“Pray do me the honour,” the prince besought, taking the dishes from the hands of the boy.  “It gives me pleasure, Miss Holland, to tell you that your father has no doubt had these very plates set before him.”

Upon a little table he deftly arranged the dishes with all the smiling ease of one to whom afternoon tea is the only business toward, and to whom an attempted murder is wholly alien.  He impressed St. George vaguely as one who seemed to have risen from the dead of the crudities of mere events and to be living in a rarer atmosphere.  The lawyer’s face was a study.  Mr. Augustus Frothingham never went to the theatre because he did not believe that a man of affairs should unduly stimulate the imagination.

There was set before them honey made by bees fed only upon a tropical flower of rare fragrance; cakes flavoured with wine that had been long buried; a paste of cream, thick with rich nuts and with the preserved buds of certain flowers; and little white berries, such as the Japanese call “pinedews”; there was a tea distilled from the roots of rare exotics, and other things savoury and fantastic.  So potent was the spell of the prince’s hospitality, and so gracious the insistence with which he set before them the strange and odourous dishes, that even Olivia, eager almost to tears for news of her father, and Mrs. Hastings, as critical and suspicious as some beetle with long antennae, might not refuse them.  As for Mr. Augustus Frothingham, although this might be Cagliostro’s spagiric food, or “extract of Saturn,” for aught that his previous experience equipped him to deny, yet he nibbled, and gazed, and was constrained to nibble again.

When they had been served, Prince Tabnit abruptly began speaking, the while turning the fine stem of his glass in his delicate fingers.

“You do not know,” he said simply, “where the island of Yaque lies?”

Mrs. Hastings sat erect.

“Yaque!” she exclaimed.  “That was the name of the place where your father was, Olivia.  I know I remembered it because it wasn’t like the man What’s-his-name in As You Like It, and because it didn’t begin with a J.”

“The island is my home,” Prince Tabnit continued, “and now, for the first time, I find myself absent from it.  I have come a long journey.  It is many miles to that little land in the eastern seas, that exquisite bit of the world, as yet unknown to any save the island-men.  We have guarded its existence, but I have no fear to tell you, for no mariner, unaided by an islander, could steer a course to its coasts.  And I can tell you little about the island for reasons which, if you will forgive me, you would hardly understand.  I must tell you something of it, however, that you may know the remarkable conditions which led to the introduction of Mr. Holland to Yaque.

“The island of Yaque,” continued the prince, “or Arqua, as the name was written by the ancient Phoenicians, has been ruled by hereditary monarchs since 1050 B.C., when it was settled.”