he suddenly saw the authority and reality of homely hearts.  The better and more intimate names for everything which seemed now within his grasp were more important than Yaque itself.  He remembered, with a thrill, how his mother had been wont to tell him that a man must walk through some sort of fairy-land, whether of imagination or of the heart, before he can put much in or take much from the market-place.  And lo! this fairy-land of his finding had proved—­must it not always prove?—­the essence of all Reality.

His eyes went to Olivia’s face in a flash of understanding and belief.

“Don’t you see?” he said, quite as if they two had been talking what he had thought.

She waited, smiling a little, thrilled by his certainty of her sympathy.

“None of this happened really,” triumphantly explained St. George, “I met you at the Boris, did I not?  Therefore, I think that since then you have graciously let me see you for the proper length of time, and at last we’ve fallen in love just as every one else does.  And true lovers always do have trouble, do they not?  So then, Yaque has been the usual trouble and happiness, and here we are—­engaged.”

“I’m not engaged,” Olivia protested serenely, “but I see what you mean.  No, none of it happened,” she gravely agreed.  “It couldn’t, you know.  Anybody will tell you that.”

In her eyes was the sparkle of understanding which made St. George love her more every time that it appeared.  He noted, the white cloth frock, and the coat of hunting pink thrown across her chair, and he remembered that in the infinitesimal time that he had waited for her outside the Palace of the Litany, she must have exchanged for these the coronation robe and jewels of Queen Mitygen.  St. George liked that swift practicality in the race of faery, though he was completely indifferent to Mrs. Hastings’ and Antoinette’s claims to it; and he wondered if he were to love Olivia more for everything that she did, how he could possibly live long enough to tell her.  When one has been to Yaque the simplest gifts and graces resolve themselves into this question.

The Aloha gently freed herself from the shallow green pocket where she had lain through three eventful days, and slipped out toward the waste of water bound by the flaunting autumn of the west.  An island wind, fragrant of bark and secret berries, blew in puffs from the steep.  A gull swooped to her nest in a cranny of the basalt.  From below a servant came on deck, his broad American face smiling over a tray of glasses and decanters and tinkling ice.  It was all very tranquil and public and almost commonplace—­just the high tropic seas at the moment of their unrestrained sundown, and the odour of tea-cakes about the pleasantly-littered deck.  And for the moment, held by a common thought, every one kept silent.  Now that The Aloha was really moving toward home, the affair seemed suddenly such a gigantic impossibility that every one resented every one else’s knowing what a trick had been played.  It was as if the curtain had just fallen and the lights of the auditorium had flashed up after the third act, and they had all caught one another breathless or in tears, pretending that the tragedy had really happened.