d air
the great bulk of the palace towered like a faithless sentinel, the
alien banners in nameless colours sending streamers into the
moon-lit upper spaces.

On before, down nebulous ways, went the whiteness of the floating
veil.

CHAPTER XII

BETWEEN-WORLDS

Down nebulous ways they went, the thin darkness flowing past them.
The sloping avenue ran all the width of the palace grounds, and here
among slim-trunked trees faint fringes of the light touched away the
dimness in the open spaces and expressed the borders of the dusk.
Always the way led down, dipping deeper in the conjecture of shadow,
and always before them glimmered the mist of Olivia's veil, an
eidolon of love, of love's eternal Vanishing Goal.

And St. George was in pursuit. So were Amory and Jarvo, and Rollo of
the oil-skins, but these mattered very little, for it was St. George
whose eyes burned in his pale face and were striving to catch the
faintest motion in that fleeing car ahead.

"Faster, Jarvo," he said, "we're not gaining on them. I think
they're gaining on us. Put ahead, can't you?"

Amory vexed the air with frantic questionings. "How did it happen?"
he said. "Who did it? Was it the guard? What did they do it for?"

"It looks to me," said St. George only, peering distractedly into
the gloom, "as if all those fellows had on uniforms. Can you see?"

Jarvo spoke softly.

"It is true, adon," he said, "they are of the guard. This is what
they had planned," he added to Amory. "I feared the harm would be to
you. It is the same. Your turn would be the next."

"What do you mean?" St. George demanded.

Amory, with some incoherence, told him what Jarvo had come to them
to propose, and heightened his own excitement by plunging into the
business of that night and the next, as he had had it from the
little brown man's lips.

"Up the mountain to-morrow night," he concluded fervently, "what do
you think of that? Do you see us?"

"Maniac, no," said St. George shortly, "what do we want to go up the
mountain for if Miss Holland is somewhere else? Faster, Jarvo, can't
you?" he urged. "Why, this thing is built to go sixty miles an hour.
We're creeping."

"Perhaps it's better to start in gentle and work up a pace, sir,"
observed Rollo inspirationally, "like a man's legs, sir, beggin'
your pardon."

St. George looked at him as if he had first seen him, so that Amory
once more explained his presence and pointed to the oil-skins. And
St. Ge