He turned fearfully to Olivia.  Ah—­what if she did not guess anything of the meaning of what she was hearing?  For one instant he knew all the misery of one whose friend stands on another star.  But when he saw her uplifted face, her eager eyes and quick breath and her look divinely questioning his, he was certain that though she might not read the figures of the veil, yet she too knew how near, how near they Stood; and to be with her on this side was dearer—­nay, was nearer the Secret—­than without her to pass the veil that they touched.  Then he looked at Amory; wouldn’t old Amory know, he wondered.  Wouldn’t his mere understanding of news teach him what was happening?  But old Amory, the light flashing on his pince-nez, was keeping one eye on the prince and wondering if the chair that he had just placed for Antoinette was not in the draught of the dome; and little Antoinette was looking about her like a rosebud, new to the butterflies of June; and King Otho was listening, languid, heavy-lidded, sensitive to little values, sophisticating the moment; and Little Cawthorne stood with eyes raised in simple, tolerant wonder; and the others, Bennietod, Mrs. Hastings and Mr. Augustus Frothingham, showed faces like the pools in which pebbles might be dropped, making no ripples—­one must suppose that there are such pools, since there are certainly such faces.  St. George saw how it was.  Here, spoken casually by the prince, just as the Banal would speak of the visible and invisible worlds, here was the Sesame of understanding toward which the centuries had striven, the secret of the link between two worlds; and here, of all mankind, were only they two to hear—­they two and that motionless company who knew what the prince knew and who kept it sealed within their eyes.

St. George looked at the multitude in swift understanding.  They were like a Greek chorus, signifying what is.  They knew what the prince was saying, they had the secret and yet—­they were no nearer, no nearer than he.  With their ancient kindliness naked in their faces, St. George knew that through his love he was as near to the Source as were they.  And it was suddenly as it had been that first night when he had stridden buoyantly through the island; for he could not tell which was the secret of the prince and of these people and which was the blessedness of his love.

None the less he clung desperately to the last words of Prince Tabnit in a vain effort to hold, to make clear, to sophisticate one single phrase, as one waking in the night says over, in a vain effort to fix it, some phantom sentence cried to him in dreams by a shadowy band destined to be dissolved when, in bright day, he would reclaim it.  He even managed frantically to write down a jumble of words of which he could make nothing, save here and there a phrase like a touch of hands from the silence:  “...the infinite moment that is pending” ... “all is become a window where had been a wall” ...