Antoinette Frothingham, the lawyer’s daughter, had leaned on the high casement and looked over the sea.  The window was narrow, and deep in an embrasure of stone.  To be twenty and to be leaning in this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no possibility of any knight within an altitude of many hundred feet.

“The dear little ponies’ heads!” Mrs. Hastings had kept saying.  “What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don’t you think?  That’s what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings—­at least, that’s what he always said to me:  ’Most games are so needless, but chess is really up and down poetic’”

Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in silence.

“Um,” he had responded liberally.

“I’m sure,” Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, “neither he nor I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano in the middle of the ocean.  It’s this awful feeling,” Mrs. Hastings had cried querulously, “of being neither on earth nor under the water nor in Heaven that I object to.  And nobody can get to us.”

“That’s just it, Mrs. Hastings,” Antoinette had observed earnestly at this juncture.

“Um,” said Mr. Frothingham, then, “not at all, not at all.  We have all the advantages of the grave and none of its discomforts.”

Whereupon Antoinette, rising suddenly, had slipped out of the white marble room altogether and had found the knight smoking in loneliness on the very veranda.

Amory put his cap under his arm and bowed.

“I hope,” he said, “that I haven’t frightened you.”

He was an American!  Antoinette’s little heart leaped.

“I am having to wait here for a bit,” explained Amory, not without vagueness.

Miss Frothingham advanced to the veranda rail and contrived a shy scrutiny of the intruder.

“No,” she said, “you didn’t frighten me in the least, of course.  But—­do you usually do your waiting at this altitude?”

“Ah, no,” answered Amory with engaging candour, “I don’t.  But I—­happened up this way.”  Amory paused a little desperately.  In that soft light he could not tell positively whether this was Miss Holland or that other figure of silver and rose which he had seen in the throne room.  The blue gown was not interpretative.  If she was Miss Holland it would be very shabby of him to herald the surprise.  Naturally, St. George would appreciate doing that himself.  “I’m looking about a bit,” he neatly temporized.

Antoinette suddenly looked away over the terrace as her eyes met his, smiling behind their pince-nez.  Amory was good to look at, and he had never been more so than as he towered above her on the steps of the king’s palace.  Who was he—­but who was he?  Antoinette wondered rapidly.  Had a warship arrived?  Was Yaque taken?  Or had—­she turned eyes, round with sudden fear, upon Amory.