"
Olivia waived the whole matter for one of vaster importance.
"Then why did you come to Yaque?" she demanded.
Mr. Frothingham had left his place by the wheel-house and wandered
forward. The steamer chair had a back that was both broad and high,
and one sitting in its shadow was hermetically veiled from the rest
of the deck. So St. George bent forward, and told her.
After that they sat in silence, and together they looked back
toward the island with its black rocks smitten to momentary gold by
a last javelin of light. There it lay--the land locking away as
realities all the fairy-land of speculation, the land of the
miracles of natural law. They had walked there, and had glimpsed the
shadowy threshold of the Morning. Suppose, St. George thought, that
instead of King Otho, with his delicate sense of the merely visible,
a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque? And instead
of Mr. Frothingham, slave to the contestable, and Little Cawthorne
in bondage to humour, and Amory and himself swept off their feet by
a heavenly romance, suppose a party of savants and economists had
arrived in Yaque, with a poet or two to bring away the fire--what
then? St.
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