After that they sat in silence, and together they looked back toward the island with its black rocks smitten to momentary gold by a last javelin of light.  There it lay—­the land locking away as realities all the fairy-land of speculation, the land of the miracles of natural law.  They had walked there, and had glimpsed the shadowy threshold of the Morning.  Suppose, St. George thought, that instead of King Otho, with his delicate sense of the merely visible, a great man had chanced to be made sovereign of Yaque?  And instead of Mr. Frothingham, slave to the contestable, and Little Cawthorne in bondage to humour, and Amory and himself swept off their feet by a heavenly romance, suppose a party of savants and economists had arrived in Yaque, with a poet or two to bring away the fire—­what then?  St. George lost the doubt in the noon of his own certainty.  There could be no greater good, he chanted to the god who had breathed upon him, than this that he and Amory shared now with the wise and simple world, the world of the resonant new names.  He even doubted that, save in degree, there could be a purer talisman than the spirit that inextinguishably shone in the face of the childlike old lawyer as the strange little animal nestled in his coat and licked his hand.  And these were open secrets.  Open secrets of the ultimate attainment.

They watched the land dissolving in the darkness like a pearl in wine of night.  But at last, when momentarily they had turned happy eyes to each other’s faces, they looked again and found that the dusk, taking ancient citadels with soundless tread, had received the island.  And where on the brow of the mountain had sprung the white pillars of the king’s palace glittered only the early stars.

“Crown jewels,” said Olivia softly, “for everybody’s head.”