The King’s Alcove laid upon one the delicate demands of calm open water—­for its floor of white transparent tiles was cunningly traced with the reflected course of the carven roof, and one seemed to look into mirrored depths of disappearing line between spaces shaped like petals and like chevrons.  In the King’s Alcove one stood in a world of white and one’s sight was exquisitely won, now by a niche open to a blue well of sea and space, now by silver plants lucent in high casements.  And there one was spellbound with this mirroring of the Near which thus became the Remote, until one questioned gravely which was “there” and which was “here,” for the real was extended into vision, and vision was quickened to the real, and nothing lay between.  But to Olivia, entering, none of these things was clearly evident, for as the curtain of many dyes fell behind her she was aware of two figures—­but the one, with a murmured word which she managed somehow to answer without an idea what she said or what it had said either, vanished down the way that she had come.  And she stood there face to face with St. George.

He had risen from a low divan before a small table set with figs and bread and a decanter of what would have been bordeaux if it had not been distilled from the vineyards of Yaque.  He was very pale and haggard, and his eyes were darkly circled and still fever-bright.  But he came toward her as if he had quite forgotten that this is a world of danger and that she was a princess and that, little more than a week ago, her name was to him the unknown music.  He came toward her with a face of unutterable gladness, and he caught and crushed her hands in his and looked into her eyes as if he could look to the distant soul of her.  He led her to a great chair hewn from quarries of things silver and unremembered, and he sat at her feet upon a bench that might have been a stone of the altar of some forgotten deity of dreams, at last worshiped as it should long have been worshiped by all the host that had passed it by.  He looked up in her face, and the room was like a place of open water where heaven is mirrored in earth, and earth reflects and answers heaven.

St. George laughed a little for sheer, inextinguishable happiness.

“Once,” he said, “once I breakfasted with you, on tea and—­if I remember correctly—­gold and silver muffins.  Won’t you breakfast with me now?”

Olivia looked down at him, her heart still clamourous with its anxiety of the night and of the morning.

“Tell me where you can have been,” she said only; “didn’t you know how distressed we would be?  We imagined everything—­in this dreadful place.  And we feared everything, and we—­” but yet the “we” did not deceive St. George; how could it with her eyes, for all their avoidings, so divinely upon him?

“Did you,” he said, “ah—­did you wonder?  I wish I knew!”

“And my father—­where did you find him?” she besought.  “It was you?  You found him, did you not?”