party found it far from difficult to do the same.  St. George looked at Olivia in her gown of roses, and his eyes swept the high white walls of the room with its frescoes and inscriptions, its broken statues and defaced chests of stone and ancient armour, and so back to Olivia in her gown of roses, with her little ringless hands touching and lifting among the alien dishes as she ministered to him.  What a dear little gown of roses and what beautiful hands, St. George thought; and as for the broken statues and the inscriptions and the contents of the stone chests, nobody had paid any attention to them for so long that they could hardly have missed his regard.  Nor Amory’s.  For Amory was in the midst of a reminiscent reference to the Chiswicks, in the Adirondacks, and to Antionette Frothingham in a launch.

At last they all were aware that the chess-board was being closed and Mrs. Hastings had risen.

“I suppose,” she was saying, “that they have an idea here, the poor deluded creatures, that it is very late.  But I tell Olivia that we are so much farther east it can’t be very late in New York at this minute, and I intend to go to bed by my watch as I always do, and that is New York time.  If I were in New York I wouldn’t be sleepy now, and I’m no different here, am I?  I don’t think people are half independent enough.”

Mrs. Hastings stepped round a stone god, almost faceless, that stood in a little circular depression in the floor.

“Olivia, where,” she inquired, patting the bobbing, ticking jet on her gown, “where do you think that frightful, mad, old man is?”

“I heard him cross the corridor a little while ago,” Olivia answered.  “I think he went to his room.”

“I must say, Olivia,” said Mrs. Hastings with a damp sigh, “that you are very selfish where I am concerned—­in this matter.”

“Ah,” said Olivia, “please, Aunt Dora.  He is far too feeble to harm any one.  And he’s away there on the second floor.”

“I’m sure he’s a murderer,” protested Mrs. Hastings.  “He has the murderer’s eye.  Mr. Hastings would have said he has.  We all sleep on the ground floor here,” she continued plaintively, “because we are so high up anyway that I think the air must be just as pure as it would be up stairs.  I always leave my window up the width of my handkerchief-box.”

As they went out to the great corridor Olivia spoke softly to St. George.

“Look up,” she said.

He looked, and saw that the vast circular chamber was of incalculable height, extending up to the very dome of the palace, and shaping itself to the lines of the topmost of the three huge cones.  It was a great well of light, playing over strange frescoes of gods and daemons, of constellations and of beasts, and exquisite with all the secret colours of some other way of vision.  As high as the eye could see, the precious metals upon the skeleton of the open roof shone in the bright light that was set there—­the light on the summit of the king’s palace.