a very fiend for bounding the divine concrete--after a
time Amory spoke hesitatingly on the other side of the curtain of
many dyes.

"St. George," he said, "I'm afraid they want you. Mr. Holland--the
king, he's got through playing them. He wants you to get up and give
'em the truth, I think."

"Come in--come in, Amory," St. George said and lifted the curtain,
and "I beg your pardon," he added, as his eyes fell upon Antoinette
in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated. She had followed
Olivia from the hall, and had met Amory midway the avenue of prickly
trees, and they had helpfully been keeping guard. Now they went on
before to the Hall of Kings, and St. George, remembering what must
happen there, turned to Olivia for one crowning moment.

"You know," she said fearfully, "before father came the prince
intended the most terrible things--to set you and Mr. Amory adrift
in a rudderless airship--"

St. George laughed in amusement. The poor prince with his impossible
devices, thinking to harm him, St. George--_now_.

"He meant to marry you, he thought," he said, "but, thank Heaven, he
has your father to answer to--and me!" he ended jubilantly.

And yet, after all, Heaven knew what possibilities hemmed them
round. And Heaven knew what she was going to think of him when she
heard his story. He turned and caught her to him, for the crowning
moment.

"You love me--you love me," he said, "no matter what happens or what
they say--no matter what?"

She met his eyes and, of her own will, she drew his face down to
hers.

"No matter what," she answered. So they went together toward the
chamber which they had both forgotten.

When they reached the Hall of Kings they heard King Otho's
voice--suave, mellow, of perfect enunciation:

"--some one," the king was concluding, "who can tell this
considerably better than I. And it seems to me singularly fitting
that the recognition of the part eternally played by the 'possible'
be temporarily deferred while we listen to--I dislike to use the
word, but shall I say--the facts."

It seemed to St. George when he stood beside the dais, facing that
strange, eager multitude with his strange unbelievable story upon
his lips--the story of the finding of the king--as if his own voice
were suddenly a part of all the gigantic incredibility. Yet the
divinely real and the fantastic had been of late so fused in his
consciousness that he had come to look upon both as the
normal--whic