regardless where it should please the others to dispose
themselves. He had no recollection of hearing Jarvo point the way
through the trees to a path that led away, as far from them as a
voice would carry, to the Ilex Tower whose key burned in Amory's
pocket, promising radiant, intangible things to his imagination. St.
George understood with magnificent unconcern that Amory and Rollo
were gone off there to wait for the return of him and Jarvo; he took
it for granted that Jarvo had grasped that Olivia must be taken
back to her aunt and her friends at the palace; and afterward he
knew only, for an indeterminate space, that the car was moving
across some dim, heavenly foreground to some dim, ultimate
destination in which he found himself believing with infinite faith.

For this was Olivia, in his arms. St. George looked down at her, at
the white, exquisite face with its shadow of lashes, and it seemed
to him that he must not breathe, or remember, or hope, lest the gods
should be jealous and claim the moment, and leave him once more
forlorn. That was the secret, he thought, not to touch away the
elusive moment by hope or memory, but just to live it, filled with
its ecstasies, borne on the crest of its consciousness. It seemed to
him in some intimately communicated fashion, that the moment, the
very world of the island, was become to him a more intense object
of consciousness than himself. And somehow Olivia was its
expression--Olivia, here in his arms, with the stir of her breath
and the light, light pressure of her body and the fall of her hair,
not only symbols of the sovereign hour, but the hour's realities.

On either side the phantom wood pressed close about them, and its
light seemed coined by goblin fingers. Dissolving wind, persuading
little voices musical beyond the domain of music that he knew,
quick, poignant vistas of glades where the light spent itself in
its longed-for liberty of colour, labyrinthine ways of shadow that
taught the necessity of mystery. There was something lyric about it
all. Here Nature moved on no formal lines, understood no frugality
of beauty, but was lavish with a divine and special errantry to a
divine and special understanding. And it had been given St. George
to move with her merely by living this hour, with Olivia in his
arms.

The sweet of life--the sweet of life and the world his own. The
words had never meant so much. He had often said them in exultation,
but he had never known