te and one's sight was exquisitely won, now by a niche open to
a blue well of sea and space, now by silver plants lucent in high
casements. And there one was spellbound with this mirroring of the
Near which thus became the Remote, until one questioned gravely
which was "there" and which was "here," for the real was extended
into vision, and vision was quickened to the real, and nothing lay
between. But to Olivia, entering, none of these things was clearly
evident, for as the curtain of many dyes fell behind her she was
aware of two figures--but the one, with a murmured word which she
managed somehow to answer without an idea what she said or what it
had said either, vanished down the way that she had come. And she
stood there face to face with St. George.

He had risen from a low divan before a small table set with figs and
bread and a decanter of what would have been bordeaux if it had not
been distilled from the vineyards of Yaque. He was very pale and
haggard, and his eyes were darkly circled and still fever-bright.
But he came toward her as if he had quite forgotten that this is a
world of danger and that she was a princess and that, little more
than a week ago, her name was to him the unknown music. He came
toward her with a face of unutterable gladness, and he caught and
crushed her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he could
look to the distant soul of her. He led her to a great chair hewn
from quarries of things silver and unremembered, and he sat at her
feet upon a bench that might have been a stone of the altar of some
forgotten deity of dreams, at last worshiped as it should long have
been worshiped by all the host that had passed it by. He looked up
in her face, and the room was like a place of open water where
heaven is mirrored in earth, and earth reflects and answers heaven.

St. George laughed a little for sheer, inextinguishable happiness.

"Once," he said, "once I breakfasted with you, on tea and--if I
remember correctly--gold and silver muffins. Won't you breakfast
with me now?"

Olivia looked down at him, her heart still clamourous with its
anxiety of the night and of the morning.

"Tell me where you can have been," she said only; "didn't you know
how distressed we would be? We imagined everything--in this dreadful
place. And we feared everything, and we--" but yet the "we" did not
deceive St. George; how could it with her eyes, for all their
avoidings, so divinely upon him?

"Did yo