He was not far from asleep, nor perhaps from the dream of the Roman emperor who believed the sea to have come to his bedside and spoken with him, when something—­he was not sure whether it was a voice or a touch—­startled him awake.  He rose on his elbow and looked drowsily out at the glorified blackness—­as if black were no longer absence cf colour but, the veil of negative definitions having been pierced, were found to be a mystic union of colour and more inclusive than white.  The very dark seemed delicately vocal and to “fill the waste with sound” no less than the wash of the waves.  St. George awoke deliciously confused by a returning sense of the sweet and the joy of the night.

“‘This was the loneliest beach between two seas,’” there flitted through his mind, “’and strange things had been done there in the ancient ages.’” He turned among the vines, half listening.  “And in there is the king’s daughter,” he told himself, “and this is certainly ‘the strangest thing that ever befell between two seas.’  And I have a great mind to look up the old woman of that tale who must certainly be hereabout, dancing ‘widdershins.’”

Then, like a bright blade unsheathed in a quiet chamber, a cry of great and unmistakable fear rang out from the palace—­a woman’s cry, uttered but once, and giving place to a silence that was even more terrifying.  In an instant St. George was on his feet, running with all his might.

“Coming!” he called, “where are you—­where are you?” And his heart pounded against his side with the certainty that the voice had been Olivia’s.

It was unmistakably Olivia’s voice that replied to him.

“Here!” she cried clearly, and St. George followed the sound and dashed through the long open window of the room next that in which he had first seen her that night.

“Here,” she repeated, “but be careful.  Some one is in this room.”

“Don’t be afraid,” he cried cheerily into the dark.  “It’s all right,” which is exactly what he would have said if there had been about dragons and real shades from Sidon.

The room was now in darkness, and in the dim light cast by the high moon he could at first discern nothing.  He heard a silken rustling and the tap of slippered feet.  The next instant the apartment was quick with light, and in the curtained entrance to an inner room, Olivia, in a brown dressing-gown, her hair vaguely bright about her flushed face, stood confronting him.

Between them, his thin hand thrown up, palm outward, to protect his eyes from the sudden light, was the old man whom St. George had last seen by the shrine on the terrace.

St. George was prepared for a mere procession of palace ghosts, but at this strange visitor he stared for an uncomprehending moment.

“What are you doing here?” he said wonderingly to him; “what in the world are you doing here?”

The old man looked uncertainly about him, one hand spread against the pillar behind him, the other fumbling at his throat.