Rollo hadn’t thought of that, and his mask fell once more into its lines of misery.

“I don’t know, sir,” he said doubtfully, “most men can go up a steep place all right.  It’s comin’ down that’s hard on the knees.  And if I was to try it alone, sir—­”

Jarvo made a sign of reassurance.

“That is not well,” he said, “you would be dashed to pieces.  Ulfin, one of the six, will wait for us to-night on the edge of the grove.  He can conduct the way to the vessel.”

“Ah, sir,” said Rollo, not without a certain self-satisfaction, “something is always sure to turn up, sir.”

From a tour of the temple Amory came listlessly back to the king’s chapel.  There, where the descendants of Abibaal had worshiped until their idols had been refined by Time to a kind of decoration, the Americans and Jarvo had spent the night.  They had slept stretched on benches of beveled stone.  They had waked to trace the figures in a length of tapestry representing the capture of Io on the coast of Argolis, doubtless woven by an eye-witness.  They had bathed in a brook near the entrance where stood the altar for the sacrifice round which the priests and hierodouloi had been wont to dance, and where huge architraves, metopes and tryglyphs, massive as those at Gebeil and Tortosa and hewn from living rock, rose from the fragile green of the wood like a huge arm signaling its eternal “Alas!” They had partaken of Jarvo’s fruit and sweet herbs, and Rollo had served them, standing with his back to the niche where once had looked augustly down the image of the god.  And now Amory, with a smile, leaned against a wall where old vines, grown miraculously in crannies, spread their tendrils upon the friendly hieroglyphic scoring of the crenelated stone, and summed up his reflections of the night.

“I’ve got it,” he announced, “I think it was up in the Adirondacks, summer before last.  I think I was in a canoe when she went by in a launch, with the Chiswicks.  Why, do you know, I think I dreamed about Miss Frothingham for weeks.”

St. George smiled suddenly and radiantly, and his smile was for the sake of both Rollo and Amory—­Rollo whose sense of the commonplace nothing could overpower, Amory who talked about the Chiswicks in the Adirondacks.  Why not?  St. George thought happily.  Here in the temple certain precious and delicate idols were believed to be hidden in alcoves walled up by mighty stone; and here, Jarvo was telling them, were secret exits to the road contrived by the priests of the temple at the time of their oppression by the worshipers of another god; but yet what special interest could he and Amory have in brooding upon these, or the ancient Phoenicians having “invited to traffic by a signal fire,” when they could sit still and remember?

“To-night,” he said aloud, feeling a sudden fellowship for both Amory and Rollo, “to-night, when the moon rises, we shall watch it from the top of the mountain.”