u are doing?" he persisted. "Don't you
see--dear, don't you see that by loving me you are giving up a world
that you can never, never get back?"

Olivia looked down at the fair disordered hair on his temples. It
seemed incredible that she had the right to push it from his
forehead. But it was not incredible. To prove it Olivia touched it
back. To prove that _that_ was not incredible, St. George turned
until his lips brushed her wrist.

"Don't you know, don't you, dear," he pressed the matter, "that very
possibly these people here have really got the secret that all the
rest of the world is talking about and hoping about and dreaming
they will sometime know?"

Olivia heard of this likelihood with delicious imperturbability.

"I know a secret," she said, just above her breath, "worth two of
that."

"You'll never be sorry--never?" he urged wistfully, resolutely
denying himself the entire bliss of that answer.

"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"

That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he
whimsically remembered something else:

"You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is
another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a
queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And
in New York--in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."

"No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I _insist_ upon a
flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the
altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour
dissolving to mirrored point and light--the mystic union of sight
with dream--and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine
resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different--a flat," she said
shyly.

Wouldn't it--wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?

"Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.

"But it will be different, just different enough to like better,"
she admitted then. "You know that I think so," she said.

"If only you knew how much I think so," he told her, "how I have
thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris.
Olivia, dear heart--when did you think so first--"

She shook her head and laid her hands upon his and drew them to her
face.

"Now, now--now!" she cried, "and there never was any time but now."

"But there will be--there will be," he said, his lips upon her hair.

After a time--for Time, that seems to have no boundaries in the
abstract, is