He touched the green gem to his lips, and let it fall upon the embroidered laces on his breast.  Then quietly and in another voice he began to speak.

With the first words there came to St. George the thrill of something that had possessed him—­when?  In that ecstatic moment on The Aloha when he had seen the light in the king’s palace; in the instant when the Isle of Yaque had first lain subject before him, “a land which no one can define or remember—­only desire;” in the divine time of his triumph in having scaled the heights to the palace, that sky-thing, with ramparts of air; above all, in the hour of his joy in the King’s Alcove, when Olivia had looked in his eyes and touched his lips.  Inexplicably as the way that eternity lies barely unrevealed in some kin-thing of its own—­a shell, a duty, a vista—­he suddenly felt it now in what the prince was saying.  He listened, and for one poignant stab of time he knew that he touched hands with the elemental and saw the ancient kindliness of all those people naked in their faces and knew himself for what he was.

He listened, and yet there was no making captive the words of the prince in understanding.  Prince Tabnit was speaking the English, and every word was clearly audible and, moreover, was probably daily upon St. George’s lips.  But if it had been to ransom the rest of the world from its night he could not have understood what the prince was saying.  Every word was a word that belonged as much to St. George as to the prince; but in some unfathomable fashion the inner sense of what he said for ever eluded, dissolving in the air of which it was a part.  And yet, past all doubting, St. George knew that he was hearing the essence of that strange knowledge which the Isle of Yaque had won while all the rest of mankind struggled for it—­he knew with the certainty with which we recognize strange forces in a dozen of the every-day things of life, in electricity, in telepathy, in dreams.  With the same certainty he realized that what the prince was saying would, if he could understand, lift a certain veil.  Here, put in words at last, was manifestly the secret, that catch of understanding without which men are groping in the dark, perhaps that mere pointing of relations which would make clear, without blasphemy, time and the future, rebirth and old existence, it might be; and certainly the accident of personality.  Here, crystallized, were the things that men almost know, the dream that has just escaped every one, the whisper in sleep that would have explained if one could remember when one woke, the word that has been thrillingly flashed to one in moments of absorption and has fled before one might catch the sound, the far hope of science, the glimpse that comes to dying eyes and is voiced in fragments by dying lips.  Here without penetrating the great reserve or tracing any principle to its beginning, was the truth about both.  And St. George was powerless to receive it.