g hands of
warning. "Aside! Aside!" shrieked the main Golden Guard, "a motor is
without control!"

Immediately there was confusion. At a touch the prince's car was
drawn to the road's extreme edge, and the Golden Guards rode
furiously back along the train, hailing the peaceful, slow-going
machines into orderly retreat. They were all sufficiently amenable,
for at sight of the alarming and unprecedented onrush of the growing
speck that was bearing full down upon them, anxiety sat upon every
face.

St. George watched. And as the car drew nearer the thought which, at
first sight of its speed, had vaguely flashed into being, took
definite shape, and his blood leaped to its music. Whose hand would
be upon that lever, whose daring would be directing its flight,
whose but one in all Yaque--and that Olivia's?

It was Olivia. That was plain even in the mere instant that it took
the great, beautiful motor, at thirty miles an hour, to flash past
them. St. George saw her--coat of hunting pink and fluttering veil
and shining eyes; he was dimly conscious of another little figure
beside her, and of the unmistakable and agonized Mrs. Hastings in
the tonneau; but it was only Olivia's glance that he caught as it
swept the prince. There was the faintest possible smile, and she was
gone; and St. George, his heart pounding, sat staring stupidly after
that shining cloud of dust, frantically wondering whether she could
just possibly have seen him. For this was no trick of the
imagination, his galloping heart told him that. And whether or not
Yaque was a place, the world, the world was within his grasp,
instinct with possibilities heavenly sweet. His eyes met Amory's in
the minute when Cassyrus, prime minister of Yaque, had it borne in
upon him that this was no runaway machine, but the ordinary and
preferred pace of the daughter of their king; and while Cassyrus, at
the enormity of the conception, breathed out expostulations in
several languages--some of them known to us only by means of
inscriptions on tombs--Amory spoke to St. George:

"Who was the other girl?" he asked comprehensively.

"What other girl?" St. George blankly murmured.

And at this, Amory turned away with a look that could be made to
mean whatever Amory meant.

On went the imperial train faring back to Med over the road lately
stirred to shining dust by the wheels of Olivia's auto. Olivia's
auto. St. George was secretly saying over the words with a kind of
ecstatic