e has only to take a walk in it at this moment to know the truth.
Yet in spite of the wind, in spite of their high security, in spite
of the little wing-like moments that hold not history but
revelation, they were all going down the hours beneath the pendent
sword of "To-morrow, at noon."

CHAPTER XVII

BENEATH THE SURFACE

Up came the dusk to the doors of the king's palace--a hurry of grey
banners flowing into the empty ways where the sun had been. Upon
this high dominion Night could not advance unheralded, and here the
Twilight messengered her coming long after the dark lay thick on the
lowland and on the toiling water.

St. George, leaning from Amory's window, looked down on the shadows
rising in exquisite hesitation, as if they came curling from the
lighted censer of Med. There is no doubt at all, Olivia had said
gravely, that the dusk is patterned, if only one could see
it--figured in unearthly flowers, in wandering stars, in upper-air
sprites, grey-winged, grey-bodied, so that sometimes glimpsing them
one fancies them to be little living goblins. He smiled, remembering
her words, and glanced over his shoulder down the long room where
the other light was now beginning to creep about, first expressing,
then embracing the chamber dusk. It seemed precisely the moment
when something delicate should be caught passing from gloom to
radiance, to be thankfully remembered. But only many-winged colours
were visible, though he could hear a sound like little murmurous
speech in the dusky roof where the air had a recurrent fashion of
whispering knowingly.

Indeed, the air everywhere in the palace had a fashion of whispering
knowingly, for it was a place of ghostly draughts and blasts
creeping through chambers cleft by yawning courts and open corridors
and topped by that skeleton dome. And as St. George turned from the
window he saw that the door leading into the hall, urged by some
nimble gust, imaginative or prying, had swung ajar.

St. George mechanically crossed the room to close the door, noting
how the pale light warmed the stones of that cave-like corridor.
With his hand upon the latch his eyes fell on something crossing the
corridor, like a shadow dissolving from gloom to gloom. Well beyond
the open door, stealing from pillar to pillar in the dimness and
moving with that swiftness and slyness which proclaim a covert
purpose as effectually as would a bell, he saw old Malakh.

Now St. George was in felt-s