"Go on, please," said Olivia eagerly.

"Olivia, I'm sure," protested Mrs. Hastings, "I think it's very unwomanly of you to show such an interest in these things."

"Will you bear with me for one moment, Mrs. Hastings?" begged the prince, "and perhaps I shall be able to interest you. The submarine returned, bringing the sole survivor of the wreck of the African transport."

"Ah, now," Mrs. Hastings assured him blandly, "you are dealing with things that can happen. My brother Otho, my niece's father, was just this last year the sole survivor of the wreck of a very important vessel."

"I have the honour, Mrs. Hastings, to be narrating to you the circumstances attending the discovery of your brother and Miss Holland's father, after the wreck of that vessel."

"My father?" cried Olivia.

The prince bowed.

"After this manner, Chance had rewarded us. We crowned your father King of Yaque."



CHAPTER V

OLIVIA PROPOSES

Prince Tabnit's announcement was received by his guests in the silence of amazement. If they had been told that Miss Holland's father was secretly acting as King of England they could have been no more profoundly startled than to hear stated soberly that he had been for nearly a year the king of a cannibal island. For the cannibal phase of his experience seemed a foregone conclusion. To St. George, profoundly startled and most incredulous, the possible humour of the situation made first appeal. The picture of an American gentleman seated upon a gold throne in a leopard-skin coat, ordering "oysters and foes" for breakfast, was irresistible.

"But he shaved with a shell when he chose, 'Twas the manner of Primitive Man"

floated through his mind, and he brought himself up sharply. Clearly, somebody was out of his head, but it must not be he.

"What?" cried Mrs. Hastings in two inelegant syllables, on the second of which her uncontrollable voice rose. "My brother Otho, a vestry-man at St. Mark's—"

"Aunt Dora!" pleaded Olivia. "Tell us," she besought the prince.

"King Otho I of Yaque," the prince was begining, but the title was not to be calmly received by Mrs. Hastings.

"King Otho!" she articulated. "Then—am I royalty?"

"All who may possibly succeed to the throne Blackstone holds to be royalty," said the lawyer in an edictal voice, and St. George looked away from Olivia.

The Princess Olivia!

"King Otho," continued the prince, "ruled wisely and well for seven months, and it was at the beginning of that time that the imperial submarine was sent to the Azores with letters and a packet to you. The enterprise, however, was attended by so great danger of discovery that it was never repeated. This is why, for so long, you have had no word from the king. And now I come," said the prince with hesitation, "to the difficult part of my narrative."

He paused and Mr. Frothingham rushed to his assistance.

"As the family solicitor," said the lawyer, pursing his lips, and waving his hands, once, from the wrists, "would you not better divulge to my ear alone, the—a—"

"No—no!" flashed Olivia. "No, Mr. Frothingham—please."

The prince inclined his head.

"Will it surprise you, Miss Holland," he said, "to learn that I made my voyage to this country expressly to seek you out?"

"To seek me?" exclaimed Olivia. "But—has anything happened to my father?"

"We hope not," replied the prince, "but what I have to tell will none the less occasion you anxiety. Briefly, Miss Holland, it is more than three months since your father suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from Yaque, leaving absolutely no clue to his whereabouts."

A little cry broke from Olivia's lips that went to St. George's heart. Mrs. Hastings, with a gesture that was quite wild and sent her bonnet hopelessly to one side, burst into a volley of exclamations and demands.

"Who did it?" she wailed. "Who did it? Otho is a gentleman. He would never have the bad taste to disappear, like all those dreadful people's wives, if somebody hadn't—"

"My dear Madame," interposed Mr. Frothingham, "calm—calm yourself. There are families of undisputed position which record disappearances in several generations."

"Please," pleaded Olivia. "Ah, tell us," she begged the prince again.

"There is, unfortunately, but little to tell, Miss Holland," said the prince with sympathetic regret. "I had the honour, three months ago, to entertain the king, your father, at dinner. We parted at midnight. His Majesty seemed—"

"His Majesty!" repeated Mrs. Hastings, smiling up at the opposite wall as if her thought saw glories.

"—in the best of health and spirits," continued the prince. "A meeting of the High Council was to be held at noon on the following day. The king did not appear. From that moment no eye in Yaque has fallen upon him."

"One moment, your Highness," said St. George quickly; "in the absence of the king, who presides over the High Council?"

"As the head of the House of the Litany, the chief administrator of justice, it is I," said the prince with humility.

"Ah, yes," St. George said evenly.

"But what have you done?" cried Olivia. "Have you had search made? Have you—"

"Everything," the prince assured her. "The island is not large. Not a corner of it remains unvisited. The people, who were devoted to the king, your father, have sought night and day. There is, it is hardly right to conceal from you," the prince hesitated, "a circumstance which makes the disappearance the more alarming."

"Tell us. Keep nothing from us, I beg, Prince Tabnit," besought Olivia.

"For centuries," said the prince slowly, "there has been in the keeping of the High Council of the island a casket, containing what is known as the Hereditary Treasure. This casket, with some of the finest of its jewels, was left by King Abibaal himself. Since his time every king of the island has upon his death bequeathed to the casket the finest jewel in his possession; and its contents are now therefore of inestimable value. The circumstance to which I refer is that two days after the disappearance of the king, your father, which spread grief and alarm through all Yaque, it was discovered that the Hereditary Treasure was gone."

"Gone!" burst from the lips of the prince's auditors.

"As utterly as if the Fifth Dimension had received it," the prince gravely assured them. "The loss, as you may imagine, is a grievous one. The High Council immediately issued a proclamation that if the treasure be not restored by a certain date—now barely two weeks away—a heavy tax will be levied upon the people to make good, in the coin of the realm, this incalculable loss. Against this the people, though they are a people of peace, are murmurous."

"Indeed!" cried Mrs. Hastings. "Great loyalty it is that sets up the loss of their trumpery treasure over and above the loss of their king, my brother Otho! If," she shrilled indignantly, "we are not unwise to listen to this at all. What is it you think? What is it your people think?"

She raised her head until she had framed the prince in tortoise-shell. Mrs. Hastings never held her head quite still. It continually waved about a little, so that usually, even in peace, it intimated indignation; and when actual indignation set in, the jet on her bonnet tinkled and ticked like so many angry sparrows.

"Madame," said the prince, "there are those among his Majesty's subjects who would willingly lay down their lives for him. But he is a stranger to us—come of an alien race; and the double disappearance is a most tragic occurrence, which the burden of the tax has emphasized. To be frank, were his Majesty to reappear in Yaque without the treasure having been found—"

"Oh!" breathed Mrs. Hastings, "they would kill him!"

The prince shuddered and set his white teeth in his nether lip.

"The gods forbid," he said. "Such primeval punishment is as unknown among us as is war itself. How little you know my people; how pitifully your instincts have become—forgive me—corrupted by living in this barbarous age of yours, fumbling as you do at civilization. With us death is a sacred rite, the highest tribute and the last sacrifice to the Absolute. Our dying are carried to the Temple of the Worshipers of Distance, and are there consecrated. The limit of our punishment would be aerial exposure—"

"You mean?" cried St. George.

"I mean that in extreme cases we have, with due rite and ceremonial, given a victim to an airship, without ballast or rudder, and abundantly provisioned. Then with solemn ritual we have set him adrift—an offering to the great spirits of space—so that he may come to know. This," the prince paused in emotion, "this is the worst that could befall your father."

"How horrible!" cried Olivia. "Oh, how horrible."

"Oh," Mrs. Hastings moaned, "he was born to it. He was born to it. When he was six he tied kites to his arms and jumped out the window of the cupola and broke his collar bone—oh, Otho,—oh Heaven,—and I made him eat oatmeal gruel three times a day when he was getting well."

"Prince Tabnit," said St. George, "I beg you not to jest with us. Have consideration for the two to whom this man is dear."

"I am speaking truth to you," said the prince earnestly. "I do not wish to alarm these ladies, but I am bound in honour to tell you what I know."

"Ah then," said St. George, his narrowed eyes meeting those of the prince, "since the taking of life is unknown to you in Yaque, will you explain how it was that your servant adopted such unerring means to take the life of Miss Holland? And why?"

"My servant," said the prince readily, "belongs to the lahnas or former serfs of the island. Upon her people, now the owners of rich lands, the tax will fall heavily. Crazed by what she considers her people's wrongs following upon the coming of the stranger sovereign, the poor creature must have developed the primitive instincts of your race. Before coming to this country my servant had never heard of murder save as a superseded custom of antiquity, like the crucifying of lions. Her discovery of your daily practice of murder, and of murder practised as a cure for crime—"

"Sir," began the lawyer imposingly.

"—wakened in her the primitive instincts of humanity, and her instinct took the deplorable and fanatic form of your own courts," finished the prince. "Her bitterness toward his Majesty she sought to visit upon his daughter."

Olivia sprang to her feet.

"I must go to my father. I must go to Yaque," she cried ringingly. "Prince Tabnit, will you take me to him?"

Into the prince's face leaped a fire of admiration for her beauty and her daring. He bowed before her, his lowered lashes making thick shadows on his dark cheeks.

"I insist upon this," cried little Olivia firmly, "and if you do not permit it, Prince Tabnit, we must publish what you have told us from one end of the city to the other."

"Yes, by Jove," thought St. George, "and one's country will have a Yaque exhibit in its own department at the next world's fair."

"Olivia! My child! Miss Holland—," began the lawyer.

The prince spoke tranquilly.

"It is precisely this errand," he said, "that has brought me to America. Do you not see that, in the event of your father's failure to return to his people, you will eventually be Queen of Yaque?"

St. George found himself looking fixedly at Mrs. Hastings' false front as the only reality in the room. If in a minute Rollo was going to waken him by bringing in his coffee, he was going to throttle Rollo—that was all. Olivia Holland, an American heiress, the hereditary princess of a cannibal island! St. George still insisted upon the cannibal; it somehow gave him a foothold among the actualities.

"I!" cried Olivia.

Mrs. Hastings, brows lifted, lips parted, winked with lightning rapidity in an effort to understand.

St. George pulled himself together.

"Your Highness," he said sternly, "there are several things upon which I must ask you to enlighten us. And the first, which I hope you will forgive, is whether you have any direct proof that what you tell us of Miss Holland's father is true."

"That's it! That's it!" Mr. Frothingham joined him with all the importance of having made the suggestion. "We can hardly proceed in due order without proofs, sir."

The prince turned toward the curtain at the room's end and the youth appeared once more, this time bearing a light oval casket of delicate workmanship. It was of a substance resembling both glass and metal of changing, rainbow tints, and it passed through St. George's mind as he observed it that there must be, to give such a dazzling and unreal effect, more than seven colours in the spectrum.

"A spectrum of seven colours," said the prince at the same moment, "could not, of course, produce this surface. I confess that until I came to this country I did not know that you had so few colours. Our spectrum already consists of twelve colours visible to the naked eye, and at least five more are distinguishable through our powerful magnifying glasses."

St. George was silent. It was as if he had suddenly been permitted to look past the door that bars and threatens all knowledge.

The prince unlocked the casket. He drew out first a quantity of paper of extreme thinness and lightness on which, embossed and emblazoned, was the coat of arms of the Hollands—a sheaf of wheat and an unicorn's head—and this was surmounted by a crown.

"This," said the prince, "is now the device upon the signet ring of the King of Yaque, the arms of your own family. And here chances to be a letter from your father containing some instructions to me. It is true that writing has with us been superseded by wireless communication, excepting where there is need of great secrecy. Then we employ the alphabet of any language we choose, these being almost disused, as are the Cuneiform and Coptic to you."

"And how is it," St. George could not resist asking, "that you know and speak the English?"

The prince smiled swiftly.

"To you," he said, "who delve for knowledge and who do not know that it is absolute and to be possessed at will, this can not now be made clear. Perhaps some day..."

Olivia had taken the paper from the prince and pressed it to her lips, her eyes filling with tears. There was no mistaking that evidence, for this was her father's familiar hand.

"Otho always did write a fearful scrawl," Mrs. Hastings commented, "his l's and his t's and his vowels were all the same height. I used to tell him that I didn't know whatever people would think."

"I may, moreover," continued the prince, "call to mind several articles which were included in the packet sent from the Azores by his Majesty. You have, for example, a tapestry representing an ibis hunt; you have an image in pink sutro, or soft marble, of an ancient Phoenician god—Melkarth. And you have a length of stained glass bearing the figure of the Tyrian sphinx, crucified, and surrounded by coiled asps."

"Yes, it is true," said Olivia, "we have all these things."

"Why, the trash must be quite expensive," observed Mrs. Hastings. "I don't care much for so many colours myself, perhaps because I always wear black; though I did wear light colours a good deal when I was a girl."

"What else, Mr. St. George?" inquired the prince pleasantly.

"Nothing else," cried Olivia passionately. "I am satisfied. My father is in danger, and I believe that he is in Yaque, for he would never of his own will desert a place of trust. I must go to him. And, Aunt Dora, you and Mr. Frothingham must go with me."

"Oh, Olivia!" wailed Mrs. Hastings, a different key for every syllable, "think—consider! Is it the necessary thing to do? And what would your poor dear uncle have done? And is there a better way than his way? For I always say that it is not really necessary to do as my poor dear husband would have done, providing only that we can find a better way. Oh," she mourned, lifting her hands, "that this frightful thing should come to me at my age. Otho may be married to a cannibal princess, with his sons catching wild goats by the hair like Tennyson and the whistling parrots—"

"Madame," said the prince coldly, "forgets what I have been saying of my country."

"I do not forget," declared Mrs. Hastings sharply, "but being behind civilization and being ahead of civilization comes to the same thing more than once. In morals it does."

St. George was silent. Olivia's splendid daring in her passionate decision to go to her father stirred him powerfully; moreover, her words outlined a possible course of his own whose magnitude startled him, and at the same time filled him with a sudden, dazzling hope.

"But where is your island, Prince Tabnit?" he asked. "You've naturally no consul there and no cable, since you are not even on the map."

"Yaque," said the prince readily, "lies almost due southwest from the Azores."

Mr. Frothingham stirred skeptically.

"But such an island," he said pompously, "so rich in material for the archaeologist, the anthropologist, the explorer in all fields of antiquity—ah, it is out of the question, out of the question!"

"It is difficult," said the prince patiently, "most difficult for me to make myself intelligible to you—as difficult, if you will forgive me, as if you were to try to explain calculus to one of the street boys outside. But directly your phase of civilization has opened to you the secrets of the Fourth Dimension, much will be discovered to you which you do not now discern or dream, and among these, Yaque. I do not jest," he added wearily, "neither do I expect you to believe me. But I have told you the truth. And it would be impossible for you to reach Yaque save in the company of one of the islanders to whom the secret is known. I can not explain to you, any more than I can explain harmony or colour."

"Well, I'm sure," cried Mrs. Hastings fretfully, "I don't know why you all keep wandering from the subject so. Now, my brother Otho—"

"Prince Tabnit,"—Olivia's voice never seemed to interrupt, but rather to "divide evidence finely" at the proper moment—"how long will it take us to reach Yaque?"

St. George thrilled at that "us."

"My submarine," replied the prince, "is plying about outside the harbour. I arrived in four days."

"By the way," St. George submitted, "since your wireless system is perfected, why can not we have news of your island from here?"

"The curve of the earth," explained the prince readily, "prevents. We have conquered only those problems with which we have had to deal. The curve of the earth has of course never entered our calculation. We have approached the problem from another standpoint."

"We have much to do, Prince Tabnit," said Olivia; "when may we leave?"

"Command me," said Prince Tabnit, bowing.

"To-morrow!" cried Olivia, "to-morrow, at noon."

"Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings' voice broke over the name like ice upon a warm promontory. Mrs. Hastings' voice was suited to say "Keziah" or "Katinka," not Olivia.

"Can you go, Mr. Frothingham?" demanded Olivia.

Mr. Frothingham's long hands hung down and he looked as if she had proposed a jaunt to Mars.

"My physician has ordered a sea-change," he mumbled doubtfully, "my daughter Antoinette—I—really—there is nothing in all my experience—"

"Olivia!" Mrs. Hastings in tears was superintending the search for both side-combs.

"Aunt Dora," said Olivia, "you're not going to fail me now. Prince Tabnit—at noon to-morrow. Where shall we meet?"

St. George listened, glowing.

"May I have the honour," suggested the prince, "of waiting upon you at noon to conduct you? And I need hardly say that we undertake the journey under oath of secrecy?"

"Anything—anything!" cried Olivia.

"Oh, my dear Olivia," breathed Mrs. Hastings weakly, "taking me, at my age, into this awful place of Four Dimentias—or whatever it was you said."

"We will be ready to go with you at noon," said Olivia steadily.

St. George held his peace as they made their adieux. A great many things remained to be thought out, but one was clear enough.

The boy servant ran before them to the door. They made their way to the street in the early dusk. A hurdy-gurdy on the curb was bubbling over with merry discords, and was flanked by garrulous Italians with push-carts, lighted by flaring torches. Men were returning from work, children were quarreling, women were in doorways, and a policeman was gossiping with the footman in a knot of watching idlers. With a sigh that was like a groan, Mrs. Hastings sank back on the cushions of the brougham.

"I feel," she said, eyes closed, "as if I had been in a pagan temple where they worship oracles and what's-his-names. What time is it? I haven't an idea. Dear, dear, I want to get home and feel as if my feet were on land and water again. I want some strong sleep and a good sound cup of coffee, and then I shall know what's actually what."

To St. George the slow drive up town was no less unreal than their visit. His head was whirling, a hundred plans and speculations filled his mind, and through these Mrs Hastings' chatter of forebodings and the lawyer's patterned utterance hardly found their way. At his own street he was set down, with Mrs. Hastings' permission to call next day.

Miss Holland gave him her hand.

"I can not thank you," she said, "I can not thank you. But try to know, won't you, what this has been to me. Until to-morrow."

Until to-morrow. St. George stood in the brightness of the street looking after the vanishing carriage, his hand tingling from her touch. Then he went up to his apartment and met Rollo—sleek, deferential, the acme of the polite barbarism in which the prince had made St. George feel that he and his world were living. Ah, he thought, as Rollo took his hat, this was no way to live, with the whole world singing to be discovered anew.

He sat down before the trim little white table with its pretty china and silver and its one rose-shaded candle, but the doubtful content of comfort was suddenly not enough. The spirit of the road and of the chase was in his veins, and he was aglow with "the taste for pilgriming." He looked about on the simple luxury with which he had surrounded himself, and he welcomed his farewell to it. And when Rollo had gone up stairs to complain in person of the shad-roe, St. George spoke aloud:

"If Miss Holland sails for Yaque to-morrow on the prince's submarine," he said, "The Aloha and I will follow her."



CHAPTER VI

TWO LITTLE MEN

Next morning St. George was early astir. He had slept little and his dreams had been grotesques. He threw up his blind and looked across buildings to the grey park. The sky was marked with rose, the still reservoir gave back colour upon its breast, and the tower upon its margin might have been some guttural-christened castle on the Rhine. St. George drew a deep breath of good, new air and smiled for the sake of the things that the day was to bring him. He was in the golden age when the youthful expectation of enjoyment is just beginning to be savoured by the inevitable longing for more light, and he seemed to himself to be alluringly near the verge of both.

His first care the evening before had been to hunt out Chillingworth. He had found him in a theatre and had got him out to the foyer and kept him through the third act, pouring in his ears as much as he felt that it was well for him to know. Chillingworth had drawn his square, brown hands through his hair and, in lieu of copy-paper, had nibbled away his programme and paced the corner by the cloak-room.

"It looks like a great big thing," said the city editor; "don't you think it looks like a great big thing?"

"Extraordinarily so," assented St. George, watching him.

"Can you handle it alone, do you think?" Chillingworth demanded.

"Ah, well now, that depends," replied St. George. "I'll see it through, if it takes me to Yaque. But I'd like you to promise, Mr. Chillingworth, that you won't turn Crass loose at it while I'm gone, with his feverish head-lines. Mrs. Hastings and her niece must be spared that, at all events."

"Don't you be a sentimental idiot," snapped Chillingworth, "and spoil the biggest city story the paper ever had. Why, this may draw the whole United States into a row, and mean war and a new possession and maybe consulates and governorships and one thing or another for the whole staff. St. George, don't spoil the sport. Remember, I'm dropsical and nobody can tell what may happen. By the way, where did you say this prince man is?"

"Ah, I didn't say," St. George had answered quietly. "If you'll forgive me, I don't think I shall say."

"Oh, you don't," ejaculated Chillingworth. "Well, you please be around at eight o'clock in the morning."

St. George watched him walking sidewise down the aisle as he always walked when he was excited. Chillingworth was a good sort at heart, too; but given, as the bishop had once said of some one else, to spending right royally a deal of sagacity under the obvious impression that this is the only wisdom.

At his desk next morning Chillingworth gave to St. George a note from Amory, who had been at Long Branch with The Aloha when the letter was posted and was coming up that noon to put ashore Bennietod.

"May Cawthorne have his day off to-morrow and go with me?" the letter ended. "I'll call up at noon to find out."

"Yah!" growled Chillingworth, "it's breaking up the whole staff, that's what it's doin'. You'll all want cut-glass typewriters next."

"If I should sail to-day," observed St. George, quite as if he were boarding a Sound steamer, "I'd like to take on at least two men. And I'd like Amory and Cawthorne. You could hardly go yourself, could you, Mr. Chillingworth?"

"No, I couldn't," growled Chillingworth, "I've got to keep my tastes down. And I've got to save up to buy kid gloves for the staff. Look here—" he added, and hesitated.

"Yes?" St. George complied in some surprise.

"Bennietod's half sick anyway," said Chillingworth, "he's thin as water, and if you would care—"

"By all means then," St. George assented heartily, "I would care immensely. Bennietod sick is like somebody else healthy. Will you mind getting Amory on the wire when he calls up, and tell him to show up without fail at my place at noon to-day? And to wait there for me."

Little Cawthorne, with a pair of shears quite a yard long, was sitting at his desk clipping jokes for the fiction page. He was humming a weary little tune to the effect that "Billy Enny took a penny but now he hadn't many—Lookie They!" with which he whiled away the hours of his gravest toil, coming out strongly on the "Lookie They!" until Benfy on the floor above pounded for quiet which he never got.

"Cawthorne," said St. George, "it may be that I'm leaving to-night on the yacht for an island out in the southeast. And the chief says that you and Amory are to go along. Can you go?"

Little Cawthorne's blue eyes met St. George's steadily for a moment, and without changing his gaze he reached for his hat.

"I can get the page done in an hour," he promised, "and I can pack my thirty cents in ten minutes. Will that do?"

St. George laughed.

"Ah, well now, this goes," he said. "Ask Chillingworth. Don't tell any one else."

"'Billy Enny took a penny,'" hummed Little Cawthorne in perfect tranquillity.

St. George set off at once for the McDougle Street house. A thousand doubts beset him and he felt that if he could once more be face to face with the amazing prince these might be better cleared away. Moreover, the glimpses which the prince had given him of a world which seemed to lie as definitely outside the bourne of present knowledge as does death itself filled St. George with unrest, spiced his incredulity with wonder, and he found himself longing to talk more of the things at which the strange man had hinted.

The squalor of the street was even less bearable in the early morning. St. George wondered, as he hurried across from the Grand Street station, how the prince had understood that he must not only avoid the great hotels, but that he must actually seek out incredible surroundings like these to be certain of privacy. For only the very poor are sufficiently immersed in their own affairs to be guiltless of curiosity, save indeed a kind of surface morbid wonderment at crepe upon a door or the coming of a well-dressed woman to their neighbourhood. The prince might have lived in McDougle Street for years without exciting more than derisive comment of the denizens, derision being no other than their humour gone astray.

St. George tapped at the door which the night before had admitted him to such revelation. There was no answer, and a repeated summons brought no sound from within. At length he tentatively touched the latch. The door opened. The room was quite empty. No remnant of furniture remained.

He entered, involuntarily peering about as if he expected to find the prince in a dusty corner. The windows were still shuttered, and he threw open the blinds, admitting rectangles of sunlight. He could have found it in his heart, as he looked blankly at the four walls, to doubt that he had been there at all the night before, so emphatically did the surroundings deny that they had ever harboured a title. But on the floor at his feet lay a scrap of paper, twisted and torn. He picked it up. It was traced in indistinguishable characters, but it bore the Holland coat of arms and crown which the prince had shown them. St. George put the paper in his pocket and questioned a group of boys in the passage.

"Yup," shouted one of the boys with that prodigality of intonation distinguishing the child of the streets, who makes every statement as if his word had just been contradicted out of hand, "he means de bloke wid de black block. Aw, he lef' early dis mornin' wid 's junk follerin.' Dey's two of 'em. Wot's he t'ink? Dis ain't no Nigger's Rest. Dis yere's all Eyetalian."

St. George hurried to Fifty-ninth Street. It was not yet ten o'clock, but the departure of the prince made him vaguely uneasy and for his life he could not have waited longer. Perhaps it was not true at all; perhaps none of it had happened. The McDougle Street part had vanished; what if the Boris too were a myth? But as he sprang up the steps at the apartment house St. George knew better. The night before her hand had lain in his for an infinitesimal time, and she had said "Until to-morrow."

On sending his name to Mrs. Hastings he was immediately bidden to her apartment. He found the drawing-room in confusion—the furniture covered with linen, the bric-a-brac gone, and three steamer trunks strapped and standing outside the door. All of which mattered to him less than nothing, for Olivia was there alone.

She came down the dismantled room to meet him, smiling a little and very pale but, St. George thought, even more beautiful than she had been the day before. She was dressed for walking and had on a sober little hat, and straightway St. George secretly wondered how he could ever have approved of anything so flagrant as a Gainsborough. She lifted her veil as they sat down, and St. George liked that. To complete his capitulation she turned to a little table set before the bowing flames of juniper branches in the grate.

"This is breakfast," she told him; "won't you have a cup of tea and a muffin? Aunt Medora will be back presently from the chemist's."

For the first time St. George blessed Mrs. Hastings.

"You are really leaving to-day, Miss Holland?" he asked, noting the little ringless hand that gave him two lumps.

"Really leaving," she assented, "at noon to-day. Mr. Frothingham sails with us, and his daughter Antoinette, who will be a great comfort to me. The prince doesn't know about her yet," she added naively, "but he must take her."

St. George nodded approvingly. Unless all signs failed, he reflected, Yaque had some surprises in store at the hands of the daughter of its sovereign.

"Where does the prince appoint?" he asked.

He listened in entire disapproval while she told him of the place below quarantine where they were to board the submarine. The prince, it appeared, had sent his servant early that morning to assure them that all was in readiness, a bit of oriental courtesy which made no impression upon St. George, though it explained the prompt withdrawal from 19 McDougle Street. When she had finished, St. George rose and stood before the fire, looking down at her from a world of uncertainty.

"I don't like it, Miss Holland," he declared, and hesitated, divided between the desire to tell her that he was going too, and the fear lest Mrs. Hastings should arrive from the chemist's.

Olivia made a gesture of throwing it all from her.

"Have a muffin—do," she begged. "This is my last breakfast in America for a time—let me have a pleasant memory of it. Mr. St. George, I want—oh, I want to tell you how greatly I appreciate—"

"Ah, please," urged St. George, and smiled while he protested, "you see, I've been very selfish about the whole matter. I'm selfish now to be here at all when, I dare say, you've no end of things to do."

"No," Olivia disclaimed, "I have not," and thus proved that she was a woman of genius. For a less complex woman always flutters through the hour of her departure. Only Juno can step from the clouds without packing a bag and feeding the peacocks and leaving, pinned to an asphodel, a note for Jupiter.

"Then tell me what you are going to do in Yaque," he besought. "Forgive me—what are you going to do all alone there in that strange land, and such a land?"

He divined that at this she would be very brave and buoyant, and he was lost in anticipative admiration; when she was neither he admired more than ever.

"I don't know," said Olivia gravely, "I only know that I must go. You see that, do you not—that I must go?"

"Ah, yes," St. George assured her, "I do indeed, believe me. Don't you think," he said, "that I might give you a lamp to rub if you need help? And then I'll appear."

"In Yaque?"

He nodded gravely.

"Yes, in Yaque. I shall rise out of a jar like the Evil Genie; and though I shall be quite helpless you will still have the lamp. And I shall be no end glad to have appeared."

"But suppose," said Olivia merrily, "that when I have eaten a pomegranate or a potato or something in Yaque I forget all about America? And when you step out of the jar I say 'Off with his head,' by mistake. How shall I know it is you when the jar is opened?"

"I shall ask you what the population of Yaque is," he assured her, "and how the island compares with Manhattan, and if this is your first visit, and how you are enjoying your stay; and then you will recognize the talk of civilization and spare me."

"No," she protested, "I've longed to say 'Off with his head' to too many people who have said all that to me. And you mustn't say that a holiday always seems like Sunday, either."

Whereat they both laughed, and it seemed an uncommonly pleasant world, and even the sad errand that was taking Olivia to Yaque looked like a hope.

Then the talk ran on pleasantly, and things went very briskly forward, and there was no dearth of fleet little smiles at this and that. What was she to bring him from Yaque—a pet ibis? No, he had no taste for ibises—unless indeed there should be Fourth-Dimension ibises; and even then he begged that she would select instead a magic field-glass, with which one might see what is happening at an infinite distance; although of what use would that be to him, he wanted to know, since it would be his too late to follow her errantry through Yaque? They felt, as they talked, quite like the puppets of the days of Haroun-al-Raschid; only the puppets, poor children of mere magic, had not the traditions of the golden age of science for a setting, and were obliged to content themselves with mere tricks of jars of genii instead of applied electricity and its daring. What an Arabian Nights' Entertainment we might have had if only Scheherazade had ever heard of the Present! As for the thousand-and-one-nights, they would not have contained all her invention. No wonder that the time went trippingly for the two who were concerned in such bewildering speculation as the prince had made possible and who were furthering acquaintanceship besides.

"Ah, well now, at all events," begged St. George at length, "will you remember something while you are away?"

"Your kindness, always," she returned.

"But will you remember," said St. George with his boy's eagerness, "that there is some one who hopes no less than you for your success, and who will be infinitely proud of any command at all from you? And will you remember that, though I may not be successful, I shall at least be doing something to try to help you?"

"You are very good," she said gently, "I shall remember. For already you have not only helped me—you have made the whole matter possible."

"And what of that," propounded St. George gloomily, "if I can't help you just when the danger begins? I insist, Miss Holland, that it takes far more good nature to see some one else set off at adventure than it takes to go one's self. Won't you let me come back here at twelve o'clock and go down with you to the boat?"

"By all means," Olivia assented, "my aunt and I shall both be glad, Mr. St. George. Then you can wish us well. What is a submarine like," she wanted to know; "were you ever on one?"

"Never, excepting a number of times," replied St. George, supremely unconscious of any vagueness. He was rapidly losing count of all events up to the present. He was concerned only with these things: that she was here with him, that the time might be measured by minutes until she would be caught away to undergo neither knew what perils, and that at any minute Mrs. Hastings might escape from the chemist's.

Although the commonplace is no respecter of enchantments, it was quite fifteen minutes before the sword fell and Mrs. Hastings did make the moment her prey, as pinkly excited as though her drawing-room had been untenanted. And in the meantime no one knows what pleasantly absurd thing St. George longed to say, it is so perilous when one is sailing away to Yaque and another stands upon the shore for a word of farewell. But, indeed, if it were not for the soberest moments of farewell, journeys and their returns would become very tame affairs. When the first man and maid said even the most formal farewell, providing they were the right man and the right maid, the very stars must have begun their motion. Very likely the fixed stars are nothing but grey-beards with no imagination. Distance lends enchantment, but the frivolous might say that the preliminary farewell is the mint that coins it. And, enchantment being independent of the commonplace, after all, it may have been that certain stars had already begun to sing while St. George sat staring at the little bowing flames of the juniper branches and Olivia was taking her tea. Then in came Mrs. Hastings, a very literal interfering goddess, and her bonnet was frightfully awry so that the parrot upon it looked shockingly coquettish and irreverent and lent to her dignity a flavour of ill-timed waggishness. But it must be admitted that Mrs. Hastings and everything that she wore were "les antipodes des graces." She was followed by a footman, his arms filled with parcels, and she sank among them on the divan and held out her limp, plump hand for a cup of tea. Mrs. Hastings had the hands that are fettered by little creases at the wrists and whose wedding rings always seem to be uncomfortably snug. She sat down, and her former activity dissolved, as it were, into another sort of energy and became fragments of talk. Mrs. Hastings was like the old woman in Ovid who sacrificed to the goddess of silence, but could never keep still; save that Mrs. Hastings did not sacrifice.

"Good morning, Mr. St. George," she said. "I'm sure I've quite forgotten everything. Olivia dear, I've had all the prescriptions made up that I've ever taken to Rutledge's, because no one can tell what the climate will be like, it's so low on the map. I've looked up the Azores—that's where we get some of our choicest cheese. And camphor—I've got a pound of camphor. And I must say positively that I always was against these wars in the far East, because all the camphor comes from Korea or one of those frightful islands and now it has gone up twenty-six cents a pound. And then the flaxseed, Olivia dear. I've got a tin of flaxseed, for no one can tell—"

St. George doubted if she knew when he said good morning, although she named him Mr. St. John, gave him permission to go to the boat, hoped in one breath that he would come again to see them, and in the next that he would send them a copy of whatever the Sentinel might publish about them, in serene oblivion of the state of the post-office department in Yaque. Mrs. Hastings, in short, was one of the women who are thrown into violent mental convulsions by the prospect of a journey; this was not at all because she was setting sail specifically for Yaque, for the moment that she saw a porter or a pier, though she was bound only for the Bronx or Staten Island, she was affected in the same way.

As Olivia gave St. George her hand he came perilously near telling her that he would follow her to Yaque; but he reflected that if he were to tell her at all, he would better do so on the way to the submarine. So he went blindly down the hall and rang the elevator bell for so long that the boy deliberately stopped on the floor below and waited, with the diabolical independence of the American lords of the lift, "for to teach 'im a lessing," this one explained to a passing chamber-maid.

St. George hurried to his apartment to leave a note for Amory who was directed upon his arrival to bide there and await his host's return. Then he paced the floor until it was time to go back to the Boris, deaf to Rollo's solemn information that the dust comes up out of the varnish of furniture during the night, like cream out of milk. By the time he had boarded a down-town car, St. George had tortured himself to distraction, and his own responsibility in this submarine voyage loomed large and threatening. Therefore, it suddenly assumed the proportion of mountains yet unseen when, though it wanted ten minutes to twelve when he reached the Boris, his card was returned by a faint polite clerk with the information that Mrs. Hastings and Miss Holland had been gone from the hotel for half an hour. There was a note for him in their box the clerk believed, and presently produced it—a brief, regretful word from Olivia telling him that the prince had found that they must leave fully an hour earlier than he had planned.

Sick with apprehension, cursing himself for the ease and dexterity with which he had permitted himself to be outwitted by Tabnit, St. George turned blindly from the office with some vague idea of chartering all the tugs in the harbour. It came to him that he had bungled the matter from first to last, and that Bud or Bennietod would have used greater shrewdness. And while he was in the midst of anathematizing his characteristic confidence he stepped in the outer hallway and saw that which caused that confidence to balloon smilingly back to support him.

In the vestibule of the Boris, deaf to the hovering attention of a door-boy more curious than dutiful, stood two men of the stature and complexion of Prince Tabnit of Yaque. They were dressed like the youth who had answered the door of the prince's apartment, and they were speaking softly with many gestures and evidently in some perplexity. The drooping spirits of St. George soared to Heaven as he hastened to them.

"You are asking for Miss Holland, the daughter of King Otho of Yaque," he said, with no time to smile at the pranks of the democracy with hereditary titles.

The men stared and spoke almost together.

"We are," they said promptly.

"She is not here," explained St. George, "but I have attended to some affairs for her. Will you come with me to my apartment where we may be alone?"

The men, who somehow made St. George think of tan-coloured greyhounds with very gentle eyes, consulted each other, not with the suspicion of the vulgar but with the caution of the thorough-bred.

"Pardon," said one, "if we may be quite assured that this is Miss Holland's friend to whom we speak—"

St. George hesitated. The hall-boy listened with an air of polite concern, and there were curious over-shoulder glances from the passers-by. Suddenly St. George's face lighted and he went swiftly through his pockets and produced a scrap of paper—the fragment that had lain that morning on the floor of the prince's deserted apartment, and that bore the arms of the King of Yaque. It was the strangers' turn to regard him with amazement. Immediately, to St. George's utmost embarrassment, they both bowed very low and pronounced together:

"Pardon, adon!"

"My name is St. George," he assured them, "and let's get into a cab."

They followed him without demur.

St. George leaned back on the cushions and looked at them—lean lithe little men with rapid eyes and supple bodies and great repose. They gave him the same sense of strangeness that he had felt in the presence of the prince and of the woman in the Bitley Reformatory—as if, it whimsically flashed to him, they some way rhymed with a word which he did not know.

"What is it," St. George asked as they rolled away, "what is it that you have come to tell Miss Holland?"

Only one of the men spoke, the other appearing content to show two rows of exceptionally white teeth.

"May we not know, adon," asked the man respectfully, "whether the prince has given her his news? And if the prince is still in your land?"

"The prince's servant, Elissa, has tried to stab Miss Holland and has got herself locked up," St. George imparted without hesitation.

An exclamation of horror broke from both men.

"To stab—to kill!" they cried.

"Quite so," said St. George, "and the prince, upon being discovered, disclosed some very important news to Miss Holland, and she and her friends started an hour ago for Yaque."

"That is well, that is well!" cried the little man, nodding, and momentarily hesitated; "but yet his news—what news, adon, has he told her?"

For a moment St. George regarded them both in silence.

"Ah, well now, what news had he?" he asked briefly.

The men answered readily.

"Prince Tabnit was commissioned by the Yaquians to acquaint the princess with the news of the strange disappearance of her father, the king, and to supplicate her in his place to accept the hereditary throne of Yaque."

"Jupiter!" said St. George under breath.

In a flash the whole matter was clear to him. Prince Tabnit had delivered no such message from the people of Yaque, but had contented himself with the mere intimation that in some vanishing future she would be expected to ascend the throne. And he had done this only when Olivia herself had sought him out after an attempt had been made upon her life by his servant. It seemed to St. George far from improbable that the woman had been acting under the prince's instructions and, that failing, he himself had appeared and obligingly placed the daughter of King Otho precisely within the prince's power. Now she was gone with him, in the hope of aiding her father, to meet Heaven knew what peril in this pagan island; and he, St. George, was wholly to blame from first to last.

"Good Heavens," he groaned, "are you sure—but are you sure?"

"It is simple, adon," said the man, "we came with this message from the people of Yaque. A day before we were to land, Akko and I—I am Jarvo—overheard the prince plan with the others to tell her nothing—nothing that the people desire. When they knew that we had heard they locked us up and we have only this morning escaped from the submarine. If the prince has told her this message everything is well. But as for us, I do not know. The prince has gone."

"He told her nothing—nothing," said St. George, "but that her father and the Hereditary Treasure have disappeared. And he has taken her with him. She has gone with him."

Deaf alike to their exclamations and their questions St. George sat staring unseeingly through the window, his mind an abyss of fear. Then the cab drew up at the door of his hotel and he turned upon the two men precipitantly.

"See," he cried, "in a boat on the open sea, would you two be at all able to direct a course to Yaque?"

Both men smiled suddenly and brilliantly.

"But we have stolen a chart," announced Jarvo with great simplicity, "not knowing what thing might befall."

St. George wrenched at the handle of the cab door. He had a glimpse of Amory within, just ringing the elevator bell, and he bundled the two little men into the lobby and dashed up to him.

"Come on, old Amory," he told him exultingly. "Heaven on earth, put out that pipe and pack. We leave for Yaque to-night!"



CHAPTER VII

DUSK, AND SO ON

Dusk on the tropic seas is a ceremony performed with reverence, as if the rising moon were a priestess come among her silver vessels. Shadows like phantom sails dip through the dark and lie idle where unseen crafts with unexplained cargoes weigh anchor in mid-air. One almost hears the water cunningly lap upon their invisible sides.

To Little Cawthorne, lying luxuriously in a hammock on the deck of The Aloha, fancies like these crowded pleasantly, and slipped away or were merged in snatches of remembered songs. His hands were clasped behind his head, one foot was tapping the deck to keep the hammock in motion while strange compounds of tune and time broke aimlessly from his lips.

"Meet me by moonlight alone, And then I will tell you a tale. Must be told in the moonlight alone In the grove at the end of the vale"

he caroled contentedly.

Amory, the light of his pipe cheerfully glowing, lay at full length in a steamer chair. The Aloha was bounding briskly forward, a solitary speck on the bosom of darkening purple, and the men sitting in the companionship of silence, which all the world praises and seldom attains, had been engaging in that most entertaining of pastimes, the comparison of present comfort with past toil. Little Cawthorne's satisfaction flowered in speech.

"Two weeks ago to-night," he said, running his hands through his grey curls, "I took the night desk when Ellis was knocked out. And two weeks ago to-morrow morning we were the only paper to be beaten on the Fownes will story. Hi—you."

"Happy, Cawthorne?" Amory removed his pipe to inquire with idle indulgence.

"Am I happy?" affirmed Little Cawthorne ecstatically in four tones, and went on with his song:

"The daylight may do for the gay, The thoughtless, the heartless, the free, But there's something about the moon's ray That is sweeter to you and to me."

"Did you make that up?" inquired Amory with polite interest.

"I did if I want to," responded Little Cawthorne. "Everything's true out here—go on, tell everything you like. I'll believe you."

St. George came out of the dark and leaned on the rail without speaking. Sometimes he wondered if he were he at all, and he liked the doubt. He felt pleasantly as if he had been cut loose from all old conditions and were sailing between skies to some unknown planet. This was not only because of the strange waters rushing underfoot but because of the flowering and singing of something within him that made the world into which he was sailing an alien place, heavenly desirable. A week ago that day The Aloha had weighed anchor, and these seven days, in fairly fortunate weather, her white nose had been cleaving seas to traverse which had so long been her owner's dream; and yet her owner, in pleasant apostasy, had turned his back upon the whole matter of what he had been used to dream, and now ungratefully spent his time in trying to count the hours to his journey's end.

Somewhere out yonder, he reflected, as he leaned on the rail, this southern moonlight was flooding whatever scene she looked on; the lapping of the same sea was in her ears; and his future and hers might be dependent upon those two perplexed tan-coloured greyhounds below. By which one would have said that matters had been going briskly forward with St. George since the morning that he had breakfasted with Olivia Holland.

Exactly when the end of the journey would be was not evident either to him or to the two strange creatures who proposed to be his guides. Or rather to Jarvo, who was still the spokesman; lean little Akko, although his intelligence was unrivaled, being content with monosyllables for stepping-stones while the stream of Jarvo's soft speech flowed about him. Barnay, the captain, frankly distrusted them both, and confided to St. George that "them two little jool-eyed scuts was limbs av the old gint himself, and they reminded him, Barnay, of a pair of haythen naygurs," than which he could say no more. But then, Barnay's wholesale skepticism was his only recreation, save talking about his pretty daughter "of school age," and he liked to stand tucking his beard inside his collar and indulging in both. In truth, Barnay, who knew the waters of the Atlantic fairly well, was sorely tried to take orders from the two little brown strangers who, he averred, consulted a "haythen apparaytus" which they would cheerfully let him see but of which he could "make no more than av the spach av a fish," and then directed him to take courses which lay far outside the beaten tracks of the high seas.

St. George, who had had several talks with them, was puzzled and doubtful, and more than once confided to himself that the lives of the passenger list of The Aloha might be worth no more than coral headstones at the bottom of the South Atlantic. But he always consoled himself with the cheering reflection that he had had to come—there was no other way half so good. So The Aloha continued to plow her way as serenely as if she were heading toward the white cliffs of Dover and trim villas and a custom-house. And the sea lay a blue, uninhabited glory save as land that Barnay knew about marked low blades of smoke on the horizon and slipped back into blue sheaths.

This was the evening of the seventh day, and that noon Jarvo had looked despondent, and Barnay had sworn strange oaths, and St. George had been disquieted. He stood up now, going vaguely down into his coat pockets for his pipe, his erect figure thrown in relief against the hurrying purple. St. George was good to look at, and Amory, with the moonlight catching the glass of his pince-nez, smoked and watched him, shrewdly pondering upon exactly how much anxiety for the success of the enterprise was occupying the breast of his friend and how much of an emotion a good bit stronger. Amory himself was not in love, but there existed between him and all who were a special kinship, like that between a lover of music and a musician.

Little Cawthorne rose and shuffled his feet lazily across deck.

"Where is that island, anyway?" he wanted to know, gazing meditatively out to sea.

St. George turned as if the interruption was grateful.

"The island. I don't see any island," complained Little Cawthorne. "I tell you," he confided, "I guess it's just Chillingworth's little way of fixing up a nice long vacation for us."

They smiled at memory of Chillingworth's grudging and snarling assents to even an hour off duty.

From below came Bennietod, walking slowly. The seaman's life was not for Bennietod, and he yearned to reach land as fervently as did St. George, though with other anxiety. He sat down on the moon-lit deck and his face was like that of a little old man with uncanny shrewdness. His week among them had wrought changes in the head office boy. For Bennietod was ambitious to be a gentleman. His covert imitations had always amused St. George and Amory. Now in the comparative freedom of The Aloha his fancy had rein and he had adopted all the habits and the phrases which he had long reserved and liked best, mixing them with scraps of allusions to things which Benfy had encouraged him to read, and presenting the whole in his native lower East-side dialect. Bennietod was Bowery-born and office-bred, and this sad metropolitanism almost made of him a good philosopher.

"I'd like immensely to say something," observed St. George abruptly, when his pipe was lighted.

"Oh, yes. All right," shrilled Little Cawthorne with resignation, "I suppose you all feel I'm the Jonah and you thirst to scatter me to the whales."

"I want to know," St. George went on slowly, "what you think. On my life, I doubt if I thought at all when we set out. This all promised good sport, and I took it at that. Lately, I've been wondering, now and then, whether any of you wish yourselves well out of it."

For a moment no one spoke. To shrink from expression is a characteristic in which the extremes of cultivation and mediocrity meet; the reserve of delicacy in St. George and Amory would have been a reserve of false shame in Bennietod, and of an exaggerated sense of humour in Little Cawthorne. It was not remarkable that from the moment the enterprise had been entered upon, its perils and its doubtful outcome had not once been discussed. St. George vaguely reckoned with this as he waited, while Amory smoked on and blew meditative clouds and regarded the bowl of his pipe, and Little Cawthorne ceased the motion of his hammock, and Bennietod hugged his knees and looked shrewdly at the moon, as if he knew more about the moon than he would care to tell. St. George felt his heart sink a little. Then Little Cawthorne rose and squared valiantly up to him.

"What," inquired the little man indignantly, "are you trying to do? Pick a fight?"

St. George looked at him in surprise.

"Because if you are," continued little Cawthorne without preamble, "we're three to one. And three of us are going to Yaque. We'll put you ashore if you say so."

St. George smiled at him gratefully.

"No—Bennietod?" inquired Little Cawthorne.

Bennietod, pale and manifestly weak, grinned cheerfully and fumbled in sudden abashment at an amazing checked Ascot which he had derived from unknown sources.

"Bes' t'ing t'ever I met up wid," he assented, "ef de deck'd lay down levil. I'm de sonny of a sea-horse if it ain't."

"Amory?" demanded the little man.

Amory looked along his pipe and took it briefly from his lips and shook his head.

"Don't say these things," he pleaded in his pleasant drawl, "or I'll swear something horrid."

St. George merely held his pipe by the bowl and nodded a little, but the hearts of all of them glowed.

After dinner they sat long on deck. Rollo, at his master's invitation, joined them with a mandolin, which he had been discovered to play considerably better than any one else on board. Rollo sat bolt upright in a reclining chair to prove that he did not forget his station and strummed softly, and acknowledged approval with:

"Yes, sir. A little music adds an air to any occasion, I always think, sir."

The moon was not yet full, but its light in that warm world was brilliant. The air was drowsy and scented with something that might have been its own honey or that might have come from the strange blooms, water-sealed below. Now and then St. George went aside for a space and walked up and down the deck or sent below for Jarvo. Once, as Jarvo left St. George's side, Little Cawthorne awoke and sat upright and inquiring, in his hammock.

"What is the matter with his feet?" he inquired peevishly. "I shall certainly ask him directly."

"It's the seventh day out," Amory observed, "and still nobody knows."

For Jarvo and Akko had another distinction besides their diminutive stature and greyhound build. Their feet, clad in soft soleless shoes, made of skins, were long and pointed and of almost uncanny flexibility. It had become impossible for any one to look at either of the little men without letting his eyes wander to their curiously expressive feet, which, like "courtier speech," were expressive without revealing anything.

"I t'ink," Bennietod gave out, "dat dey're lost Eyetalian organ-grinder monkeys, wid huming intelligence, like Bertran's Bimi."

"What a suspicious child it is," yawned Little Cawthorne, and went to sleep again. Toward midnight he awoke, refreshed and happy, and broke into instant song:

"The daylight may do for the gay, The thoughtless, the heartless, the free, But there's something about the moon's ray—"

he was chanting in perfect tonelessness, when St. George cried out. The others sprang to their feet.

"Lights!" said St. George, and gave the glass to Amory, his hand trembling, and very nearly snatched it back again.

Far to the southeast, faint as the lost Pleiad, a single golden point pricked the haze, danced, glimmered, was lost, and reappeared to their eager eyes. The impossibility of it all, the impossibility of believing that they could have sighted the lights of an island hanging there in the waste and hitherto known to nobody simply because nobody knew the truth about the Fourth Dimension did not assail them. So absorbed had St. George become in the undertaking, so convincing had been the events that led up to it, and so ready for anything in any dimension were his companions, that their excitement was simply the ancient excitement of lights to the mariner and nothing more; save indeed that to St. George they spoke a certain language sweeter than the language of any island lying in the heart of mere science or mere magic either.

When it became evident that the lights were no will-o'-the-wisps, born of the moon and the void, but the veritable lights that shine upon harbours, Bennietod tumbled below for Jarvo, who came on deck and gazed and doubted and well-nigh wept for joy and poured forth strange words and called aloud for Akko. Akko came and nodded and showed white teeth.

"To-morrow," he said only.

Barnay came.

"Fwhat matther?" He put it cynically, scowling critically at Jarvo and Akko. "All in the way av fair fight, that'll be about Mor-rocco, if I've the full av my wits about me, an' music to my eyes, by the same token."

Jarvo fixed him with his impenetrable look.

"It is the light of the king's palace on the summit of Mount Khalak," he announced simply.

The light of the king's palace. St. George heard and thrilled with thanksgiving. It would be then the light at her very threshold, provided the impossible is possible, as scientists and devotees have every reason to think. But was she there—was she there? If there was an oracle for the answer, it was not St. George. The little white stars danced and signaled faintly on the far horizon. Whatever they had to reveal was for nearer eyes than his.

The glass passed from hand to hand, and in turn they all swept the low sky where the faint points burned; but when some one had cried that the lights were no longer visible, and the others had verified the cry by looking blankly into a sudden waste of milky black—black water, pale light—and turned baffled eyes to Jarvo, the little man spoke smoothly, not even reaching a lean, brown hand for the glass.

"But have no fear, adon," he reassured them, "the chart is not exact—it is that which has delayed us. It will adjust itself. The light may long disappear, but it will come again. The gods will permit the possible."

They looked at one another doubtfully when the two little brown men had gone below, where Barnay had immediately retired, tucking his beard in his collar and muttering sedition. If the two strange creatures were twin Robin Goodfellows perpetrating a monstrous twentieth century prank, if they were gigantic evolutions of Puck whose imagination never went far beyond threshing corn with shadowy flails, at least this very modern caper demanded respect for so perfectly catching the spirit of the times. At all events it was immensely clever of them to have put their finger upon the public pulse and to have realized that the public imagination is ready to believe anything because it has seen so much proved. Still, "science was faith once"; and besides, to St. George, charts and compasses of all known and unknown systems of seamanship were suddenly become but the dead letter of the law. The spirit of the whole matter was that Olivia might be there, under the lights that his own eyes would presently see again. "Who, remembering the first kind glance of her whom he loves, can fail to believe in magic?" It is very likely that having met Olivia at all seemed at that moment so wonderful to St. George that any of the "frolic things" of science were to be accepted with equanimity.

For an hour or more the moon, flooding the edge of the deck of The Aloha, cast four shadows sharply upon the smooth boards. Lined up at the rail stood the four adventurers, and the glass passed from one to another like the eye of the three Grey Sisters. The far beacon appeared and disappeared, but its actuality might not be doubted. If Jarvo and Akko were to be trusted, there in the velvet distance lay Yaque, and Med, the King's City, and the light upon the very palace of its American sovereign.

St. George's pulses leaped and trembled. Amory lifted lazy lids and watched him with growing understanding and finally, upon a pretext of sleep, led the others below. And St. George, with a sense of joyful companionship in the little light, paced the deck until dawn.



CHAPTER VIII

THE PORCH OF THE MORNING

By afternoon the island of Yaque was an accomplished fact of distinguishable parts. There it lay, a thing of rock and green, like the islands of its sister latitudes before which the passing ships of all the world are wont to cast anchor. But having once cast anchor before Yaque the ships of all the world would have had great difficulty in landing anybody.

Sheer and almost smoothly hewn from the utmost coast of the island rose to a height of several hundred feet one scarcely deviating wall of rock; and this apparently impregnable wall extended in either direction as far as the sight could reach. Above the natural rampart the land sloped upward still in steep declivities, but cut by tortuous gorges, and afar inland rose the mountain upon whose summit the light had been descried. There the glass revealed white towers and columns rising from a mass of brilliant tropical green, and now smitten by the late sun; but save these towers and columns not a sign of life or habitation was discernible. No smoke arose, no wharf or dock broke the serene outline of the black wall lapped by the warm sea; and there was no sound save that of strong torrents afar off. Lonely, inscrutable, the great mass stood, slightly shelved here and there to harbour rank and blossomy growths of green and presenting a rugged beauty of outline, but apparently as uninhabitable as the land of the North Silences.

Consternation and amazement sat upon the faces of the owner of The Aloha and his guests as they realized the character of the remarkable island. St. George and Amory had counted upon an adventure calling for all diplomacy, but neither had expected the delight of hazard that this strange, fairy-like place seemed about to present. Each felt his blood stirring and singing in his veins at the joy of the possibilities that lay folded before them.

"We shall be obliged to land upon the east coast then, Jarvo?" observed St. George; "but how long will it take us to sail round the island?"

"Very long," Jarvo responded, "but no, adon, we land on this coast."

"How is that possible?" St. George asked.

"Well, hi—you," said Little Cawthorne, "I'm a goat, but I'm no mountain goat. See the little Swiss kid skipping from peak to peak and from crag to crag—"

"Do we scale the wall?" inquired St. George, "or is there a passage in the rock?"

Bennietod hugged himself in uncontrollable ecstasy.

"Hully Gee, a submarine passage, in under de sea, like Jules Werne," he said in a delight that was almost awe.

"There is a way over the rock," said Jarvo, "partly hewn, partly natural, and this is known to the islanders alone. That way we must take. It is marked by a White Blade blazoned on the rock over the entrance of the submarines. The way is cunningly concealed—hardly will the glass reveal it, adon."

Barnay shook his head.

"You've a bad time comin' with the home-sickness," he prophesied, tucking his beard far down in his collar until he looked, for Barnay, smooth-shaven. "I've sailed the sou' Atlantic up an' down fer a matther av four hundhred years, more or less, an' I niver as much as seed hide nor hair av the place before this prisint. There ain't map or chart that iver dhrawed breath that shows ut, new or old. Ut's been lifted out o' ground to be afther swallowin' us in—a sweet dose will be the lot av us, mesilf with as foine a gir-rl av school age as iver you'll see in anny counthry."

"Ah yes, Barnay," said St. George soothingly—but he would have tried now to soothe a man in the embrace of a sea-serpent in just the same absent-minded way, Amory thought indulgently.

The sun was lowering and birds of evening were beginning to brood over the painted water when The Aloha cast anchor. In the late light the rugged sides of the island had an air of almost sinister expectancy. There was a great silence in their windless shelter broken only by the boom and charge of the breakers and the gulls and choughs circling overhead, winging and dipping along the water and returning with discordant cries to their crannies in the black rock. Before the yacht, blazoned on a dark, water-polished stratum of the volcanic stone, was the White Blade which Jarvo told them marked the subterranean entrance to the mysterious island.

St. George and his companions and Barnay, Jarvo and Akko were on deck. Rollo, whose soul did not disdain to be valet to a steam yacht, was tranquilly mending a canvas cushion.

"The adon will wait until sunrise to go ashore?" asked Jarvo.

"Sunrise!" cried St. George. "Heaven on earth, no. We'll go now."

There was no need to ask the others. Whatever might be toward, they were eager to be about, though Rollo ventured to St. George a deprecatory: "You know, sir, one can't be too careful, sir."

"Will you prefer to stay aboard?" St. George put it quietly.

"Oh, no, sir," said Rollo with a grieved face, "one should meet danger with a light heart, sir," and went below to pack the oil-skins.

"Hear me now," said Barnay in extreme disfavour. "It's I that am to lay hereabouts and wait for you, sorr? Lord be good to me, an' fwhat if she lays here tin year', and you somewheres fillin' the eyes av the aygles with your brains blowed out, neat?" he demanded misanthropically. "Fwhat if she lays here on that gin'ral theory till she's rotted up, sorr?"

"Ah well now, Barnay," said St. George grimly, "you couldn't have an easier career."

Little Cawthorne, from leaning on the rail staring out at the island, suddenly pulled himself up and addressed St. George.

"Here we are," he complained, "here has been me coming through the watery deep all the way from Broadway, with an octopus clinging to each arm and a dolphin on my back, and you don't even ask how I stood the trip. And do you realize that it's sheer madness for the five of us to land on that island together?"

"What do you mean?" asked St. George.

The little man shook his grey curls.

"What if it's as Barnay says?" he put it. "What if they should bag us all—who'll take back the glad news to the harbour? Lord, you can't tell what you're about walking into. You don't even know the specific gravity of the island," he suggested earnestly. "How do you know but your own weight will flatten you out the minute you step ashore?"

St. George laughed. "He thinks he is reading the fiction page," he observed indulgently. "Still, I fancy there is good sense on the page, for once. We don't know anything about anything. I suppose we really ought not to put all five eggs in one basket. But, by Jove—"

He looked over at Amory with troubled eyes.

"As host of this picnic," he said, "I dare say I ought to stay aboard and let you fellows—but I'm hanged if I will."

Little Cawthorne reflected, frowning; and you could as well have expected a bird to frown as Little Cawthorne. It was rather the name of his expression than a description of it.

"Suppose," he said, "that Bennietod and I sit rocking here in this bay—if it is a bay—while you two rest your chins on the top of that ledge of rock up there, and look over. And about to-morrow or day after we two will venture up behind you, or you could send one of the men back—"

"My thunder," said Bennietod wistfully, "ain't I goin' to get to climb in de pantry window at de palace—nor fire out of a loophole—"

"Bennietod an' I couldn't talk to a prince anyway," said Little Cawthorne; "we'd get our language twisted something dizzy, and probably tell him 'yes, ma'am.'"

St. George's eyes softened as he looked at the little man. He knew well enough what it cost him to make the suggestion, which the good sense of them all must approve. Not only did Little Cawthorne always sacrifice himself, which is merely good breeding, but he made opportunities to do so, which is both well-bred and virtuous. When Rollo came up with the oil-skins they told him what had been decided, and Rollo, the faithful, the expressionless, dropped his eyelids, but he could not banish from his voice the wistfulness that he might have been one to stay behind.

"Sometimes it is best for a person to change his mind, sir," was his sole comment.

Presently the little green dory drew away from The Aloha, and they left her lying as much at her ease as if the phantom island before her were in every school-boy's geography, with a scale of miles and a list of the principal exports attached.

"If we had diving dresses, adon," Jarvo suggested, "we might have gone down through the sluice and entered by the lagoon where the submarines pass."

"Jove," said Amory, trying to row and adjust his pince-nez at the same time, "Chillingworth will never forgive us for missing that."

"You couldn't have done it," shouted Little Cawthorne derisively, from the deck of the yacht, "you didn't wear your rubbers. If anybody sticks a knife in you send up a r-r-r-ocket!"

The landing, effected with the utmost caution, was upon a flat stone already a few inches submerged by the rising tide. Looking up at the jagged, beetling world above them their task appeared hopeless enough. But Jarvo found footing in an instant, and St. George and Amory pressed closely behind him, Rollo and little Akko silently bringing up the rear and carrying the oil-skins. Slowly and cautiously as they made their way it was but a few minutes until the three standing on the deck, and Barnay open-mouthed in the dory, saw the sinuous line of the five bodies twist up the tortuous course considerably above the blazoned emblem of the White Blade.

In truth, with Jarvo to set light foot where no foot seemed ever before to have been set, with Jarvo to inspect every twig and pebble and to take sharp turns where no turn seemed possible, the ascent, perilous as it was, proved to be no such superhuman feat as from below it had appeared. But it seemed interminable. Even when the sea lay far beneath them and the faces of the watchers on the deck of The Aloha were no longer distinguishable, the grim wall continued to stretch upward, melting into the sky's late blue.

The afterglow laid a fair path along the water, and the warm dusk came swiftly out of the east. At snail's pace, now with heads bent to knees, now standing erect to draw themselves up by the arms or to leap a wicked-looking crevice, the four took their way up the black side of the rock. Birds of the cliffs, disturbed from long rest, wheeled and screamed about them, almost brushing their faces with long, fearless wings. There was an occasional shelf where, with backs against the wall spotted with crystals of feldspar, they waited to breathe, hardly looking down from the dizzy ledge. Great slabs of obsidian were piled about them between stretches of calcareous stone, and the soil which was like beds of old lava covered by thin layers of limestone, was everywhere pierced by sharp shoulders of stone lying in savage disarray. Gradually rock-slides and rock-edges yielded a less insecure footing on the upper reaches, but the chasms widened and water dripping from lateral crevasses made the vague trail slippery and the occasional earth sodden and treacherous. For a quarter of a mile their way lay over a kind of porous gravel into which their feet sank, and beyond at the summit of a ridge Jarvo halted and threw back to them a summary warning to prepare for "a long leap." A sharp angle of rock, jutting out, had been split down the middle by some ancient force—very likely a Paleozoic butterfly had brushed it with its wing—and the edges had been worn away in a treacherous slope to the very lip of the crumbling promontory. From this edge to the edge of the opposite abutment there was a gap of wicked width, and between was a sheer drop into space wherefrom rose the sound of tumbling waters. When Jarvo had taken the leap, easily and gracefully, alighting on the other side like the greyhound that he resembled, and the others, following, had cleared the edge by as safe a margin as if the abyss were a minor field-day event, St. George and Amory looked back with sudden wonder over the path by which they had come.

"I feel as if I weighed about ninety pounds," said St. George; "am I fading away or anything?"

Amory stood still.

"I was thinking the same thing," he said. "By Jove—do you suppose—what if Little Cawthorne hit the other end of the nail, as usual? Suppose the specific gravity—suppose there is something—suppose it doesn't hold good in this dimension that a body—by Jove," said Amory, "wouldn't that be the deuce?"

St. George looked at Jarvo, bounding up the stony way as easily as if he were bounding down.

"Ah well now," he said, "you know on the moon an ordinary man would weigh only twenty-six or seven pounds. Why not here? We aren't held down by any map!"

They laughed at the pleasant enormity of the idea and were hurrying on when Akko, behind them, broke his settled silence.

"In America," he said, "a man feels like a mountain. Here he feels like a man."

"What do you mean by that?" demanded St. George uneasily. But Akko said no more, and St. George and Amory, with a disquieting idea that each was laughing at the other, let the matter drop.

From there on the way was easier, leveling occasionally, frequently swelling to gentle ridges, and at last winding up a steep trail that was not difficult to keep in spite of the fast falling night. And at length Jarvo, rounding a huge hummock where converging ridges met, scrambled over the last of these and threw himself on the ground.

"Now," he said simply.

The two men stood beside him and looked down. It seemed to St. George that they looked not at all upon a prospect but upon the sudden memory of a place about which he might have dreamed often and often and, waking, had not been able to remember, though its familiarity had continued insistently to beat at his heart; or that in what was spread before him lay the satisfaction of Burne-Jones' wistful definition of a picture: "... a beautiful, romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember, only desire..." yet it was to St. George as if he had reached no strange land, no alien conditions; but rather that he had come home. It was like a home-coming in which nothing is changed, none of the little improvements has been made which we resent because no one has thought to tell us of them; but where everything is even more as one remembers than one knew that one remembered.



At his feet lay a pleasant valley filled with the purple of deep twilight. Far below a lagoon caught the late light and spread it in a pattern among hidden green. In the midst of the valley towered the mountain whose summit, royally crowned by shining towers, had been visible from the open sea. At its feet, glittering in the abundant light shed upon its white wall and dome and pinnacle, stood Med, the King's City—but its light was not the light of the day, for that was gone; nor of the moon, not risen; and no false lights vexed the dark. Yet he was looking into a cup of light, as clear as the light in a gazing-crystal and of a quality as wholly at variance with reality. The rocky coast of Yaque was literally a massive, natural wall; and girt by it lay the heart of the island, fertile and populous and clothed in mystery. This new face which Nature turned to him was a glorified face, and some way it meant what he meant.

St. George was off for a few steps, trampling impatiently over the coarse grass of the bank. Somewhere in that dim valley—was she there, was she there? Was she in trouble, did she need him, did she think of him? St. George went through the ancient, delicious list as conscientiously as if he were the first lover, and she were the first princess, and this were the first ascent of Yaque that the world had ever known. For by some way of miracle, the mystery of the island was suddenly to him the very mystery of his love, and the two so filled his heart that he could not have told of which he was thinking. That which had lain, shadowy and delicious, in his soul these many days—not so very many, either, if one counts the suns—was become not only a thing of his soul but a thing of the outside world, almost of the visible world, something that had existed for ever and which he had just found out; and here, wrapped in nameless light, lay its perfect expression. When a shaft of silver smote the long grass at his feet, and the edge of the moon rose above the mountain, St. George turned with a poignant exultation—did a mere victory over half a continent ever make a man feel like that?—and strode back to the others.

"Come on," he called ringingly in a voice that did everything but confess in words that something heavenly sweet was in the man's mind, "let's be off!"

Amory was carefully lighting his pipe.

"I feel sort of tense," he explained, "as if the whole place would explode if I threw down my match. What do you think of it?"

St. George did not answer.

"It's a place where all the lines lead up," he was saying to himself, "as they do in a cathedral."

The four went the fragrant way that led to the heart of the island. First the path followed the high bank the branches of whose tropical undergrowth brushed their faces with brief gift of perfume. On the other side was a wood of slim trunks, all depths of shadow and delicacies of borrowed light in little pools. Everywhere, everywhere was a chorus of slight voices, from bark and air and secret moss, singing no forced notes of monotone, but piping a true song of the gladness of earth, plaintive, sweet, indescribably harmonious. It came to St. George that this was the way the woods at night would always sound if, somehow, one were able to hear the sweetness that poured itself out. Even that familiar sense in the night-woods that something is about to happen was deliciously present with him; and though Amory went on quietly enough, St. George swam down that green way, much as one dreams of floating along a street, above-heads.

The path curved, and went hesitatingly down many terraces. Here, from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see about them. Yet it did not occur to either to distrust the phenomenon, or to regard it as unnatural or the fruit of any unnatural law. It was somehow quite as convincing to them as is his first sight of electric light to the boy of the countryside, and no more to be regarded as witchcraft.