The Secret Dove


I KNOW where a dove sits brooding in the dark,
     Nested in leaves, the quiet boughs among;
And when the midnight falls I lean to mark
     Her home, where a great star is hung.
The star, it does not know the secret dove,
     The dove that firefly planet may not see.
     What lovelier things the night may fold from me --
The watching eye, the brooding heart, and love.

Romance Island


"Who that remembers the first kind glance of her
whom he loves can fail to believe in magic?"

— Novalis


Contents


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

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.

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 Phœnicians, 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnician 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 Phœnician 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!"

ChapterVII

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.
 

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."