u," he said, "ah--did you wonder? I wish I knew!"

"And my father--where did you find him?" she besought. "It was you?
You found him, did you not?"

St. George looked down at a fold of her gown that was fallen across
his knee. How on earth was he ever to move, he wondered vaguely, if
the slightest motion meant the withdrawing of that fold. He looked
at her hand, resting so near, so near, upon the arm of the chair;
and last he looked again into her face; and it seemed wonderful and
before all things wonderful, not that she should be here, jeweled
and crowned, but that he should so unbelievably be here with her.
And yet it might be but a moment, as time is measured, until this
moment would be swept away. His eyes met hers and held them.

"Would you mind," he said, "now--just for a little, while we wait
here--not asking me that? Not asking me anything? There will be time
enough in there--when _they_ ask me. Just for now I only want to
think how wonderful this is."

She said: "Yes, it is wonderful--unbelievable," but he thought that
she might have meant the white room or her queen's robe or any one
of all the things which he did not mean.

"_Is_ it wonderful to you?" he asked, and he said again: "I wish--I
wish I knew!"

He looked at her, sitting in the moon of her laces and the stars of
her gems, and the sense of the immeasurableness of the hour came
upon him as it comes to few; the knowledge that the evanescent
moment is very potent, the world where the siren light of the Remote
may at any moment lie quenched in some ashen present. To him, held
momentarily in this place that was like shoreless, open water, the
present was inestimably precious and it lay upon St. George like the
delicate claim of his love itself. What the next hour held for them
neither could know, and this universal uncertainty was for him
crystallized in an instant of high wisdom; over the little hand
lying so perilously near, his own closed suddenly and he crushed her
fingers to his lips.

"Olivia--dear heart," he said, "we don't know what they may do--what
will happen--oh, may I tell you _now_?"

There was no one to say that he might not, for the hand was not
withdrawn from his. And so he did tell her, told her all his heart
as he had known his heart to be that last night on _The Aloha_, and
in that divine twilight of his arriving on the island, and in those
hours beside the airy ramparts of the king's palace, and in the
vigil that followed,