isited?"

"You are very wonderful," observed the prince, smiling meditatively
at St. George, "and your penetration gives me good news--news that
I had not hoped for, yet. I can not tell you all that you ask, but I
can tell you much. Will you sit down?"

He turned and glanced at the curtain at the far end of the room.
Instantly the boy servant appeared, bearing a tray on which were
placed, in dishes of delicate-coloured filigree, strange dainties
not to be classified even by a cosmopolitan, with his Flemish and
Finnish and all but Icelandic cafes in every block.

"Pray do me the honour," the prince besought, taking the dishes from
the hands of the boy. "It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell
you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before
him."

Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the
smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business
toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien. He
impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from
the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer
atmosphere. The lawyer's face was a study. Mr. Augustus Frothingham
never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of
affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.

There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a
tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that
had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and
with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white
berries, such as the Japanese call "pinedews"; there was a tea
distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury
and fantastic. So potent was the spell of the prince's hospitality,
and so gracious the insistence with which he set before them the
strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia, eager almost to tears
for news of her father, and Mrs. Hastings, as critical and
suspicious as some beetle with long antennae, might not refuse them.
As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might be Cagliostro's
spagiric food, or "extract of Saturn," for aught that his previous
experience equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and was
constrained to nibble again.

When they had been served, Prince Tabnit abruptly began speaking,
the while turning the fine stem of his glass in his delicate
fingers.

"You do not know," he said simply, "where the island of Yaque lies?"

Mrs. Hasting