“Clusium,” said Amory softly.  “I had actually wanted to go to the cemetery at Clusium, to see some inscriptions!”

“No, you didn’t, Toby,” said St. George pleasantly, “you wanted to go somewhere and you called it Clusium.  You wanted an adventure and you thought Clusium was the name of it.”

“I know,” said Amory shamelessly, “and there are no end of names for it.  But it’s always the same thing. Excepting this.”

“Excepting this,” St. George repeated fervently as they turned to go; and if, in singing of that morning, the rollicking wind sang that, it must have breathed and trembled with a chorus of faint voices from every shelf in the room,—­voices that of old had thrilled with the same meaning and woke now to the eternal echo.

Woke now to the eternal echo—­an echo that touched delicately through the events of that afternoon and laid strange values on all that happened.  Otherwise, if they four were not all a little echo-mad, how was it that in the shadow of doubt, in the face of danger, and near the inextinguishable mystery they yet found time for the little, wing-like moments that never hold history, because they hold revelation.  There were, too, some events; but an event is a clumsy thing at best, unless it has something intangible about it.  The delicious moments are when the intangibilities prevail and pervade and possess.  In the king’s palace there must have been shrines to intangibilities—­as there should be everywhere—­for they seemed to come there, and belong.

The mere happenings included, for example, a talk that St. George had with Mr. Augustus Frothingham on the terrace after luncheon, in which St. George laid before the lawyer a plan which he had virtually matured and of which he himself thought very well.  Thought so well, because of its possibilities, that his face was betrayingly eager as he told about it.  It was, briefly, that inasmuch as four of the six men who could scale the mountain were now on its summit, and inasmuch as all the airships were there also, now, therefore, they, the guests on the island of Yaque, were in a perfectly impregnable position—­counting out Fifth Dimension contingencies, which of course might include appearings as well as disappearings—­and why shouldn’t they stay there, and let the ominous noon of the following day slip by unmarked?  And when the lawyer said, “But, my dear fellow,” as he was bound to say, St. George answered that down there in Med there would be, by noon of the following day, two determined persons who, if Jarvo would get word to them, would with perfect certainty find Mr. Otho Holland, the king, if he were on the island.  And when “Well, but my dear fellow” occurred again, St. George replied with deference that he knew it, but although he never had managed an airship he fancied that perhaps he might help with one; and down there in the harbour was a yacht waiting to sail for New York, and therefore no one need even set foot on the island who didn’t wish.  And Mr. Frothingham laid one long hand on each coat-lapel and threw back his head until his hair rested on his collar, and he looked at the palace—­that Titan thing of the sky with ramparts of air—­and said, “Nothing in all my experience—­” and St. George left him, deep in thought.