
+gentlest women descended from Homeric days. If the island was so
+historic, little Olivia may have said, where was the interfering
+goddess? She looked unseeingly toward St. George and toward her
+father, and the sense of the bitter actuality of the choice suddenly
+wounded her, as the Actual for ever wounds the woman and the dream.
+
+Then suddenly, above the stir of expectation of the people, and the
+associate bustling of the High Council there came a vague confusion
+and trampling from outside, and the far outer doors of the hall were
+thrown open with a jar and a breath, vibrant as a murmur. There was
+a cry, the determined resistance of some of the Golden Guard, and
+shouts of expostulation and warning as they were flung aside by a
+powerful arm. In the disorder that followed, a miraculously-familiar
+figure--that familiarity and strangeness are both miracles ought to
+explain certain mysteries--was beside St. George and a thankful
+voice said in his ear:
+
+"Mr. St. George, sir, for the mercy of Heaven, sir--come back to the
+yacht. No person can tell what may happen ten minutes ahead, sir!"
+
+The oracle of this universal truth was Rollo, palpitating, his
+immaculate coat stained with earth, earth-stains on his cheeks, and
+his breast labouring in an excitement which only anxiety for his
+master could effect. But St. George hardly saw him. His eyes were
+fixed on some one who stood towering before the dais, like the old
+prints of the avenging goddesses. Clad in the hideous stripes which
+boards of directors consider _de rigueur_ for the soul that is to be
+won back to the normal, stood the woman Elissa, who, by all counts
+of Prince Tabnit, should have been singing a hymn with Mrs. Manners
+and Miss Bella Bliss Utter in the Bitley Reformatory, in Westchester
+County, New York.
+
+"Stop!" she cried in that perfect English which is not only a rare
+experience but a pleasant adventure, "what new horror is this?"
+
+To Prince Tabnit's face, as he looked at her, came once more that
+indefinable change--only this time nearer and more intimately
+explainable, as if something ethereal, trained to delicate lines,
+like smoke, should suddenly shape itself to a menace. St. George saw
+the woman step close to the dais, he saw Olivia's eyes questioning
+him, and in the hurried rising of the peers and of the High Council
+he heard Rollo's voice in his ear:
+
+"It's a gr'it go, sir," observed Rollo respectfully, "the woman has
+things to tell, sir, as people generally don't know. She's flew the
+coop at the place she was in--it seems she's been shut up some'eres
+in America, sir; an' she got 'old of the capting of a tramp boat o'
+some kind--one o' them boats as smells intoxicating round the
+'atches--an' she give 'im an' the mate a 'andful o' jewelry that
+she'd on 'er when she was took in an' 'ad someways contrived to 'ang
+on to, an' I'm blessed hif she wasn't able fer to steer fer the
+island, sir--we took 'er aboard the yacht only this mornin' with 'er
+'air down her back, an' we've brought 'er on here. An' she says--men
+can be gr'it beasts, sir, an' no manner o' mistake," concluded Rollo
+fervently.
+
+And a little hoarse voice said in St. George's ear:
+
+"Mr. St. George, sir--we ain't late, are we? We been flirtin' de
+ger-avel up dat ka-liff since de car-rack o' day."
+
+And there was Bennietod, with an edge of an old horse pistol
+showing beneath his cuff; and, round-eyed and alert as a bird newly
+alighted on a stranger sill, Little Cawthorne stood; and the sight
+put strength into St. George, and so did Little Cawthorne's words:
+
+"I didn't know whether they'd let us in or not," he said, "unless we
+had on a plaited decollette, with biases down the back."
+
+Clearly and confidently in the silent room rang the voice of the
+woman confronting Prince Tabnit, and her eyes did not leave his
+face. St. George was struck with the change in her since that day in
+the Reformatory chapel. Then she had been like a wild, alien thing
+in dumb distress; now she was unchained and native. Her first words
+explained why, in the extreme dilemma in which St. George had last
+seen her, she had yet remained mute.
+
+"I release myself," she cried, "from my oath of silence, though
+until to-day I have spoken only to those who helped me to come back
+to you--my master. Have you nothing to say to me? Has the time
+seemed long? Is it a weary while since I left you to do your will
+and murder the woman whom you were now about to make your wife?"
+
+A cry of horror rose from the people, and then stillness came again.
+
+"Take the woman away," said Prince Tabnit only, "she is speaking
+madness."
+
+"I am speaking the truth," said the woman clearly. "I was of
+Melita--there are those here who will know my face. And it is not I
+alone who have served the State. I challenge you, Tabnit--here,
+before them all! Where are Gerya and Ibera, Cabulla and Taura? Have
+not their people, weeping, besought news of them in vain? And what
+answer have you given them?"
+
+Murmurs and sobs rose from the assembly, stilled by the tranquil
+voice of the prince.
+
+"Where are they?" he repeated gently, his voice vibrant in its rise
+and fall, its giving of delicate values. "But the people know where
+they are. They have attained to the perfect life and died the
+perfect death. For I have raised them to the supreme estate."
+
+Prince Tabnit, with uplifted face, sat motionless, looking out over
+the throng from beneath lowered lids; then his eyes, confident and a
+little mocking, returned to the woman. But they had for her no
+terror. She turned from him, confronting the pale, eager faces of
+the people; and in her beauty and distinction she was like Olivia's
+women, crowded beside the dais.
+
+"Men and women of Yaque," cried Elissa, "I will tell you to what
+'supreme estate' these friends whom you seek have long been raised.
+For here in Med and in Melita you will find many of those whom you
+have mourned as dead--you will find them as you yourselves have met
+and passed them, it may have been countless times, on your streets
+of Yaque--not young and beautiful as when they left you, but men and
+women of incredible age. Withered, shaken by palsy, infirm, they
+creep upon their lonely ways or go at will to drag themselves
+unrecognized along your highways, as helpless as the dead
+themselves. They number scores, and they are those who have
+displeased your prince by some little word, some little wrong, or,
+more than these, by some thwarting of the way of his ambition: Oblo,
+who disappeared from his place as keeper at the door; Ithobal,
+satrap of Melita; young Prince Kaal--ay, and how many more? You do
+not understand my words? I say that your prince has knowledge of
+some secret, accursed drug that can call back youth or make actual
+age--_age_, do you understand--just as we of Yaque bring both
+flowers and fruit to swift maturity!"
+
+Olivia uttered a little cry, not at the grotesque horror of what the
+woman had said but at the miracle of its unconscious support of the
+story and theory of St. George. And St. George heard; and suddenly,
+because another had voiced his own fantastic message, its
+incredibility and unreality became appalling, and yet he felt
+infinitely reconciled to both because he interpreted aright that
+little muffled exclamation from Olivia. What did it matter--oh, what
+did it matter whether or not the reality were grotesque? What seems
+to be happening is always the reality, if only one understands it
+sufficiently. And at all events there had been that hour in the
+King's Alcove. At last, as he weighed that hour against the fantasy
+of all the rest, St. George understood and lived the divine madness
+of all great moments, the madness that realizes one star and is
+content that all the heavens shall march unintelligibly past so long
+as that single shining is not dimmed.
+
+But King Otho was riding no such griffin with sun-gold wings. King
+Otho was genuinely and personally interested in the woman's words.
+He turned to Prince Tabnit with animation.
+
+"Really, Prince," he said, "is it so? Pray do not deny it unless
+there is no other way, for I am before all things interested. It is
+far more important to me that you tell me as much as you can tell,
+than that you deny or even disprove it."
+
+Prince Tabnit smiled in the eagerly interested face of his
+sovereign, and rose and came to the edge of the dais, his garments
+embroidered by a thousand needles touching and floating about him;
+and it was as if he reached those before him by a kind of spiritual
+magnetism, not without sublimity.
+
+"My people," he said--and his voice had all the tenderness that they
+knew so well--"this is some conspiracy of those to whom we have
+shown the utmost hospitality. I would have shielded your king, for
+he was also my sovereign and I owed him allegiance. But now that is
+no longer possible, and the time is come. Know then, oh my people of
+Yaque, that which my loyalty has led me wrongfully to conceal: that
+in the strange disappearance and return of your sovereign, King
+Otho, he who will may trace the loss of that which the island has
+mourned without ceasing. I accuse your king--he is no longer
+mine--of being now in possession of the Hereditary Treasure of
+Yaque."
+
+Then St. George came back with a thrill to actuality. In the press
+of the events of this morning, after his awakening in the room of
+the tombs, he had completely forgotten the soft fire of gems that
+had burned beneath the hands of old Malakh in that dark chamber
+under King Abibaal's tomb. He and Amory and Jarvo had, with the
+king, left the chamber by the upper passages, and Amory and Jarvo
+knew nothing of the jewels. Yet St. George was certain that he could
+not have been mistaken, and he listened breathlessly for what the
+king would say.
+
+King Otho, with a smile, nodded in perfect imperturbability.
+
+"That is true," he said, "I had forgotten all about it."
+
+They waited for him to speak, the people in amazed silence, Mrs.
+Medora Hastings saying unintelligible things in whispers, for which
+she had a genius.
+
+"It is true," said King Otho, "that I am responsible for the
+disappearance of the Hereditary Treasure. You will find it at this
+moment in a basement dungeon of the palace on Mount Khalak. On the
+very day, three months ago, that I dined with your prince I had made
+a discovery of considerable importance to me, namely, that the
+little island of Yaque is richer in most of the radio-active
+substances than all the rest of the world. The discovery gave me
+keener pleasure than I had known in years--I had suspected it for
+some time after I found the noctilucous stars on the ceiling of my
+sitting-room at the palace. And in the work-shop of the Princess
+Simyra I came upon a quantity of metallic uranium, and a great many
+other things which I question the taste of taking the time to
+describe. But my experiments there with the very perfect gems of
+your admirable collection had evidently been antedated by some of
+your own people, for the apparatus was intact. I shall be glad to
+show some charming effects to any one who cares to see them. I have
+succeeded in causing the diamonds of Darius to phosphoresce most
+wonderfully."
+
+The phosphorescence of the diamonds of Darius was to the people far
+less important than the joyous fact which they were not slow to
+grasp, that the Hereditary Treasure was, if they might believe the
+king's words, restored to them, and the burden of the tax averted.
+They did not understand, nor did they seek to understand; because
+they knew the inefficiency of details and they also knew the value
+of mere import.
+
+But the king, child of a social order that wreaks itself on
+particularizations, returned to his quest for a certain recounting.
+
+"Prince Tabnit," he said, "the High Council and the people of Yaque
+are impatient for your answer to this woman's words."
+
+"I rejoice with them and with your Majesty," replied Prince Tabnit
+softly, "that the treasure is safe. My own explanation is far less
+simple. If what this woman says is true, yet it is true in such wise
+as, strive as I may, I can not speak; nor, strive as you may, can
+you fathom. Therefore I say that the claim which she has made is
+idle, and not within my power to answer."
+
+At this St. George bounded to his feet. Amory looked up at him in
+terror, and Little Cawthorne and Bennietod went a step or two after
+him as he sprang forward, and Rollo's lean shadowed face, obvious as
+his way of speech, was wrinkled in terrified appeal.
+
+"An idle claim!" St. George thundered as he strode before the dais.
+"Is this woman's story and mine an idle claim, and one not within
+your power to answer? Then I will tell you how to answer, Prince
+Tabnit. I challenge you now, in the presence of your people--taste
+this!"
+
+Upon the carven arm of Prince Tabnit's throne St. George set
+something that he had taken from his pocket. It was the vase of
+rock-crystal from which, the night before in the room of the tombs,
+the king had drunk.
+
+What followed was the last thing that St. George had expected. It
+was as if his defiance had unlocked flood-gates. In an instant the
+vast assembly was in motion. With a sound of garments that was like
+far wind they were upon their feet and pressing toward the throne.
+With all the passion of their "Yes! Yes! Yes!" in response to
+Olivia's appeal they came, resistlessly demanding the answer to some
+dreadful question long shrouded in their hearts. Their armour was
+their silence; they made no sound save that ominous sweep of their
+robes and the conspiracy of their sandaled feet upon the tiles.
+
+St. George did not turn. Indeed, it did not once cross his mind that
+their hostility could possibly be toward him. Besides, his look was
+fixed upon the prince's face, and what he read there was enough. The
+peers, the High Council and those nearest the throne wavered and
+swerved from the man, leaving him to face what was to come.
+
+Whatever was to come he would have met nobly. He was of those
+infrequent folk of some upper air who exhibit a certain purity even
+in error, or in worse. He stood with his exquisite pale face
+uplifted, his white hair in a glory about it, his white gown
+embroidered by a thousand needles falling in virginal lines against
+the warm, pure colour of that room with its wraiths of hue and
+light. And he opened the heart of the green jewel that burned upon
+his breast.
+
+"Not for me the wine of youth," he said slowly, "but the poison of
+age. The poison which, without me to unlock the secret, all mankind
+must drink alone. May you drink it late, my friends!" he cried. "I,
+who hold in my soul the secret of the passing of time and youth,
+drink now to those among you and among all men who have won and kept
+the one thing dearer than these."
+
+He touched the green gem to his lips, and let it fall upon the
+embroidered laces on his breast. Then quietly and in another voice
+he began to speak.
+
+With the first words there came to St. George the thrill of
+something that had possessed him--when? In that ecstatic moment on
+_The Aloha_ when he had seen the light in the king's palace; in the
+instant when the Isle of Yaque had first lain subject before him, "a
+land which no one can define or remember--only desire;" in the
+divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the
+palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour
+of his joy in the King's Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes
+and touched his lips. Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies
+barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own--a shell, a duty, a
+vista--he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying. He
+listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched
+hands with the elemental and saw the ancient kindliness of all those
+people naked in their faces and knew himself for what he was.
+
+He listened, and yet there was no making captive the words of the
+prince in understanding. Prince Tabnit was speaking the English, and
+every word was clearly audible and, moreover, was probably daily
+upon St. George's lips. But if it had been to ransom the rest of the
+world from its night he could not have understood what the prince
+was saying. Every word was a word that belonged as much to St.
+George as to the prince; but in some unfathomable fashion the inner
+sense of what he said for ever eluded, dissolving in the air of
+which it was a part. And yet, past all doubting, St. George knew
+that he was hearing the essence of that strange knowledge which the
+Isle of Yaque had won while all the rest of mankind struggled for
+it--he knew with the certainty with which we recognize strange
+forces in a dozen of the every-day things of life, in electricity,
+in telepathy, in dreams. With the same certainty he realized that
+what the prince was saying would, if he could understand, lift a
+certain veil. Here, put in words at last, was manifestly the secret,
+that catch of understanding without which men are groping in the
+dark, perhaps that mere pointing of relations which would make
+clear, without blasphemy, time and the future, rebirth and old
+existence, it might be; and certainly the accident of personality.
+Here, crystallized, were the things that men almost know, the dream
+that has just escaped every one, the whisper in sleep that would
+have explained if one could remember when one woke, the word that
+has been thrillingly flashed to one in moments of absorption and has
+fled before one might catch the sound, the far hope of science, the
+glimpse that comes to dying eyes and is voiced in fragments by dying
+lips. Here without penetrating the great reserve or tracing any
+principle to its beginning, was the truth about both. And St. George
+was powerless to receive it.
+
+He turned fearfully to Olivia. Ah--what if she did not guess
+anything of the meaning of what she was hearing? For one instant he
+knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star. But
+when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and
+her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she
+might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near,
+how near they Stood; and to be with her on this side was
+dearer--nay, was nearer the Secret--than without her to pass the
+veil that they touched. Then he looked at Amory; wouldn't old Amory
+know, he wondered. Wouldn't his mere understanding of news teach him
+what was happening? But old Amory, the light flashing on his
+pince-nez, was keeping one eye on the prince and wondering if the
+chair that he had just placed for Antoinette was not in the draught
+of the dome; and little Antoinette was looking about her like a
+rosebud, new to the butterflies of June; and King Otho was
+listening, languid, heavy-lidded, sensitive to little values,
+sophisticating the moment; and Little Cawthorne stood with eyes
+raised in simple, tolerant wonder; and the others, Bennietod, Mrs.
+Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, showed faces like the pools
+in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples--one must
+suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly such
+faces. St. George saw how it was. Here, spoken casually by the
+prince, just as the Banal would speak of the visible and invisible
+worlds, here was the Sesame of understanding toward which the
+centuries had striven, the secret of the link between two worlds;
+and here, of all mankind, were only they two to hear--they two and
+that motionless company who knew what the prince knew and who kept
+it sealed within their eyes.
+
+St. George looked at the multitude in swift understanding. They
+were like a Greek chorus, signifying what is. They knew what the
+prince was saying, they had the secret and yet--they were _no
+nearer, no nearer_ than he. With their ancient kindliness naked in
+their faces, St. George knew that through his love he was as near to
+the Source as were they. And it was suddenly as it had been that
+first night when he had stridden buoyantly through the island; for
+he could not tell which was the secret of the prince and of these
+people and which was the blessedness of his love.
+
+None the less he clung desperately to the last words of Prince
+Tabnit in a vain effort to hold, to make clear, to sophisticate one
+single phrase, as one waking in the night says over, in a vain
+effort to fix it, some phantom sentence cried to him in dreams by a
+shadowy band destined to be dissolved when, in bright day, he would
+reclaim it. He even managed frantically to write down a jumble of
+words of which he could make nothing, save here and there a phrase
+like a touch of hands from the silence: "...the infinite moment that
+is pending" ... "all is become a window where had been a wall" ...
+"the wintry vision" ... they were all words that beckon without
+replying. And all the time it was curiously as if the Something
+Silent within St. George himself, that so long had striven to speak,
+were crying out at last in the prince's words--and he could not
+understand. Yet in spite of it all, in spite of this imminent
+satisfying of the strange, dreadful curiosity which possesses all
+mankind, St. George, even now, was far less keen to comprehend than
+he was to burst through the throng with Olivia in his arms, gain the
+waiting _Aloha_ and sail into the New York harbour with the prize
+that he had won. "I drink now to those among you and among all men
+who have won and kept that which is greater than these," the prince
+had said, and St. George perfectly understood. He had but to look at
+Olivia to be triumphantly willing that the gods should keep their
+secrets about time and the link between the two worlds so long as
+they had given him love. What should he care about time? He had this
+hour.
+
+When the prince ceased speaking the hall was hushed; but because of
+the tempest in the hearts of them all the silence was as if a strong
+wind, sweeping powerfully through a forest, were to sway no boughs
+and lift no leaves, only to strive noiselessly round one who walked
+there.
+
+Prince Tabnit wrapped his white mantle about him and sat upon his
+throne. Spell-stricken, they watched him, that great multitude, and
+might not turn away their eyes. Slowly, imperceptibly, as Time
+touches the familiar, the face of the prince took on its change--and
+one could not have told wherein the change lay, but subtly as the
+encroachment of the dark, or the alchemy of the leaves, or the
+betrayal of certain modes of death, the finger was upon him. While
+they watched he became an effigy, the hideous face of a fantasy of
+smoke against the night sky, with a formless hand lifted from among
+the delicate laces in farewell. There was no death--the horror was
+that there was no death. Only this curse of age drying and withering
+at the bones.
+
+A long, whining cry came from Cassyrus, who covered his face with
+his mantle and fled. The spell being broken, by common consent the
+great hall was once more in motion--St. George would never forget
+that tide toward all the great portals and the shuddering backward
+glances at the white heap upon the beetling throne. They fled away
+into the reassuring sunlight, leaving the echoless hall deserted,
+save for that breathing one upon the throne.
+
+There was one other. From somewhere beside the dais the woman Elissa
+crept and knelt, clasping the knees of the man.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+OPEN SECRETS
+
+
+"Will you have tea?" asked Olivia.
+
+St. George brought a deck cushion and tucked it in the willow
+steamer chair and said adoringly that he would have tea. Tea. In a
+world where the essentials and the inessentials are so deliciously
+confused, to think that tea, with some one else, can be a kind of
+Heaven.
+
+"Two lumps?" pursued Olivia.
+
+"Three, please," St. George directed, for the pure joy of watching
+her hands. There were no tongs.
+
+"Aren't the rest going to have some?" Olivia absently shared her
+attention, tinkling delicately about among the tea things. "Doesn't
+every one want a cup of tea?" she inquired loud enough for nobody to
+hear. St. George, shifting his shoulder from the rail, looked
+vaguely over the deck of _The Aloha_, sighed contentedly, and smiled
+back at her. No one else, it appeared, would have tea; and there was
+none to regret it.
+
+St. George's cursory inspection had revealed the others variously
+absorbed, though they were now all agreed in breathing easily since
+Barnay, interlarding rational speech with Irishisms of thanksgiving,
+had announced five minutes before that the fires were up and that in
+half an hour _The Aloha_ might weigh anchor. The only thing now left
+to desire was to slip clear of the shadow of the black reaches of
+Yaque, shouldering the blue.
+
+Meanwhile, Antoinette and Amory sat in the comparative seclusion of
+the bow with their backs to the forward deck, and it was definitely
+manifest to every one how it would be with them, but every one was
+simply glad and dismissed the matter with that. Mr. Frothingham, in
+his steamer chair, looked like a soft collapsible tube of something;
+Bennietod, at ease upon the uncovered boards of the deck, was
+circumspectly having cheese sandwiches and wastefully shooting the
+ship's rockets into the red sunset, in general celebration; and
+Rollo, having taken occasion respectfully to submit to whomsoever it
+concerned that fact is ever stranger than fiction, had gone below.
+Mr. Otho Holland and Little Cawthorne--but their smiles were like
+different names for the same thing--were toasting each other in
+something light and dry and having a bouquet which Mr. Holland, who
+ought to know, compared favourably with certain vintages of 1000
+B.C. In a hammock near them reclined Mrs. Medora Hastings, holding
+two kinds of smelling salts which invariably revived her simply by
+inducing the mental effort of deciding which was the better. Her
+hair, which was exceedingly pretty, now rippled becomingly about her
+flushed face and was guiltless of side-combs--she had lost them both
+down a chasm in that headlong flight from the cliff's summit, and
+they irrecoverably reposed in the bed of some brook of the Miocene
+period. And Mrs. Hastings, her hand in that of her brother, lay in
+utter silence, smiling up at him in serene content.
+
+For King Otho of Yaque was turning his back upon his island domain
+for ever. In that hurried flight across the Eurychorus among his
+distracted subjects, his resolution had been taken. Jarvo and Akko,
+the adieux to whom had been every one's sole regret in leaving the
+island, had miraculously found their way to the king and his party
+in their flight, and were despatched to Mount Khalak for such of
+their belongings as they could collect, and the island sovereign was
+well content.
+
+"Ah well now," he had just observed, languidly surveying the
+tropical horizon through a cool glass of winking amber bubbles, "one
+must learn that to touch is far more delicate than to lift. It is
+more wonderful to have been the king of one moment than the ruler of
+many. It is better to have stood for an instant upon a rainbow than
+to have taken a morning walk through a field of clouds. The
+principle has long been understood, but few have had--shall I
+say the courage?--to practise it. Yet 'courage' is a term
+from-the-shoulder, and what I require is a word of finger-tips,
+over-tones, ultra-rays--a word for the few who understand that to
+leave a thing is more exquisite than to outwear it. It is by its
+very fineness circumscribed--a feminine virtue. Women understand it
+and keep it secret. I flatter myself that I have possessed the high
+moment, vanished against the noon. Ah, my dear fellow--" he added,
+lifting his glass to St. George's smile.
+
+But little Cawthorne--all reality in his heliotrope outing and duck
+and grey curls--raised a characteristic plaint.
+
+"Oh, but I've done it," he mournfully reviewed. "When'll I ever be
+in another island, in front of another vacated throne? Why didn't I
+move into the palace, and set up a natty, up-to-date little
+republic? I could have worn a crown as a matter of taste--what's the
+use of a democracy if you aren't free to wear a crown? And what kind
+of American am I, anyway, with this undeveloped taste for acquiring
+islands? If they ever find this out at the polls my vote'll be
+challenged. What?"
+
+"Aw whee!" said Bennietod, intent upon a Roman candle, "wha' do you
+care, Mr. Cawt'orne? You don't hev to go back fer to be a
+child-slave to Chillingwort'. Me, I've gotta good call to jump
+overboard now an' be de sonny of a sea-horse, dead to rights!"
+
+St. George looked at them all affectionately, unconscious that
+already the experience of the last three days was slipping back into
+the sheathing past, like a blade used. But he was dawningly aware,
+as he sat there at Olivia's feet in glorious content, that he was
+looking at them all with new eyes. It was as if he had found new
+names for them all; and until long afterward one does not know that
+these moments of bestowing new names mark the near breathing of the
+god.
+
+The silence of Mrs. Hastings and her quiet devotion to her brother
+somehow gave St. George a new respect for her. Over by the
+wheel-house something made a strange noise of crying, and St. George
+saw that Mr. Frothingham sat holding a weird little animal, like a
+squirrel but for its stumpy tail and great human eyes, which he had
+unwittingly stepped on among the rocks. The little thing was licking
+his hand, and the old lawyer's face was softened and glowing as he
+nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. As he looked, St. George warmed
+to them all in new fellowship and, too, in swift self-reproach; for
+in what had seemed to him but "broad lines and comic masks" he
+suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts. The better
+and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his
+grasp were more important than Yaque itself. He remembered, with a
+thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must
+walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of
+the heart, before he can put much in or take much from the
+market-place. And lo! this fairy-land of his finding had
+proved--must it not always prove?--the essence of all Reality.
+
+His eyes went to Olivia's face in a flash of understanding and
+belief.
+
+"Don't you see?" he said, quite as if they two had been talking what
+he had thought.
+
+She waited, smiling a little, thrilled by his certainty of her
+sympathy.
+
+"None of this happened really," triumphantly explained St. George,
+"I met you at the Boris, did I not? Therefore, I think that since
+then you have graciously let me see you for the proper length of
+time, and at last we've fallen in love just as every one else does.
+And true lovers always do have trouble, do they not? So then, Yaque
+has been the usual trouble and happiness, and here we are--engaged."
+
+"I'm not engaged," Olivia protested serenely, "but I see what you
+mean. No, none of it happened," she gravely agreed. "It couldn't,
+you know. Anybody will tell you that."
+
+In her eyes was the sparkle of understanding which made St. George
+love her more every time that it appeared. He noted, the white cloth
+frock, and the coat of hunting pink thrown across her chair, and he
+remembered that in the infinitesimal time that he had waited for her
+outside the Palace of the Litany, she must have exchanged for these
+the coronation robe and jewels of Queen Mitygen. St. George liked
+that swift practicality in the race of faery, though he was
+completely indifferent to Mrs. Hastings' and Antoinette's claims to
+it; and he wondered if he were to love Olivia more for everything
+that she did, how he could possibly live long enough to tell her.
+When one has been to Yaque the simplest gifts and graces resolve
+themselves into this question.
+
+_The Aloha_ gently freed herself from the shallow green pocket where
+she had lain through three eventful days, and slipped out toward the
+waste of water bound by the flaunting autumn of the west. An island
+wind, fragrant of bark and secret berries, blew in puffs from the
+steep. A gull swooped to her nest in a cranny of the basalt. From
+below a servant came on deck, his broad American face smiling over a
+tray of glasses and decanters and tinkling ice. It was all very
+tranquil and public and almost commonplace--just the high tropic
+seas at the moment of their unrestrained sundown, and the odour of
+tea-cakes about the pleasantly-littered deck. And for the moment,
+held by a common thought, every one kept silent. Now that _The
+Aloha_ was really moving toward home, the affair seemed suddenly
+such a gigantic impossibility that every one resented every one
+else's knowing what a trick had been played. It was as if the
+curtain had just fallen and the lights of the auditorium had flashed
+up after the third act, and they had all caught one another
+breathless or in tears, pretending that the tragedy had really
+happened.
+
+"Promise me something," begged St. George softly, in sudden alarm,
+born of this inevitable aspect; "promise me that when we get to New
+York you are not going to forget all about Yaque--and me--and
+believe that none of us ever happened."
+
+Olivia looked toward the serene mystery of the distance.
+
+"New York," she said only, "think of seeing you in New York--now."
+
+"Was I of more account in Yaque?" demanded St. George anxiously.
+
+"Sometimes," said Olivia adorably, "I shall tell you that you were.
+But that will be only because I shall have an idea that in Yaque you
+loved me more."
+
+"Ah, very well then. And sometimes," said St. George contentedly,
+"when we are at dinner I shall look down the table at you sitting
+beside some one who is expounding some baneful literary theory, and
+I shall think: What do I care? He doesn't know that she is really
+the Princess of Far-Away. But I do."
+
+"And he won't know anything about our motor ride, alone, the night
+that I was kidnapped, either--the literary-theory person," Olivia
+tranquilly took away his breath by observing.
+
+St. George looked up at her quickly and, secretly, Olivia thought
+that if he had been attractive when he was courageous he was doubly
+so with the present adorably abashed look in his eyes.
+
+"When--alone?" St. George asked unconvincingly.
+
+She laughed a little, looking down at him in a reproof that was all
+approbation, and to be reproved like that is the divinest praise.
+
+"How did you know?" protested St. George in fine indignation.
+"Besides," he explained, "I haven't an idea what you mean."
+
+"I guessed about that ride," she went on, "the night before last,
+when you were walking up and down outside my window. I don't know
+what made me--and I think it was very forward of me. Do you want to
+know something?" she demanded, looking away.
+
+"More than anything," declared St. George. "What?"
+
+"I think--" Olivia said slowly, "that it began--then--just when I
+first thought how wonderful that ride would have been. Except--that
+it had begun a great while before," she ended suddenly.
+
+And at these enigmatic words St. George sent a quick look over the
+forward deck. It was of no use. Mr. Frothingham was well within
+range.
+
+"Heavens, good heavens, how happy I am," said St. George instead.
+
+"And then," Olivia went on presently, "sometimes when there are a
+lot of people about--literary-theory persons and all--I shall look
+across at you, differently, and that will mean that you are to
+remember the exact minute when you looked in the window up at the
+palace, on the mountain, and I saw you. Won't it?"
+
+"It will," said St. George fervently. "Don't try to persuade me that
+there wasn't any such mountain," he challenged her. "I suppose," he
+added in wonder, "that lovers have been having these secret signs
+time out of mind--and we never knew."
+
+Olivia drew a little breath of content.
+
+"Bless everybody," she said.
+
+So they made invasion of that pure, dim world before them; and the
+serene mystery of the distance came like a thought, drawn from a
+state remote and immortal, to clasp the hand of There in the hand of
+Here.
+
+"And then sometimes," St. George went on, his exultation proving
+greater than his discretion, "we'll take the yacht and pretend
+we're going back--"
+
+He stopped abruptly with a quick indrawn breath and the hope that
+she had not noticed. He was, by several seconds, too late.
+
+"Whose yacht is it?" Olivia asked promptly. "I wondered."
+
+St. George had dreaded the question. Someway, now that it was all
+over and the prize was his, he was ashamed that he had not won it
+more fairly and humiliated that he was not what she believed him, a
+pillar of the _Evening Sentinel_. But Amory had miraculously heard
+and turned himself about.
+
+"It's his," he said briefly, "I may as well confess to you, Miss
+Holland," he enlarged somewhat, "he's a great cheat. _The Aloha_ is
+his, and so am I, busy body and idle soul, for using up his yacht
+and his time on a newspaper story. You were the 'story,' you know."
+
+"But," said Olivia in bewilderment, "I don't understand. Surely--"
+
+"Nothing whatever is sure, Miss Holland," Amory sadly assured her,
+but his eyes were smiling behind his pince-nez. "You would think one
+might be sure of him. But it isn't so. Me, you may depend upon me,"
+he impressed it lightly. "I'm what I say I am--a poor beggar of a
+newspaper man, about to be held to account by one Chillingworth for
+this whole millenial occurrence, and sent off to a political
+convention to steady me, unless I'm fired. But St. George, he's a
+gay dilettante."
+
+Then Amory resumed a better topic of his own; and Olivia, when she
+understood, looked down at her lover as miserably as one is able
+when one is perfectly happy.
+
+"Oh," she said, "and up there--in the palace to-day--I did think for
+a minute that perhaps you wanted me to marry the prince so
+that--they could--."
+
+One could smile now at the enormity of that.
+
+"So that I could put it in the paper?" he said. "But, you see, I
+never could put it in any paper, even if I didn't love you. Who
+would believe me? A thousand years from now--maybe less--the
+_Evening Sentinel_, if it is still in existence, can publish the
+story, perhaps. Until then I'm afraid they'll have to confine
+themselves to the doings of the precincts."
+
+Olivia waived the whole matter for one of vaster importance.
+
+"Then why did you come to Yaque?" she demanded.
+
+Mr. Frothingham had left his place by the wheel-house and wandered
+forward. The steamer chair had a back that was both broad and high,
+and one sitting in its shadow was hermetically veiled from the rest
+of the deck. So St. George bent forward, and told her.
+
+After that they sat in silence, and together they looked back
+toward the island with its black rocks smitten to momentary gold by
+a last javelin of light. There it lay--the land locking away as
+realities all the fairy-land of speculation, the land of the
+miracles of natural law. They had walked there, and had glimpsed the
+shadowy threshold of the Morning. Suppose, St. George thought, that
+instead of King Otho, with his delicate sense of the merely visible,
+a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque? And instead
+of Mr. Frothingham, slave to the contestable, and Little Cawthorne
+in bondage to humour, and Amory and himself swept off their feet by
+a heavenly romance, suppose a party of savants and economists had
+arrived in Yaque, with a poet or two to bring away the fire--what
+then? St. George lost the doubt in the noon of his own certainty.
+There could be no greater good, he chanted to the god who had
+breathed upon him, than this that he and Amory shared now with the
+wise and simple world, the world of the resonant new names. He even
+doubted that, save in degree, there could be a purer talisman than
+the spirit that inextinguishably shone in the face of the childlike
+old lawyer as the strange little animal nestled in his coat and
+licked his hand. And these were open secrets. Open secrets of the
+ultimate attainment.
+
+They watched the land dissolving in the darkness like a pearl in
+wine of night. But at last, when momentarily they had turned happy
+eyes to each other's faces, they looked again and found that the
+dusk, taking ancient citadels with soundless tread, had received the
+island. And where on the brow of the mountain had sprung the white
+pillars of the king's palace glittered only the early stars.
+
+"Crown jewels," said Olivia softly, "for everybody's head."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Romance Island, by Zona Gale
+
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