Prince Tabnit, with uplifted face, sat motionless, looking out over the throng from beneath lowered lids; then his eyes, confident and a little mocking, returned to the woman.  But they had for her no terror.  She turned from him, confronting the pale, eager faces of the people; and in her beauty and distinction she was like Olivia’s women, crowded beside the dais.

“Men and women of Yaque,” cried Elissa, “I will tell you to what ‘supreme estate’ these friends whom you seek have long been raised.  For here in Med and in Melita you will find many of those whom you have mourned as dead—­you will find them as you yourselves have met and passed them, it may have been countless times, on your streets of Yaque—­not young and beautiful as when they left you, but men and women of incredible age.  Withered, shaken by palsy, infirm, they creep upon their lonely ways or go at will to drag themselves unrecognized along your highways, as helpless as the dead themselves.  They number scores, and they are those who have displeased your prince by some little word, some little wrong, or, more than these, by some thwarting of the way of his ambition:  Oblo, who disappeared from his place as keeper at the door; Ithobal, satrap of Melita; young Prince Kaal—­ay, and how many more?  You do not understand my words?  I say that your prince has knowledge of some secret, accursed drug that can call back youth or make actual age—­age, do you understand—­just as we of Yaque bring both flowers and fruit to swift maturity!”

Olivia uttered a little cry, not at the grotesque horror of what the woman had said but at the miracle of its unconscious support of the story and theory of St. George.  And St. George heard; and suddenly, because another had voiced his own fantastic message, its incredibility and unreality became appalling, and yet he felt infinitely reconciled to both because he interpreted aright that little muffled exclamation from Olivia.  What did it matter—­oh, what did it matter whether or not the reality were grotesque?  What seems to be happening is always the reality, if only one understands it sufficiently.  And at all events there had been that hour in the King’s Alcove.  At last, as he weighed that hour against the fantasy of all the rest, St. George understood and lived the divine madness of all great moments, the madness that realizes one star and is content that all the heavens shall march unintelligibly past so long as that single shining is not dimmed.

But King Otho was riding no such griffin with sun-gold wings.  King Otho was genuinely and personally interested in the woman’s words.  He turned to Prince Tabnit with animation.

“Really, Prince,” he said, “is it so?  Pray do not deny it unless there is no other way, for I am before all things interested.  It is far more important to me that you tell me as much as you can tell, than that you deny or even disprove it.”

Prince Tabnit smiled in the eagerly interested face of his sovereign, and rose and came to the edge of the dais, his garments embroidered by a thousand needles touching and floating about him; and it was as if he reached those before him by a kind of spiritual magnetism, not without sublimity.