“You love me—­you love me,” he said, “no matter what happens or what they say—­no matter what?”

She met his eyes and, of her own will, she drew his face down to hers.

“No matter what,” she answered.  So they went together toward the chamber which they had both forgotten.

When they reached the Hall of Kings they heard King Otho’s voice—­suave, mellow, of perfect enunciation: 

“—­some one,” the king was concluding, “who can tell this considerably better than I. And it seems to me singularly fitting that the recognition of the part eternally played by the ‘possible’ be temporarily deferred while we listen to—­I dislike to use the word, but shall I say—­the facts.”

It seemed to St. George when he stood beside the dais, facing that strange, eager multitude with his strange unbelievable story upon his lips—­the story of the finding of the king—­as if his own voice were suddenly a part of all the gigantic incredibility.  Yet the divinely real and the fantastic had been of late so fused in his consciousness that he had come to look upon both as the normal—­which is perhaps the only sane view.  But how could he tell to others the monstrous story of last night, and hope to be believed?

None the less, as simply as if he had been narrating to Chillingworth the high moment of a political convention, St. George told the people of Yaque what had happened in that night in the room of the tombs with that mad old Malakh whom they all remembered.  It came to him as he spoke that it was quite like telling to a field of flowers the real truth about the wind of which they might be supposed to know far more than he; and yet, if any one were to tell the truth about the wind who would know how to listen?  He was not amazed that, when he had done, the people of Yaque sat in a profound silence which might have been the silence of innocent amazement or of utter incredulity.

But there was no mistaking the face of Prince Tabnit.  Its cool tolerant amusement suddenly sent the blood pricking to St. George’s heart and filled him with a kind of madness.  What he did was the last thing that he had intended.  He turned upon the prince, and his voice went cutting to the farthest corner of the hall: 

“Men and women of Yaque,” he cried, “I accuse your prince of the knowledge that can take from and add to the years of man at will.  I accuse him of the deliberate and criminal use of that knowledge to take King Otho from his throne!”

St. George hardly knew what effect his words had.  He saw only Olivia, her hands locked, her lips parted, looking in his face in anguish; and he saw Prince Tabnit smile.  Prince Tabnit sat upon the king’s left hand, and he leaned and whispered a smiling word in the ear of his sovereign and turned a smiling face to Olivia upon her father’s right.

“I know something of your American newspapers, your Majesty,” the prince said aloud, “and these men are doing their part excellently, excellently.”