orge slipped down upon the stones and sat motionless. There
was a little blue, forked vein on the man's forehead, and upon this
he fastened his eyes, mechanically following it downward and back.
Lines had crossed it, and there had been a deep cleft between the
eyes, but these had disappeared, leaving the brow almost smooth. The
cheeks were now tinged with colour, and the throat, where he had
pulled aside the robe, showed firm and white. Mechanically St.
George passed his hand along the inert arm, and it was no more
withered than his own--the arm of no greybeard, but of a man in the
prime of life. What did it mean--what did it mean? St. George
waited, the blood throbbing in his temples, a mist before his eyes.
What did it mean?

The minutes dragged by and still the unconscious man did not stir or
unclose his eyes. From time to time St. George pressed his hand to
the heart, and found it beating on rhythmically, powerfully. When he
found himself sitting with averted head, as if he were afraid to
look back at that changing face, a fear seized him that he had lost
his reason and that what he imagined himself to see was a phase of
madness. So he left the old man's side and sturdily tramped away
into the huge dark of the room, resolutely explaining to himself
that this was all very natural; the old man had been ill, improperly
nourished, and the powerful stimulant of the wine had partly
restored him. But even while he went over it St. George knew in his
heart that what had happened was nothing that could be so explained,
nothing that could be explained at all by anything within his ken.

His footsteps echoed startlingly on the stones, and the chill breath
of the place smote his face as he moved. He stumbled on a displaced
tile and pitched forward upon a jagged corner of sarcophagus, and
reeled as if at a blow from some arm of the darkness. The taper rays
struck a length of wall before him, minting from the gloom a sheet
of pale orchids clinging to the unclean rock. St. George remembered
a green slope, spangled with crocuses and wild strawberries,
coloured like the orchids but lying under free sky, in free air. It
seemed only a trick of Chance that he was not now lying on that far
slope, wherever it was, instead of facing these ghost blooms in this
ghost place. Back there, where the light glimmered beside the tomb
of King Abibaal, nobody could tell what awaited him. If the man
could change like this, might he not take on some