“Never,” said Olivia, “never.  Shall you?”

That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he whimsically remembered something else: 

“You live in the king’s palace now,” he reminded her, “and this is another palace where you might live if you chose.  And you might be a queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest.  And in New York—­in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat.”

“No,” she cried, “no, indeed!  Not ‘perhaps,’ I insist upon a flat.”  She looked about the room with its bench brought from the altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour dissolving to mirrored point and light—­the mystic union of sight with dream—­and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine resemblance.  “It wouldn’t be so very different—­a flat,” she said shyly.

Wouldn’t it—­wouldn’t it, after all, be so very different?

“Ah, if you only think so, really,” cried St. George.

“But it will be different, just different enough to like better,” she admitted then.  “You know that I think so,” she said.

“If only you knew how much I think so,” he told her, “how I have thought so, day and night, since that first minute at the Boris.  Olivia, dear heart—­when did you think so first—­”

She shook her head and laid her hands upon his and drew them to her face.

“Now, now—­now!” she cried, “and there never was any time but now.”

“But there will be—­there will be,” he said, his lips upon her hair.

After a time—­for Time, that seems to have no boundaries in the abstract, is a very fiend for bounding the divine concrete—­after a time Amory spoke hesitatingly on the other side of the curtain of many dyes.

“St. George,” he said, “I’m afraid they want you.  Mr. Holland—­the king, he’s got through playing them.  He wants you to get up and give ’em the truth, I think.”

“Come in—­come in, Amory,” St. George said and lifted the curtain, and “I beg your pardon,” he added, as his eyes fell upon Antoinette in a gown of colours not to be lightly denominated.  She had followed Olivia from the hall, and had met Amory midway the avenue of prickly trees, and they had helpfully been keeping guard.  Now they went on before to the Hall of Kings, and St. George, remembering what must happen there, turned to Olivia for one crowning moment.

“You know,” she said fearfully, “before father came the prince intended the most terrible things—­to set you and Mr. Amory adrift in a rudderless airship—­”

St. George laughed in amusement.  The poor prince with his impossible devices, thinking to harm him, St. George—­now.

“He meant to marry you, he thought,” he said, “but, thank Heaven, he has your father to answer to—­and me!” he ended jubilantly.

And yet, after all, Heaven knew what possibilities hemmed them round.  And Heaven knew what she was going to think of him when she heard his story.  He turned and caught her to him, for the crowning moment.