produce it in tins, nicely labeled."

Later, St. George came upon old Malakh, leaning on the terrace wall,
looking out to sea, and stood close beside him, marveling at the
pallor and the thousand wrinkles of the man's strange face. The face
was stranger by day than it had been by night--this St. George had
felt when he went that morning to release him, and the old man
leaned from the frowning bed-hangings to bid him a gentle good
morning. Could he be, St. George now wondered vaguely, a citizen of
the fifteenth or twentieth dimension, and, there, did they live to
his incredible age? Then he noticed that the old man was not wearing
the ruby ring.

"I wear it only when I wish to see it shine, sir," old Malakh
answered, and St. George marveled at that courteous "sir," and at
other things.

To everything that he asked him the old man returned only his
urbane, unmeaning replies, touched with their melancholy symbolism.
When St. George left him it was in the hope that Olivia would
consent to have him sent down the mountain, although St. George
himself was half inclined to agree with Amory's "But, really, I
would far rather talk with one madman with this madman's manners
than to sup with uncouth sanity" and "After all, if he should murder
us, probably no one could do it with greater delicacy." And Olivia
had no intention of sending old Malakh back to Med. "How could one
possibly do that?" she wanted to know, and there was no oracle.

All the while the world of intangibilities was growing, growing as
only that world can grow from the abysmal silence of life that went
before. St. George was saying to himself that at last the _Here_ and
the _Now_ were infinitely desirable; and as for the fear for the
morrow, what was that beside the promise of the days beyond? At noon
they all climbed the Obelisk Tower with its ceiling of carved leaves
above carved leaves, and the real heavens a little farther up. They
leaned on the broad wall, cut by mock bastions and faced the glory
of the sunny, trembling sea, starred with the dipping wings of
gulls. Blue sky, blue sea, eyes that saw looks that eyes did not
know they gave--ah, what a day it was! When the rollicking wind told
about that, down on the dun earth, surely it echoed their young
courage, their young belief in the future, the incorruptibility of
their understanding that the future was theirs, under the law. For
the wind always teaches that. The wind is the supreme believer, and
on