ter's hands.

"My dear child," he murmured, "the picture that you make entirely
justifies my existence, but hardly my absence. Shall we ask his
Highness to do that?"

It mattered little who was to do that so long as it was done. For to
that people, steeped in dream, risen from the crudity of mere events
to breathe in the rarer atmosphere of their significance, here was a
happening worthy their attention, for it had the dignity of mystery.
Even Mrs. Medora Hastings, billowing toward the throne with cries,
was less poignantly a challenge to be heard. Upon her the king laid
a tranquillizing hand and, with a droop of eyelids in recognition of
Mr. Frothingham, he murmured: "Ah, Medora--Medora! Delight in the
moment--but do not embrace it," while beside him, star-eyed, Olivia
stood waiting for Prince Tabnit to speak.

To Olivia, trembling a little as she leaned upon his arm, King Otho
bent with some word, at which she raised to his her startled face,
and turned from him uncertainly, and burned a heavenly colour from
brow to chin. Then, her father's words being insistent in her ear,
and her own heart being tumultuous with what he had told her, she
turned as he bade her, and, following his glance, slipped beneath a
shining curtain that cut from the audience chamber the still
seclusion of the King's Alcove, a chamber long sacred to the
sovereigns of Yaque.

Confused with her wonder and questioning, hardly daring to
understand the import of her father's words, Olivia went down a
passage set between two high white walls of the palace, open
to-day to the upper blue and to the floating pennons of the dome.
Here, prickly-leaved plants had shot to the cornices with
uncouth contorting of angled boughs, and in their inner green
ruffle-feathered birds looked down on her with the uncanny
interest of myriapods. She caught about her the lace of her skirts
and of her floating veil, and the way echoed musically to the
touch of her little sandals and was bright with the shining of her
diadem. And at the end of the passage she lifted a swaying curtain
of soft dyes and entered the King's Alcove.

The King's Alcove laid upon one the delicate demands of calm open
water--for its floor of white transparent tiles was cunningly traced
with the reflected course of the carven roof, and one seemed to look
into mirrored depths of disappearing line between spaces shaped like
petals and like chevrons. In the King's Alcove one stood in a world
of whi