I followed quickly--I was without when you entered, but I came too
late. Since then I have waited, unwilling to go to you, certain that
the gods would permit the possible. And now--what shall I say?"

He hesitated, his eyes meeting Miss Holland's. And in that moment
Mrs. Hastings found her voice. She curved the chain of her
eye-glasses over her ear, threw back her head until the
tortoise-rims included her host, and spoke her mind.

"Well, Prince Tabnit," she said sharply--quite as if, St. George
thought, she had been nursery governess to princes all her life--"I
must say that I think your regret comes somewhat late in the day.
It's all very well to suffer as you say over what your servant has
tried to do. But what kind of man must you be to have such a
servant, in the first place? Didn't you know that she was dangerous
and blood-thirsty, and very likely a maniac-born?"

Her voice, never modulated in her excitements, was so full that no
one heard at that instant a quick, indrawn breath from St. George,
having something of triumph and something of terror. Even as he
listened he had been running swiftly over the objects in the room to
fasten every one in his memory, and his eyes had rested upon the
table at his side. A disc of bronze, supported upon a carven tripod,
caught the light and challenged attention to its delicate traceries;
and within its border of asps and goat's horns he saw cut in the
dull metal a sphinx crucified upon an upright cross--an exact
facsimile of the device upon that strange opalized glass from some
far-away island which he had lately noted in the window in Mrs.
Hastings' drawing-room. Instantly his mind was besieged by a volley
of suppositions and imaginings, but even in his intense excitement
as to what this simple discovery might bode, he heard the prince's
soft reply to Mrs. Hastings:

"Madame," said the prince, "she is a loyal creature. Whatever she
does, she believes herself to be doing in my service. I trusted her.
I believed that such error was impossible to her."

"Error!" shrilled Mrs. Hastings, looking about her for support and
finding little in the aspect of Mr. Augustus Frothingham, who
appeared to be regarding the whole proceeding as one from which he
was to extract data to be thought out at some future infinitely
removed.

As for St. George, he had never had great traffic with a future
infinitely removed; he had a youthful and somewhat imaginative
fashion of striking before t