St. George turned from the glory of it and looked into her eyes.

“‘A new Heaven and a new earth,’” he said; but he did not mean the dome of light nor yet the splendour of the palace.

* * * * *

Manifestly, there is no use in being asleep when one can dream rather better awake.  St. George wandered aimlessly between his room and Amory’s and took the time to reflect that when a man looks the way Amory did he might as well have Cupids painted on his coat.

“St. George,” Amory said soberly, “is this the way you’ve been feeling all the way here?  Is this what you came for?  Then, on my soul, I forgive you everything.  I would have climbed ten mountains to meet Antoinette Frothingham.”

“I’ve been watching you, you son of Dixie,” said St. George darkly; “don’t you lose your head just when you need it most.”

“I have a notion yours is gone,” defended Amory critically, “and mine is only going.”

“That’s twice as dangerous,” St. George wisely opined; “besides—­mine is different.”

“So is mine,” said Amory, “so is everybody’s.”

St. George stepped through the long window to the terrace.  Amory didn’t care whether anybody listened; he simply longed to talk, and St. George had things to think about.  He crossed the terrace to the south, and went back to the very spot where he and Olivia had stood; and there, because the night would have it no other way, he stretched along the broad wall among the vines, and lit his pipe, and lay looking out at sea.  Here he was, liberated from the business of “buzzing in a corner, trifling with monosyllables,” set upon a field pleasant with hazard and without paths, to move in the primal experiences where words themselves are born.  Better and more intimate names for everything seemed now almost within his ken.

He had longed unspeakably to go pilgriming, and he had forthwith been permitted to leave the world behind with its thickets and thresholds, its hesitations and confusions, its marching armies, breakfasts, friendships and the like, and to live on the edge of what will be.  He thought of his mother, in her black gowns and Roman mosaic pins with a touch of yellow lace at her throat, listening to the bishop as he examined the dicta of still cloisters, and he told himself that he knew a heresy or two that were like belief.  His mother and the bishop at Tuebingen and on the Baltic!  Curiously enough, they did not seem very remote.  He adored his mother and the bishop, and so the thought of them was a part of this fairy tale.  All pleasant thoughts whether of adventure or impression boast kinship, perhaps have identity.  And the name of that identity was Olivia.  So he “drove the night along” on the leafy parapet.