feeling all the way here? Is this what you came for? Then, on my
soul, I forgive you everything. I would have climbed ten mountains
to meet Antoinette Frothingham."

"I've been watching you, you son of Dixie," said St. George darkly;
"don't you lose your head just when you need it most."

"I have a notion yours is gone," defended Amory critically, "and
mine is only going."

"That's twice as dangerous," St. George wisely opined;
"besides--mine is different."

"So is mine," said Amory, "so is everybody's."

St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace. Amory
didn't care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and
St. George had things to think about. He crossed the terrace to the
south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood;
and there, because the night would have it no other way, he
stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe,
and lay looking out at sea. Here he was, liberated from the business
of "buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables," set upon a
field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal
experiences where words themselves are born. Better and more
intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.

He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith
been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and
thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies,
breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of
what will be. He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman
mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to
the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told
himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief. His
mother and the bishop at Tuebingen and on the Baltic! Curiously
enough, they did not seem very remote. He adored his mother and the
bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.
All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast
kinship, perhaps have identity. And the name of that identity was
Olivia. So he "drove the night along" on the leafy parapet.

He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman
emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken
with him, when something--he was not sure whether it was a voice or
a touch--startled him awake. He rose on his elbow and looked
drowsily out at the glorified blacknes