Some terrifying and exalting sense swept him into a new intimacy of understanding as he realized glimmeringly what heights and depths lay about his ceasing to see that car of the guard.  Yet, with Olivia’s head upon his arm, all that he theorized in that flash of time hung hardly beyond the border of his understanding.  Indeed, it seemed to St. George as if almost—­almost he could understand, as if he could pierce the veil and know utterly all the secrets of spirit and sense that confound.  “We shall all know when we are able to bear it,” he had once heard another say, and it seemed to him now that at last he was able to bear it, as if the sense of the uninterrupted connection between the two worlds was almost a part of his own consciousness.  A moment’s deeper thought, a quicker flowing of the imagination, a little more poignant projecting of himself above the abyss and he, too, would understand.  It came to him that he had almost understood every time that he had looked at Olivia.  Ah, he thought, and how exquisite, how matchless she was, and what Heaven beyond Heaven the world would hold for him if only she were to love him.  St. George lifted the little hand that hung at her side, and stooped momentarily to touch his cheek to the soft hair that swept her shoulder.  Here for him lay the sweet of life—­the sweet of the world, ay, and the sweet of all the world’s mysteries.  This alien land was no nearer the truth than he.  His love was the expression of its mystery.  They went back through the great archway, and entered the palace park.  Once more the slim-trunked trees flew past them with the fringes of light expressing the borders of the dusk.  St. George crouched, half-kneeling, on the floor of the tonneau, his free hand protecting Olivia’s face from the leaning branches of heavy-headed flowers.  He had been so passionately anxious that she should know that he was on the island, near her, ready to serve her; but now, save for his alarm and anxiety about her, he felt a shy, profound gratitude that the hour had fallen as it had fallen.  Whatever was to come, this nearness to her would be his to remember and possess.  It had been his supreme hour.  Whether she had recognized him in that moment on the road, whether she ever knew what had happened made, he thought, no difference.  But if she was to open her eyes as they reached the border of the park, and if she was to know that it was like this that the genie had come out of the jar—­the mere notion made him giddy, and he saw that Heaven may have little inner Heaven-courts which one is never too happy to penetrate.

But Olivia did not stir or unclose her eyes.  The great strain of the evening, the terror and shock of its ending, the very relief with which she had, at all events, realized herself in the hands of friends were more than even an island princess could pass through in serenity.  And when at last from the demesne of enchantment the car emerged in the court of the palace, Olivia knew nothing of it and, as nearly as