ss and
continually took papers from their graceful sleeves. By
developments these were revealed to be the High Council of Yaque,
conservative and radical, even in dimensional isolation. Farther
back rose tier upon tier of seats sacred to the wives and daughters
of the ministry, and St. George even looked hopelessly and
mechanically among these for the face that he sought.

To some seats slightly elevated, not far from the dais, his
attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of
purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to
have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs.
Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus
Frothingham, in indescribably gorgeous apparel elaborately bent to
receive--and a member of the High Council bent to hand--two
glittering articles which St. George was certain were side-combs.
There the lady sat, tilting her head to keep her tortoise-shell
glasses on her nose, perpetually curving their chain over her ear, a
gesture by which the side-combs were perpetually displaced. If the
island people had been painted purple, St. George felt sure that she
would have acted quite the same. Personality meant nothing to
her--not, as with them, because it had been merged in something
greater, but because, with her, it was overborne by self. And there
sat Mr. Frothingham (who did not attend the play during court
because he believed that a man of affairs should not unduly
stimulate the imagination), his head thrown back so that his long
hair rested on his amazing collar, his hands laid trimly along his
knees. In that crystal air, instinct with its delicate, dominant
implication of things imponderable, the personality of each
persisted undisturbed, in a kind of adamantine unconsciousness.
Again, as when he had considered the soul of Rollo, St. George
smiled a shade bitterly. Is it then so easy to persist, he wondered?
Is love's uttermost gift so little? But as the music swelled with
premonitory meaning, he understood something that its very
transitoriness disclosed: the persistence of love, love's mere
immortality, is the dead letter of the law without that which is
elusive, imponderable, even evanescent as the spirit of the land to
which he had come, into which he felt himself new-born.

Immediately, bestowing its gift of altered mood, other music, cut by
the lift and fall of trumpets, sounded from hidden places all about
the