e ran boldly up
the long steps. It was a part of the unreality of the place that
there seemed absolutely no sign of life about the King's palace. The
windows glowed with the soft light within, but there were no guards,
no servants, no sign of any presence. For the first time, when they
reached the top of the steps, the two men hesitated.

"Personally," said Amory doubtfully, "I have never yet tapped at a
king's front door. What does one do?"

St. George looked at the long stone porches, uncovered and girt by a
parapet following the curve of the facade.

"Would you mind waiting a minute?" he said.

With that he was off along the balcony to the south--and afterward
he wondered why, and if it is true that Fate tempts us in the way
that she would have us walk by luring us with unseen roses budding
from the air.

Where the porch abruptly widened to a kind of upper terrace, like a
hanging garden set with flowering trees, three high archways opened
to an apartment whose bright lights streamed across the grass-plots.
St. George felt something tug at his heart, something that urged him
forward and caught him up in an ecstasy of triumph and hope
fulfilled. He looked back at Amory, and Amory was leaning on the
parapet, apparently sunk in reflections which concerned nobody. So
St. George stepped softly on until he reached the first archway, and
there he stopped, and the moment was to him almost past belief.
Within the open doorway, so near that if she had lifted her eyes
they must have met his own, was the woman whom he had come across
the sea to seek.

St. George hardly knew that he spoke, for it was as if all the world
were singing her name.

"Olivia!" he said.

CHAPTER XIV

THE ISLE OF HEARTS

The room in which St. George was looking was long and lofty and hung
with pale tapestries. White pillars supporting the domed white
ceiling were wound with garlands. The smoke from a little brazen
tripod ascended pleasantly, and about the windows stirred in the
faint wind draperies of exceeding thinness, woven in looms stilled
centuries ago.

Olivia was crossing before the windows. She wore a white gown strewn
with roses, and she seemed as much at home on this alien
mountain-top as she had been in her aunt's drawing-room at the
Boris. But her face was sad, and there was not a touch of the
piquancy which it had worn the night before in the throne-room, nor
of its delicious daring as she had sped past him in the big