er, and they understood. The _rapport_ was like that among
those who hear one music. But St. George listened, and though his
mind applauded, it ran on ahead to the terrifying future. This was
all very well, but how was it to help her in the face of what was to
happen in three days' time?

"Therefore," Olivia's words touched tranquilly among the flying ends
of his own thought, "I am come before you to make that sacrifice
which my love for my father, and my grief and my anxiety demand. I
count upon your support, as he would count upon it for me. I ask
that one heart be in us all in this common sorrow. And I am come
with the unalterable determination both to renounce my throne
there"--never was anything more enchanting than the way those two
words fell from her lips--"and to postpone my marriage"--there never
was anything more profoundly disquieting than _those_ two words in
such a connection--"until such time as, by your effort and by my
own, we may have news of my father, the king; and until, by your
effort or by my own, the Hereditary Treasure shall be restored."

So, serenely and with the most ingenuous confidence, did the
daughter of the absent King Otho make disposition of the hour's
events. Amory leaned forward and feverishly polished his pince-nez.

"What do you think of that?" he put it, beneath his breath, "what
_do_ you think of that?"

St. George, watching that little figure--so adorably, almost
pathetically little in its corner of the great throne--knew that he
had not counted upon her in vain. Over there on the raised seats
Mrs. Medora Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham were looking on
matters as helplessly as they would look at a thunder-storm or a
circus procession, and they were taking things quite as seriously.
But Olivia, in spite of the tragedy that the hour held for her, was
giving the moment its exact value, guiltless of the feminine
immorality of panic. To give a moment its due without that panic,
is, St. George knew, a kind of genius, like creating beauty, and
divining another's meaning, and redeeming the spirit of a thing from
its actuality. But by that time the arithmetic of his love was by
way of being in too many figures to talk about. Which is the proper
plight of love.

Every one had turned toward Prince Tabnit, and as St. George looked
it smote him whimsically that that impassive profile was like the
profiles upon the ancient coins which, almost any day, might be cast
up by a passin