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