"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.



"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."