“Mercy around us!” cried Mrs. Medora Hastings, “if it isn’t that newspaper man!  He’s probably come over here to cable it all over the front page of every paper in New York.  Well,” she added complacently, as if she had brought it all about, “it seems good to see some of your own race.  How did you get here?  Some trick, I suppose?”

“My dear fellows,” burst out Mr. Augustus Frothingham fervently, “thank God!  I’m not, ordinarily, unequal to my situations, but I confess to you, as I would not to a client, that I don’t object to sharing this one.  How did you come?”

“It’s a house-party!” said Antoinette ecstatically.

Amory looked at her in her blue gown in the light of the white room, and his spirits soared heavenward.  Why should St. George have an idea that he controlled the hour?

From a tumult of questioning, none of which was fully answered before Mrs. Hastings put another query, the lawyer at length elicited the substance of what had occurred.

“You came up the side of the mountain, carried by four of those frightful natives?” shrilled Mrs. Hastings.  “Olivia, think.  It’s a wonder they didn’t murder you first and throw you over afterward, isn’t it, Olivia?  Oh, and my poor dear brother.  To think of his lying somewhere all mangled and bl—­”

Emotion overcame Mrs. Hastings.  Her tortoise-shell glasses fell to her lap and both her side-combs tinkled melodiously to the tiled floor.

“This reminds me,” said Mr. Frothingham, settling back and finding a pencil with which to emphasize his story, “this reminds me very much of a case that I had on the June calendar—­”

In half an hour St. George and Amory saw that all serious consideration of their situation must be accomplished alone with Olivia; for in that time Mr. Frothingham had been reminded of two more cases and Mrs. Hastings had twice been reduced to tears by the picture of the possible fate of her brother.  Moreover, there presently appeared supper—­a tray of the most savoury delicacies, to produce which Olivia had slipped away and, St. George had no doubt, said over some spell in the kitchens.  Supper in the white marble room of the king’s palace was almost as wonderful as muffins and tea at the Boris.

There were Olivia in her gown of roses on one side of the table and Antoinette on the other and between them the hungry and happy adventurers.  Across the room under a tall silver vase that might have been the one proposed by Achilles at the funeral games for Patroclus ("that was the work of the ‘skilful Sidonians’” St. George recalled with a thrill), Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Frothingham were conscientiously finishing their chess, since the lawyer believed in completing whatever he undertook, if for nothing more than a warning never to undertake it again.  Manifestly the little ivory kings and queens and castles were in league with all the other magic of the night, for the game prolonged itself unconscionably, and the supper