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.
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