“That,” St. George explained, “is as you like.  For if your father is on the island we shall have found him by day after to-morrow, at noon, if we have to shake all Yaque inside out, like a paper sack.  And if he isn’t here, we simply needn’t stop.”

Olivia shook her head.

“You don’t know the prince,” she said.  “I have heard enough to convince me that it is quite as he says.  He holds events in the hollow of his hand.”

“Amory proposed,” said St. George, “that we sit up here and throw pebbles at him for a time.  And Amory is very practical.”

Olivia laughed—­her laugh was delicious and alluring, and St. George came dangerously near losing his head every time that he heard it.

“Ah,” she cried, “if only it weren’t for the prince and if we had news of father, what a heavenly, heavenly place this would be, would it not?”

“It would, it would indeed,” assented St. George, and in his heart he said, “and so it is.”

“It’s like being somewhere else,” she said, looking into the abyss of far waters, “and when you look down there—­and when you look up, you nearly know.  I don’t know what, but you nearly know.  Perhaps you know that ‘here’ is the same as ‘there,’ as all these people say.  But whatever it is, I think we might have come almost as near knowing it in New York, if we had only known how to try.”

“Perhaps it isn’t so much knowing,” he said, “as it is being where you can’t help facing mystery and taking the time to be amazed.  Although,” added St. George to himself, “there are things that one finds out in New York.  In a drawing-room, at the Boris, for instance, over muffins and tea.”

“It will be delightful to take all this back to New York,” Olivia vaguely added, as if she meant the fairy palace and the fairy sea.

“It will,” agreed St. George fervently, and he couldn’t possibly have told whether he meant the mystery of the island or the mystery of that hour there with her.  There was so little difference.

“Suppose,” said Olivia whimsically, “that we open our eyes in a minute, and find that we are in the prince’s room in McDougle Street, and that he has passed his hand before our faces and made us dream all this.  And father is safe after all.”

“But it isn’t all a dream,” St. George said softly, “it can’t possibly all be a dream, you know.”

She met his eyes for a moment.

“Not your coming away here,” she said, “if the rest is true I wouldn’t want that to be a dream.  You don’t know what courage this will give us all.”

She said “us all,” but that had to mean merely “us,” as well.  St. George turned and looked over the terrace.  What an Arabian night it was, he was saying to himself, and then stood in a sudden amazement, with the uncertain idea that one of the Schererazade magicians had answered that fancy of his by appearing.